Gustavo San Román

Onetti (1909-1994) and Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964) are generally regarded in current critical thinking as the two most important Uruguayan prose writers since the 1930s. Their work, which overlapped for about twenty years, has some features in common. Both authors were inclined to write stories based on their protagonists’ fantasies, a fact explained by one critic with reference to the relatively stable and uneventful times they grew up in;1 also, both produced some highly ambiguous texts, as several studies have shown.2 But the task of the present piece is to contrast rather than compare the two writers and it is based on the premise that the motives and the authority behind their narratives are quite different.

Although both authors produced highly dense writing, Onetti’s work offers an impression of ultimate control and objectivity behind its textual complexity which Hernández’s lacks; Hernández’s stories, on the other hand, seem to be dictated by more urgent and subjective preoccupations. This claim could be tested through the analysis of a pair of texts such as Onetti’s La muerte y la niña [“Death and the Girl”] (1973) and Hernández’s Diario de un sinvergüenza [“Diary of the Scoundrel”] (left unfinished on his death), both highly ambiguous but in fundamentally different ways: briefly, in terms of narrative technique in one case and by dint of the exploration of an eccentric mind in the other. But this article has taken, as it were, a negative path, and will consider two stories where the signs of narrative cohesiveness are in fact strong: Onetti’s Para una tumba sin nombre [A Grave with No Name] (1959) and Hernández’s La casa inundada [The Flooded House] (1960). I shall therefore consider ambiguity where it is at its most controlled rather than at its most overt.

The present essay builds on two observations. The first is that there is a difference in attitude in the two authors towards the physical shape of their characters: whilst Onetti favors figures who are thin, Hernández is partial to fat ones. The second stems from an article Onetti wrote on his countryman in Madrid in 1975 where he paid particular attention to his subject’s transformation from slim as a young man to obese in his maturity; although central to the piece, the reference remains intriguing on a first reading. It is proposed that the reference will be better understood in the light of the discussion of the two texts selected for the present article. The argument that follows is based on the premise that the apparently superficial difference in predilection as regards body shape in Onetti and Hernández is a sign of a more profound contrast in their work. In the first section I explore the contrast in actual writing practice, with reference first to the associations affecting fat and thin figures in each writer in general and then to the position of the narrator and the role of food in the two selected texts. I next relate the findings to the wider cultural context in which the two authors wrote, bearing in mind both the contemporary critical reception of their work and the image that each writer projected in terms of local notions of masculinity. Finally, I turn to Onetti’s article on Hernández.

Fat and thin characters and discourses
Onetti prefers his characters thin. In his texts people who are fat tend to be treated contemptuously or pitifully. One clear example is Tito Perotti, who in “El álbum” [The Photograph Album] (1953) is described by Jorge Malabia as “Gordito, sonrosado, presuntuoso, servil, [...] idiota” [“Chubby, pink-cheeked, presumptuous, (…) an idiot”] (OC 1276). A similar assessment applies to more important characters who seem to carry the implied author’s sympathy, at least partially or temporarily. Such is the case of Larsen, whom Onetti considered an “artista fracasado” [“failed artist”];3 his plumpness is a sign that his goals are doomed to fail. Larsen is “el hombre gordo” [“the fat man”] (81) when we first meet him at the beginning of Tierra de nadie [No Man’s Land] (1941), and he appears even heavier when he returns to Santa María at the opening of El astillero [The Shipyard] (1961), in what seems to be an indication of his increased conformism: “tal vez más gordo, más bajo, confundible y domado en apariencia” [“perhaps fatter, shorter, more run-of -the-mill and tamed in appearance”] (1049). A similar treatment affects the older and more conservative Jorge Malabia in La muerte y la niña, where Díaz Grey says that Jorge “estaba aprendiendo a ser imbécil. [...] Su cara y su vientre estaban engordando” [“was learning how to be stupid. (…) His face and his belly were getting fat”] (CC 377-78). Later in the same text there is some indication of the significance of fat when the doctor is disappointed at Jorge’s surrendering to bourgeois values: “Le dolía que el otro engordara, que se mezclara [...] con la estupidez y la mugre del porvenir que le ofrecía la ciudad” [“He was disappointed to see him getting fat, getting mixed up (…) with the stupidity and dirt of the future which the city offered him”] (382).

Onetti’s posture on obesity also applies to female characters, as his first and last novels show. At the beginning of El pozo [The Pit] (1939), when Linacero expresses disgust at the people he can see in the yard outside his window, his eyes focus on a fat woman: “Las gentes del patio me resultaron más repugnantes que nunca. Estaban, como siempre, la mujer gorda lavando en la pileta, rezongando sobre la vida […]” [“The people in the yard seemed to me more repugnant than ever. There were, as usual, the fat woman washing in the sink, grumbling about life (...)]” (49-50). Similarly, the decline of the little girl Elvirita in Cuando ya no importe [Past Caring?] (1993) is predicted by the narrator in terms of her gaining weight: “Imaginé a la muchacha gorda, obesa, perdiendo por los mofletes el encanto de la inocencia” [“I imagined the girl was fat, obese, losing through her chubby cheeks the charm of innocence”] (Cuando ya no importe, 77). Fat in Onetti, then, seems to be associated with materialism and bourgeois values in the case of men, and with the loss of sexual innocence for women, who tend to either become whores, or mothers, as Linacero expounds in a notorious passage of El pozo (63).

Onetti’s attitude towards overweight women is quite contrary to Felisberto Hernández’s, whose texts are often peopled by matron-like female characters who are surreptitiously or overtly desired by the male protagonists. There are two stories where this sexual preference is most strongly felt: La casa inundada, the last work to be published in Hernández’s lifetime and perhaps his most popular, and the posthumous “Úrsula” [“Ursula”] (1969). In the latter the narrator likes to remember Úrsula’s “cuerpo grande” [“large body”] walking along a narrow street when “a cada paso sus pantorrillas se rozaban y las carnes le quedaban temblando” [“at every step her calves rubbed each other and left her flesh trembling”].4 Using a similar image, the narrator of La casa inundada fantasizes about being married to the voluminous señora Margarita and being mocked by his previous girlfriends who “se reirían de mí al descubrirme caminando por veredas estrechas detrás de una mujer gruesísima” [“would laugh at me when they spotted me walking along narrow pavements behind a very stout woman”] (82).

This picture of a large woman interfering with the narrator’s steps along a narrow path is one that points to the potential of seeing “fat” and “thin” as wider categories of writing. In fact, at least one study so far has found it useful to pursue the wider implications of “literary fat ladies”: Patricia Parker’s interesting essay on that figure in English Renaissance texts, where she pursues in particular the notion of rhetorical dilatio and its associations with deferral and excess in the discourse of romances.5 I would like to explore here the idea that “fat” and “thin” texts not only privilege or ill-treat obese or lean characters, but that they also differ in terms of their relative density of discourse and single-mindedness of plot. To bring in an older compatriot of Onetti and Hernández and author of several pieces on the ars poetica of the short story, Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), we may say that a text is the “thinner” the more it displays directness of plot and economy of means.

Quiroga’s explicit advice to budding writers insists on the desirability of a slim and controlled plot: “No empieces a escribir sin saber desde la primera palabra adónde vas”; “No adjetives sin necesidad”; “Toma a tus personajes de la mano y llévalos firmemente hasta el final. [..] No abuses del lector.” [“Do not start writing without knowing from the first word where you are heading”; “Do not use unnecessary adjectives”; “Take your characters by the hand and lead them firmly to the end. (…) Do not abuse your reader”]. For him, the short story should be “una sola línea, trazada por una mano sin temblor desde el principio al fin” [“a single line, traced by a steady hand from beginning to end”] or “una flecha que, cuidadosamente apuntada, parte del arco para ir a dar directamente en el blanco. Cuantas mariposas trataran de posarse sobre ella para adornar su vuelo, no conseguirían sino entorpecerlo” [“an arrow which, carefully aimed, leaves the bow directly towards the target. Any butterflies which might try to settle upon it in order to adorn its flight, would only manage to interfere with it.].6 Although Onetti and Hernández are quite different writers from their predecessor, Quiroga’s views on the ideal short story are helpful to distinguish between them. This paper aims to show that Onetti is more likely than Hernández to produce “thin” texts such as the one widely regarded as his masterpiece, El astillero, where the plot gives an impression of high precision in the making. Such precision is rarely apparent in Hernández, where the dominant aesthetic tends instead towards the “fat”. Two aspects which seem particularly appropriate to test this idea will be considered below: the role of the narrator and the function of food.

The two texts to be confronted here, Onetti’s Para una tumba sin nombre and Hernández’s La casa inundada, were published in Montevideo within a few months of each other (1959-60), and have certain traits in common. Though fairly carefully drawn and so relatively “thin”, both works self-consciously build upon a plot not entirely in the hands of the first person narrator. In Para una tumba, the narrator is doctor Díaz Grey (though he remains nameless), a common voice in Onetti’s works from the Santa María cycle and the one most easily identifiable with the implied author. Díaz Grey presents the versions he hears about the tale behind the death and burial of Rita, who had been the maid of the Malabia family. His main source of information is Jorge Malabia, who arranged Rita’s funeral and looked after her ailing goat until the animal died a week after its owner. The other main source of information about the plot is Jorge’s friend and fellow student at university in Buenos Aires, Tito Perotti. The two secondary narrators provide versions which are in part contradictory, and the doctor himself adds missing information in one chapter, as well as warning at the end that he is making no firm claims about the truth of the story.

In La casa inundada, the anonymous narrator reports the story of señora Margarita, a rich and corpulent patroness who hires him as her boatman for trips in a canal around an island in her garden, during which she provides some background about her peculiar relationship with water. From other sources the narrator cites, it appears that the water also helps Margarita to reminisce over her disappeared husband, José. The narrator, like Díaz Grey, makes no claim to have reported the story in all true details. He is a writer and shares certain features with other narrators in Hernández which make him, like Díaz Grey for Onetti, a likely representative of the author.    

The narrative voice
Since both stories are concerned with filling a gap in the knowledge of the narrator, his position invites special attention. Two aspects of that position are particularly relevant: degree of control over the plot and relationship with other characters.

The two narrators differ in the strength of their grip on the plot. A hint of this can be gleaned from the first of two curious parallels between the stories. At the center of each text there is a remarkably similar intrigue: the status of both Rita and José, who motivate the plot in each story, is far from clear. They may or may not be dead; their graves in each case, the plot in Santa María’s cemetery and the fountain in the flooded house, may after all be only cenotaphs, empty tombs. In La casa inundada, the ambiguity is announced early on when the narrator vacillates about the possibility that José might be buried in the fountain-turned-island (68) and it is maintained until the very end in the closing words of Margarita’s dedication of the story to José: “Esté vivo o esté muerto” [“Whether he be alive or dead”] (89). As with much of the reported story, this is an area which the narrator acknowledges as falling beyond his understanding and control.

In Onetti’s story, unlike Hernández’s, the last word is firmly by the narrator, who dismisses both Jorge’s latest version of events, now reduced to “Hubo una mujer que murió y enterramos, hubo un cabrón que murió y enterré. Y nada más” [“There was a woman who died and whom we buried, there was a goat who died and whom I buried. Nothing else”] (1044), and Tito’s letter (whose contents contradict Jorge). It is Díaz Grey who declares that there may not after all have been a body in the coffin that was buried in the graveyard: “no me extrañaría demasiado que resultara inútil [...] toda pesquisa en los libros del cementerio” [“I wouldn’t be too surprised if any search in the cemetery records turned out to be fruitless”] (1046), a declaration which amounts to beating Jorge, the putative originator of the tale, at his own game of adding variations. Indeed, as we look back in the story, there is a prefiguration of this statement and of the narrator’s control over the plot in Díaz Grey’s impression at the burial that the coffin was surprisingly light: “Éramos sólo cuatro personas y bastábamos [...]. Era, casi, como llevar una caja vacía [...] como transportar en un sueño dichoso [...] el fantasma liviano de un muerto antiguo [...] el ataúd de peso absurdo” [“We were only four people and that was more than enough (…). It was, almost, like carrying an empty box (…) like transporting in a happy dream (…)  the light ghost of a dead friend (…) the coffin of  absurd weight”] (995-96). Such a commanding presence of the narrator is absent in La casa inundada, where his voice is often replaced by that of Margarita.

There are two more instances of the narrator’s firm control on events in Para una tumba. The first is Díaz Grey’s recurring judgment over the way Jorge Malabia tells his story, which includes criticism of the young man’s showiness (998), irony, pride and harshness (1008), cocksureness, cynicism and self-righteousness (1026-31).7 His overall assessment is that Jorge is “un mal narrador” [“a bad story teller”]: he is too slow and fails to perceive that his audience needs to be told events and not his own rather vague reflections (1012). He then proceeds to prod Jorge into spelling out missing information (1012-13). But since Jorge does not take up the offer, Díaz Grey puts on the second demonstration of his control over the plot by providing his own imagined version of how Rita came to be in charge of the goat. Not only is Díaz Grey’s account, including his christening of the inventor of the goat ploy as Ambrosio, accepted by Jorge and Tito as valid; his telling is altogether “thinner” than Malabia’s: “Es muy corto. [...] Unas pocas páginas” [“It’s very short. (…) Just a few pages”] (1026). The higher degree of succinctness is denoted by the difference in length between the two chapters: chapter 3, by the doctor, is almost half the size of chapter 2 where Jorge tells the original tale. The other main difference is in plot development, which is direct in Díaz Grey’s version and vacillating in Jorge’s, a fact confirmed by the young man himself when at the end of chapter 2 he declares that all he has said is merely preliminary material: “no era el final de un capítulo sino el final del prólogo” [“it wasn’t the end of a chapter but rather the end of the prologue”] (1014).

No such tight grip on the plot is apparent in La casa inundada. The boatman adds no factual information to the story Margarita supplies, and confesses his inability to report reliably what he has heard. Unlike Díaz Grey, the boatman’s role is confined to taking note of what Margarita says rather than making contributions. This is evident when he declares his puzzlement soon after the “velorio” [“wake”] episode: “Esta vez ni siquiera comprendía por qué la señora Margarita me había llamado y contaba su historia sin dejarme hablar ni una palabra” [“This time I did not even understand why señora Margarita had summoned me and was telling me her story without allowing me to say a word”] (88). A further difference is illustrated by the boatman’s frequent vacillations, a feature of “fat” discourse which distances him from Díaz Grey and rather approximates him to the less single-minded teller of that story, Jorge Malabia. La casa inundada begins with a preamble which seems, paradoxically, to have been unplanned, judging by the statement that closes it: “Pero ahora yo debo esforzarme en empezar esta historia por su verdadero principio, y no detenerme demasiado en las preferencias de los recuerdos” [“But now I must make an effort to start this story at its proper beginning, and not detain myself too long on the preferences of my memories”] (69). This amounts to a confession of the narrator’s inability to keep control over the plot (and also echoes another famous beginning by Hernández, that of Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling [“For the Times of Clemente Colling”], of 1942).

His hesitation is evident in the connections between sentences, as in the case of the second paragraph of the story (68), which opens with the hypothesis that José might be buried in the island in the middle of the canal. This is followed by one supporting statement (“Por eso ella me hacía dar vueltas por allí” [“that’s why she made me go around it”]), but in the next sentence the hypothesis is denied (“sin embargo, el marido no podía estar en aquella isla” [“however, the husband couldn’t be in that island”]) and several reasons are given for the new position (Alcides had said José had fallen off a cliff in Switzerland; the previous boatman had said that he had helped make the island by filling an old fountain with earth; Margarita’s head movements as the boat went past the island were not consistent with her husband being buried there). In a new reversal, however, the paragraph ends with a statement which appears to support the original claim: Margarita’s thick glasses could conceal her true feelings and the place, covered with a glass dome, would be suitable to hold a corpse after all.

A second area of difference between the stories involves the relationship between the narrator and the other characters. Díaz Grey’s authority cuts through a highly polyphonic text made up of a collection of voices whose status can be discerned according to a range of attributes that include smoking, drinking alcohol (positive features), materialist values and, of course, body weight (negative traits). On a scale of narratorial partiality, near the bottom go Godoy and Caseros (obese and non-smoker respectively), followed closely by the fat and pragmatic Tito. Next comes Jorge Malabia, who is thin but there are hints that this may change in future: at the beginning of the story he is “flaco, joven, noble” [“think, young, honest”] (996); at a second meeting he is “más grande pero no más gordo” [“larger but not fatter”] himself, but his horse is gaining weight (1023-24). Since Díaz Grey gradually changes his appreciation of Jorge as the young man becomes increasingly associated with materialism, it is not far-fetched to expect him to be gaining weight in the time of the story, a prediction corroborated in later texts such as La muerte y la niña, already cited. Near the top in the narrator’s estimation is his own invention, Ambrosio, who unsurprisingly is also thin. We are told this, appropriately enough, when he brings home the goat after nine months of mental gestation: “parecía más delgado, un poco ojeroso, con un aire de liberación y amansado orgullo” [“he looked thinner, a little haggard, with an air of relief and a tamed pride”] (1019). This description clearly improves on Rita’s impression of his insecurity when she first met him: “tenía el aire de haber perdido a la mamá entre un gentío” [“had the air of having lost his mummy in a crowd”] (1016), thus marking Ambrosio’s progression towards self-confidence.  

Other secondary characters are also distinguished through features which can be related to gluttony or frugality. Thus of two funeral directors, Grimm, preferred by the narrator, is blunt and straightforward: “la brutalidad o indiferencia de Grimm [...] su falta de hipocresía [...] enfrentando a la muerte como un negocio, considerando al cadáver como un simple bulto transportable” [“the bluntness or indifference of Grimm (…) his lack of hypocrisy (…) confronting death as a business, considering a corpse was a simple bundle to be transported”] (987). Miramonte, by contrast, is hyperbolic and showy: “confía todo, en apariencia, a los empleados y se dedica, vestido de negro, peinado de negro, con su triste bigote negro y el brillo discretamente equívoco de los ojos de mulato, a mezclarse entre los dolientes, a estrechar manos y difundir consuelos” [“he leaves everything, apparently, to his workers, and devotes himself, dressed in black, with his black hair combed back, his sad black mustache and his discreetly equivocal shining mulatto eyes, to mingling with the mourners, to shaking hands and proffering condolences”] (987-88). The connotations of thinness and fatness sometimes overrule actual physical characteristics, as when the old Nordic priest Bergner is preferred to the Italian successor who, though slight of frame, has negative traits of excess: “Favieri, chico, negro, escuálido, con su indomable expresión provocativa, casi obscena” [“Favieri, small, black, scraggy, with his untamable, provocative, almost obscene expression”] (988). Similarly, Miramonte’s employee, Caseros, physically fit on account of his sportsmanship, is the butt of irony worthy of overweight characters: “Exageraba, mentía un poco, andaba buscando alarmas. [...] Tiene largos los bigotes y los puños de la camisa, mueve las manos frente a la boca como apartando moscas con languidez” [“He was exaggerating, he was lying a bit, he was looking for something to alarm me. (...) He has a long mustache and the sleeves of his shirt are long, he moves his hands in front of his mouth as if wearily shooing flies away”] (989).

Finally in the hierarchy of Para una tumba, Díaz Grey’s own superiority over the other characters corresponds to his status within the social context of the story. He is a well respected figure in his community, as indicated most explicitly by the attitude of the lesser characters who report events to him, Caseros and Fragoso. Apart from the overt high regard they show towards him, both characters pay for his drinks and are willing to pass on to him the information they have, implicitly asking for the doctor’s approval. He, in turn, does not issue any comments but, in a gesture of superiority, keeps his judgment to himself.

The position of Hernández’s narrator is quite different: he is an employee of señora Margarita, who has hired him to write her story. During his stay at the flooded house, the narrator constantly obeys Margarita’s orders even when unhappy to do so, as happens during the third outing: “Parece mentira, la noche es tan inmensa, en el campo, y nosotros aquí, dos personas mayores, tan cerca y pensando quién sabe qué estupideces diferentes” [“I’m puzzled, the night is immense upon the countryside, and here we are, two grown-up people, so near each other and yet each thinking who knows what stupid and different thoughts” (76). It is also significant that not only is he unable to articulate to Margarita his displeasure at being there, but that his nearest move in that direction is to quote the words of others: “Yo me ahogaba y me venían cerca de la boca palabras que parecían de un antiguo compañero de orquesta que tocaba el bandoneón: ‘¿quién te hace ninguna pregunta?... Mejor me dejaras ir a dormir...’” [“I was drowning and words reached my mouth which seemed to belong to an old fellow musician who played the accordion with me in an orchestra: ‘who is asking you anything?… I wish you let me go to sleep…’”] (76). That this statement should remain unuttered is confirmation that the narrator’s real feelings are repressed in the presence of Margarita. And the fact that her name is always prefaced by the title “señora” underpins his lower status and further contrasts him to his counterpart in Para una tumba, who is typically addressed as “doctor” by the other characters.

A further illustration of her power in La casa inundada is that Margarita need only request his writing of her story indirectly: “si por casualidad a usted se le ocurriera escribir todo lo que le he contado, cuente con mi permiso” [“if by any chance you are thinking of writing down all that I have told you, you have my permission”] (89). And her tacit superiority over the narrator is overtly inscribed in the last sentence of the story, which is a quotation of her dedication of the tale to José and represents her final appropriation of the text. This contrasts with the ending of Para una tumba, when the narrator imposes his own assessment: “Y cuando pasaron bastantes días de reflexión [...] escribí, en pocas noches, esta historia. [...] Lo único que cuenta es que al terminar de escribirla me sentí en paz” [“And when enough days of reflection had passed (…) I wrote this story in a few nights. (…) All that counts now is that once I had finished writing it I felt at peace”] (1045-46).

Food
Bearing in mind the associations highlighted so far, the difference in goal between the two narrators should be corroborated in the stories’ references to food. The subject is indeed treated quite differently in the two texts. In Para una tumba there is little mention of eating, and much mention of drinking alcohol, although the impression given is that consumption has not been extravagant. By contrast, food is an important preoccupation in La casa inundada (and in Hernández’s texts more generally).

The difference in attitude towards food in the two texts can be gleaned from the second of the two curious parallels between them: also at the center of each story there are a wake and a goat, real in Para una tumba and metaphorical or pictorial in La casa inundada. Whatever other meanings these elements may have in each text,8 two aspects are relevant to the argument being pursued here. One is the fact that the “velorio” [“wake”] in La casa inundada is closely associated with food. The first piece of furniture the boatman sees on arrival is a food trolley (“trinchante” [86]), the candles are placed into pudding basins and the ceremony is triggered off by the sound of a gong. The second aspect is complementary to the first: in Para una tumba, the goat appears to represents both Ambrosio’s achievement and the opposite to Jorge’s uncertainty and shortcomings (“símbolo de algo que moriré sin comprender” [“a symbol of something I shall die without understanding”] [1011]); it is also, in the opinion of Díaz Grey, the motor that triggered the plot (“El cabrón, que es lo que cuenta” [“the goat, which is what counts/recounts”] [1023]). According to the logic that has emerged from things “fat” and “thin” in the two stories, it should follow that the goat, as a positive figure in Onetti’s text, must be slim. Although this is not stated openly, it is the case that the animal lives up to its idealized image by dying of self-imposed inanition. As he arrives at the cemetery, Díaz Grey observes that the animal “refregaba el hocico en los pastos cortos de la zanja, sin llegar a comer” [“rubbed its snout against the short grass in the ditch, without eating it”] (993) and Jorge confirms that it had given up eating a few days previously: “Creo que tiene una pata rota, hace unos días que apenas come” [“I think it has a broken leg, it’s hardly eaten for a few days”] (995). When it eventually dies, at lunchtime, it was still fasting: “Murió. Recién hoy a mediodía. No pude conseguir que comiera” [“It died. Only today at lunchtime. I didn’t manage to make it eat”] (998). (Relatedly, although no reference is made to the size of the goat in La casa inundada, the picture which contains it is “un cuadro enorme” [“an enormous picture”] placed over a bed which is “muy grande” [“very large”] [86].)

There is no comparable intentional dieting in Hernández’s text. On the contrary, the main reason why the narrator wanted the post of boatman at the flooded house was to avoid starvation. Alcides, Margarita’s nephew, mentioned the possibility of a job to the narrator one day when he was feeling weak with hunger, “Alcides me encontró en Buenos Aires un día en que yo estaba muy débil [...] y me hizo comer de todo” [“Alcides found me in Buenos Aires one day when I was very weak (…) and he made me eat a lot”], and the narrator is grateful to Margarita because of the “cambio brusco que me había hecho pasar de la miseria a esta opulencia” [“sudden change which brought me from poverty to this opulence”] (69). It is significant, furthermore, that the part of the story in which Margarita, after several failed attempts which frustrate the narrator, finally speaks about her past happens on an evening when he had eaten and drunk excessively: “Otra noche en que yo había comido y bebido demasiado” [“On another night, when I had eaten and drunk too much”] (76). It is as if inebriation and gluttony made him more perceptive in the eyes of his landlady. And on reaching his bed after the outing, he has memories of a previous mildly drunken night: “al tantear los muebles tuve el recuerdo de otra noche en que me había emborrachado ligeramente con una bebida que tomaba por primera vez” [“as I was groping the furniture I remembered another night when I was slightly drunk on a beverage I had taken for the first time”] (81). This declaration further undermines the authority of a highly distracted teller who, in a clear contrast with Díaz Grey’s position, readily confesses his inability to understand people: “Yo sabía que tenía gran dificultad en comprender a los demás y trataba de pensar en la señora Margarita un poco como Alcides y otro poco como María” [“I knew that I had great difficulty understanding other people and tried to think about señora Margarita a bit as Alcides would and another bit as María would”] (75).

Man versus child
This last quotation points to an important feature of the boatman’s personality which also markedly opposes him to Díaz Grey, namely his highly diffused sense of self. Whilst in both stories the narrator displays certain parallels with the main character, the two relationships involved are quite different. As we have seen, the doctor eventually stands back from Jorge Malabia and judges him from a position of superiority. This is not the case in Hernández’s text, where the narrator often seems unable to disentangle himself from Margarita emotionally and psychologically. This situation obtains throughout, and is perhaps particularly strong during the third outing, when he has been eating and drinking heavily. There we read that his mind takes a path of its own (“La cabeza se me entretenía en pensar cosas por su cuenta” [“My head entertained itself thinking on its own”] [76]), and that he cannot separate his own from Margarita’s thoughts: “Después que ella empezó a hablar, me pareció que su voz también sonaba dentro de mí como si yo pronunciara sus palabras. Tal vez por eso ahora confundo lo que ella me dijo con lo que yo pensaba” [“After she started to speak, I thought that her voice also sounded inside me as if I was pronouncing her words. Perhaps that’s why now I’m confusing what she told me with what I was thinking”] (77).

This general dispersion of discourse is related specifically to Margarita’s large body, again showing that fat discourse and fat bodies tend to coexist, in this case further supported by overindulgence in food and drink. Margarita’s body is the site upon which the narrator constructs his fantasies: “su cuerpo inmenso [...] me tentaba a imaginar sobre él, un pasado tenebroso. [...] ella se prestaba--como prestaría el lomo una elefanta blanca a un viajero--para imaginar disparates entretenidos” [“her immense body (…) tempted me to imagine on it a shady past. (…) she lent herself--as a white elephant would lend her body to a traveler--as a site for me to imagine entertaining and absurd thoughts]” (69); “Cuando dijo ‘mundo’, yo, sin mirarla, me imaginé las curvas de su cuerpo” [“When she said ‘world’ I, without looking at her, imagined the curves of her body”] (74).

The boatman’s desire for Margarita is linked to several references to him as a child: she looks as if she was asking him “¿Qué pasa, hijo mío?” [“What’s wrong, my boy?”] (69); she represents “el sueño fantástico de un niño” [“the fantastic dream of a child”] (73); after seeing her, he climbs the stairs “como un chiquilín” [“like a child”] (74); he sees himself as a satellite attracted by her and wishes to replace José in her eyes (82). The narrator also shares with Margarita an affinity with water (e.g. “los recuerdos de agua que yo recibía en mi propia vida, en las intermitencias del relato, también me parecían fieles de esa religión” [“the water memories which I received in my own life, in the gaps in the story, also seemed to me that were faithful to that religion”] [81]). As Patricia Parker notes at the end of her study of “literary fat ladies”, the deferral and excess of the romances she has analyzed echo the claims of écriture féminine criticism, amongst them “the description of women’s speech, in Luce Irigaray, as ‘dilatable’” (31). A further connection with Irigaray is also relevant to Hernández’s text; in particular, Margarita’s relationship with water appears to support Irigaray’s ideas on liquids as icons of female desire: “Yo debo estar con mis pensamientos y mis recuerdos como en un agua que corre con gran caudal” [“I must be with my own thoughts and memories as if I was being carried by a great flow of water (80).9

These two tendencies in the boatman, desiring a motherly woman and sharing in her affinity for water, contrast strongly with the tone of control and authority of Díaz Grey, who behaves like a man, not a child. Such a contrast, which is paralleled in a difference in the critical reception of Hernández and Onetti in contemporary culture in Uruguay and beyond, can be related to dominant views of masculinity. Although some critics from the implacable “generation of 1945” in Uruguay took to Hernández (most strongly, the rather benign Ángel Rama and José Pedro Díaz),10 the majority seemed ambiguous about him (e.g. Ruben Cotelo, Mario Benedetti and Martínez Moreno),11 and some were quite openly hostile, most notoriously Emir Rodríguez Monegal in a review of Nadie encendía las lámparas [No One Had Lit a Lamp] (1947) to which I return below.

The grounds for critics’ disapproval of Hernández appear to be mainly three: bad writing, deviant sexuality and dependency on others. The first aspect involved not only deficient Spanish, as highlighted in Rodríguez Monegal’s review by an addendum listing grammatical and lexical errors, but also poor writing in more general terms. What was criticized in Hernández was, in brief, a tendency towards “excess”, which, in the terms of the present analysis, can be related to his predilection for things “fat”. Thus in his review Rodríguez Monegal focused on what he saw as Hernández’s lack of control over his material: “[El] niño detrás de este relator [...] no puede organizar sus experiencias, ni la comunicación de las mismas; no puede regular la fluencia de la palabra” [“The child behind this narrator (…) cannot organize his experience, nor the communication of it; he cannot regulate the flow of language”] (52). Similarly, Ruben Cotelo criticized La casa inundada for its failure to present what was “material [...] potencialmente rico” [“potentially rich material”] in a suitable, and we could say “thin”, form; instead, he delivered it “casi en bruto” [“almost in a raw state”] and without having achieved “su debida forma narrativa” [“its proper narrative form”] (107). In each review, the excess in form is coupled with a lack of control, and therefore also “excess”, in sexuality: Monegal notices that the author “no se reconoce límites, ni siquiera los impuestos por la sobriedad” [“sets himself no limits, not even those imposed by sobriety”] (51) and that behind him there is a child who “no maduró para el arte ni para lo sexual” [“did not reach maturity in art or in sexuality”] (52). And Cotelo feels that: “A esta altura del siglo estamos curados de perversiones; lo reprochable es que se nos haga partícipes de ellas” [“At this stage in the century we are immune to perversions; what is to be reproached is that we should be made to participate in them”] (107).

By contrast, the value of frugality (and the rejection of “fat”) comes through quite clearly in the following assessment by Cotelo of Onetti’s “La cara de la desgracia” [The Image of Misfortune] (1960), published a week earlier than his review of La casa inundada: “Es un placer que pocas veces proporciona la literatura uruguaya: un estilo tenso, la precisión de vocabulario, el pudor expresivo, [...] la ausencia total de adiposidades, vacilaciones y rellenos; […] una estructura formalmente limpia y cargada de significado, de un ascetismo que no rehuye el humor y la pasión [sino que] más bien los destaca” [“It is a pleasure which is rarely provided by Uruguayan literature: a tense style, precision in vocabulary, modesty of expression, (…) total absence of adiposity, vacillation and stuffing; (…) a structure formally clean and loaded with meaning, with an ascetic quality which rejects neither humor nor passion [but rather] highlights them”] (“El guardián de su hermano” [41]) Moreover, although neither of these critics particularly celebrated Onetti’s preference for idealized pubescent girls, they held back from a strong attack of this aspect. (In one of the subtlest early readings of Onetti, “Muchacha y mujer”, Cotelo relates the writer’s interest in the figure of the girl with Catholic ideas). As Rodríguez Monegal summed up elsewhere, Onetti inspired unanimous high regard amongst contemporary local critics: “resulta [...] notorio el caso de Juan Carlos Onetti, cuya fortuna ha ido acentuándose hasta ser hoy el único escritor uruguayo aceptado por tirios y troyanos”  [“the case of Juan Carlos Onetti is well-known, whose status has been growing to the extent that he is today the only Uruguayan writer accepted in all quarters”].12 Indeed, it is really only with the advent of feminist criticism that the overwhelming respect for Onetti has been seriously challenged (one recent example being Moreira).

The third criticism of Hernández relates most overtly to contemporary views of masculinity, where Hernández and Onetti occupy extreme poles in a continuum. At one end there is the dependent child-like figure of Hernández, who needed the help of his friends’ subscriptions or connections to get his works published or to obtain employment.13 This trait of Hernández’s character was an important factor behind Rodríguez Monegal’s negative disposition towards him, as shown in one of his more favorable notes: “siempre pensé que había en Hernández un escritor de grandes dotes, pero malogrado por la adulación de sus amigos” [“I always thought that there was in Hernández a writer of great qualities, but spoilt by the adulation of his friends”] (”Un escritor original”). This contrasts with the position of Onetti at the other end of the continuum, since he saw himself and was perceived by everyone else locally not only as the most important literary figure of his time but also as a strong, detached, and, for his contemporaries, archetypal male.14

In an interview for French television a few years before his death, Onetti laughed when told of the claim by one of his countrymen that he was one of the greatest living Uruguayan writers, considering such praise rather insignificant.15 And in an article incorporating an earlier interview, a young writer who had known Onetti for some time confessed the effect of awe he inspired in others: “No he conocido a nadie (salvo aisladas mujeres) que no se ponga solemne o tartamudo cuando Onetti empieza a burlarse de él” [“I haven’t known anyone (save a few women) who didn’t become solemn or develop a stutter when Onetti began to mock them”]. This position of superiority was acknowledged by Onetti himself (though not without irony) when the same young interviewer put it to him more directly: “Entonces le repetí mi teoría, ya una vieja convicción: ‘A vos no te interesa tener amigos. O no tenerlos. Tanto te da.’” [“So I repeated my theory, which is already an old conviction: ‘You are not interested in having friends. Or in not having them. It’s all the same to you’”] “Puede ser” [“Maybe”] was Onetti’s reply.16

Onetti on Hernández
The images of the two writers which come through in the work of contemporary critics seem quite consistent with those of the two narrators studied above. They seem also to correspond to what we know of the two authors’ relationships with their own writing. Whilst Onetti claimed not to have to labor over his texts (“Pues yo le digo que no trabajo ni la sintaxis ni el estilo” [“Well, I tell you that I do not work on syntax or style”], he told Chao17), Hernández confessed to his mentor and supporter Jules Supervielle that he had to go over numerous drafts of La casa inundada: “le he hecho, realmente, miles de veces” [“I have redone it, literally, thousands of times”]18, a fact consistent with statements in other letters and in his biographers’ comments on his lack of self-confidence.

For a closer assessment of what they thought of each other, we can now turn to the short article by Onetti on Hernández, published in exile in Spain and mentioned at the beginning of the present paper. The article should confirm some of the insights gained through the study of the two stories undertaken above. Two aspects of the piece, entitled “Felisberto, el ‘naif’” [“Felisberto, the naïve one”] are particularly relevant to the present discussion because they highlight a contrast between Onetti and his subject. The first is a comment made in passing: “Felisberto--siempre se le llamó así--” [“Felisberto--that’s what everyone called him--”] (31). It is true that, like a child or a woman writer, Hernández was and still is generally referred to by his Christian name. This may have to do partly with the rarity of that appellation, as opposed to the common nature of his surname, but it is also consistent with the image of a man who, like a child, always depended on others for support. By reminding the reader of this fact, the author tacitly confirms the difference in their status, which is endorsed by Onetti’s further statement that Felisberto, who was seven years older than him, seemed insecure and lost when they met: “Lo sentí tan descentrado, tan sinceramente inseguro de los pequeños libros que había publicado” [“I felt he was so directionless, so sincerely unsure about the little books he had published”] (31). Hernández’s status is thus in clear opposition to that of Onetti himself, who, as it happens, is generally referred to by his surname alone.

The second aspect of interest comes when Onetti ponders on what he calls Hernández’s innocence: “su inocencia de aquellos días le hizo preguntarme al despedirse: --¿Usted en qué café habla?” [“his innocence at the time made him ask me as we parted: ‘In what café do you speak?’”] (32). After reporting his own reply (“Ninguno” [“There isn’t one”]), Onetti makes a curious parenthetical remark which refers to Hernández’s physical outlook: “(Y un detalle tal vez desdeñable pero que a mí me importa: cuando se produjo la entrevista recién contada, Felisberto era más flaco que yo)” [“And one detail which is perhaps negligible but which I care about: when the above-related interview took place, Felisberto was thinner than me”]. He then comments on some of Hernández’s early texts, saying he was impressed by the spontaneous originality they displayed: “Para resumir, era necesario desgastar otra vez la maltrecha frase: un alma desnuda” [“To sum up: one had to turn again to the old cliché: a naked soul”] (32).

It seems therefore as if Onetti finds a parallel between the innocence of the man and that of the work he produced when he was thin. Onetti’s reaction then changes as he mentions some of Hernández’s later texts: of Las Hortensias [The Daisy Dolls], he says that it was “alargado sin necesidad o por empeño en la inocencia” [“stretched unnecessarily or by determination on its innocence”] (32), and of La casa inundada, that it was “una sucesión de situaciones absurdas que mostraban, con exceso, la deliberación de conservar la pureza, la sinceridad de sus primeros libros” [“a succession of absurd situations which showed, with excess, his deliberation to maintain the purity and sincerity of his early books”] (33). There then follows a second reference to the size of the now older Felisberto Hernández, which once again ties together writing and the body of the author:
Y ahora un casi nota bene para explicar por qué señalé la flacura del Felisberto inicial. Cuando pasaron años de aquel encuentro, después del viaje a París, el escritor comenzó a engordar, a pedir en los restaurantes cantidades asombrosas de platos. Llegó a deformarse físicamente y eran muchos los amigos del pasado que no lograban reconocerlo a primera vista. (33)
[And now almost a nota bene, to explain why I pointed to the thinness of the early Felisberto. Years after that meeting, after his trip to Paris, the writer started to get fat, to order amazing numbers of dishes in restaurants. He became physically deformed and there were many of his old friends who did not recognize him at first sight.]
Nothing more explicit is said on the link, but the implication is that the older Felisberto had lost the quality of innocence associated with his earlier slimness by Onetti. Instead, Hernández’s gaining in weight seems to be contemporary with an increasing artificiality in his writing. The assessments implied by “por empeño” [“by determination”] as regards Las Hortensias and “deliberación con exceso” [“with excessive deliberation”] concerning  La casa inundada are applicable both to the discourse of Jorge Malabia in Para una tumba and to that of Margarita’s boatman in the story written by the older and plump Felisberto. They also echo the appreciations of contemporary critics, as we have seen. They are clearly a criticism of “fat” discourse.

Onetti’s piece thus helps to draw together a number of the features noted above. The conclusion that emerges from the various texts considered is that Onetti’s preference for thin characters and Hernández’s for fat ones represent the tip of an iceberg that contains models of writing and manliness which contribute to an understanding of the contemporary critical reception of their texts. On the one hand Onetti, like Díaz Grey, and apart from any other artistic merit of his work, practiced a form of writing which was consistent with a dominant notion of adult masculinity: controlled, detached, self-sufficient and goal-oriented. Onetti’s fantasies, furthermore, were comprehensible to current perceptions, notably the thin girl as an icon of innocence which counteracts the undesirable aspirations of his whores, pimps or bourgeois young men like Jorge Malabia and Tito Perotti, who are all typically fat figures. Although very different in tone to Quiroga’s own work, Onetti’s writing is consistent with the exhortations from his “Decálogo” [“Decalogue”] already mentioned, as well as others such as “No escribas bajo el imperio de la emoción” [“Do not write under the rule of your emotions”] and “No pienses en tus amigos al escribir” [“Do not think of your friends when you are writing”], which Hernández’s texts and biography would seem to disobey. Quiroga also shared with Onetti, perhaps not unpredictably, an inclination for pubescent girls, as both some of his stories and some biographical details would confirm.19

Felisberto Hernández, on the other hand, and regardless of his own aesthetic achievements, failed to live up to hegemonic ideals. He and his characters represented weak figures, needful of supporters and interested in a sexuality associated with children’s fantasies: the interminable motherly provider consistent with the appreciation of food and fat figures in his stories. What for Hernández was reassuring plenitude, for others signaled despised and unmanly excess.
Notes

1. See José Pedro Díaz, El espectáculo imaginario, esp. 46-56.
2. See, for example, Arthur Terry, “Onetti and the Meaning of Fiction” and Stephanie Merrim, “Felisberto Hernández’s Aesthetic of ‘lo otro’”.
3. In an interview with Jorge Ruffinelli included in Juan Carlos Onetti, Requiem por Faulkner y otros artículos, 222.
4. Felisberto Hernández, Obras Completas, Vol. 3, 118. All further references to La casa inundada are to this same volume.
5. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 8-35.
6. Horacio Quiroga, “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista” [“Decalogue of the Perfect Short-Story Writer” (1927) and “Ante el tribunal” [“Before the Judges”] (1931), included in Sobre literatura [“On Literature”], 87 and 137.
7. On Jorge’s transformation see Mark Millington, Reading Onetti, 220-227. Ch.7 of this book and “Contar el cuento” by Josefina Ludmer, included in her Onetti o la construcción del relato (143-185), are essential readings on Para una tumba.
8. See Jorge Panesi, “Felisberto Hernández, un artista del hambre”, and Gabriela Mora, “La casa inundada: hacia una interpretación”.
9. See Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en pas un, 105-6.
10. See, for example, Ángel Rama, “Felisberto Hernández”, Capítulo Oriental 29. It is interesting that although Hernández was older than Onetti and started publishing earlier, he should come after Onetti in this collection of installments on Uruguayan literature (the Capítulo on Onetti is Vol. 28). For José Pedro Díaz on Hernández, see note 1 above.
11. See Ruben Cotelo’s reviews of El caballo perdido (26.7.64) and La casa inundada (19.12.60); Mario Benedetti, “Felisberto Hernández o la credibilidad de lo fantástico”; Carlos Martínez Moreno, “Un viajero falsamente distraído”.
12. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Literatura uruguaya del medio siglo, 222.
13. For instances of this support see, for example, Norah Giraldi de Dei Cas, Felisberto Hernández: del creador al hombre, 52, 66 and 91.
14. See María Esther Gilio and Carlos M. Domínguez, Construcción de la noche. La vida de Juan Carlos Onetti, esp. Chs 5 and 6.
15. The interview has been published in French and, expanded, in Spanish; see Ramón Chao, Onetti, 78, and Un posible Onetti, 117.
16. Álvaro Castillo, “Hacia Onetti”, 281.
17. Ramón Chao, Un posible Onetti, 30.
18. See Nicasio Perera San Martín, “Alrededor de dos cartas de Felisberto Hernández a Jules Supervielle”, 424.
19. An example of a story is “Rea Silvia”, from El crimen del otro; a famous anecdote about Quiroga’s inclination towards young girls is related by Manuel Gálvez in Amigos y maestros de mi juventud, 1900-1910, 275. The link between literature and anecdote is noted by Emir Rodríguez Monegal in his biography on Quiroga, El desterrado, 125-26.

Works cited

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Cotelo, Ruben. “El guardián de su hermano” (12.12.60). Lídice Gómez Mango (Ed.). En torno a Juan Carlos Onetti, 39-44.

Cotelo, Ruben. “Muchacha y mujer” (1964). Lídice Gómez Mango (Ed.). En torno a Juan Carlos Onetti, 45-53.

Cotelo, Ruben. Review of El caballo perdido (26.7.64). Lídice Gómez Mango (Ed.). Felisberto Hernández: notas críticas, 81-88.

Cotelo, Ruben. Review of La casa inundada (19.12.60). Lídice Gómez Mango (Ed.). Felisberto Hernández: notas críticas, 103-07.

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Source/Fuente:
Onetti and Others. Comparative Essays on a Major Figure in Latin
American Literature. New York: SUNY (Latin American and Iberian and
Thought and Culture series), 1999. pp. 83-103. ISBN 0-7914-4235-7 (hb)
0-7914-4236-5 (pb)