A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Onetti
"A Brief Life" by Juan Carlos Onetti is a profound exploration of identity and alienation, centered around the character Juan María Brausen. Facing a personal crisis after his wife Gertrudis undergoes surgery, Brausen grapples with feelings of revulsion towards her scarred body and begins to question his own existence. In his struggle for a sense of self, he creates alternate identities, including Juan María Arce, and finds solace in a fictional world he invents called Santa María. This imaginary realm serves as a refuge from his troubled reality, where he lives out scenarios that reflect his fears and desires.
The novel emphasizes Brausen's internal turmoil, portraying him as an outsider in a dreary Buenos Aires setting, inhabited by marginalized figures. Onetti's narrative delves into themes of failure and resignation, with Brausen's journey marked by a lack of transformation despite his escapism. The story ultimately presents a bleak view of existence, suggesting that while one can inhabit multiple lives through imagination, the core identity remains unchanged. "A Brief Life" stands as a pivotal work in Onetti's oeuvre, showcasing his distinctive style that intertwines psychological depth with existential inquiry, establishing a lasting legacy in Latin American literature.
A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Onetti
First published:La vida breve, 1950 (English translation, 1976)
Type of plot: Psychological novel
Time of work: The twentieth century
Locale: Buenos Aires and Santa María
Principal Characters:
Juan María Brausen , the protagonist, a publicistJuan María Arce , his other selfDr. Díaz Grey , a creation of Brausen’s imaginationGertrudis , Brausen’s wifeQueca , Arce’s lover, a prostituteElena Salas , Díaz Grey’s patient and love
The Novel
A Brief Life presents the inner conflict of a man who, after suffering a traumatizing experience, feels lost and seeks an identity. He splits into two selves, and, at the same time, he finds refuge in his own fantasy.
Juan María Brausen is about to be fired from his job. His wife, Gertrudis, has undergone surgery on her left breast, and her scarred body is so repulsive to him that it has become an obsession. He begins to realize that he is not the same person he thought he was and suffers a crisis of identity: “I understood that I had been aware for weeks that I, Juan María Brausen and my life were nothing but empty molds, pure representations of an old meaning kept out of indolence, of a being dragging himself among the people, the streets, and the time of the city, routine acts.”
Through the wall of his apartment, Brausen can listen to the incidents that take place in the world of Queca, a prostitute. He decides to enter this adjacent world as an alternative to his tortured existence. In his imagination, Brausen becomes Juan María Arce, a new man who will exist simultaneously but apart from Brausen. Arce will live “a brief life in which time could not be enough to engage him, to make him repent, or grow older.”
The agency for which Brausen works has ordered him to write a screenplay. For that purpose, he has invented the imaginary world of Santa María at the shores of the Río de la Plata. There, an imaginary alter ego, the mediocre forty-year-old Dr. Díaz Grey, spends his life selling morphine to Elena Salas, the woman with whom he is in love. Brausen repeatedly escapes to this world and projects himself into the doctor.
These “brief lives” exist primarily in Brausen’s consciousness, rather than in the real world. The conclusion of the novel completes the image of failure presented at the beginning: Brausen has been fired from his job and has been abandoned by his wife. Queca has been killed, and Elena Salas also has died. The novel ends with Brausen walking along the streets of Santa María, integrated into his own fantasy.
The Characters
Onetti presents in A Brief Life an interesting, three-dimensional protagonist. By splitting the character’s personality, the author is able to make a more profound study of human identity.
Onetti concentrates on Brausen’s psychological problems, fears, and fantasies, rather than on a narrative description of his life. For this reason, Brausen’s internal life, depicted through his reflections and through passages of stream of consciousness, predominates over action in the book.
Juan María Brausen, like many of Onetti’s protagonists, is an imaginative man who refuses to develop the practical qualities that his world demands of him. Brausen is an alienated, existentially tortured man, an outsider. He knows that the world in which he lives is full of falsehood, but he does not fight it. He adopts a skeptical and resigned attitude. He invents new lies, new identities. Brausen creates other selves through which he evades his anxiety, taking refuge in his fantasy as a self-defense mechanism, but he does not undergo change in the course of the novel. His life has changed with his wife’s surgery and the consequent trauma, but Brausen has the same wandering attitude from the beginning to the end. He is consistently a failure.
The noises and voices to which Brausen listens through the wall of his room invite him to enter the world of sex, a world from which his wife’s scars have separated him. Brausen transformed into Arce will visit Queca, the prostitute, to overcome the impotence that he feels with his wife. Arce can live with Queca a life that is “without memories and without foreknowledge.” Arce becomes Brausen’s strongest persona.
In his attempt at salvation, Brausen has also invented Dr. Díaz Grey. This fictitious doctor is based on Brausen’s monotonous life and on the revulsion that his wife’s scarred body provokes in him.
Brausen projects himself into Arce and Díaz Grey, all three sharing a life of failure and lies. They incarnate the fatalism in which Onetti seems to believe. They accept their colorless lives without attempting to change them. Indeed, they seem unwilling to attempt external change.
The protagonist’s sense of alienation is underlined by the fact that most of the secondary characters belong to a marginal world—the world inhabited by prostitutes and pimps. Onetti does not even place his hero (or antihero) in a historical context, or in a clearly defined place. Brausen lives in some obscure part of Buenos Aires that contaminates him with its dullness and mediocrity.
The other characters are presented through Brausen’s eyes and are totally dependent on Brausen-Arce-Díaz Grey. Gertrudis, a character who rarely speaks, represents Brausen’s past. Queca passively accepts Arce’s love and Arce’s beatings. It seems that she has been created to be abused by others; this is her role, she knows, and she merely plays it. Elena Salas is a projection of Gertrudis. These three women, the foundation of Brausen-Arce-Díaz Grey’s life, will have to disappear before Brausen can find his real identity.
Critical Context
Onetti belongs to a group of writers, born in Uruguay and Argentina, who reached maturity during the politically tumultuous 1930’s and who became known as “the lost generation.” They share a nihilist vision of the world, expressed through the solitary, alienated characters they create. These writers practice a kind of existentialism; their conflict with society is reflected in the deliberately fragmentary quality of their fiction. A good example of such fragmentation can be seen in Onetti’s A Brief Life.
A Brief Life is considered to be a pivotal work in Onetti’s career. His previous works—El pozo (1939), Tierra de nadie (1941), and Para esta noche (1943)—sketch the psychological conflicts that are fully developed in A Brief Life. Many of the works that follow—Los adioses (1954), Para una tumba sin nombre (1959), Juntacádaveres (1964), and La muerte y la niña (1973)—base their plots on the inventions created in Juan María Brausen’s mind.
Indeed, the world of Santa María, first introduced in A Brief Life, appears as a constant in Onetti’s following works. Santa María, like Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s books, becomes a mythical place. Onetti succeeds in transporting the reader to his character’s fantasy world, because, although nonexistent, it seems perfectly real.
A Brief Life explores man’s search for an answer to his existence. “People believe they are condemned to one life until death. But they are only condemned to one soul, to one identity. One can live many times, many lives, shorter or longer.” By creating an imaginary world, and imaginary selves, Brausen can enjoy several lives, although he remains the same person, the same soul.
Bibliography
Adams, Michael I. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Adams presents a sociopsychological critical interpretation of three Latin American authors whose works share similar themes. Includes a chapter focusing on Onetti’s view of spiritual disillusionment as inevitable in the urban setting.
Ainsa, Fernando. “Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994): An Existential Allegory of Contemporary Man.” World Literature Today 68 (Summer, 1994): 501-504. A tribute to and biographic profile of Onetti as well as an analysis and evaluation of his work.
Kadir, Djelal. Juan Carlos Onetti. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Kadir provides a critical and interpretive study of Onetti with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.
Lewis, Bart L. “Realizing the Textual Space: Metonymic Metafiction in Juan Carlos Onetti.” Hispanic Review 64 (Autumn, 1996): 491-506. Lewis compares Onetti’s style to that of Boris Pasternak. Lewis asserts that through his works, Onetti reveals that there are many openings to be filled in the fictional scheme because fictional characters live in a web of words.
Verani, Hugo J. “Juan Carlos Onetti.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Onetti. Includes analysis of his works and a bibliography.