Projection as a narrative technique in Juan Carlos Onetti's 'Goodbyes.'

But that was when, without my understanding completely what was happening, I began knowing things and exactly what we had gotten ourselves into, though I could never say it, just as one knows what a persons soul is like but can't describe it in words. (Onetti, "A Dream Come True" 59)

Few contemporary fiction writers have depended as heavily on the interpretive strategies of the reader as did Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994). Although his 1954 novella, Los adioses (Goodbyes), is one of his most demanding texts in this regard, it is also a hallmark of Onettian narrative in its controlled structuring of ambiguity. A close reading of the text reveals that it is, in fact, designed to draw maximally on the projective capacity of the reader. In the words of Fredric Jameson, "it is itself the inaugural narrative act that grounds the perception and interpretation of the events to be narrated" (xiii). The fact that the past 40 years of critical theorizing have failed to exhaust the responses elicited by Goodbyes would seem to confirm that the power of the text to draw on the unconscious projections of any given reader is inherent in its composition.

There has been, moreover, a decided shift among critical theorists in the past two decades to view fictional texts as refractions of a fragmenting or kaleidoscopic and highly subjective field of perception. We appear to be less intent in fixing a meaning on a work and more inclined to solicit the interplay of textual enigmas and responses.

When Onetti replies to a critical essay by Wolfgang A. Luchting in a preface to the Spanish text of the novella, Los adioses (Luchting 7-26), his admission that Luchting has only unraveled a part of the enigma reveals an element of triumph ("|Media vuelta' de la tuerca" 29). This rare interchange between writer and critic would seem to confirm our suspicion that Onetti delighted most in his own power as a writer to draw on the projective capacities and fantasies of reader and critic alike. Both are inevitably trapped as they engage in the no-win game of seeking a definitive interpretation to a text that admits of no such resolution.

Angel Rama, Onetti's close friend and Uruguay's leading literary critic until his death in a 1983 air crash, had the following to say of the Luchting-Onetti exchange:

The subsequent enigma proffered by Onetti, departing from Wolfgang A. Luchting's reading of Goodbyes (according to which, despite the testimony of the young girl's letter that she could be not the daughter but rather a lover) suggests that she could be daughter and lover (something that in no way is indicated in the text) does not in any way alter the field of forces. What it does do is mock the capacity of the narrator, who could not foresee more complex possibilities than those within his sight; that is to say, in constructing another's soul, he is not able to go beyond the limits of his own, which he proceeds to transfer. (59; my translation)

Rama has drawn attention to the fact that in Goodbyes the Onettian character becomes surface for the projections of the narrator, whose pathology is made manifest by the constricted nature of his viewpoint. Rama seems to suggest that Onetti's enthusiasm for Luchting's commentary was likely based on the latter's willingness to enter the game. Onetti appears to view the critic/reader as making yet another imaginary foray amidst the fluctuating planes that constitute the space of the text, Goodbyes, and, in fact, leave it open to a multiplicity of encounters. Most salient among Rama's remarks is the relation between the degree of the narrator's personality constriction and, ultimately, the reader's, in contrast to either's capacity for fantasy projection.

Onetti's is a literature of subjectivity, about how we perceive and interpret, as we are perceived and interpreted by others. Through words we are capable of transforming others and being transformed by them, as so many fragments of perceptions and interpretations coalesce in order to create any given version of reality.

In one of the most insightful attempts to date to describe Onetti's narrative technique, Sylvia Molloy defines what might be called the "fiction of gossip." Molloy invites us to reflect on the conditions requisite to gossip. One individual (the narrator in the case of Goodbyes), imparts to another (the text's reader) gossip about a third (the character of the ex-basketball player). Gossip, Molloy implies, is always a game of power or a desire to impose one's own perception on someone else. Gossip can have a positive or a negative effect. One might, for instance, proffer a perceived version of someone in order to favor that person's situation in a given instance. Key to all of this, according to Molloy, is that it matters less what is said about the other than how it is said and received (266). Onetti himself denies the privileging of objective "truth" in his narrative technique, as stated in his first novel in 1939, El pozo (The Well):