Despite his solitary profile and the almost no intention of seeking glory or notoriety that he pursued, Onetti became the reference for a generation ofLatin American writers who not only admired his work, but who, thanks to his example, marked a period of rupture with the ancient traditions of Latin American literature.
By Alejandra Amatto
An image persists in memory… the lights are dim or barely relevant, the bed looks untidy with chaotic sheets that entangle the brandished body of the most important author and first Cervantes Prize for Literature in Uruguay: Juan Carlos Onetti. This is how his laconic figure is shown in what was practically his last interview in Madrid, at the beginning of the nineties. In it, several of his readers witnessed movedly the ravages of the passage of time and old age, almost ontological assumptions of his narrative debates, which he himself had turned into a leitmotif of much of his work. That lacerating image reappeared on May 30, 1994 when the news of his death spread around the world and, for a couple of more years, it would be the unpleasant postcard of memory that would haunt one of the most luminous, unconventional and disturbing figures. of Latin American literature of the 20th century. Thirty years after his death, I propose to discard the fortuitous memory of decadence and choose to remember him based on those three faithful characteristics of his that gave immense posthumous recognition to his work, and that correctly removed him during his lifetime from the spotlight and literary trends in vogue of his time.
Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo on July 1, 1909 and died in Spain, far from his native Santa María Montevideo, from which he was expelled and condemned to exile by the Uruguayan civil-military dictatorship in the seventies. Onetti had been part of the jury that awarded first place in 1974 to the story “The Bodyguard” by Nelson Marra, a critical text about the harshness of the repression that was experienced in the South American country due to the dictatorship and that did not escape its attention. censorship. The outcome of the story could also have been part of the absurd plot of one of his stories: the jury of the contest is imprisoned, the weekly promoter of the contest (Marcha) is closed, its authorities arrested and the author of the story is also going to stop. to jail.
After several years of exile, Onetti will never return to Uruguay. The last stage of his life and also the last stage of his work will be marked by this painful event. Because, despite his nomadic condition, his trips to Buenos Aires and his almost zero sense of nationalism, Onetti was a writer who understood better than anyone else the complex character of the Uruguayan idiosyncrasy, of its literary system and was, without a doubt, who was most determined to transform it. His creative tools in that sense were not few.
Despite having grown up in a relatively privileged environment, Onetti had no interest in completing his secondary education. What’s more, he doesn’t even finish the first year. From 1922 to 1929 he held various jobs, all of them very heterogeneous, ranging from doorman and waiter to an official collecting data for a census – an activity that he set out to do on horseback. His intellectual journey began to bear fruit years later after his appointment as editorial secretary of the weekly Marcha in 1939 and with the appearance of the weekly column that he signed under the pseudonyms “Periquito el Aguador”, “Groucho Marx” and “ «Pierre Regy.» In December of that year, Onetti published his first novel: The Well, in Signo editions. This was an almost unknown publisher that years later only reported selling just fifty copies. The data exemplifies the eternal situation of the author, as it tells us about the almost subterranean status that his work possessed and accentuates a kind of mythical facet, that of a cult writer, which will haunt him throughout his entire literary career. Onetti, as an emblematic figure of Latin American literature, was an acid critic of false political longings and the most ossified literary conventions in a very specific period in the cultural history of Latin America. It is not surprising that his most dedicated and attentive readers were, initially, other contemporary authors such as Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa or a very young José Emilio Pacheco, who deeply admired his work.
In 1941, with a job at the Reuters news agency that he had obtained in Uruguay, Onetti moved to Buenos Aires, thus inaugurating the second and longest period of his stays on the other side of the Río de la Plata. From now on, several of his novels will see the light of day: No Man’s Land (1941), published in Losada and finalist in the “Ricardo Güiraldes” contest, among the members of whose jury was Jorge Luis Borges; For Tonight (1943); and stories like “Welcome, Bob” and “The Face of Misfortune.”
In the middle of the century one of his best and most accomplished works appears: La vida Breve (1950), a novel in which his fictional city called Santa María is “formally” created. The so-called Sanmariana saga is made up of this work and five more novels: Para una tumba sin nombre (1959), El astillero (1961), Juntacadáveres (1964), La muerte y la niña (1973) and Dejemos hablar al viento (1979).
It is also made up of some stories that take place in this space, for example: “Story of the Knight of the Rose and the Pregnant Virgin Who Came from Liliput” (1956), “The Stolen Bride” (1968) and “The Hell So Feared” ” (1957), one of his most tragically memorable stories.
Onetti’s narrative is characterized, among other themes, by its acute and chaotic sense of reality, by its ironic vision of the feminine world and by its impudent, and often distressing, treatment of old age. In her novels, an inverse process operates that converts her characters, most of them marginalized or socially maladjusted beings, into degraded heroes who gradually transform into antiheroes. These individuals never manage to achieve the goals they set for themselves. On the contrary, the size of their projects not only exceeds their real possibilities of completion but their own marginal nature negatively influences the social environment that hosts them, frustrating any possibility of success.
It is likely that several of the traits that Onetti marks in his characters are reasons for rejection and discomfort, since a deep and desperate instinct for survival is involved in them, the fruitless attempt to collapse certain monolithic aspects of stagnant customs and the constant traps to the lives that develop in a tragically natural space for their narratives: the city. What ultimately is the city for Onetti? A place where there is no place for everyone, where impoverishment is progressive and where the infrastructure itself fosters the paradox of lack of communication: you have all the means to talk to others more effectively and quickly; However, it favors ignorance of the other and therefore the isolation of everyone. Let’s Let the Wind Speak will be the work that closes the themes and obsessions of the most prolific Onetti, the one that sets fire to Santa María and reduces it to nothing and the one that probably consecrates him with Cervantes in 1980. Then there will be two other books that will Despite containing its essence, they make it feel indistinct, but they settle a last debt with its readers: When then (1987) and When it no longer matters (1993), his last published novel that stands under the shadows of the posthumous.
Since the commemoration of his centenary in 2009, the investigation into his life and his work became a persistent task for a broad sector of specialized criticism. Perhaps, as a fortunate consequence of this fact, some readers approached – even for the first time – the rusty pages of several famous Onettian texts that had been forgotten, or that had been relegated to the status of “Latin American classics”, without good dissemination or prior critical reading. They arrived to fill the Onettian universe of the 21st century with new reprints and complete works.
Although this “rediscovery” of his work attracted, in later years, new interpretative views, the celebration of the centenary provided the opportunity for several young readers to approach his novels and mainly his stories. How do new generations read Onetti thirty years after his death? That question worries me, but at the same time it enthralls me. Despite his solitary profile and the little or almost no intention of fame or notoriety that he pursued, Onetti became the reference for a generation of Latin American writers who not only admired his work, but, thanks to his example, marked a period of break with the old traditions of Latin American literature. My wish is that this is the Onetti that reaches us today, to the readers of the 21st century, after having lost it thirty years ago.
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Alejandra Amatto (Montevideo, 1979) is a full-time professor-researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM and member of the National System of Researchers. She coordinates the Seminar on Hispanic American Fantasy Literature (19th, 20th, 21st centuries).