La borra del cafe.

Nash, Susan Smith

In seemingly effortless and transparent prose, Mario Benedetti foregrounds how the Kunstlerroman (a novel which involves individual struggle to become an artist) explores the limits of representation. In doing so, he creates a narrative which suggests that the novel's traditional connections to the projects of constructing a personal world, an intensely private space in which to question or reinforce the culture's dominant beliefs and values, are overshadowed by the writer's own struggles with the intractabilities of language, and how, as Wittgenstein put it in Lectures and Conversations (1938), "There is a constant surprise at the new tricks language plays on us when we get into a new field."

La borra del cafe opens in Montevideo, where in a somewhat nostalgic voice the narrator, Claudio, immediately defines the unstable space that formed his conception of his world: "Mi familia siempre se estaba mudando." However, the constant changes and disorientations did not, as one might expect, instill profound angst or alienation. Instead, young Claudio found the constant moving to be a source of entertainment. At this point the narrative begins to take on metonymic qualities: the processes of packing and unpacking, breaking down and reordering the household, become emblematic of Benedetti's approach to constructing a narrative.

Within the narrative, the events of Claudio's life are ordered and reordered, with structural elements--repetitions and resonances--emerging at each reordering. This is one way the author creates meaning within the novel. Furthermore, this technique suggests that the basis of Benedetti's development as an artist (a writer of essays, poetry, fiction, and plays) is the fluid manner in which he is able to redefine and rename the situations in his life. For example, when Claudio and his friends discover a corpse (Dandy), they define and name the situation by speculating about the crime and the nature of the dead man. In doing so, they effect a reification process: they build a narrative that brings into existence the dead man and all potential stories. This includes the Sherlock Holmes--style exercises in deductive reasoning in which Ciaudio and his friends engage with relish.

The reordering and renaming occurs later in the novel, when subsequent incidents in Claudio's life remind him of Dandy (the corpse) and he connects the experience of discovering a dead body to later events. Benedetti builds analogues when he suggests a later event contains similarities to the first discovery of the corpse; he also posits equivalences and suggests that the history of one's life can be constructed in a cyclical manner. Cycles predominate the narrative of La borra del cafe, and they help build a sense of continuity. Still, there is a tension between history as linear and history as cyclical. If history is cyclical, and the Kunstlerroman as well, then is there an amount of determinism at work? What is the role of choice, and where can one see the manifestation of the action of will?

The answer may lie in the relation of language to narrative. The limits of self-constructivism are the limits of language: when language breaks down into its intractable elements and chaos and indeterminacy intrude, the artist must intervene and impose order. If that requires "abrir y cerrar cajones, baules, grandes cajas, maletas" and struggling, time and time again, to rearrange and reorder moving boxes and materials, then so be it. Benedetti orders the history of a young, struggling artist, and in doing so, he represents how the artist learns to organize his mind, his consciousness, and his ways of knowing.

Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma