Onetti. Juan Carlos Onetti.

Luis Harss, Barbara Dohmann

Onetti, an ardent Arltian [i.e. strongly influenced by the writer Roberto Arlt], belongs to a "lost" generation that came of age around 1940, when the intellectual life of the country was being reassessed against a background of demagoguery and political disenchantment, of totalitarianism in Europe, and nationalism – with pro-Axis sympathies – in Argentina. In Uruguay a reactionary government ruled the country from 1933 to 1942, eroding faith in democracy as the corruption lurking under the monotonous surface of bureaucratic stability became daily more obvious. There were many broken lives in those days. Onetti speaks of the nihilism of his generation – portrayed in massive detail in his second novel, Tierra de Nadie (No Man's Land, 1941) – as a delayed echo of the epidemic malaise of the twenties. But, of course, Onetti lived it as an endemic phenomenon. For him, it was the disillusionment and resulting individualism of an era in which he was one of those who fell by the wayside. . . .

A new type of human being, a creature of twilight, rootless, rancorous, frustrated, displaced, populated our big cities. He was not so much the Marxist underdog as the spiritual outlaw, the moral discard. Arlt had already drawn his prophetic portrait. Now Onetti followed suit, with the dour shrug of a man shouldering the burden of a sad responsibility. In a prefatory note to Tierra de Nadie, whose action takes place in the Buenos Aires of 1940, Onetti has said: "I paint a group of people who may seem exotic in Buenos Aires but are nevertheless representative of a generation. . .. The fact is that the most important country of the young South American continent has started to produce a type of morally indifferent individual who has lost his faith and all interest in his own fate." He adds, defining a bankrupt attitude conditioned by the surrounding indigence: "Let no one reproach the novelist for having undertaken the portrait of this human type in the same spirit of indifference."

In his first published work, El Pozo (The Pit, 1939), the gloomy protagonist, Eladio, a thinly veiled projection of the author, had already recorded his skepticism in regard to personal commitment, his phlegmatic unconcern for anything resembling direct action or involvement. With sad irony Eladio confesses his total lack of social consciousness, of "popular spirit." The tone, as in most of Onetti, is confessional. Why even bother to put pen to paper? wonders Eladio, thinking out loud for the author. The willful answer is in a kind of militant argument for self-expression. "It's true I don't know how to write," he admits. "But I write about myself." Eladio, with his apoplectic inhibitions, is the classic Outsider. He lives disconnected from the world, stranded within himself, adrift in his tiny corner on the borderline of humanity, without any possibility of joining the mainstream. He begins and ends in himself. Which is why his single ambition is "to write the story of a soul, all by itself, without any of the events it had to mix in whether it wanted to or not." Though, of course, whether he "wants to or not," he forms part of the unconscious community of the lonely, the diaspora of the estranged. Even in his alienation, or because of it, he is the representative of a time and place, a frame of mind, an epoch. It is this fact that gives his experiences relevance and validity. To have realized this is Onetti's merit. In a literary scene still too often made up of inflated social canvases, painters of the soul like Onetti are a rarity. But, if only because in the last years they have been producing much of our best work, they have begun to seem inevitable. That our literature is gradually shifting its focus from object to subject, in appearance, perhaps, narrowing its perspectives, is actually a clear sign of our growing self-awareness and, of course, the price in pain and distress that we are paying for it. The price may be high, but, then, who can deny that the stakes are, too? Meditating on the world of solitary inner lives he has created out of what might pass for superfluous materials in the age of industrial waste, Onetti, a man who has never bargained, said in an interview in 1961, without immodesty: "All I want to express is the adventure of man.". . .

In Onetti's ordinarily middle-aged protagonists – his other selves – there is a desperate yearning for vanished youth, innocence and purity, corroded images to which they cling, rusted by time and undermined by memory. They live in the nonexistent past, in the shambles of approaching death and decay, as life passes them by. They have grown old without ever growing up, barely surviving or subsisting through the years, after some distant – and more or less nebulous – fall from grace into the sordid facts of life. Thus, we have Ana María in El Pozo, a joyless little sexpot who inspires a sad lust in the protagonist. His absurd love for her, which exists entirely in the sublimated realm of reverie, is a cynical front behind which he disguises feelings of guilt and remorse. It is nothing but an exorcism – an alibi. The fact is that he has once raped or in some way humiliated her – an impulse that in Onetti functions as a form of wish fulfillment – after which, for understandable reasons, their relations were discontinued. But in his vagaries the climactic act of violence repeats itself indefinitely with a high poetic charge, as if it had been an act of love. The switch is an attempt on Eladio's part to trick himself out of the trap he has set for himself. But it is too late. In Onetti a single moment of bad faith – or bad luck – derails a life forever. Perhaps because "love is marvelous and absurd, and incomprehensibly visits all kinds of souls. But absurd and marvelous people do not abound; and even those gifted with those qualities retain them only for a short time, in their early youth. Then they start accepting things and that's the end of them."

For Onetti, growing out of adolescence into adult life means compromising with impotence and despair. Hidden somewhere in the process is a loss that can never be made up. Says Onetti: "I think that happens to everybody." The sense of having strayed, of things left undone, opportunities missed, chances overlooked, is universal, says Onetti. He has always been haunted by it. The feeling is vague – a sort of chronic uneasiness. "Each person, out of convenience, even intellectual convenience, tries to pinpoint the cause of the trouble, to find something concrete and say: This is it.' Even if it isn't." The effect is numbing. But numbness is the human lot. Onetti defines his characters in terms of their omissions. "Because that's the way I am." In fact, in his early work .. . the characters are little more than episodes in his own mental processes. They are passing fancies that flicker in and out of existence like dream figures. Their sole reality is their subjective charge. And that defines their function. They are dreams dreamed by an author who in turn is dreamed by them. They have only a shadowy secondary – subsidiary – existence and no dramatic substance.

Passing himself off as his narrator is a favorite Onetti device. "I feel freer, more like myself, working this way," he says. Thus Eladio, an inchoate writer, is doubling for the author when he sits down to compose a page of his journal reflecting, as he puts it with heavy irony, that "a man ought to write the story of his life when he reaches the age of forty, especially if interesting things have happened to him." The point is, of course, that nothing has ever happened to him worth mentioning. And what little has happened is a lot less real or interesting than what he has imagined. Reality is tedious and destructive, never up to the high standards of fantasy. Perhaps in this notion lies the source of the narrator's sense of inferiority which his dreams compensate for, providing him with a means of working off his obscure grudge against the world. Because "facts are always empty." It is out of this sense of inadequacy that the author invents surrogate characters who in turn perpetuate themselves in an endless succession of other invented characters that are all his mirror images. "For the writer," says Onetti, "his world is the world. Otherwise he is cheating." What this amounts to in practice is that reading an Onetti book is a schizophrenic experience. The reader is in constant flux between the mind or perceptions of the narrator-protagonist and those of the author, the two being practically indistinguishable. Onetti's figments would cease to exist the moment no one looked at them. They are in the mind's eye and gain access to their borrowed reality only in so far as there is an onlooker to bear witness to them. That is why Onetti says he writes "for his characters." They are his inner inventory. Exposing and outlining himself in them is his way of offering himself through them. Even in their spuriousness, the subjective load they carry is a sign of his abiding affection for them. He has been accused of emotional poverty. The charge is not unfounded. He is not versatile with his emotions. . . .

La Vida Breve, which contains the germ of everything that followed in Onetti's subsequent work, is a long pregnancy that ends in the birth of a subject and a fictional world. Onetti seems to have caught a sudden – incomplete but ultimately lucid – glimpse of the whole road that lay ahead of him. Here, for the first time, we encounter Santa María, "a small town extending between a river and a settlement of Swiss laborers." Here, in the narrator's overactive imagination, we witness the birth of Díaz Grey, himself the narrator and central intelligence in later works. La Vida Breve is a dream-world that later becomes the real world. Dreams used symbolically, says Onetti, are a cheap device. For him they are not transparent Freudian metaphors subject to pat clinical interpretation but an added dimension of reality.

The protagonist, or figurehead, of La Vida Breve, Bransen, is a colorless minor employee in a publicity firm who, attempting to find a way out of the dreariness of his life, dreams himself into the person of Díaz Grey, a doctor he conjures up out of some vaporous literary reminiscence, presumably for a film script he has been commissioned to write for his friend Julio Stein. A chance meeting in the hallway of the rooming house where he lives supplies him with a third identity. A fourth – the author, multiplied, occasionally dissolved, in the roles he shares – complicates the strange cast of characters. Bransen's various split personalities are in constant tension, nourishing and starving each other as they compete for supremacy. There is doubt up to the end as to which will impose itself at the expense of the others. The center of the whirlpool – the eye of the storm – is a static tableau, a set piece of décor in which Bransen, in suspended animation, stages the drama: his room. The immutable setting, says Onetti, was "stolen" from a still life by Ivan Albright that depicts objects on a table, among them a pair of empty gloves that retain the shape of the hands that have been in them. Bransen inhabits this unchanging picture. From there he spins out his fantasies, which branch off in all directions in an intricate pattern of crisscrossing lines in which each intersection is a new starting point. The author, hovering over his shoulder, is an active participant in every story. In each, there is a woman who is all women and enacts the standard parts in the female repertory, appearing under the different guises of sister, wife, mistress, prostitute. The protagonist, in vicarious raptures, escapes from one life into another, improvising as he goes. But every apparent escape leads to a dead end.

Of all Bransen's surrogate creations, it is the doctor Díaz Grey (Dorian Gray?) who acquires the most depth and substance and gradually gains the upper hand over the others, finally supplanting the author himself. . . .

The creation, via Bransen, of Díaz Grey and his world committed Onetti to a task of years and heroic feats of concentration. It has always been a tenuous and unstable fiction that a moment's absentmindedness could obliterate. Already in La Vida Breve, says Onetti, "there are several attempts on the part of the narrator to keep Díaz Grey alive." The ubiquitous but incurably ephemeral doctor keeps slipping away from Bransen, who "sets him back up again, shelters him, damns him, puts him by the window to look out at the river. At a certain moment he says: 'So many days have gone by since I was last able to see Diaz Grey.' He has to bring him back to put him on his fated course again." A lot is at stake. Like God and His creatures in some eminently symbiotic scheme, Onetti and Diaz Grey depend on each other.

Evidence of this is Un Sueño Realizado y Otros Cuentos (A Dream Fulfilled and Other Stories, 1951), written between 1941 and 1949 – or more or less simultaneously with La Vida Breve – and first published in the course of the years in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación. Here, amid a lot of peripheral stage machinery, we can see Onetti assembling and dismounting the props that support his framework. Un Sueño Realizado is setting and background for La Vida Breve. Onetti is projecting antecedents, plotting case histories, feeling his way into attitudes, customs, and habitats. People and faces are in uncertain suspense, shadows flashing on the screen and flickering off in the blink of an eyelash. We have no clear concept, no overall view, of the situation yet; but Onetti's main themes are all present. The hypocritical idealism of adolescence is exposed in "Bienvenido, Bob" ("Welcome, Bob"). The shabbiness of false hope – in this case a man who swindles his boss to fulfill his Danish wife's ruinous yearning to return to the land of her childhood – is portrayed in "Esbjerg, en la Costa" ("Esbjerg, on the Coast"). Again, there is the death of illusion on contact with reality, in the title story, "Un Sueño Realizado." And, most notably, there is our friend Díaz Grey – grown independent of his progenitor, Bransen – in a familiar dilemma: the recollection, from the unfathomable depths of age, of the one moment of possible redemption in his life, which he threw away when he betrayed the trust of the woman who had offered him her help and love ("La Casa en la Arena" – "The House on the Sand"). The retrospective view of Díaz Grey ties up some loose ends in his story, but actually raises more questions than it solves. The past, in Onetti, is mythologized. Remembrance is a distant vantage point in which old scenes recur full of problematic variations. In "La Casa en la Arena" we are told what actually happened, what the protagonist imagined had happened, what he wished had happened, and what may, for all we know, still be happening, all of these different phases of the experience superimposed as time holds still around them. Onetti does not want to crystallize his world; he wants it to remain fluid. Therefore his various accounts of events, even when they cover the same grounds, may not coincide. Facts in one book may contradict those given in another, or even elsewhere in the same book. Inconsistencies need not be accounted for. What remains unchanged is the atmosphere of loss and drift, resentment and cynicism, that absorbs his creatures with their vague urges, their flashes of hate toward others, their perverse fantasies and obscure qualms and regrets. They are fixtures in a closed circuit that seals off all escape routes and makes all conclusions foregone. The town is little more than an extension of their boredom, staleness, and misery. Everywhere there are "fat and badly dressed people." The settings are grubby bedrooms, sweaty bars, fetid back streets, or "any smelly office." The detailed description – sometimes ad nauseam – of the gestures and movements of minor characters thickens the paste, adding to the cumulative agony. Every twitch and contortion has its place in the system. Even as the protagonists reflect the author, the secondary characters enact the moods of the protagonists. They form overlapping images that act as objective correlatives of a single state of mind. "That's the way I am. The small detail in persons or situations is enormously important to me," says Onetti. The traits scattered among the surrounding human specters belong less to individual persons than they do to the ensemble, to the repertory of the book as a whole. Personifying the décor is a way of rendering it dynamic, humanizing it. Onetti's figments are never rounded persons; they are choreographic figures. He says he could never create the complete psychology of a Babbitt. Nor would he want to. He deals with a single emotional – almost abstract – type: the stranger. Often his characters are actually out-of-towners of vaguely foreign genealogy; there is a predominance of Nordic or Germanic names that enhance this effect. They lead an erratic existence, "a grotesque life," married to flabby women, too big for their small lives, too small for their fantasies, straitjacketed by their past, eroded by "the quiet underhanded work of time."

A somewhat painful subject must be brought up in relation to Onetti: his style. Over the years it has gone through subtle but steady changes that throw considerable light on Onetti's intentions. In El Pozo the language was careless, straightforward, almost journalistic, in the Arltian manner – decidedly antiliterary. In La Vida Breve it had become more elliptical, but without taking on any added syntactical complications, retaining its aura of artlessness. In Un Sueño Realizado – as in Tierra de Nadie and, increasingly, in Para Esta Noche – there is more artifice. Onetti is echoing a master who has had an enormous influence on him: Faulkner. The influence is conscious and deliberate, and Onetti sees no reason to apologize for it. But it is sometimes embarrassing to the reader. Un Sueño Realizado is made of tortuously long and graceful Faulknerian sentences that contribute to the cloistered atmosphere of the book but, because of an excess of imitated mannerisms – intricate modifiers, pleomastic subclauses, redundant adjectival expanses – sometimes seem affected. Onetti loves the circular and static, perfectly suitable devices in a world of fates settled in advance, where every life is a sentence served backward, predestined and therefore in some sense tautological. The reiterative style is an integral part of the manic-depressive atmosphere. But in strong doses it can begin to seen like a noisy contrivance, more hysterical than inherent. In Faulkner accumulations of words add force and momentum to the story; in Onetti they too often merely distract and diffuse. Onetti admits and does not attempt to justify, his Faulknerian variations. He merely points out the obvious difference between his and Faulkner's conceptions of the world. Faulkner is a tragedian; Onetti, if one can coin a term, is a pathetician. He shares with Faulkner the use of a fictional site as his setting, a preoccupation for inner architectures with metaphysical overtones. Otherwise – above all, temperamentally – they have little in common. Their respective frames of reference are entirely different. And perhaps that is where the trouble lies. Faulkner's characters live outside him, in time and history; they are endowed with independent means of action and individual consciences. Onetti's characters are at once more intimate and more abstract. Living at such close quarters with their creator, they have become disembodied. The more said about them, the less real they seem. They are floating essences. Words bury them. Whether or not Onetti has overcome this danger is a matter we leave unresolved. The Faulknerian trance has had such a lasting hold over him that even today he claims that the best thing he ever wrote was a translation he did years ago of a story from These 13.

One of his works most damaged by contact with the Faulknerian mode was Los Adioses, an involuted chronicle of futility that ends in suicide. A moribund athlete – one of Onetti's melancholy maniacs – retires to die in Santa Maria. He rents a house on a knoll outside town, where he secludes himself, alternately receiving two apparently rival women who have an agreement to visit him separately. Letters, in the possession of the narrator (in this case not one of the protagonists but the owner of the general store, who keeps the refugees in supplies), subsequently reveal the women to be his wife – and a daughter by a previous marriage. The loneliness and essential selfishness of the suicidal impulse are the subject of the story. The protagonist, reduced to the last imaginable extreme, clings to the forlorn hope of privacy in death, because "he had only that, and did not want to share it." The language overloads a thin plot which, typically, unfolds at second hand, progressing through gossip, rumor, and indirection. The effect is somewhat hazy. The surprise ending – based on withheld information – does not seem implicit. Yet in a sense Los Adioses represents an advance over La Vida Breve, or at least a new phase in Onetti's work. The narrator, though not dispensed with, has been relegated to a secondary plane. The protagonists – whose impenetrable mystery ultimately remains intact – have at least a semblance of an objective existence outside him.

A considerable improvement in this vein, and one of Onetti's most readable books, because of a skillfully handled element of suspense in it, is Una Tumba sin Nombre (A Nameless Tomb, 1959), an enigma without a complete solution that generates some of the excitement of a good detective story (a genre the author is much addicted to; he says he wishes he could plot as well as Raymond Chandler). The setting, as usual, is Santa María. The subject is the moral corruption and consequent compunctions of an errant adolescent, Jorge Malabia, who pours out his guilt to a sympathetic listener, and chronicler: Díaz Grey. As Díaz Grey records it with blood-thirsty relish – picking up odds and ends to complete the picture from Tito Perotti, Jorge's roommate at the university, and spicing the racy mixture with his own acid speculations – it is a gory tale. It involves an amoral young woman, Rita, an ex-maid in the Malabia household, once the mistress of Marcos Bergner, the brother of Jorge's sister-in-law, Julita. Exploited, then abandoned, by Marcos, Rita has taken to whoring for a living in Buenos Aires, where Jorge meets her while studying at the university and sets up house with her. Una Tumba sin Nombre, with all due allowances for its Onettian vagaries, is a Bildungsroman. The occasion for Jorge's growth is his enslaving passion, which is at least partly self-imposed. As a child, the commentator reveals, Jorge used to spy on Marcos and Rita through the keyhole, fascinated by their lovemaking. It is his tormenting memories of Rita in intimate postures, become obsessive with time, that somehow make him feel entitled to possess her now, as if she had been destined for him. He picks her up, installs her among his belongings, and although he has a generous allowance of his own and he knows she is dying of tuberculosis, lives off her for months, completely abandoning his studies. A curious twist is the motivation Onetti provides for the melodrama. Rita, bound from the beginning to occupy the unmarked tomb of the title, attracts disaster and thrives on humiliation; she is one of the insulted and injured of the world. Jorge turns out to be a sort of minor Raskolnikov. He acts out of gratuitous malice, pleased to imagine himself in the shoes of Rita's ex-pimp, Ambrosio, whose identity he borrows on the theory, as he tells Tito Perotti, that "I can never regret anything because whatever I do will have to be within the limits of human possibility." Of course – as we gather from the distortions and refractions out of which the story gradually takes shape – he learns better. His intellectual arrogance, his middle-class smugness, have led him into some of the cardinal sins on Onetti's list: hypocrisy, cynicism, and above all, the false pride that tempts the gods. His righteousness is a disguise for cowardice, his rebelliousness for conformity. Onetti – or Díaz Grey – does not blame him. He merely exposes him. Jorge has tried to find a way out; he has failed. His crime – the crime of phoniness – was in pretending he could win in the first place. Covering up his failure compounded it. The author's – or narrator's – verdict is dispassionate. Such is life. Jorge's defeat is everyone's defeat. As they filter through to us, the facts of the case remain somewhat enigmatic. We have to sift shifting points of view. Here Onetti has hit on a compromise formula he uses with varying success in his later books. Díaz Grey, the seeing eye, is only a partial witness. Sometimes there is none. Certain passages are told straight. Others are once, twice, or even three times removed behind layers of lenses. Díaz Grey, not quite emancipated from his creator, has become a sort of universal conscience, a father confessor and faceless guiltbearer for others. His independence is strictly putative, conditional – a convenient assumption for narrative purposes, pending the author's suspension of belief in him, whereupon his fickle autonomy will instantly vanish. Which is what happens once he has provided the necessary angles and insights. Suddenly slight differentiations are abandoned. The author becomes the actor. He is directly involved when he qualifies his – or Díaz Grey's; here the two fuse – account of Jorge's adventures as a liberating experience for him, who, in living it down or, more precisely, writing it out, has gained the upper hand over at least one of life's "daily setbacks."

In La Cara de la Desgracia (The Face of Misfortune, 1960) we find Onetti making a clean breast of the things he will obviously never be entirely rid of. Written in an unusually polite and slick style for him, told directly in the first person, with its share of ambivalences and blackouts, it is another story of guilt and noncommunication. The setting is a resort somewhere in the coastal area of Santa María, where the protagonist, in retreat, searches his conscience over the recent death of his brother, declines responsibility for the brother's widow, and on the side conducts an intermittent love affair on the beach with a deaf girl – another nymphomaniac virgin – who pays for their love (a scandal against the order of things: the rules of mourning, human solidarity in suffering) with her life. The germ of La Cara de la Desgracia was a story called "La Larga Historia" ("The Long Affair") that Onetti had written many years before (in 1944). The lighter accent, the more flippant tone, cannot hide the fact that his standard themes appear in a more muddled form than usual. There are too many blind spots. But we strike a new note here. The narrator-protagonist is another of Onetti's dreamers; but, though as usual mortally wounded by life, he is no longer entirely the helpless victim of circumstance. He has begun to develop a strategy with which to fight back. He is an embryonic ancestor of the saintly sinner that appears in Onetti's later work, for whom criminal intent miraculously becomes a twisted form of faith and inner harmony. . . .

After El Astillero ... , we have a pause which he fills with a mortuary exercise in Faulknerian craftsmanship, a collection of stories called El Infierno tan Temido (The Hell We Dread, 1962). We are back in a Santa María now so intensely felt that it is almost lost in the glare. Somehow it seems less credible than before. The verbal flood has become more convoluted as the author's backstage maneuverings become more devious and remote. Díaz Grey, Petrus, [from El Astillero], and other staples reappear, but in residual form. The foreground is occupied by marginal characters, sometimes outlandish visitors on their way through town, who flare into existence for a second, then recede into the surrounding vacuum. The language is of no help. The compliment of imitation Onetti pays his master sometimes verges on parody. Nevertheless, the characteristic Onettian mode is present. The best of the stories deals with the sad predicament of an aging lecher infatuated with a frivolous actress who succumbs to extracurricular temptations, elopes with one of them, then tortures her admirer for the rest of his life mailing him obscene photographs she has posed for in compromising postures, as if to get back at him for saddling her with his charity and forgiveness, intent on blaming him for her inability to atone for her own weakness and treachery.

Shifting the blame is also the topic of the rather careless and superficial Tan Triste Como Ella (As Sad as She Is, 1963), "a sketch that didn't quite come off," as Onetti says himself, recognizing its poverty, which gives it the distinction of being probably the worst thing he ever wrote. He committed the mistake, he says, of describing something – a marriage on the rocks – that had actually happened (to him? He has been married three or four times) and that therefore enslaved him to the facts, dampening his inventiveness. The story reads like a self-conscious love letter that soon dwindles into radio drama. A curious slip for a writer at such a late stage in his work. But Onetti has too little distance from his work to take an objective view of the results. He lacks judgment and perspective...

[Onetti's] pessimism seems to have become almost generic. He is resigned, as Jorge in Juntacadáveres, to furnish his empty world with the shapes of his fictions, to create faces and gestures, needs and ambitions, and appropriate roles to which they can be appointed, the better to be sacrificed. The fate assigned each man is impersonal, he wrote in La Vida Breve. It can be fulfilled only in so far as it is the fate of all men. It does not allude to his true self, which is elsewhere, out of sight and circulation, a humble offering waiting to be put before the gods, who may choose to regard it as a small masterpiece or a penny dreadful.

Source: Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers, Harper & Row, 1967, pp. 173-205.