Saturday, May 21, 2011

Rereading / The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

Rereading: The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

The Argentinian writer's work explored his country's darkest days and helped to bring the military regime to account

Colm Tóibín
Saturday 21 May 2011 00.05 BST

It is with sadness and sorrow that we have carried out the mission entrusted to us by the constitutional president of the republic. It has been an extremely arduous task, for we had to piece together a shadowy jigsaw, years after the events had taken place, when all the clues had been deliberately destroyed, all documentary evidence burned, and buildings demolished. The basis for our work has therefore been the statements made by relatives of those who had managed to escape from this hell, or even the testimonies of people who were involved in the repression but who, for whatever obscure motives, approached us to tell us what they knew. – Ernesto Sábato, prologue to Nunca Mas, 1984

Ernesto Sábato, who died on 30 April just two months away from his 100th birthday, was a central figure not only in the literary life of Argentina in the 20th century, but in its political and civil life as well. In the dark days after the fall of the generals who had caused the disappearance of thousands of people, and lost the Malvinas war, Sábato was chosen to chair the commission to investigate the crimes against humanity committed during their reign. As a novelist of immense seriousness and power, he was one of the few public figures who had moral authority and independence of mind in Argentina at that time. The commission delivered its findings in September 1984; the report was detailed, horrifying and indisputable. As a result of what it disclosed – published in November 1984 as Nunca Mas (Never Again) – the generals were put on trial. It was Sábato's report that established in the minds of people in Argentina the enormity of what had happened in their country.

Sábato was born in the province of Buenos Aires in 1911 and began his career as a scientist. In the early 1940s, he was one of those many talented Argentinians whose work appeared in the literary magazine Sur, which was edited by Victoria Ocampo. His first novel, The Tunnel, was published in the magazine in 1948. Although he knew and admired Borges and Bioy Casares, and wrote about them in Sur, he was not an intimate of theirs; his early communism, for one thing, would not have endeared him to them. But he had something essential in common with them, and with other Argentine novelists such as Julio Cortázar and Juan José Saer: his work, especially the novels The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs (1961) and The Angel of Darkness (1974), was uncompromising and original both in tone and structure.

In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Borges made clear the scope and the scale of the ambition of the Argentine writers of the 20th century. He suggested that, by virtue of being so distant and so close to Europe at the same time, the Argentine writer had more "rights" to western culture than anyone in any western nation. They were like Irish writers, he wrote, for whom it was "enough, the fact of feeling Irish, different, to become innovators within English culture". Thus, Borges, Bioy Casares and Sábato had in common the idea that it was not their role to explain Argentina to itself or to the world; it was not their job to explore changes in morals and manners in their country, or write social realism about Buenos Aires or the Pampas. Their job was not to remake their country in their own image, but remake literature itself, to offer it energy and fresh form.

So they took what was available from European literature and set about refining it or undermining it. In The Tunnel, Sábato took the idea of the demented male artist and the city, which had its roots in Russian and French fiction, and transported it to Buenos Aires – not to offer it local colour, but to offer it further depth and strangeness. He created a hero even less heroic than usual and made his actions even more inexplicable to everyone except himself. He allowed the surrounding existential darkness to be even more negative than normal; the protagonist's obsession became more driven, energetic and generally demented than that of his European counterparts, and also more oddly credible and intense.

The intensity and credibility arise from the style. Like Borges and Bioy Casares, as The Tunnel makes clear, Sábato the scientist was interested in the clipped, declarative style of the murder mystery or the police file. While the novel describes extreme states of frenzied feeling and related activity, the prose is fiercely controlled; most of the sentences are short and describe a single action or emotion. Thus, the distance between the subject of the novel and the tone of the prose offers a sort of tension to the narrative. This tension allows the narrator not to bother with analysis of motive, or flashbacks or character studies. It forces the reader to accept these as either totally unnecessary or fully understood.

The Tunnel is a novel about madness recollected in a prison cell, but it is not an apology for the madness or the actions that the madness caused, nor is it a rational explanation of them. Instead, it leads the reader into the world of the protagonist, using a deliberately calm style to suggest that this world is normal. The mind of Juan Pablo Castel is given a kind of logic by the tone and sentence structure of the novel, which are precise and clear.

As in novels by Dostoyevsky and Kafka, there are moments when the rules governing despair are so closely undermined or re-examined or dramatised that the entire enterprise of living or thinking seems deeply absurd. What ensues is pure comedy. This happens, for example, in a classic scene in The Tunnel, when Juan Pablo Castel posts a letter to Maria and then decides he wishes to retrieve the letter. The encounter with the woman in the post office and the listing of regulations and demands put the reader on the side of Castel for a while. But not for long. The feeling that Castel is behaving both rationally and outrageously forces the reader to switch loyalty every few sentences: you feel one minute that Castel is a maniac and his own worst enemy, and then the next minute you really want him to retrieve the letter.

It is clear that The Tunnel belongs to a literary genre that explores dark areas of the self, and violence and irrationality in the anonymous mean streets of the modern city. It is important to remember that it is an Argentine novel only because it was open to European influences and contemporary genres, which it set out to develop and intensify. In its manic material and its grim laughter, it is not a metaphor for any society, Argentine or otherwise. Yet, because of the style, so controlled and factual, and the content, which deals with a world where violence, disorder and megalomania reigned, it is fascinating to read The Tunnelfrom 1948 in conjunction with the sober and detailed report that Sábato and his commission produced in 1984, about real murders committed in the real city where the fictional anti-hero Juan Pablo Castel once produced his art, and where Sábato produced his first novel.

THE GUARDIAN