SOURCE: Sullivan, Mary Lee. “Projection as a Narrative Technique in Juan Carlos Onetti's Goodbyes.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (summer 1994): 441-47.

[In the following essay, Sullivan attempts to define Onetti's narrative technique in Los adioses.]

But that was when, without my understanding completely what was happening, I began knowing things and exactly what we had gotten ourselves into, though I could never say it, just as one knows what a person's soul is like but can't describe it in words.

(Onetti, “A Dream Come True” 59)

Few contemporary fiction writers have depended as heavily on the interpretive strategies of the reader as did Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994). Although his 1954 novella, Los adioses (Goodbyes), is one of his most demanding texts in this regard, it is also a hallmark of Onettian narrative in its controlled structuring of ambiguity. A close reading of the text reveals that it is, in fact, designed to draw maximally on the projective capacity of the reader. In the words of Fredric Jameson, “it is itself the inaugural narrative act that grounds the perception and interpretation of the events to be narrated” (xiii). The fact that the past 40 years of critical theorizing have failed to exhaust the responses elicited by Goodbyes would seem to confirm that the power of the text to draw on the unconscious projections of any given reader is inherent in its composition.

There has been, moreover, a decided shift among critical theorists in the past two decades to view fictional texts as refractions of a fragmenting or kaleidoscopic and highly subjective field of perception. We appear to be less intent in fixing a meaning on a work and more inclined to solicit the interplay of textual enigmas and responses.

When Onetti replies to a critical essay by Wolfgang A. Luchting in a preface to the Spanish text of the novella, Los adioses (Luchting 7-26), his admission that Luchting has only unraveled a part of the enigma reveals an element of triumph (“‘Media vuelta’ de la tuerca” 29). This rare interchange between writer and critic would seem to confirm our suspicion that Onetti delighted most in his own power as a writer to draw on the projective capacities and fantasies of reader and critic alike. Both are inevitably trapped as they engage in the no-win game of seeking a definitive interpretation to a text that admits of no such resolution.

Angel Rama, Onetti's close friend and Uruguay's leading literary critic until his death in a 1983 air crash, had the following to say of the Luchting-Onetti exchange:

The subsequent enigma proffered by Onetti, departing from Wolfgang A. Luchting's reading of Goodbyes (according to which, despite the testimony of the young girl's letter that she could be not the daughter but rather a lover) suggests that she could be daughter and lover (something that in no way is indicated in the text) does not in any way alter the field of forces. What it does do is mock the capacity of the narrator, who could not foresee more complex possibilities than those within his sight; that is to say, in constructing another's soul, he is not able to go beyond the limits of his own, which he proceeds to transfer.

(59; my translation)

Rama has drawn attention to the fact that in Goodbyes the Onettian character becomes surface for the projections of the narrator, whose pathology is made manifest by the constricted nature of his viewpoint. Rama seems to suggest that Onetti's enthusiasm for Luchting's commentary was likely based on the latter's willingness to enter the game. Onetti appears to view the critic/reader as making yet another imaginary foray amidst the fluctuating planes that constitute the space of the text, Goodbyes, and, in fact, leave it open to a multiplicity of encounters. Most salient among Rama's remarks is the relation between the degree of the narrator's personality constriction and, ultimately, the reader's, in contrast to either's capacity for fantasy projection.

Onetti's is a literature of subjectivity, about how we perceive and interpret, as we are perceived and interpreted by others. Through words we are capable of transforming others and being transformed by them, as so many fragments of perceptions and interpretations coalesce in order to create any given version of reality.

In one of the most insightful attempts to date to describe Onetti's narrative technique, Sylvia Molloy defines what might be called the “fiction of gossip.” Molloy invites us to reflect on the conditions requisite to gossip. One individual (the narrator in the case of Goodbyes), imparts to another (the text's reader) gossip about a third (the character of the ex-basketball player). Gossip, Molloy implies, is always a game of power or a desire to impose one's own perception on someone else. Gossip can have a positive or a negative effect. One might, for instance, proffer a perceived version of someone in order to favor that person's situation in a given instance. Key to all of this, according to Molloy, is that it matters less what is said about the other than how it is said and received (266). Onetti himself denies the privileging of objective “truth” in his narrative technique, as stated in his first novel in 1939, El pozo (The Well):

It is said that there are various ways of lying, but the most repugnant of all ways is to tell the truth, concealing the soul of the facts. Because the facts are always empty, are vessels which will take on the form of the sentiment that fills them.

(64; my translation)

We certainly could, in a reading of Goodbyes, adopt a stance of total complicity with the narrator, being guided by his interpretations of the sentiments that give form to the facts. Onetti, however, always manages to create sufficient inexplicable gaps in the narrator's version. These gaps are the blank surfaces that elicit the reader's desires and fears within the ambiguous, creative space of the text.

A measure of personality projection, the Rorschach ink blots, uses a technique designed to maximize the viewer's projective mechanisms and is analogous, in its pull for projective materials, to Onetti's narrative structure in Goodbyes. Standard procedures for a Rorschach interpreter, whose goal it is to create a sufficiently ambiguous situation to draw forcefully on a reader's unconscious projections, are as follows:

The performance proper or free-association procedure, as it has been called, is the oldest and most widely employed part of the Rorschach procedure. Most writers have agreed that the essential characteristic of this phase should be a lack of structure, which forces the individual being examined to assume responsibility for dealing with the situation.

(Klopfer 7)

Angel Rama emphasized the fact that we have almost no information about the narrator in Goodbyes, that the narrator becomes a blank, that nothing can be predicted about his private self (56). Our contention is that it is precisely the ambiguity surrounding the person of the narrator that invites the reader's projection and participation, and, perhaps, gives the reader as strong a claim as anyone to the role of the text's protagonist. More relevant than any argument as to who is truly the protagonist is the question basically posed by Rama: How does Onetti force the reader to rearticulate the text (57)?

We are confined to one narrative point of view in Goodbyes, that of the bartender or narrator. He is keeper of a general store in a mountain retreat, where patients suffering from lung ailments have come to be cured or, in some cases, to live out their last days. All we can say for certain about the plot, since the narrator himself often draws attention to the subjective nature of his own version with phrases such as “I imagined …” or “it occurred to me …,” is that a newly arrived patient is alternately visited by two women, one younger than the other. The narrator leads us to believe that the exathlete is an introvert who isolates himself from other patients. Even this point has been challenged by at least one critic, Santiago Rojas, as one more precarious perception, in that the narrator admits to at least a few instances of gregarious behavior on the part of the ex-athlete (37). The athlete apparently chooses to share his death with neither of the two women. In any event, they are not present when his corpse is discovered. The cause of death is evidently assumed to be suicide by revolver.

As Rojas has noted, even the death is cloaked with a certain vagueness, in that we have neither eye witness nor even a suicide note (Rojas 37). Ultimately, nothing is certain. Our unreliable narrator does, however, support his version of the events by citing other witnesses, such as a male nurse or orderly who attends the patient and the latter's girlfriend, another employee of the retreat. Their accounts, however, also come to us filtered through the narrator/bartender's vision. Nonetheless, his version is extremely compelling in that it is narrated with all the skill of the most riveting of oral histories or, as previously discussed, becomes a most engaging piece of gossip. It does, indeed, draw on our complicity as readers. More often than not, we are caught midstream in an account before it occurs to us (and it may, in fact, never occur to the inattentive reader) that the narrator could not possibly have been a witness to the details he includes.

The narrator's images are all extremely visual, conjuring up in our “mind's eye” what could only have been seen in his “mind's eye.” Onetti often makes use of gradual description. The verbal camera of the narrator in Goodbyes frequently focuses on the movement of a single body part, such as the hands of the ex-athlete moving across the bar or the young girl who comes to visit him, first discovered as “a bit of skirt, a shoe, one side of a suitcase poking out into the lamplight” (16). This intentionally fragmented vision on the part of the narrator would lead us to believe that minute attention to isolated aspects of body language can result in accurate deductions about the whole mental repertoire of the characters.

The narrator's version, in short, might well represent the view of one whose capacity for distinguishing between reality and conjecture or fantasy has slipped. The disintegration of his own personality is characterized by his use of the defense mechanisms of “introjection” and “projection.” Nancy Chodorow defines these terms from the perspective of object relations theory. Introjection is a mechanism of internalizing by which one takes into oneself conflictual relationships as experienced in the external social world. She cautions that “internalization does not mean direct transmission of what is objectively in … [one's] social world into the unconscious experience of self-in-relationship. Social experiences take on varied psychological meanings depending on … [one's] feelings of … helplessness, dependence, … conflict, and fear” (50). Object relations theory is seen as pertinent to narrative structure, which relies on the unconscious relationship of the reader's self to those others brought into play by the text. We are attending to the role of projection in the act of interpretation both inside of the text, by characters, and outside of the text, by various readers.

It is clear that the narrator in Goodbyes has internalized the love triangle and the impending death of the ex-athlete. As a result of the narrator's internalization and subsequent projection, he believes that the ex-athlete corresponds in recognizing him, the narrator, as a participant in the drama. Chodorow writes the following on this defense mechanism:

People also engage in projection and externalization. They assume that others have qualities which are in fact their own, or that they have a relation to another which is in fact an internal relation of one part of the self to another (the highly self judgmental person who thinks the whole world is judging).

(43)

Much of what the narrator says about the ex-basketball player has more to do with himself than with the patient. This tendency becomes most clear in the manner in which the narrator projects much of what we suspect is his own solitude onto his accomplice, the orderly, with whom he gossips about the ex-basketball player. He says of the orderly, for instance:

He lived in the garage off the store, doing nothing but giving shots and putting his money in a bank in the city; he was alone, and when solitude bothers us we are capable of all the base acts necessary to assure ourselves company: eyes and ears to pay attention to us. I speak of them, the others, not of myself.

(5)

It is the narrator's compelling need to include this last remark, the superfluous addition that the solitude to which he is referring applies to others and not to himself that, naturally, draws the reader's suspicions. We see in the narrator's rigid control of the textual version a will to power. He attributes this need for power over the ex-athlete to the orderly: “perhaps he thought to guarantee that he would be asked to give any possible shots” (2). According to the narrator, it is the orderly who nurses a secret hatred for the ex-athlete: “it occurred to me that the orderly's cool stubborn hatred could not have come from the other's refusal to have the shots recommended by Gunz, that at its origin was an incomprehensible humiliation, a secret offense” (7).

This last remark could potentially draw the reader into projecting a homoerotic content on the relationship sought by the male nurse with the ex-athlete. On the other hand, if it is the narrator whose personal sense of disintegration is being projected onto the others, it may well be the bartender's own interests that are reflected, when he says of the orderly: “… perhaps he respects me because I have lived here for fifty years and for twelve gotten by with three quarters of a lung” (1). If the mechanism of projection is at work, it may in fact signal the homoerotic desire of the bartender/narrator, his wishing to gain the respect of the orderly and/or ex-athlete. We know at least from his remark that the physical health of the narrator is less than perfect. It is entirely plausible that it is his own depression and solitude that he projects onto the ex-athlete.

There are certainly enough clues hidden within the text to defend any number of hypotheses. Those to which individual readers subscribe may well depend on their own capacities for projection or their own repertoire of fantasies. Everything from incest to homicide is up for grabs. Onetti, as always, intentionally leaves any number of unexplained sequences, loose ends that readers would encounter even if they could create plausible explanations or story lines for a plot that occasionally has the non-sequitur quality of a dream.

Had Onetti set out to portray the crisis of fragmentation that precedes many suicidal acts, he could not have structured his novella with greater accuracy. Attempts to control one's fragmentation lead to a more generalized need to control, a restricted and rigid point of view, completely lacking in creative flexibility. Such is the perspective of the narrator in Goodbyes.

Despite the fact that suicides do occur in the vast majority of Onetti's texts, both the novels and the short stories, there has been surprisingly little attention to this theme in the past 40 years of critical readings of his fiction. This holds true for Goodbyes, whose title alone might, one would think, have drawn more attention to the topic. If Onetti's writing is considered by some as unnecessarily pessimistic in its vision, this may, in part, be owing to his penchant for touching on areas that many Western societies have succeeded in repressing to a comfortable level.

At a conference held at Harvard Medical School on 27 January 1984, Karl Menninger, a pioneer in the field of suicidology, restated his position on the particular disintegration of the self that is confirmed in the act of suicide. Menninger's seminal work, Man Against Himself, was the initial study of the intolerable pain involved in the fragmentation against which humans struggle in order to stay alive. It is when the introjected sub-voices within can no longer be maintained in any coherent balance that suicide becomes imminent. Discussion at the conference focused on the extreme levels of stress and solitude whereby the adaption of self to world regresses, as signaled by the adoption of the most archaic or earliest of a life cycle's defense mechanisms, introjection and projection.

Angel Rama does allude to the underlying homosexual note (57) that develops as an internal battle between the bartender, in his predictions that the ex-athlete will not have sufficient hope left to live, and his introjection of the latter. Is it the bartender's own suicidal tendencies that he is projecting on the ex-athlete and against which he bets?

Could the text not be read as a gradually fragmenting account of the narrator's disintegration, which, on the one hand could turn in on him or, ultimately, take the projected form of a death-wish against the other?

The working space of an Onettian text, a place where inner conflicts grapple with external facts, is not dissimilar to Jameson's own view of man's current space in a world whose systems bespeak far greater solitude than solidarity. The experience of a contemporary reader in the textual field as structured by Onetti is akin to Jameson's description of the “intermittent” and “fragmentary way” in which “people become aware of the dynamics of some new system, in which they are themselves seized, only later on and gradually” or “from various unrelated crisis symptoms” (xix).

Works Cited/Consulted

Ainsa, Fernando. Las trampas de Onetti. Montevideo: Alfa, 1970.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Giacoman, Helmy F., ed. Homenaje a Juan Carlos Onetti: Variaciones interpretativas en torno a su obra. New York: Las Americas, 1974.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Klopfer, Bruno, et al. Technique and Theory. Vol. 1 of Developments in the Rorschach Technique. New York: Harcourt, 1954. 3 vols.

Luchting, Wolfgang. “El lector como protagonista de la novela.” Los adioses. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1981. 7-26. [Also appeared in Marcha 12 June 1970: 14-15.]

Ludmer, Josefina. Onetti: Los procesos de construccion del relato. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerica, 1977.

Maio, Eugene A. “Onetti's Los adioses: A Cubist Reconstruction of Reality.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 173-81.

Menninger, Karl A. Man Against Himself. New York: Harcourt, 1956.

Millington, Mark. Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative and the Subject. Liverpool: F. Cairns, 1985.

Molloy, Sylvia. “El relato como mercancia: Los adioses.” Juan Carlos Onetti. Ed. Hugo J. Verani. Madrid: Taurus, 1987.

Onetti, Juan Carlos. Goodbyes and Stories. Intro. and trans. Daniel Balderston. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.

———. “‘Media vuelta’ de tuerca.” Los adioses. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1981. 29.

———. “El pozo.” Obras completas. 1st ed. Mexico: Aguilar, 1970.

Rama, Angel. “El narrador ingresa al baile de mascaras de la modernidad.” Studi di Letteratura Ispano-americana 13-14 (1983): 45-61.

Rojas, Santiago. “Juan Carlos Onetti: Los adioses y la critica.” Hispania 73 (March 1990): 32-39.

Ruffinelli, Jorge, ed. Onetti: Seleccion, cronologia y preparacion. Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1973.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971.