SOURCE: "The Shorter Works of Juan Carlos Onetti," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Winter, 1971, pp. 112-22.

For some twenty years after he published his first work, El pozo (The Well, 1939), Juan Carlos Onetti's reputation was confined to his native Uruguay and to Argentina. Born in 1909, he lived in Buenos Aires during most of the thirties, forties and early fifties, met the literary establishment there and published with major houses; but his books sold poorly, and he received scant critical attention. Except for a few critics and the coterie of Montevideo writers who felt his influence, the reading public seemed unprepared to follow his technical explorations or to recognize itself in the degraded world he was devising.

Wider recognition came in the sixties. Onetti won several distinctions, including the Uruguayan national literary prize in 1963. More important, as awareness spread of the rich new strain of Latin American fiction that had superseded the die-hard conventions of naturalism and sentimental folklore, critics began to name Onetti as a forerunner and a major participant in the movement. Two of them have discovered recently that El pozo fits neatly into their constructs as its starting point. Leo Pollmann, in his parallel study of the Latin American and French new novels [Der Neue Roman in Frankreich and Lateinamerika, 1969], detects an existentialist strain sui generis beginning haltingly with Roberto Arlt, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Eduardo Mallea, and he concludes that Onetti was the first in that line fully to unify form and content. Similarly, [in "Primitives and Creators," The Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 1968] Mario Vargas Llosa divides the history of the Latin American novel into a primitive form, culminating in Ciro Alegría and Asturias, which "constituted the subjectivization of a selected objective reality," and the authentically creative form, which began with El pozo and "consists in the objectivization of something subjective." Whatever rankings one prefers to make, it should be stressed that Onetti has contributed both to the novel (five to date) and to the shorter forms (six novellas and a dozen stories). El pozo itself would more properly be called a novella, although these commentators chose it to exemplify a trend in the novel. In the short pieces, Onetti brings some of his key symbols into close focus, and he has made explorations in self-conscious or reflexive narration, multiple point of view and, to some extent, language.

THE Two AGES OF MAN

Onetti's "subjective something" consists in a pathetic and ironic recognition of human aging and decay, of life as tedious compromise, of the futility and necessity of illusion. Much of the décor of the dark tradition of modern fiction has found its way into his works, through literary cross-breeding and simply through his own affinity with the negative view of man's possibilities. Certainly his habitat, urban Uruguay and Argentina, has offered a natural setting for pessimism and considerations of marginality. Immigrant nations, barely pretending to be viable bourgeois states, they suffer their own version of Latin America's neocolonial malaise. While Onetti's fiction may be shown to reflect the individual alienation that results from deficient forms of social organization, its laws are not primarily social. The conflict takes place not between classes but between man and his fatally predetermined nature. Often the major battle of the conflict has taken place before the work begins, and the protagonist acts from a basic attitude of disillusionment. As in much literature of marginality, plot is usually subordinated to descriptive detail that emphasizes the drag of time. Typically, Onetti focuses upon an anti-hero in resentful estrangement from others, from political commitment and from any metaphysical sense. The characters tend toward atrophy and lack will. They spend their days and nights smoking insomniac on a bed, making routine trips to prostitutes, toying with seedy enterprises doomed from the start. Their prototype, Eladio Linacero of El pozo, bluntly sums up his lot in this way: "I feel that my life is nothing more than the passing of fractions of time, one after the other, like the sound of a clock, running water, coins being counted. I'm lying flat and time is passing."

Perception of this fate is the sign of maturity. There are two ages of man, naive youth and the age of conformity. These are defined in the early story "Bienvenido, Bob" ("Welcome, Bob"; written in the early forties, collected in 1951), as a middle-aged narrator celebrates the initiation of a younger man into hopelessness. Ten years earlier, Bob had successfully blocked the narrator's effort to marry his sister, on the grounds that he was too old for her. With the arrogance of "implacable youth," Bob twitted the narrator over his surrender to age and habit, and finally destroyed the courtship. Now Bob himself has aged, is known as Roberto, and has traded his confidence and personal promise for a routine of alcohol and gambling. Previously, the older man had the role of uncomfortable victim and was fascinated with his tormentor's nonchalance. Now he takes delight in recording the sadistic friendship he has struck up with Roberto, so as to observe him at last "sunken into the filthy life of men . . . tainted for good." The narrator has won the upper hand, and his obsessive game is to bait any nostalgia Roberto still has for the days of Bob. The taint of age was summed up by Bob when he told the narrator he would not permit the marriage: ". . . you are a mature man, that's to say a man undone, like all men your age who are not extraordinary. . . . You are an egoist; you are sensual in a dirty way. You are attached to miserable objects and it is the objects that lead you around. You are not going anywhere, you don't really want to." Just as the narrator was barred from recapturing some of his lost purity in the person of the young woman, maturity welcomes Bob with a vengeance.

One finds comparable pairings of the two ages everywhere in Onetti. They give structure to several other stories. Youth and age coincide in the heroine of "Un sueño realizado" ("A Dream Come True"), title story of the collection that includes "Bienvenido, Bob." The dreamer is in her fifties, but has the "air of a young girl from another century who had fallen asleep and was just now awakening, hardly aged but on the verge of catching up with her years at any moment, all of a sudden, and falling apart there in silence." She hires the narrator, a down-and-out director, to stage an apparently uneventful street scene she has dreamed, in which she takes the role of a young girl. At the end of the performance, given in an empty theater, she dies on stage. The scene juxtaposes her conflicting aspects, and the narrator's premonitory description is confirmed. The pathos of the woman's dream-like attempt to reverse time stands in contrast to the cynicism of the narrator and of the chief actor, both of whom have accepted the compromises of life.

A close inside view of a girl's thoughts and sensations as she moves toward her fall from innocence is provided in "Mascarada" ("Masquerade"; another early story collected only in 1962). Her mask is the thick make-up she has applied after deciding, a few hours before, to parade herself as a prostitute. Her motivation is never made clear, and this increases the sense of inevitability. She moves through a park full of onlookers who are watching a sleazy group of entertainers and then turn their attention to her. The entire story is limited to this walk with its foreseeable ending. Every movement and every image of the park has a metaphoric function and adds to the portrait of the young girl as she makes the transition from youth to experience, still uncomfortable under her painted face. The story is one of the finest examples of a functional application of the convoluted language Onetti adapted from Faulkner. At its best, this language of linked clauses, of qualifiers and amplifications spun out into lengthy periods, can refine sentiments and articulate nuances exhaustively. Here its wavy rhythmic patterns correspond to a reported interior monologue that objectifies the protagonist's movement and the chain of almost hallucinatory raw images she encounters on her walk.

THE FACE OF MISFORTUNE

Eve is predestined to bring about the loss of innocence and the arrival of sobering knowledge. In Onetti, la desgracia—the misfortune that causes a fall or relapse into disillusionment—tends to be centered in a woman and transmitted to the man who placed his hope in her. Male points of view reveal her as the instinctive vehicle of destiny. In "Esbjerg, en la costa" ("Esbjerg, on the Coast," 1951), Kirsten, a Dane, began to long for her country. Her lover, Montes, caught up in her dimly articulated dream of recovering the past, tried to embezzle money for her passage from his employer, a bookie. He failed and is being made to repay the loss. Montes and Kirsten now make a daily routine of going to the harbor to watch departing ships, she a heavy figure with the "face of a statue in winter, the face of someone who fell asleep and didn't close her eyes in the rain." The bookie, who as narrator restrains excessive sentimentality, imagines that "when the ships' horns allow Montes to hear how she moves along the stones, dragging her men's shoes, the poor devil must feel that he is getting deeper into the night on the arm of misfortune." Kirsten's doggedness, as well as the details of her peasant frame and her shoes, may be seen to derive from some of Faulkner's women who carry out the designs of fate in similar ways.

[In Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo, 1966] Emir Rodríguez Monegal has described the hero of what he calls Onetti's "allegories" as "a solitary man with the illusion (always defrauded) of attaining the purity of an adolescent girl, with the inner certainty that to win her means to destroy her, to reveal her basic sordidness." This confrontation, with its mixed motives and its inevitable pull toward disaster, is sharply defined in the novella La cara de la desgracia (The Face of Misfortune, 1960). The narrator sizes up a young bicyclist at a beach resort. She postures and throws him a memorable glance. He realizes that the attraction he feels is a resurgence of his "old, unjust, almost always mistaken pity. There was no doubt that I loved her and wanted to protect her. I could not guess from what or against what. I wanted, furiously, to shield her from herself and from any danger. I had seen her unsure and defiant, I had seen her display a proud face of misfortune. That can last for a time, but it is always repaid prematurely, disproportionately." Forewarnings of this sort produce the somewhat overdeveloped climate of fatality of the novella. The narrator perceives a resemblance between the girl's expression and that of his brother at their last meeting before his recent suicide. The feeling of guilt for his brother's death complicates his attraction for the girl as he sees in her apparent hopelessness a chance for expiation. He is temporarily rejuvenated and freed from guilt after the seduction scene, which occurs in the woods at night. But the atmosphere of the encounter is strained. The girl appears remote and speaks haltingly in a hoarse voice. The man's intentions seem more ordinary than previously described in the narration. The incommunication is made grotesque by the later revelation that the girl was deaf.

Despite some obscurity in the narrator's version, it seems clear that he did not kill the girl, but the next morning he is accused of her murder and brought before her bruised remains. The face of misfortune, which had been "twisted in tears" after the anxious coupling of the night before, has taken a final form, described at length in the funereal voice and clinical jargon of a medical examiner. It is suggested that by deflowering the girl the narrator is the virtual agent of her death. He returns to indifference, telling the police, "The amusing thing is that you are mistaken. But that doesn't matter. Nothing matters, not even this." The novella lapses into the melodrama that occasionally damages Onetti's short works, but succeeds in its detailed presentation of the narrator's fascination. Each time he sees the girl, a cinematic slow pan in the description visualizes her movements and reproduces the eagerness of his staring.

Photographs record the face of misfortune in "El infierno tan temido" ("Dreaded Hell," 1962, title story of a collection). The virgin eager for life was an actress, pointedly named Gracia, whose face was seen peering from theater posters "a little defiant, a little fascinated by the hope of convincing and being understood." Risso, a widower, married her, looking for purity and an ideal state. Instead of understanding, Gracia encountered tedious sexual insistence and Risso's repeated dictum: "Anything can happen and we'll always be happy and in love with each other." This set up a ritual of mediation in which she could express her feeling for Risso only in adultery. After they have separated, she goes on tour and begins to send him photos of herself with men. At first the photos continue the mediation, and Risso is almost caught up in it; but soon he cannot look at the photos that keep arriving. When other people in town begin receiving them, the nature of her revenge becomes clear. The progressive arrival of the photos forms the linear portion of the narrative, which is interspersed with flashbacks that describe the uncommunicative relationship. Even in the context of a story of revenge, human will is subordinated to situations. The ubiquitous third-person narrator describes both Risso's and Gracia's actions as responses to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

THE CREATIVE ILLUSION AND REFLEXIVITY

[In their Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers, 1967] Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann have observed that "to break the irreversible pattern of his life is the compulsive need of every Onetti character." Amid the paralysis and fatalism, attempts to escape through illusion are distorted by heavy irony. Love appears in perverse forms, or as the dull sensuality that underlies Risso's sentiments toward Gracia. Power, as in the case of "Bienvenido, Bob," is reduced to the exercise of small-time sadism. Another means of escape continually entertained as a counter to the grim reality principle is artistic creation. This appears to be Onetti's compulsive need. He has explored it in a series of self-conscious or reflexive works both short and long, where debased artist-heroes and self-conscious narrators grope for a kind of salvation he once optimistically described in this way: "Creations justify man. . .. They lift him above his numbered days, perhaps with no need for further assistance, without a search for another faith." The creative hero's characteristic move is to annihilate his dwindled selfhood in fictive worlds, in what Brausen of the novel La vida breve calls "a short life, in which time did not suffice to compromise me, to age me or to make me regret."

The creative theme was first sketched in El pozo. The reflexive apparatus of the novella and its attention to the physical details of the character's current situation produce an oppressive sense of time. The entire text dramatizes Eladio Linacero's act of writing a confessional memoir on the eve of his fortieth birthday. The jagged, associational development of the text responds to his mental process. The flow of time, with its disintegrating effects, is evoked as Linacero listens to the sound of his own pacing about the room, in his decline into fatigue at the end of the night when he stops writing, and even in the layout of the novella in short fragments.

Like Dostoyevsky's underground man, from whom he is derived, Linacero has retired into the uncomfortable isolation of his furnished room because he is incapable of dealing with the world. His recollections comprise a series of disastrous personal encounters each of which involved an attempt to transcend self and to enter into communication with another. At age sixteen he attacked an older cousin who had never paid much attention to him. His marriage broke up when he saw that the young Ceci he married had become Cecilia, a woman "with a stinking practical sense." A flirtation with political activism ended as he came to see that middle-class intellectuals were parasites on the social movement. His response to estrangement has been to fabricate what he calls "dreams" or sometimes "adventures" having the consistency of pulp stories or B movies. The dreams are built out of the material of his experience, but in them he has an active role denied to him in real life, and his interpersonal defeats become simple triumphs. He does not write them down, but he keeps them catalogued in his memory. Defensively, he insists he is no mere dreamer, that he has "lived as much as anyone or more." But his testimony belies it. His only full experience occurs on the sublimated level of the adventures, and they are a flimsy mediation. In the last fragment, Linacero is stretched out on his cot, listening to the sounds of the city. His language traces an imagery of surrender to the night and to the flow of time, prefiguring death. Significantly, at this point his dreams are not proof against reality: he is too exhausted to conjure up his favorite, in which his cousin gives herself to him in an idyllic log cabin in Alaska.

Although Linacero says he has suitcases full of writings, he does not presume to be a writer. The novella's reflexive passages are largely given over to his excuses and ironic commentaries on the haphazard organization he is giving to the narrative. It is in these passages that Onetti's authorial presence may be discerned most clearly, diffident about his capacity ("I don't know how to write," says Linacero, "but I'm writing about myself) but at the same time presenting an anti-literary stance in opposition to the then current highsounding fiction of Uruguay and Argentina. El pozo is expressly barbarous, designed to communicate bitter experience bitterly. Linacero's fantasies cannot be taken as seriously by the reader as they are by himself. Simple exercises in wish fulfillment, they are too easily dispersed by reality.

A somewhat more persuasive case for the possibility of imaginative sublimation—always within the fated context—is made in La vida breve (1950). A massive re-elaboration of the solipsistic world of El pozo, the novel deserves brief mention here not only because it develops the creative theme but because it marks the transition from Onetti's first period to his second group of works, most of which are set in the Faulknerian town sketched in La vida breve for the first time. As his surrogate in the novel was creating a filmscript set in the provincial Santa María, Onetti was preparing the locale for later works. Juan María Brausen's imaginative effort is an extension of the author's own. Its motivation is again the narrator's need to escape isolation and routine. In his lucid self-analysis, Brausen arrives at zero, discovering he is "nobody, really; a name, three words, a diminutive idea put together mechanically by my father." The narrative is thick with surface detail descriptive of the fragmentary consciousness Brausen seeks to reconstitute or submerge in a short life out of time. He embarks upon two short lives: an impersonation by which he enters into relations with a prostitute and the surrogate creature, Dr. Díaz Grey, the protagonist of the filmscript, whose experiences, as we see, spring from Brausen's own.

Notably, Brausen does not conjure up rosy sublimations, as in the case of Linacero, but existences almost as colorless as his original one, continuations of the self he hoped to shed. Proceeding by fluid movement from one level to another of his divided self, and by the accumulation of morbid detail on all levels, the novel reaches a resolution in which the protagonist effectively fades out of view and the narration is taken up by Díaz Grey. With its interpenetrating orders of reality and its divine analogy between creator Brausen and creature Díaz Grey (as well as implied creator Onetti), the novel seems worthy of some unimaginable Borges, long-winded enough to write a 390-page tome. In fact, there is reason to believe that Borges's speculations may have influenced Onetti's.

The aging Díaz Grey carries on in subsequent Onetti works as artist-narrator. The first of these is the story "La casa en la arena" ("The House in the Sand"; collected in Un sueño realizado). Díaz Grey is the reflector of a third-person narrative. The story material is presented as the obsessive recollection of an incident from his past in the drug racket. "His life, he himself, was no longer anything more than that recollection, the only one worth remembering and correcting, worth falsifying time and again." The invention of the incident stimulates the Doctor; it is a selfprojection which makes his present more tolerable. In it he comes together with an idiot firebug called El Colorado and a woman named Molly in a beach chalet where they must keep out of circulation. The atmosphere is one of imprisonment. Díaz Grey and Molly have a chance to escape together, but he rejects it. Sufficient tension of plot is maintained to make "La casa en la arena" an example, as well as a parody, of the crime story; but any naive response to the incident is discouraged by the device of filtering it through Díaz Grey's imagination. We see the fictionalized recollection as such, and its origin as the ineffectual doctor's compulsive self-projection. Its insubstantiality and his dependence on it become clear to him: "When Díaz Grey, in the office facing the plaza of the provincial town, engages in the game of recognizing himself in this memory, the only one, he is obliged to . . . suppose that his meticulous life, his own body deprived of lust, his bland beliefs, are symbols of the essential banality of the memory he has been careful to keep up for years." The passage recalls Díaz Grey's own fictionality and comments on the story as a meshing of two planes of reality, both dominated by the atmosphere of indifference.

Events are at an even greater remove in the novella Para una tumba sin nombre (For a Nameless Tomb, 1959). The multiple point of view of a series of unreliable testimonies is deployed to produce an unclear story. Díaz Grey, cast in the explicit role of a writer elaborating on supposedly true events, admits that what he finally had was "nothing, a hopeless confusion, a tale with no possible ending, of doubtful meaning, refuted by the very elements I had at hand to shape it." The ultimate refutation—his own position as fictive surrogate for the author—perforce escapes him. In any case, Díaz Grey writes the story once he has convinced himself that none of it is true. In his final note, he professes to have reached a modest triumph that distantly echoes Onetti's remark about creative activity: "All that matters is that when I finished writing, I was at peace, sure that I had achieved the most that can be expected from this kind of task: I had accepted a challenge, I had converted at least one of the daily defeats into victory."

He makes his points: detachment is required of the writer, there is a satisfaction in craftsmanship, and fiction is not life. Considerable portions of the novella are devoted to the investigation of storytelling. But Díaz Grey's aesthetic remove is also linked to the theme of human solidarity and indifference, around which the material of his story hovers. The incidents he has tried to piece together (adding "some deliberate lies" of his own to those of the witnesses) concern the exploitation of Rita, an ex-servant woman turned prostitute and beggar. A succession of laconic pimps lived off her work in Buenos Aires, among them Jorge Malabia, the Santa María society boy who is Díaz Grey's chief informant. The conflicting reports, complicated by additions and retractions, make it impossible to determine the exact nature of Rita, of her relationships with the men, and of their motivation. The overall picture that comes out of the accounts and Díaz Grey's inventions portrays a recognizable Onettian woman plodding in the path reserved to her by fate, accompanied by men who interpret their indifference as pity. The picture is distorted not only by the confusion of perspectives but by grotesque humor, much of it attached to the billygoat that Rita took with her daily as she solicited in a railroad station and which Malabia led to her burial. Scapegoat, symbol of lust, evil, cuckoldry—it officiates in "its divine condition," and provides a partial opprobrium to the goings-on beyond Díaz Grey's detachment.

The author-character narcissism is most communicative when controlled by the distance between what is discernible as "Onetti" and his surrogate creators. When that distance is badly handled, the result may be a tone of self-indulgence and apology or a loss of coherence. This damages the long story "La novia robada" ("The Stolen Bride," 1968). The title refers to the theft of the heroine from the tradition of would-be brides—Dickens' Miss Havisham, Faulkner's Miss Emily—confessed and apologized for at the beginning. The narrator continually addresses himself to Moncha, the heroine, and tells her that he is writing a letter, words for her ears only, although "many will be called to read them." This indicates the reader's subordinate place in the story. The narration is sentimental and strewn with cryptic references that reach beyond Moncha, apparently to an extraliterary woman she represents. There is more that the usual number of allusions to Onetti's earlier writings, limiting the readership to devotees. As an attempt to break out of the form of the short story, "La novia robada" fails. It reads as too private an expression, the record of an authorial whim.

The critics reproach Onetti's thematic insistence, the lapses into rhetoric, the minute descriptive style that serves as the imitative form of boredom and that sometimes reproduces it in the reader. The charges are often valid, but a defense might also be made of the variety of his short works. He is capable of evoking a mood, as in the uneventful "Esbjerg, en la costa"; but "Un sueño realizado" is sustained by forewarnings, suggestive symmetries and a pronounced ending. The lingering visualization heralded in El pozo forms an even more expressive part of La cara de la desgracia. Despite his narrators' frequent sameness of diction, there is variety in the narrative structures. Quite different effects emerge from the heated first-person of "Bienvenido, Bob" (sympathy for the human condition negatively expressed through a bilious narrator) and, say, the third-person of "Mascarada" (sympathy expressed through an ostensibly neutral account). Onetti's experiments in self-conscious form, particularly in the novellas, represent an awareness of the subtleties of fiction and a coming to terms with the vital implications of creativity.