Onetti said that his conversations with those exiles found their fictionalized echo in Tonight, a novel of political terror and oppression. Onetti had made an attempt in 1936 to go to Spain to fight in the civil war. Perhaps this novel is a form of compensation for his failure in that attempt as well as for his comfortable distance from yet another tragic war that was then under way. Ironically, the state of siege, the military terror, the political machinations and victimization of ideals, and the fugitive haunts of idealistic and ambiguous characters depicted in the novel were all too prophetic of what was to befall Argentina two years after the novel’s publication. That state of affairs changed little, with Onetti’s Uruguay falling victim to the same fate. Even more ironic is that some thirty years later, Onetti himself became the victim of this scourge and, reversing the pattern, went to Spain as an exile.
Technically, Onetti’s third novel is not the most accomplished of his works. It suffers
from the rhetorically melodramatic, unambiguous dichotomies of good and evil, the ide-
alistic and the corrupt, the victim and the villain. Nevertheless, the perspectivist juxtaposition of narrative points of view and the intensity of terror that builds with the manhunt and concludes with the hero’s death make the novel interesting.
A Brief Life
Onetti’s fourth novel, A Brief Life, opened a new epoch in his novelistic cycle. Santa María, the mythical realm of this and subsequent works, while adumbrated in earlier
pieces, has its genesis in A Brief Life. As the title suggests, the narrative consists of a series of brief lives, “real” or fantasized, harking back to the multiple, imaginary lives of Eladio Linacero in Onetti’s first novel. In contrast to the predicament of Linacero, however, the hero of A Brief Life, Juan María Brausen, succeeds in finding a way out of the worldly
“here and now” of space and temporality.
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Like Linacero, Brausen is a brooder; unlike Onetti’s first hero, however, he is also a
man of action. His acts of evasion are not merely fantasized mental states. Brausen breaks out of his humdrum existence by physically breaking into the ambit and life of the prostitute who lives next door. Thus, Juan María Brausen becomes Juan María Arce upon “pen-
etrating” the wall to another life, a life that proves as desolate as the respectable normalcy he has left behind. In oscillating between these two lives, the protagonist discovers the impossibility of evasion and the now compounded nature of his entrapment. Real transcen-
dence from the strictures of the existential trap, Brausen discovers, is to be found only in imaginative potency, in the creative powers of the imagination. As a scriptwriter with a commission for a particular film script, Brausen invents the world of Santa María, an
imaginary world into which he flees, a fugitive from the authorities following the murder of the prostitute. Not only does he interpolate himself into his invented world, crossing from a fiction of reality to a reality of fiction, but his created world becomes, thereafter, the novelistic cosmos of his creator, Onetti. In this sense, A Brief Life may well be Onetti’s most significant novel, the gateway to all of his subsequent works.
The Shipyard and Body Snatcher
There is common agreement among critics that The Shipyard, Onetti’s fifth major
novel, is his best-formed work; it may well be the masterpiece of his career. The Shipyard is the first full-blown treatment of the saga of Santa María; in the internal chronology of the saga, it follows the events related in Body Snatcher. Onetti said that when he was halfway through the writing of this latter work in 1957, he was assailed by the vision of the hero’s death. He then abandoned Body Snatcher and wrote The Shipyard.
The novel recounts the story of Junta Larsen and his return to Santa María. He was ex-
pelled from there five years earlier by the town fathers because of his less-than-respectable activities in running a brothel. The Shipyard, then, is a redemptive work, a seeking after salvation in the ashes of a failed dream. The redemption sought by the hero is not a phoenixlike rebirth but a pursuit of some admissible meaning in failure. Junta Larsen
emerges as an ennobled hero, a tragic figure who has already endured the blows of the implacable fates. His deep pessimism is not cynical but philosophical. He accepts fate, not with bitter resignation, but with knowing perspicacity. There is an allegorical parallel to Junta Larsen’s search for self-salvation in self-surrender to the inevitable: his engagement in salvaging the hopelessly defunct shipyard of Petrus.
The shipyard is beyond salvation. Its owner and management play out the farce of run-
ning a going concern even while they surreptitiously junk useless pieces from the carcass of the shipyard to survive. Junta Larsen shuttles between Santa María and the docks, between his own disintegrated past and the concretely visible disintegration of the shipyard.
His attempts to marry Petrus’s daughter prove futile; she is dim-witted or downright mad.
He settles for a sordid relationship with the maid in the servants’ quarters. In the face of an impossible future, the most meaningful acts are recollections of the past. In his lucid flash-184
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backs, in his silent monologue, Junta Larsen emerges as a savior, hopeful but hopelessly fated, and knowingly so, a Christ figure in the house of Petrus: The biblical allusion to Saint Peter and the church built upon a rock is transparent. Petrus’s rock, however, has become a heap of sand, and Larsen, the savior, can find only a quietus, a final reckoning, rather than a resurrection.
Although published three years later than The Shipyard, the episodes narrated in Body Snatcher antedate the events of the earlier novel. Onetti’s sixth major novel evinces, at least in the first half, the vigor and dynamism of a pursuit: Junta Larsen’s dream to found and operate the perfect whorehouse. The language of the novel is wry, at times satirically imbued with irony and frequent humor. The hero is in his prime, his energies at their apex.
The novel begins with Junta Larsen’s arrival in Santa María with his female cargo—three
or four women in varying degrees of decrepitude. The town dubs the hero with the nick-
name that gives the work its original title, Juntacadáveres, the Corpse-Gatherer (or body snatcher). The town’s reaction to Junta’s enterprise ensues, with the final expulsion of the hero and his charges from Santa María and the crumbling of Junta’s dream in a bathetic
denouement.
Interwoven into the rise and fall of Larsen’s enterprise is the story of Jorge Malabia, a young man who was the protagonist of an earlier Onetti novella, A Grave with No Name.
This novella has often been considered a blueprint for Onetti’s fiction: It embraces all of his recurring preoccupations, particularly his obsession with the relativity of truth. In Body Snatcher, Jorge Malabia is engaged in a guilt-ridden relationship with the widowed wife of his brother. His attempts to patronize Junta Larsen’s establishment and his eventual participation in the downfall of that “institution” also form part of the novel’s plot.
Thus, Body Snatcher is an intricately woven novel that gathers various threads from the annals of Santa María. Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal notes that to appreciate
the chronological order of events, one must first read Body Snatcher, then A Grave with No Name, and then The Shipyard. Monegal also noted that the second part of Body Snatcher is more somber, its language more weighty, its humor darker; the change is attributed to the fact that this second part was written after Onetti had interrupted the novel’s composition to write The Shipyard.
La muerte y la niña
If the sequence of publication violates the internal chronology of the saga of Santa
María, La muerte y la niña, Onetti’s seventh novel, violates all logical order with impu-nity. The result is a hermetic involution,
a scrambled code that can have intelligibility only for those already initiated in Onetti’s fictional system. La muerte y la niña is yet another farce played out with the knowledge of its futility in the face of implacable time, guilt, relative truth, and irrevocable fate. The episodes of the plot (the attempts of Augusto Goerdel to exonerate himself and assuage his guilt for the death of his wife, Helga Hauser, by returning to Santa María with suspect documents aimed to prove that he is not the father of 185
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the girl whose birth proved fatal to her mother) are less significant than the “resuscitation”
of ghosts from earlier novels in the saga. Onetti deliberately violates objective temporality by having characters whose death was narrated in earlier works and episodes reappear,
“posthumously,” to reflect on the fate of Santa María.
While not Onetti’s best work, La muerte y la niña is a significant novel insofar as it di-vulges the author’s deliberate destruction of objective reality even in the world of fiction, to point to yet another level, one more demonstration that literature is literature, with no obligations to any order outside itself. Accordingly, the language of the novel is deliberately artificial, studied, and rhetorical.
Let the Wind Speak
Let the Wind Speak takes its title and epigraph from the last fragment of The Cantos (1972) of Ezra Pound, who wrote
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made.
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
From the outset, then, there is a sense of an ending, a morbid finality, an intimation of doom in this apocalyptic work. The cycle of Santa María, deliberately scrambled in the
previous work, now closes in on itself. Characters return—some from death—to haunt the
novel, and whole passages are repeated from earlier volumes in the saga.
In some cases, this recursiveness extends even to works that predated the genesis of
Santa María. The protagonist of Let the Wind Speak, Medina, who appeared in previous works as a police official, returns from Santa María to Lavanda (a homonymic suggestion
of La Banda, Uruguay, which is commonly known as La Banda Oriental). His return, rem-
iniscent of Junta Larsen’s return in The Shipyard, erases all boundaries between the real world and the world of Onetti’s fiction, Santa María. There is a peculiar conflation of
worlds when, for example, Medina narrates, word for word, whole passages from Onetti’s
first novel, The Pit, and one recognizes scenes and dialogues from the narrative context of Santa María now outside that phantasmagoric geography. The textual boundaries collapse, the dead and the living intermingle, past and present fuse. The cycle has run its course and begins to overtake its own tracks.
Symbolically, the novel is the apocalypse of a literary career, of its enchanted geogra-
phy (Santa María is consumed by fire in this novel). All that remains is the specter of language. In the end, if this is indeed the end, Onetti reaffirms once again the creative potency 186
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of the imagination (the power to create and to destroy its own invention) and the enabling potency of the author to enter and fade into the world of his imaginary creation.
Djelal Kadir
Other major works
short fiction: Un sueño realizado, y otros cuentos, 1951; El infierno tan temido, 1962; Jacob y el otro: Un sueño realizado, y otros cuentos, 1965; Cuentos completos, 1967 (revised 1974; Jorge Ruffinelli, editor); La novia robada, y otros cuentos, 1968; Cuentos, 1971; Tiempo de abrazar, y los cuentos de 1933 a 1950, 1974 (short stories and fragments of unpublished novels; Ruffinelli, editor); Tan triste como ella, y otros cuentos, 1976; Goodbyes, and Other Stories, 1990.
nonfiction: Réquiem por Faulkner, y otros artículos, 1975; Confesiones de un lector, 1995.
miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1970; Onetti, 1974 (articles, interview).
Bibliography
Adams, M. Ian. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. This study of the three writers includes an extended discus-
sion of Onetti’s novel The Pit, showing how Onetti’s artistic manipulation of schizophrenia creates the sensation of participating in an alienated world.
Craig, Linda. Juan Carlos Onetti, Manuel Puig, and Luisa Valenzuela: Marginality and Gender. Woodbridge, England: Tamesis, 2005. Craig’s book analyzes the works of
Onetti and two other Latin American writers, describing how they share a sense of
“postcolonial emptiness” and constantly question realism.
Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. “Juan Carlos Onetti or the Shadows on the Wall.” In
Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper
& Row, 1967. Claims that in Onetti’s middle-age protagonists there is a yearning for vanished youth and innocence. Discusses Onetti’s pessimism and his Faulknerian
style in his novella Goodbyes.
Maloof, Judy. Over Her Dead Body: The Construction of Male Subjectivity in Onetti.
New York: Peter Lang, 1995. A feminist reading of Onetti’s novels, in which Maloff
explores Onetti’s representation of gender, particularly his creation of male protago-
nists. She discusses these male characters’ crises, placing them within the context of
social and historical events in Uruguay from the 1930’s through the 1960’s.
Millington, Mark. “No Woman’s Land: The Representation of Woman in Onetti.” MLN
102 (March, 1987): 358-377. Millington discusses the function of the wife, prostitute,
girl, and mad woman in Onetti’s fiction, arguing that the subjection of women is one of
the major impasses of Onetti’s thinking.
_______. Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative and the Subject. Liverpool, England: Francis Cairns, 1985. Millington discusses the development of Onetti’s work under
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the “hegemony of international modernism.” He focuses on the status of Onetti’s fic-
tion as narrative discourse and discusses how Goodbyes problematizes the act of reading.
Murray, Jack. The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. In his discussion of alienation in the work of Onetti and two other writers, Murray provides some background about the effect of Uruguay on Onetti’s ideological unconscious.
San Román, Gustavo, ed. Onetti and Others: Comparative Essays on a Major Figure in
Latin American Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. A collection of twelve essays written from a variety of perspectives. Several focus on gender relationships in Onetti’s work; comparative studies relating Onetti to other Latin
American writers also are prominent.
Williams, Raymond L. “The Novels of Leopoldo Marechal and Juan Carlos Onetti.” In
The Modern Latin American Novel. New York: Twayne, 1998. This analysis of
Onetti’s novels is included in a historical overview of the Latin American novel from
the modernist fiction of the mid-1940’s through the postmodern novels published in
the region since 1968. Includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.
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J. K. ROWLING
Born: Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, England; July 31, 1965
Also known as: Joanne Kathleen Rowling; Kennilworthy Whisp; Newt Scamander
Principal long fiction
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 1997 (also known as H
arry Potter
and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 1998)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1998
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 1999
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2003
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2005
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007
Other literary forms
In addition to her series of novels about the boy wizard Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling
(ROHL-ihng) has composed the volumes Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
(2001) and Quidditch Through the Ages (2001); she has contributed all proceeds from sales of these works, more than fifty million dollars, to charity. Pretending to be volumes from the library at Rowling’s fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, these two works are brief, comic parodies of the kinds of informative books often written for
children. For The Children’s Voice, a charity that she cofounded, Rowling handwrote and
auctioned a book of fairy stories titled The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which sold for £1.95
million. One of the stories (“The Tale of the Three Brothers”) appears in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Achievements
J. K. Rowling has received numerous awards for her writing. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize as well as the British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year and the Children’s Book Award. Other prizes for volumes
in the Harry Potter series followed, including the Hugo Award and the Whitbread Chil-
dren’s Book of the Year Award, but all of these pale before Rowling’s unprecedented
achievement that, despite writing in a genre (children’s literature) that was not expected to sell well, her Harry Potter series, particularly the last four volumes, so significantly broken sales records as to have changed the publishing industry and probably contributed to a renewed interest in reading for countless children. As millions of large books were put in print at once and delivered throughout the world for the parties that greeted their release, each new Harry Potter volume became a major news event and placed a strain on the avenues of parcel delivery, particularly because of the massive attempt to keep the details of 189
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