On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sábato

First published:Sobre héroes y tumbas, 1961 (English translation, 1981)

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1841 and 1946-1955

Locale: Buenos Aires and Patagonia, Argentina

Principal Characters:

• Alejandra Vidal Olmos, a young woman in Buenos Aires
• Martín del Castillo, a young man in love with Alejandra
• Bruno Bassán, the mentor and confidant of Martín
• Fernando Vidal Olmos, the father of Alejandra
• Hortensia Paz, a woman who nurses Martín during his illness
• Georgina Olmos, the mother of Alejandra
• Bucich, a truck driver

The Novel

In an introductory note to his linguistically and ideologically complex novel, Ernesto Sábato admits that the narrative represents his attempt to “free himself of an obsession that is not clear even to himself.” This admission is borne out by the novel’s extraordinary display of unusual imagery, puzzling events and characters, and conflicting political and ethical points of view.

The text of On Heroes and Tombs is presented in four parts. In “The Dragon and the Princess” and “Invisible Faces,” Martín del Castillo meets Alejandra Vidal Olmos, a young woman for whom he develops an immediate fascination. After a long period of pursuit, he finally convinces her to begin a love affair with him. In an attempt to understand the strange behavior of Alejandra, Martín follows her and sees her with another man, whom she later admits is Fernando, her father. Although she seems to be an innocent, introverted woman, Alejandra (who turns out to be the daughter of a decadent aristocratic family) is a prostitute who caters to the wealthy members of Juan Perón’s administration. At the same time, she maintains an incestuous relationship with Fernando, who is her father but was never married to her mother, Georgina.

Fernando Vidal Olmos has written a mysterious document which narrates his frequent hallucinatory experiences, a document incorporated into the text in the third part, “Report on the Blind.” After finishing the report, Fernando goes to his daughter’s home, even though he knows that he is going to his inevitable death. Alejandra shoots him and then commits suicide by setting fire to the house.

In the fourth part of the novel, “An Unknown God,” Martín seeks the help of Bruno Bassán as he attempts to understand his relationship with Alejandra. Martín falls into an alcohol-induced stupor, in which he envisions himself in a world likened to a dung heap or sewer. He is saved and nursed back to health by Hortensia Paz, who instills in him the hope for a better life. Martín meets a truck driver, Bucich, who takes him on a trip to Patagonia. Interpolated in the narrative of the trip are passages which depict the struggle of the revolutionary forces of General Juan Lavalle against the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the dictator of Argentina from 1829 to 1852. Two ancestors of Fernando and Alejandra Vidal Olmos carry the body of Lavalle toward the Argentine-Bolivian border in 1841 as Martín flees to Patagonia in 1955 and finds that the crystal-clear sky and the fresh air make him feel free and reborn.

The story of Alejandra, Martín, and Fernando is told through a variety of narrative points of view. The foreword of the novel is an objective police report of the death of Alejandra and Fernando. “The Dragon and the Princess” and “Invisible Faces,” narrated by an unnamed omniscient narrator, include many long passages which portray the thoughts of the characters and scenes from the early life of Alejandra and Martín. The “Report on the Blind” is a text written by Fernando as a memoir or confession, a narrative of his own experience. In the last section, “An Unknown God,” it becomes clear that the narrator of the first two sections is someone who knew the characters and has obtained most of the information from Bruno and from Martín years after the death of Alejandra and Fernando. The narrator acts as an organizing consciousness of the material—the episodes of the contemporary history of the characters, the recollections of the earlier years, the interpolated passages of the history of Alejandra’s ancestors, and the text of Fernando’s psychotic, paranoic report on the activities of the blind.

The Characters

Just as the novel represents an attempt to relieve an unspecified obsession, the characters are portrayed as engaged in a struggle to free themselves from their own mysterious preoccupations. Throughout the novel, Bruno seeks the thread of continuity that links the lives of Alejandra, Fernando, and Martín, primarily to understand finally the reasons for Alejandra’s act of killing her father and herself.

The contradictions of Alejandra’s behavior are not resolved in the text of the novel. Although her family has always opposed the regime of Perón, she devotes her life to satisfying the sexual appetite of the Perónists. She makes love with Martín, for whom she has a strange, obsessive fascination, yet she always remains distant and mysterious. At the same time, she engages in an incestuous relationship with her father, and then murders him and destroys herself in a ritualistic immolation.

Fernando’s lust for his daughter is barely explained. She bears a striking resemblance to Fernando’s mother and to her own mother, Georgina, who was the daughter of Patricio, the brother of Fernando’s mother. Bruno describes Fernando as an antiphilosopher, a nihilist who hates everything bourgeois and despises the world for its destruction of the aristocratic, elitist life that his family once enjoyed.

Martín is portrayed as a young man who is trying to find some explanation for life itself. Martín’s attempt to discover a hidden logic in the mysterious behavior of Alejandra creates the impression that these two characters represent opposite poles of human existence, the ordered and the chaotic, the logical and the contradictory, the rational and the irrational, oppositions that suggest that Martín and Alejandra are archetypal characters, incarnations of what Sábato understands as essentially masculine and essentially feminine characteristics.

Critical Context

Ernesto Sábato first received international acclaim with the publication of his short novel, El túnel, in 1948 (The Outsider, 1950). In the author’s note at the beginning of On Heroes and Tombs, Sábato says that in the thirteen years between the first novel and the second, he continued exploring the mysterious labyrinth that leads to the secret of human existence. The Outsider is a pessimistic, oppressive story of a man who murders his married mistress when he finds out that she has deceived him. Many of the details and themes of the second novel are contained in the first—the mistress’s husband is blind, the protagonist’s love for the woman is obsessive and violent, and his behavior is at times distorted by paranoia.

As Sábato suggests, On Heroes and Tombs does indeed seem to be a development of the obsessive concerns of the first novel. The pessimism of The Outsider, however, is tempered somewhat by the optimism of the ending of the second novel. The more promising vision of human existence offered by Hortensia Paz and the portrayal of potentially rewarding relationships in the conversation and communion of Martín and Bucich in Patagonia are indications that Sábato finds some salvation for his characters despite the apparent meaninglessness of life.

Sábato’s novel is a stylistic tour de force which inevitably evokes a comparison with the work of many of his Latin American contemporary novelists. There are many passages that are precursors of the narrative complexities of the work of Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the ontological problems suggested by the novel reflect similar preoccupations of the most influential Argentine writer of the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges. In spite of the development toward a concept of life in On Heroes and Tombs that is more optimistic than the ontology of The Outsider, the later novel continues to suggest the impossibility of resolving the conflict of human rationality and human existence. The stylistic and ideological complexities of Sábato’s work, which confirm his confession of the obsessive nature of his narrative impulse, render his novelesque work very difficult and not at all clear in its communication of the central mystery of life.

Bibliography

Bach, Caleb. “Ernesto Sábato: A Conscious Choice of Words.” Americas 43 (January/ February, 1991): 14-19. A look at Sábato’s life and work. Addresses the dark tone of his novels, as well as comments by critics “who feel that his black hope’ is several shades too dark.”

Cohen, Howard R. “Ernesto Sábato.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers an in-depth profile of Sábato’s life and career. Many of his works are discussed in detail, including On Heroes and Tombs.

Flores, Angel. Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. A good overall view of Sábato’s work. Offers a brief critical analysis of selected novels and common themes that thread through Sábato’s fiction.

Library Journal. CVI, June 15, 1981, p. 1324.

McQuade, Frank. “Personal Obsessions.” Third World Quarterly 13 (1992): 197-198. McQuade gives a brief synopsis of Sábato’s novel. He then presents an analysis of the story and notes that “this long novel” reflects all the themes already presented in Sábato’s other novels, including the search for the mother; the subconscious explored through dreams and nightmares; and the interest in perverse logic of a criminal mentality. He notes that the treatment of these themes is much more broad and bleaker than Sábato’s earlier works.

The New Republic. CLXXXV, September 23, 1981, p. 25.

The New York Review of Books. XXVIII, October 22, 1981, p. 54.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI, July 26, 1981, p. 1.

Newsweek. XCVIII, September 21, 1981, p. 103.

Sábato, Ernesto. “Ernesto Sábato: A Sense of Wonder.” Interview. UNESCO Courier (August, 1990): 4-9. Sábato discusses the opposition between science and the humanities; existentialist thought; the limitations of science in relation to dream, mythology, and art to represent reality; the current state of education; and the demise of the nuclear arms race. A good overall view of the thoughts and opinions that influence Sábato’s work.

Saturday Review VIII, June, 1981, p. 55.

Time. CXVIII, August 17, 1981, p. 78.