Marcha, where the author served as editor for two years (1939-1941). Under a variety of exotic pseudonyms and humorous epithets, Onetti wrote not only essays and criticism but
also short pieces of fiction as “fillers” for that weekly, all of which remain uncollected.
During his first stint in Buenos Aires, from 1930 to 1934, Onetti wrote a number of film reviews for the periodical Crítica, and they also remain uncollected. While he may have 177
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attempted genres other than prose, only two poems exist in print: “Y el pan nuestro,” in Cuadernos hispanoamericanos (1974), and “Balada del ausente,” in Casa de las Américas (1976).
Achievements
Until the mid-1960’s, when Latin American fiction moved into the international lime-
light and its younger practitioners acknowledged Juan Carlos Onetti as one of their fore-runners, Onetti’s popularity was limited to a devoted few. His first published novel, The Pit, did not go into a second printing for twenty-six years after its initial edition of five hundred copies. The pivotal work of his career, A Brief Life, was not reissued until fifteen years after its publication. Onetti is now internationally acclaimed, with his works translated into many languages and constantly being reissued in Spanish editions.
In the mid-1930’s, Onetti was becoming increasingly well known in his native Monte-
video. His stint as literary editor of Marcha from 1939 to 1941 furnished him with a forum for his literary ideas during what was a very productive period for his own writing. His intellectual activities did not abate when he moved to Buenos Aires for the second time, in 1941—where he would remain for a decade and a half—but the move did sever prematurely his growing influence in his own country.
In 1951, Onetti’s countrymen gave their first public recognition of his achievements
when the important Montevideo review Número dedicated a special issue to his work. Ten years later, The Shipyard was selected by a jury in a literary contest sponsored by Compañía General Fabril Editora, which published that novel. In 1962, Onetti was
awarded Uruguay’s national literary prize, and in 1963, The Shipyard received the William Faulkner Foundation Certificate of Merit. Italy awarded the same novel its prize for the best foreign work translated into Italian for the year 1975. In June of 1980, a group of distinguished writers and critics from all over the world gathered at the Universidad
Veracruzana de Méjico to pay homage to Onetti and his career on the occasion of his sev-
entieth birthday. Today, Onetti’s significance in Latin American letters is established
beyond any doubt.
Biography
Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on July 1, 1909. His father,
Carlos Onetti, whom Onetti characterized as a “gentleman,” was a functionary of Monte-
video’s customs office. On more than one occasion, Onetti noted that the family name was O’Netty before being corrupted to its present form, a suggestion that would point to early Irish ancestry. Onetti was always cryptic about his ancestors, however, intimating only
that his great-grandfather was the personal secretary of General Fructuoso Rivera, who
fought in the nineteenth century against Juan Manuel de Rosas and the Argentine dicta-
tor’s territorial pretensions in Uruguay. His mother, Honoria Borges, was of Brazilian
stock, and Onetti says only that she was a “slaveholding lady from the south of Brazil.”
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Onetti was the second of three children; he had an older brother, Raul, and a younger
sister, Raquel. He remembered his childhood as a happy one, during which the family
moved often, at least four times in his early school days. Onetti was a high school dropout—in part, he said, because he could not receive a passing grade in drawing. As an adolescent, he worked at a number of odd jobs—doorman, automobile-tire salesman, waiter,
ticket taker at a stadium, and watchman at a grain elevator.
At the age of fourteen, Onetti discovered the works of Knut Hamsun, which he read
avidly and tried, with adolescent fervor, to emulate. Onetti’s first known venture into literature and publishing came in 1928. He was nineteen then and living in Villa Colón, not far from Montevideo. With two friends, Juan Andrés Carril and Luis Antonio Urta, he
founded a journal, La tijera de Colón. Seven issues of the journal were published between March, 1928, and February, 1929, including Onetti’s first five short stories. In 1929,
Onetti tried, unsuccessfully, to travel to the Soviet Union “to witness a Socialist system in the making.” A year later, he was married for the first time, to a cousin, María Amalia, and moved with her to Buenos Aires. He remained there for four years, during which he
worked for a while as an adding-machine salesman—he did not sell a single machine. His
son, Jorge, who also became a novelist, was born in 1931.
Onetti wrote the first version of The Pit in 1932, a version that was lost. The following year, he published what was once believed to have been his first short story, “Avenida de Mayo—Diagonal—Avenida de Mayo” in the Buenos Aires daily La prensa. In 1934,
Onetti returned to Montevideo and was married for the second time, to another cousin,
María Julia. On October 6, 1935, his short story “El obstáculo” appeared in the Argentine daily La nación, whose literary supplement was edited at the time by the distinguished novelist Eduardo Mallea. A year later, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Onetti attempted, again without success, to travel to Europe to enlist as a volunteer in the
international brigades fighting in Spain.
With the founding of the weekly Marcha on June 23, 1939, Onetti was given the opportunity to work at the center of one of the most important intellectual enterprises of Uruguay. As literary editor, he made his mark on Montevideo’s cultural life. In December of that same year, a reconstituted version of The Pit was published in a limited edition. Two years later, Onetti left Marcha to work as editor for Reuter’s news agency and, in that capacity, was transferred to Buenos Aires. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned Reuter’s,
though he remained in the Argentine capital from 1941 to 1955. After leaving Reuter’s,
Onetti worked as an editor for various Argentine magazines, including Vea y lea and Ímpetu. During this decade and a half, he published some of his most important work.
In 1944, Onetti interviewed the populist strongman of Argentina, Juan Perón, a figure
Onetti found fascinating; he indicated on more than one occasion his desire to write a
novel about him and his legendary wife, Eva Perón. In this period, Onetti also undertook a number of translations of American works, the first being Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), which he translated with Elizabeth María Pikelharing, his third 179
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wife, whom he married in 1945. Only her name appears on the translation, which was
published a year later. Onetti also translated Erskine Caldwell’s This Very Earth (1948) in 1954, Paul I. Wellman’s The Comancheros (1952) in 1956, and Henry Burgess Drake’s Children of the Wind (1954) in 1957. Actually, Onetti’s interest in translation dates from 1940, when his Spanish version of William Faulkner’s “All the Dead Pilots” appeared in
Marcha, unsigned.
In 1955, back in Montevideo, Onetti worked for an advertising agency and, subse-
quently, as editor for the publication Acción, in which he had an anonymous literary column. In the same year, he was married for the fourth time, to Dorotea (Dolly) Muhr. Onetti was named director of municipal libraries of Montevideo in 1957, a position he held until his arrest in 1974 and subsequent exile in 1975. In 1962, he was the recip
ient of Uruguay’s Premio Nacional de Literatura, the country’s literary prize. With this award and the publication of his two major novels The Shipyard and Body Snatcher, Onetti began to receive international acclaim. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, after receiving the Romulo
Gallegos Novel Prize, declared in his acceptance speech that the prize rightfully belonged to Onetti. Such declarations became common. In 1970, the Mexican publishing firm Editorial Aguilar issued Onetti’s Obras completas, an incomplete collection but an indication of his growing reputation.
Because of one of those tragic but common political debacles that have become a spe-
cialty of Latin America, Onetti was first imprisoned for a short period in 1974 and forced into exile in 1975. Thereafter, he lived in Madrid, Spain. Onetti’s crime was to have served on a jury for a literary contest sponsored by Marcha, which awarded the prize (against Onetti’s own vote) to a story deemed inappropriate by the military dictatorship. While
Onetti evinced a great sense of loss in having to live in exile, his work continued. In 1979, his novel Let the Wind Speak was published, and Past Caring? was published in 1993.
Analysis
“He has the power to say a word, to put in an adjective, to change a destiny . . . until he discovers his power, and then he uses it to enter himself into his imaginary world.” This is how Juan Carlos Onetti characterizes one of his heroes and the activity of writing. The depiction is apt for Onetti himself. Beginning with The Pit—and even before, with his first published stories—Onetti’s career consisted in exploring the enabling possibilities of the
“power” he describes here. In the process, he himself has become a body of literature, a world of imagination capable of engendering itself in its imaginary world.
If one can glean a constant from Onetti’s long and distinguished career, it has to be the persevering exploration and charting of powers of the imagination. Like their author, all of Onetti’s characters inevitably strive for a salvation that can be found only in imagination’s potency. The guises, the masks, the shapes that this potency takes in Onetti’s fictions
are many—fantasy, escapism, imaginary biography, delusion, pathetic and courageous
Bovarism. The projects engendered by the energies of this power are also varied—a myth-
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ical topography, the perfect whorehouse, a dignified death. Onetti calls this itinerary the
“adventure of man,” and he says, “I only wish to express the adventure of man.”
The “destiny” to be altered by imaginative potency in Onetti’s fictional cosmos is “real life,” which inevitably emerges in his works as overbearing, vulgar, susceptible to corruption by time and experience. This vision of reality is determined in large measure by the social and historical realities of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Onetti’s formative years as a novelist. The setting of Onetti’s works, primarily urban, may also have influenced his somber vision of human circumstances. As in the fiction of the Argentine novelist Roberto Arlt, whose influence helped shape Onetti’s work, the metropolitan centers of Buenos Aires
and Montevideo assume metaphorical significance in Onetti’s vision. Onetti eventually
conflated these two urban centers to create the imaginary geography of Santa María, the
mythical setting of A Brief Life and of all of his subsequent novels.
Buenos Aires and Montevideo, of all the Latin American capitals, have always looked
toward Europe, with their backs turned, so to speak, to the vast American continent be-
yond them. Historical events that befall distant metropolitan centers at the other shores of the Atlantic, then, have always had an immediate effect in these twin Río de la Plata cities: World War I, the economic collapse of the 1930’s, Francisco Franco’s victory in Spain, the rise of fascism beyond Spain in Europe. The fate of European intellectuals has exerted an equally strong influence: Franco’s silencing of José Ortega y Gasset, the murder of
Federico García Lorca, the deaths of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo and Antonio Machado
in Spain, Adolf Hitler’s march into Paris in 1940, the imprisonment or exile of writers
such as Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide. These and other European calamities confirmed
the worst suspicions born of the disillusioned intellectuals of Onetti’s generation; Onetti and his contemporaries saw that those suspicions found their concrete objective correla-tives in what they thought to be the most urbane centers of civilization.
The urban individual with a conscience finds himself in what one of Onetti’s titles
from 1941 so succinctly expresses—a tierra de nadie, a no-man’s-land. Onetti, then, is very much a part of that “lost generation,” and his novels inevitably reflect the environment in which they have been created. Onetti, with imaginative potency, seeks and finds
an inventive, mythopoeic plane where his characters can confront worldly reality and
transform the “given” into redemptive adventure, whether as Bovaristic illusion or as creative, poetic figuration. That mythical, poetic geography is the world of Santa María, invented by one of Onetti’s protagonists in A Brief Life—a world of the imagination that carries within it the “givens” of historical reality, much like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha
County, and into which Onetti himself enters to chart its annals. Onetti’s novels become the record of that itinerary.
The Pit
Published in December of 1939, Onetti’s first novel, The Pit, is a reconstituted version of the misplaced and lost original from 1932. As a first novel, it is paradigmatic of the au-181
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thor’s oeuvre. The Pit dramatizes the trial and error of an attempt at self-mastery. In this sense, it is revealing not only of the hero’s circumstances (a protagonist who feels compelled to write his autobiography now that he has reached the age of forty) but also of
Onetti’s conception of his task as a writer. The protagonist’s self-characterizations, his halting and reticent attempts at self-writing, his disengagement from the world of reality and human relationships around him, even as he is obsessed with these things, reflect the circumstances of his author and of other, subsequent protagonists in Onetti’s fictional
cosmos.
The novel’s hero, Eladio Linacero, is obsessed with an autobiography and its self-con-
scious impossibility. In his reticence and self-deprecation, he confesses to his shortcomings as a writer as well as to the necessarily fictional nature of the details of his life that have become committed to his writing. He thus opts for recording not factual detail, which offers a mere pretense of re-creating reality, but the fantasies that have no such claims and that may well be more “true” as a result. He not only spurns historical particulars but also rejects, with a Sartrean “nausea,” the concrete, “objective” details that surround him, including his own bodily existence and his neglected apartment, with its dusty furniture and faded newspapers.
The novel’s narrative, then, becomes the record of a juxtaposition between the con-
crete (whether in historical remembrance or in immediate objectivity) and the imaginary, fantasy world of his daydreams. By the end of the novel and of the night (the span of narrative time is one night), Eladio Linacero admits to the impossibility of autobiography, of self-mastery in writing. What he has produced becomes the record of that impossibility,
a record that extends the self in the act of recording what writing attempts to contain. Implacably, time vitiates the attempt to freeze oneself in time: “I would have liked to pin the night on paper, like a nocturnal butterfly. But, in turn, it was the night that carried me off amid its waters, like the livid body of a dead man.” The problematics of Linacero’s attempt and its vicissitudes attained full significance in later works, such as A Brief Life and the subsequent novel
s from the saga of Santa María.
No Man’s Land
A collective social portrait of a historical period, No Man’s Land is Onetti’s most explicit work. Written in the late 1930’s, when the lost generation came of age, Onetti’s second novel captures, in the manner of cinematic montage, the ambience of the epoch. De-
spite the value of the novel as a social document, its technical achievement may be even more significant. If The Pit showed Onetti as a master of first-person narration, of a stream of consciousness restricted to a single voice, No Man’s Land displays his mastery of simultaneity, in the manner of John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925).
No Man’s Land is a congeries of parallel paths, multiple destinies, refracted perspectives, desultory points of view that crowd the world of the novel, that occasionally converge but rarely result in any meaningful human communion. As the title suggests, the ur-182
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ban setting is an anonymous no-man’s-land, and its sundry inhabitants are alienated
individuals whose relationship to a collective community is all but obliterated by indifference, ennui, and individual fantasies. On occasion, those fantasies converge, even if tangentially, and therein lies the seed for an imaginary world, which becomes a communal
fantasy in Onetti’s later novels. For the first time, too, certain characters who will emerge as protagonists in works from the saga of Santa María, such as Junta Larsen, hero of The Shipyard and of Body Snatcher, make a fleeting appearance. No Man’s Land was hailed at the time of its publication as a genuine Río de la Plata novel, an indication that Buenos Aires and Montevideo had finally produced a novel equal to their teeming life.
Tonight
While No Man’s Land has been hailed as a social novel, Tonight, Onetti’s third novel, has often been read as an expression of political solidarity. In the late 1930’s, when Onetti was affiliated with Marcha and later with Reuter’s, he frequented the Café Metro in Montevideo. There, Onetti would meet with other intellectuals and there, too, he encountered a number of exiles from the Spanish Civil War and its infamous aftermath.
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