Over "Afscheid" van JC Onetti. Bevat spoiler!
D. Kadir / Los adioses
From the perspective of narrative point of view, Los adioses represents a rather new way of presenting the narrative. Like most of Onetti’s fiction, it is a novel which explores creativity on two simultaneous planes, the theoretical and the practical. The problem is dramatized through an astute use of ambiguity. A “detached” character within the story witnesses and presents the events to the reader through the sordid angle of his point of view and of his personal bias. It is not until the end of the novel that we discover the unreliability of the narrator through a variation, an authorial, narrative correction which exposes the sordidness of the narrator’s mind. In addition, the final revelation proves an embarrrassment for the reader who, willingly or not, has been in complicity with the perverse narrator in the creation of the tale.
The story takes place in the hills of Cordoba, where victims of tuberculosis seek to be cured or, as is the specific case in Los adioses, retire to give in tot he inevitable. A nameless ex-athlete arrives in the town as a patient. His arrival and life are related to us by the owner of the general store who is witness to all the comings and goings of the town.
Our only view of the afflicted basketball player comes from the eyewitness testimony of this local grocer-postmaster who obviously is in an advantageous position to know what he is talking about. The owner of the grocery-bar-restaurant-post-office establishment, situated in the heart of the town, has been witness to the life (and death) of this resort for many years. It is natural for the reader to take him at his word. Accepting him in his role of inside narrator, a character within the story and on-the-spot observer, we give him our support and eager ear for what he has to tell. As a witness, however, the grocer does not adhere to the outward appearance of things but ventures into speculations and affirmations which go beyond what he sees. Nor does the reader feel inclined to question these assertions. On the contrary, he accepts them readily, which in turn becomes a way of urging the narrator on, for his assertions lend the story some degree of interest and intrigue. Once subjected to the interest evoked by the witness’ narration, the reader does not for a moment think or even entertain the notion that the author might be withholding information, which is actually the case all along. Thus, both the obsever and through him the reader have created a viable story and given its participants a human destiny.
Besides the key position which which the narrator occupies within the situation of the story, there is another technical mechanism which convinces the reader of the apparent validity of the narrator’s observations and of his reliability. I am referring tot he minutely “objective” and detailed manner with which the witness-narrator relates the gestures and particulars of his subject. It is an objectivity with which we are already familiar from Onetti’s earlier works.
Beginning with the opening paragraph we are subjected to these seemingly acute objective observations:
“The first time te man entered the store, I would have liked to have seen nothing but his hands: slow, intimidated, and clumsy, moving without faith, long and not tanned as yet, begging forgiveness fort heir disinterested behavior… I would have liked to have seen nothing but his hands, it would have been enough to have seen them when I gave him the change for the hundred pesos and the fingers clutched the bills, tried to arrange them and, suddenly, resolutely made it into a flattened bal land prudently hi dit in a jacket pocket…”
Reading the novel for the first time and unaware of its conclusion, the reader would see in the grocer nothing but an objective viewer who does not miss a thing of what he is witnessing. After completing the story, however, and returning to these passages, the reader becomes aware of something strange about this supposedly “objective” narration. It is in the final analysis a selective objectivity, qualified with very personal adjectives. Onetti might be demonstrating the impossibility of total objectivity on the part of any human being, layman, writer, narrator, or author. The human senses cannot experience everything simultaneously. What we do perceive fragmentarily, partially, is not accidental, and having acquired these perceptions, we can no longer remain as we were prior to our having experienced them. The perceptions are also transformed, personalized, and metamorphosed by our human condition.
On a second critical reading of Los adioses and with the ending in mind, we realize that the apparent objectivity of the witness-narrator is anything but objective. We discover that the narrator is not seeing merely a pair of hands belonging to a sick man, but rather hands without faith, hands that excuse themselves for their disinterestedness, hands that are capable of resoluteness and of prudence. Thus, the detached and disinterested point of view that related the story now is revealed to us as a judgmental voice whose qualifying adjectives speak louder than its uncommitted substantives. This technical oddity is the key to the work: “The point of view of a witness, seemingly objective, but extremely subjective in actuality, is the key to the ambiguity.” (Emir Rodríguez-Monegal)
However, the ambiguity does not appear as such until the end of the work when the “true” story emerges. Through a couple of letters that the narrator of Los adioses has kept from the ailing basketball player we learn that the athlete’s correspondents are his daughter and second wife. These are the same women whose visits have led our eyewitness narrator to construct the intrigue of a multiple amourous involvement. Astounded and awed by his discovery, the grocer-narrator does not admit defeat. He copes with the revealed facts in this manner: “It would be enough for me to place my recent discovery at the beginning of the story in order for everything to become simple and foreseeable. I felt the full power, as if the man and the girl, and also the woman and the child, had been born of my will to live what I had determined. I was smiling as I thought about this again, while I was being reconciled with forgiving the basketball champion’s final avidity.”
There is no reason why he should accept defeat, for as it is, his story stands and his version, the contents of his narrative point of view, is what comprises Onetti’s novel. With some incidental differences in a couple of facts, the circumstances are still the same. No one ever expects a story to be “true” or factual. Why should it be expected of this one? Literature is after all a hypothetical conjecture whose subject is life and the universe. As Borges would say, “Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors.” The grocer-storyteller then is entitled to his own intonations, sordid or dubious as they may be. We always have the writer who authored him and who might reveal the varied nature of these intonations.
Los adioses is the dramatization of the creative process. What we witness is the creation of a story and subsequently the reality and life on which the story has been based. The ambiguity then becomes an integral part of the creative process. To paraphrase Rodríguez-Monegal once again, Onetti uses ambiguity because his vision of the world is ambiguous, because his concept of the universe rests on the duality of criteria which allows the greatest of sordidness (for the spectator, the witness) to contain a charge of unredeemed poesy (for the patient).
As questionable or sordid as the witness-creator and narrator might be, he is a reflection of the man and the artistic practice which engendered him. And, although Onetti does not engage in literary theory outside his fictional work, as many other writers are won’t do, Los adioses is a clear indication that he does theorize about his art. His theorizing in Los adioses deals with the problem of perspective and narrative point of view. The same is the case with his next work, Para una tumba sin nombre, which appears five years later and is even more self-conscious than Los adioses.
© D. Kadir / Juan Carlos Onetti (1977)
Twayne Publishers