SOURCE: "Onetti's Los adioses: A Cubist Reconstruction of Reality," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 173-81.

[In the following excerpt, Maio maintains that the challenges that Los adioses poses to readers are similar to those that a cubist work of art presents to viewers. ]

A careful reading of Juan Carlos Onetti's Los adioses (1954) reveals unmistakable affinities between the aesthetic goals and structures of cubism and the narrative structure of his fiction. The bond that unites Onetti's prose to modern painting is not based on a narrative prose style that constructs visual images through intricate word patterns. Rather, Onetti's narrative style, the way in which he tells a story, indicates a structure and a process that have much in common not only with cubism but also with the aesthetics of contemporary art in general. . . .

[In Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature, 1960] Wylie Sypher writes that "technically cubism is a breakdown of three-dimensional space constructed from a fixed point of view: things exist in multiple relations to each other and change their appearance according to the point of view from which we see them." First worked out in painting, the reverberations of cubism were felt directly in sculpture and architecture, and indirectly in literature and music. Sypher writes that "cubism is an attempt to conceive the world in new ways, just as renaissance art was an attempt to conceive the world in new ways." Cubism is primarily an intellectual approach. The cubist painter breaks open the volumes of things by spreading objects upon shifting interrelated planes and therefore presents several faces of things simultaneously. The cubist discovers that an object—guitar, violin, sheet music—is a multiple reality that can be defined only by multiple images. It is for these reasons that Sypher concludes that "cubism is an art that expresses the condition of modern man who has been forced to live in a world where there are, as Whitehead put it, no longer any simple locations, where all relations are plural."

Cubism is a visual statement that art and life intersect, and the cubist underscores this conviction by the use of certain technical devices. As Sypher indicates, one is collage, the assimilation of fragments of reality—cord, cloth, newsprint—into the pictorial world. A second is passage, a breaking of contours "so that a form merges with the space about it or with other forms; planes or tones bleed into other planes and tones; outlines that coincide with other outlines, then suddenly reappear in new relations." A third is montage, in which two or more pictures or images are seen together in a compound image. "Based not on sequence but on counterpoint," says Sypher, "montage compels us to see things in multiple perspective, telescoping time and fixing representation in a spliced image like the flattened cubist perspective."

Certain formal structures in Los adioses closely parallel these techniques of the cubist reconstruction of reality. To begin with, Onetti does not comply with the traditional demand in fiction for an omniscient narrator who tells a story in a rationally ordered space-time system. Onetti entrusts his narration to a reporter Who is neither omniscient nor reliable. The reporter, isolated behind the bar that creates his own secure alienation, cannot be an eye-witness of what the ex-basketball player says and does. Yet the reporter fills in the unknown with details created by his imagination, and therefore he reconstructs the protagonist's character out of his own fantasy. The reporter is assisted in the narration by a male nurse and a hotel maid who also embellish facts with imagination so that the history of the athlete/patient is an ambiguous mixture of reality and fantasy created by a trio of unreliable reporters governed not by truth and experience but by prejudice, imagination, hostility, suspicion, self-righteousness, and scorn. In cubist fashion, the "volume" of the protagonist's history is broken open by spreading information "upon shifting interrelated planes"—the voices of the bartender, nurse, and maid.

Near the end of Los adioses the narrator admits that his role as a reporter has been vitiated by his determination to force the characters to live the kind of life he determined. He says:

Salí afuera y me apoyé en la baranda de la galería, temblando de frío, mirando las luces del hotel. Me bastaba anteponer mi reciente descubrimiento al principio de la historia, para que todo se hiciera sencillo y previsible. Me sentía lleno de poder, como si el hombre y la muchacha, y también la mujer y el niño, hubieran nacido de mi voluntad para vivir lo que yo había determinado.

I went outside and leaned on the balcony railing, shivering in the cold, looking at the hotel lights. It would have been enough for me to put my recent discovery at the beginning of the story so that everything would have been simple and foreseeable. But I felt full of power as though the man and the young woman, as well as the older woman and the boy, had been born of my will to live out what I had determined.

It is now clear that the reported narrative is not a reliable account of what actually happened in the lives of the athlete/patient and the two women, but a reconstruction by a partial eyewitness whose story is part fact, part fantasy, intellectually scrutinized and rearranged to fit the narrator's suspicious, prejudicial, despotic point of view. He deliberately omits essential information about the identity of the two women so that the reader is misled into believing with the villagers that the athlete/patient is involved in a scandalous love affair. Even with the knowledge that the young woman is the basketball player's daughter, the reader is still left with the further ambiguity about whether the daughter's love is filial or incestuous.

Onetti, like Picasso, has shattered the traditional renaissance perspective: single point of view, logical structure, fully rounded characters. Onetti disassembles the narrative point of view into a plurality of unreliable commentators, not witnesses, each of whom is governed by a particular bias. The result is a fragmentation of characters and actions whose reality changes arbitrarily depending upon whose perspective the reader adopts. "One effect of such fragmentation," writes Arthur Terry, "is to dispel the illusion that what we are reading is in some way a transcript of 'real events' and to confirm our sense of a text which is being created in accordance with its own internal laws" ["Onetti and the Meaning of Fiction: Notes on La muerte y la niña," in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, edited by Salvador Bacarisse, 1980].

In the process of re-constructing the ex-athlete's history, the narrator/creator displaces the reader's attention from narrative facticity and contextuality to the reporter's own emotional responses to the information he discovers and reports. In a veritable cubist passage the narration moves simultaneously on two superimposed planes: the plane of what the reader assumes is the story of the tubercular athlete's relations with two women and the plane of the narrator's emotional responses to the characters' actions which fragment and distort the historicity of the characters' lives. The shifting of these superimposed planes of reality and fantasy are responsible in large part for the ambiguity the reader experiences. Los adioses is similar to another work of Onetti's, La muerte y la niña, which Terry says "both defeats the reader's conventional expectations and confronts him with the possibility that the 'meaning' of the story may lie not so much in a paraphraseable content as in the actual activity he is compelled to pursue in his attempt to 'make sense' of the text."

The reader also discovers the effects of another displacement, this one in the use of time. The narration of what happens to the protagonist runs in a different time frame than the subjective commentary of the reporter. It soon becomes clear that the reader is not a witness to the pathetic disintegration of a once powerful athlete but a credulous victim of a trap skillfully contrived by the reporter/author/creator. The narrator is not reporting the sordid details of a love triangle but foisting upon the reader a life story as he thinks it ought to be and wants it to be. It is a story in which the characters have lost their autonomy, their credibility, their ability to be and to say who they are because their being and their activity are under the imperious control of an unscrupulous reporter who manipulates their lives in order to establish and to vindicate his supposed omniscience. The awareness of this contrived and manipulated sequence of events is confirmed by the almost exclusive use of verbs in the past tense. Such a ploy gives the reporter complete control of the narrative material in contrast to a narrative mode in the present tense, in which the narrator is limited, as is the reader, to watching an action unfold through a series of events whose outcome is still uncertain.

In Los adioses we eventually become aware that we are reading a novel about the apparent impossibility of writing a novel. We come to doubt the expertise of a narrator whose lack of integrity and veracity make it almost impossible for him to create a fictional world in which we vicariously experience recognizable human experiences. Instead of insights, we get suspicions; in lieu of understanding, we get ambiguity; in place of fiction, we get gamesmanship.

The narrator has disassembled the information he has gathered as bartender/postmaster/observer and re-assembled these pieces of information into a cubist collage. He collects fragments of characters and episodes and juxtaposes them in a frame that destroys their autonomy and identity. For instance, when the narrator first introduces the protagonist in the opening chapter, he actually constructs a collage of the athlete/patient composed of a suitcase, raincoat, shoulders, smile, hands, tickets and a glass of beer. These parts and pieces of a person—disembodied fragments—are assembled artfully in one-dimensional space.

To this collage of disembodied fragments the narrator adds his gratuitous speculations about the indifference and the apathy of the newly arrived patient. He says, for example, that the ex-athlete entered the general store "saludando sin sonreír porque su sonrisa no iba a ser creída" 'saying hello without smiling because his smile was not going to be believed.' The former basketball star is un-souled, despirited, reduced to mere physical dimensions. This flattening-out technique, a cubist destruction of fully rounded forms and three-dimensional space, is evident in the manner in which the reporter crowds people, events, and objects into a single dimension. Most of the characters are nameless and seem to be no more important than raincoats, beer glasses, taxis, letters, and dried sausages that clutter this collage. Characters and things co-exist in onedimensional space, flattened out in an emotional ambush of hostility, degradation, and sordid alienation.

The treatment of time in Los adioses has affinities with the cubist technique of passage, the device in which planes and tones merge or bleed into other planes and tones. There are four time-frames in the novel: the remote past, the glory days of the basketball star; the proximate past, the last few weeks of the patient's stay in the sanatorium; the present, the interaction of the reporter with the athlete/patient, the women, the staff at the sanatorium; and the future, the dismal suicide of the athlete/patient. The reader never loses awareness of these four time-frames that are skillfully superimposed one upon another.

This passage of time-frames gives the reader the impression that the narrator is omniscient since he can move from one time-frame to another to establish the credibility of his powers of prophecy, introspection, and divination. This credibility is destroyed, however, once the reader realizes that another passage is at work, one in which fantasy bleeds into fact. The outline of what really took place and the outline of what the reporter imagined took place merge into one another so that the reader is left with distrust, mystery, and ambiguity. Very little of the narration recounts what actually took place in the life of the protagonist. Most of what the reporter narrates is an embellishment of partially known, partially related events.

The perimeter of the athlete's consciousness and the perimeter of the narrator's consciousness bleed into each other—become often indistinguishable—so that the reader is deceived into accepting what the narrator imagines the athlete/patient thinks and does is actually what the protagonist thinks and does.

An example of the narrator's deceptive narrative style shows the presence of a cubist passage. The bartender relates how the protagonist does not wear the hospital attire given to the patients in the sanatorium, but continues to wear his regular clothes—suit, tie and hat. Analyzing this behavior the narrator concludes that the protagonist is "empecinado, manteniendo su aire de soledad . . . defendiéndose con las ropas, el sombrero y los polvorientos zapatos de la aceptación de estar enfermo y separado" 'stubborn in maintaining his attitude of isolation . . . protecting himself with his clothes, his hat, and his dusty shoes from admitting that he is sick and alone.'

The reader is at first inclined to accept the narrator's diagnosis about the protagonist's psychological condition until he reads further and finds out that this diagnosis as well as others he makes about the athlete/patient is totally imagined. On learning from the nurse that the ex-athlete goes into the city to mail his letters, the narrator says, "Yo lo imaginaba, solitario y perezoso, mirando la iglesia como miraba la sierra desde el almacén, sin aceptarles un significado, casi para eliminarlos" ''I imagined him, alone and indolent, looking at the church as he looked at the mountain range from the grocery store without attributing to them any significance, even trying to obliterate them.' What the protagonist feels is not necessarily what the narrator imagines he feels. Once we remind ourselves that the narrator is not only unreliable but also egocentric, it is certainly plausible to conclude that the narrator may be projecting his own feelings of alienation and denial into the heart of the protagonist. What is true is that fact and fantasy have merged. On a deeper level, the subjectivity of the protagonist and that of the narrator have also merged to such an extent as to become at times indistinguishable. Through the process of a cubist passage a more encompassing subjectivity fuses the reader, author, narrator, and protagonist into a common, disconcerting awareness of ambiguity and mystery.

It seems fairly evident that Onetti casts doubt on the creative process itself, on the ability of a writer to create autonomous characters with an authentic reality undamaged by a narrator's biased subjectivity. In Los adioses the narrator has assumed a despotic role. He has overstepped his secondary role as an objective reporter, and by focusing the reader's attention primarily on his own interior monologues, the narrator becomes the protagonist who manipulates the other fictional characters into a reconstructed history of people and events that must conform to his own needs for omniscience. An ambiguous, shifting perspective that makes it difficult to decide who is the protagonist, or whose story is being narrated—that of the athlete/patient or that of the bartender—is yet another example of the use of passage.

The use of multiple narrators in Los odioses is a literary parallel to the cubist technique of montage, the device in which the artist forces the viewer to look at objects from multiple perspectives simultaneously. For instance, at the mid-point of the novel a triad of narrators is formed. The bartender is joined by the nurse and the maid in recounting the events in the life of the ex-athlete. As the narrator describes this colloquy: "Entonces, aquella misma tarde o semanas después, porque la precisión ya no importa, porque desde aquel momento yo no ví de ellos nada más que sus distintos estilos de fracaso, el enfermero y la mucama, la Reina, empezaron a contarme la historia del epilogo" 'Then, that very afternoon or weeks later, because accuracy is no longer important, because from that moment I saw in them nothing more than their distinct styles of failure, the nurse and the maid, the Queen, began to relate to me the history of the epilogue.'

The protagonist's daily routine is spliced into three frames: what he does at the general store, as observed by the bartender; what he does at the sanatorium, as observed by the nurse; and what he does at the hotel when visited by the two women, as observed by the maid. Each frame has a separate, exclusive witness, no one of which is reliable. The bartender admits as much when he comments: "Un epilogo, pensaba, yo, defendiéndome, un final para la discutible historia, tal como estos dos son capaces de imaginarlo" The epilogue, I thought, defending myself, an ending for a controvertible history, such as these two are capable of imagining it.'

The reader is already aware of how much of the bartender's narration is based on imagination. To that is added the imagined history contributed by the nurse and the maid. The resulting portrait of the protagonist is splintered into fact and fiction, left impaired by the ambiguous details offered by three unscrupulous and biased reporters. What Gabriel Josipovici says about the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet is equally applicable to Onetti's work: "As with a cubist painting, the reader is forced to move again and again over the material that is presented, trying to force it into a single vision, a final truth, but is always foiled by the resistant artifact" ["'But time will not relent': Modern Literature and the Experience of Time," in The Modern English Novel, edited by Gabriel Josipovici, 1976].

In producing this fictional montage, each of the narrators excises from its temporal and emotional context certain events in the lives of the protagonist and the two women, re-assembles these events to fit the emotional needs of the narrator, and thus presents to the reader a multiple perspective in which the characters lose their fully rounded autonomy, their individuality, and their integrity. The multiple narrators in Los adioses do not present a reliably objective account of the lives of the principal characters. In cubist fashion the perspective is displaced, twisted away from narrative accuracy toward subjective reactions to what these narrators observe. The anticipated focus on what these characters say and do gives way to an exaggerated subjectivity in which the narrator/creator displaces the protagonist as the central figure. Objectivity is further compromised by the substitution of a biased imagination in place of reliable reporting. The arbitrary enlargement of the fictional history through creative imagination further reduces the fictional world to shadows and tones of diminishing reality.

If cubism, as Sypher argues, "is a study of the very techniques of representation—painting about the methods of painting, a report on the reality of art," then Los adioses is a study of the techniques of narration—fiction about the methods of fiction, an inquiry into the reality of narrative fiction. Like a Picasso canvas, Onetti's fiction is not an imitation of nature but an imposition upon nature of forms derived from the mind, a cubist reconstruction—multi-dimensional and ambiguous—that leads the reader into the inevitable feelings of skepticism and discomfort.