Juan Carlos Onetti

Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer

• Born: July 1, 1909
• Birthplace: Montevideo, Uruguay
• Died: May 30, 1994
• Place of death: Madrid, Spain

Biography

Juan Carlos Onetti (oh-NEHT-tee) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1909, the second of three children. He grew up in a stable, middle-class family, and he remembered his childhood as a happy one. His father, Carlos Onetti, was a customs official, and his mother, Borges de Onetti, was a descendant of wealthy Brazilian landowners. In 1930, he married his cousin, María Amalia Onetti, and left for Buenos Aires, Argentina. His first job in Buenos Aires was that of a salesman for a firm selling calculators. In 1933, he published his first short story, "Avenida de Mayo-Diagonal-Avenida de Mayo" ("May Avenue-Diagonal-May Avenue") in La Prensa of Buenos Aires. While he was making some headway in his literary career, however, his personal life was not going well. After the breakup of his first marriage, he returned to Montevideo. He remarried; his second wife was María Julia Onetti, the sister of his first wife.

In 1939 he helped to found and became chief editor of Marcha, which went on to become one of the most prestigious cultural weeklies in Latin America. Under the enlightened direction of luminaries such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Angel Rama, and Jorge Ruffinelli, its cultural section established Uruguay as a cultural center in the so-called Third World. In December, 1939, Onetti published The Pit. This novella constituted a break with the previous conventions of the genre. It is narrated by a middle-aged man who is disillusioned with life. He lives in squalor and loneliness, separated from his wife, and his isolation is made all the worse by his sense that his country, Uruguay, lacks a cultural tradition able to sustain the individual spiritually. The novel offers a jaundiced view of the fragmentation of life in a modern urban environment; it may well be seen as a projection of Onetti’s own experience of city life. In 1941, Onetti moved back to Buenos Aires (where he was to remain until 1954) and began working for the British news agency Reuters. He subsequently went on to become editor of various periodicals. In 1941, his novel Tierra de nadie (no man’s land) was published by the prestigious publishing house Losada of Buenos Aires. Like his previous work, this novel focuses on the disjointed, and ultimately aimless, lives of people struggling to find some dignity for themselves in a hostile urban environment.

Onetti’s second marriage also broke up, and in 1945, he was married for the third time, this time to Elizabeth María Pekelhering. In 1950, he published his masterpiece, A Brief Life, which won him international fame. Like most of his fiction, it expresses in poignant fashion the spiritual anguish of life in the modern city. The following year, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Isabel María. In 1953, Onetti’s novella Goodbyes appeared; the following year, he returned to Montevideo to live. There, he worked for a publicity firm and later for the periodical Acción. In 1957, largely as a result of his literary success, he was elected director of the municipal library system in Montevideo. In the same year, he became a member of the board of directors of the Comedia Nacional. In 1961, he published The Shipyard, which offers a grim view of life in midcentury Uruguay. The narrator is Larsen, who had appeared in Tierra de nadie; Larsen describes his desperate attempts to breathe new commercial life into a shipyard. Yet there are no ships, no work, and no orders. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the shipyard symbolizes the futility of humanity’s attempt to make sense of life.

In 1963, Onetti was awarded the Premio National de Literature, Uruguay’s national literary prize. In the same year, The Shipyard was distinguished by receiving the William Faulkner Foundation Certificate of Merit. His novel Body Snatcher was published in 1964 and three years later was runner-up in competition for the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which is given every five years to the best novel written in Spanish. Like The Shipyard, it is set in the imaginary city of Santa María and features the same character, Larsen. It focuses on the plan entertained by a number of the residents to establish a brothel in Santa María; the project eventually ends in failure as a result of the opposition of a number of women. More important than the plot itself is the opportunity it provides for the narrative voice to provide a violently satiric vision of the sordidness of people’s lives. In 1968 a translation of The Shipyard was published in New York and brought Onetti’s work a great deal of international recognition. In 1970 an edition of his complete works was published, although his career as a novelist was by no means over.

In 1974 Onetti was involved in a literary scandal, made all the more painful since he was by then a public figure on the Uruguayan literary scene. Uruguay had been witness to an alarming growth of political radicalization in the late 1960s and 1970s; the terrorist organization Tupamaros, named after the sixteenth century Indian leader Tupac Amaru, had been involved in a bitter and ruthless war with the state. In 1973 the military toppled the civilian government, which had by then been discredited, and seized power. Marcha, which had been founded by Onetti many years before and had been a forceful independent cultural voice of Uruguay for more than thirty years, was closed down by the military establishment in 1974. Journal archives were burned, historical research was prohibited, and many of the country’s works of literature, as well as works by contemporary European and US writers, were banned from library bookshelves. These were shocking events, especially in a country that had prided itself on being the "Switzerland of Latin America."

Onetti, understandably, became embroiled in these events. In 1974 when the military repressiveness was at its height, a literary prize was awarded to a work that was critical of the military regime, and Onetti was unlucky enough to be one of the judges who voted for the award to be made. He was imprisoned as a result; however, because of his poor health and the public and international outcry that followed the decision to imprison him, he was released. In 1975 The Shipyard was awarded Italy’s prize for best foreign work translated into Italian that year. Onetti, who had been under increasing pressure from the military authorities, was refused leave to attend the awards ceremony. At this point Onetti felt that he had no choice but to leave his native country. He resigned his library post and traveled to Europe. He subsequently took up residence in Madrid with his wife, and he remained in self-imposed exile until his death; he eventually became a Spanish citizen. Onetti was awarded the Cervantes Prize, Spain’s most prestigious literary honor, in 1980. He died in Madrid in the spring of 1994.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

El pozo, 1939 (The Pit, 1991)

Tierra de nadie, 1941 (No Man’s Land, 1994)

Para esta noche, 1943 (Tonight, 1991)

La vida breve, 1950 (A Brief Life, 1976)

Los adioses, 1954 (novella Goodbyes, 1990)

Una tumba sin nombre, 1959 (novella better known as Para una tumba sin nombre; A Grave with No Name, 1992)

La cara de la desgracia, 1960 (novella The Image of Misfortune, 1990)

El astillero, 1961 (The Shipyard, 1968)

Tan triste como ella, 1963 (novella)

Juntacadáveres, 1964 (Body Snatcher, 1991)

La muerte y la niña, 1973

Dejemos hablar al viento, 1979 (Let the Wind Speak, 1997)

Cuando ya no importe, 1993 (Past Caring?, 1995)

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

La novia robada, y otros cuentos, 1968

Cuentos, 1971

Tiempo de abrazar, 1974 (short stories and fragments of unpublished novels)

Tan triste como ella, y otros cuentos, 1976

Goodbyes, and Other Stories, 1990

Nonfiction:

Réquiem por Faulkner, y otros escritos, 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. Includes an extended discussion of Onetti’s novella The Pit; shows how Onetti’s artistic manipulation of schizophrenia creates a sensation of participating in an alienated world.

Deredita, John F. "The Shorter Works of Juan Carlos Onetti." Studies in Short Fiction 8 (Winter, 1971): 112–122. Surveys Onetti’s short fiction, focusing on the two ages of man—naïve youth and the age of conformity—in such stories as "Welcome, Bob" and "A Dream Come True."

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 and Row, 1967. Claims that in Onetti’s middle-aged protagonists there is a yearning for vanished youth and innocence. Discusses Un sueño realizado y otros cuentos, Onetti’s Faulknerian style in Goodbyes, and his pessimism.

Lewis, Bart L. "Realizing the Textual Space: Metonymic Metafiction in Juan Carlos Onetti." Hispanic Review 64 (Autumn, 1996): 491–506. Discusses four Onetti works in terms of his use of metonymy as a metafictional device. Argues that the plasticity of Goodbyes gives it a composed, pictorial quality absent from his other works. Discusses the relationship between story and storytelling.

Maio, Eugene A. "Onetti’s Los adioses: A Cubist Reconstruction of Reality." Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Spring, 1986): 173–181. Shows how Onetti’s novella has affinities with the aesthetic goals and structures of cubism. Argues that his narrative style has much in common with the aesthetics of contemporary art in general and cubism in particular.

Maloof, Judy. Over Her Dead Body: The Construction of Male Subjectivity in Onetti. New York: P. Lang, 1995. Focuses on gender relations in Onetti’s work.

Millington, Mark. An Analysis of the Short Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti: Fictions of Desire. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. Looks at Onetti’s short stories from a largely psychological perspective.

Millington, Mark. Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative and the Subject. Liverpool, England: Francis Cairns, 1985. Discusses the development of Onetti’s work under the "hegemony of international modernism." Drawing on stylistics, narratology, and post-structuralism; Millington focuses on the status of Onetti’s fiction as narrative discourse. Discusses how Goodbyes problematizes the act of reading.

Millington, Mark. "No Woman’s Land: The Representation of Woman in Onetti." MLN 102 (March, 1987): 358–377. Discusses the function of the wife, prostitute, girl, and mad woman in Onetti’s fiction; argues that the subjection of women is one of the major impasses of Onetti’s thinking.

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 Onetti’s fiction, Murray provides some background about how Uruguay has affected Onetti’s ideological unconscious.

Richards, Katherine C. "Playing God: The Narrator in Onetti’s Los adioses." Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Spring, 1989): 163–171. Argues that the narrator has a will to power that conflicts with his role as witness-observer; says his special knowledge contradicts the reader’s experience of reality and literary convention.

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.

Sullivan, Mary-Lee. "Projection as a Narrative Technique in Juan Carlos Onetti’s Goodbyes." Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Summer, 1994): 441–447. Argues that Onetti’s novella is designed to draw on the projective capacity of readers. Suggests that by leaving inexplicable gaps in the narrator’s version of the story, Onetti elicits readers’ desires and fears within the creative space of the text.