Onetti y la (in)fidelidad a las reglas del juego.

Hernandez, Ana Maria

As Wolfgang Luchting once observed, "Everyone fears Onetti." Even though the Uruguayan writer preceded the Boom by more than a quarter-century, critical attention to his novels is still surprisingly meager, a fact that Luchting attributed to Onetti's complex, at times hermetic style.

Ronald Mendez-Clark departs from the premise that Los adioses (1954) is the landmark that separates the early Onetti from the master with full command of narrative montage and plot development that characterizes his mature work. Furthermore, Mendez-Clark posits that Los adioses is perhaps Onetti's best work, the best example of a carefully constructed narrative in which the novelist best exhibits his technical mastery experimenting with all levels of fiction. It is also, perhaps, the text in which hermetism and ambiguity--the hallmark traits that most fascinate and annoy his readers and critics--attain the utmost tension. Lastly, the critic asserts that Los adioses is Onetti's only work after La vida breve (1950) that is not part of the Santa Maria cycle, but the one that best displays the narrative techniques associated with that cycle.

Onetti y la (in)fidelidad a los reglas del juego is divided into three sections. The first addresses the reader's participation in assembling and disassembling the story. Here the critic examines the narrative montages and the net of insinuations with which Onetti draws the reader into the game of decipherment. Of particular note is the analysis of the ambiguity surrounding the "true" identity of the young woman and the nature of her relationship to the consumptive protagonist of the novel. The possibility of an incestuous relationship--first postulated by Luchting and later half-admitted by Onetti as "the final half-turn of the screw" in the interpretation of the novel--receives a careful and detailed consideration in this section. The critic proceeds throughout the study with a quasi-Socratic method of unanswered questions that are sometimes capped with a "Tal vez." This method, though effective in highlighting the multitude of possibilities that Onetti's narrative style creates at every turn, at times weakens the impact of the critic's judgment, which often seems diluted in a sea of unanswered questions and conditional statements.

The second section, which will be extremely valuable to serious students of Onetti, surveys major critical interpretations of Los adioses, specifically those of Emir Rodriguez Monegal (love versus sexuality), James East Irby (Faulkner's influence), Hugo Verani (ambiguity), Jorge Ruffinelli (subjectivity), Wolfgang Luchting (reader participation), Joel Hancock (psychopathic distortions on the part of the narrator), Jose Luis Coy (point of view), Doris Rolfe (ambiguity), and other studies by Josefina Ludmer, Silvia Molloy, and Aldo Prior. The third and final section conducts an in-depth textual analysis of the novel, attempting to "expose" Onetti's subtle tricks and deceptions. Particularly lucid is Mendez-Clark's examination of the ambiguities created by the superposition of the three points of view in the novel--the storekeeper's, the nurse's, and the chambermaid's--and how these support and/or contradict one another.

In summary, Mendez-Clark's analysis of Los adioses succeeds in conveying Onetti's ultimate belief in the impossibility of grasping truth. As the critic states, "Lo unico que nos queda es la certeza de que la verdad que importa no esta en los hechos sino en el intento de apropiarse de los hechos."

Ana Maria Hernandez LaGuardia Community College, CUNY