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Contemporary Poetics to the Rescue: The Enigmatic Narrator in Sábato's El túnel

Although Ernesto Sdbato is clearly among the most significant contemporary Latin American novelists, his ranking derives more from the quality than the quantity of his works, since Sdbato to date has produced only three novels. The briefest of these, El trinel (1948), has enjoyed the most attention. Though a leading specialist on SpanishAmerican narrative believes that El tzwnel has attracted "an almost excessive amount of critical attention" (Foster, Currents 71), important facets of this multidimensional and enigmatic short novel remain unexplored. To date most studies on El tiinel have concentrated on its underlying ideology and the traits of its major characters. Specifically, the novel has been seen as a statement about man's alienation in modern society as manifested by his solitude and inability to communicate with others. The protagonist, Juan Pablo Castel, has been interpreted as a man obsessed with the twin demons of jealousy and logic, who ends up imprisoned (in a jail or an insane asylum) because his obsessions drive him to murder his mistress, Maria Iribarne. Although she appears to be the single most important character other than the protagonist, Marfa's personality remains much more mysterious and she is, consequently, more difficult to define (some critics, for instance, give excessive weight to Castel's assertions about Maria because so few independent observations can be made about her). All in all, to most critics the novel seems to center on the difficult relationship between these two characters, and critical evaluations of the work thus far have generally concentrated on such areas as the exploration of Sartrean existential philosophy, Jungian and Freudian beliefs, abnormal psychology, the links between reality and fiction.' While the observations in previous studies of El ti'nel have generally been enlightening, they have concentrated primarily on ideological issues. This study does not attempt to refute earlier interpretations of the novel but rather seeks to approach it from another perspective, to explore a significant dimension of the work which so far has remained largely unexamined, and in so doing affirms Jonathan Culler's assertion that "To engage in the study of literature is not to provide yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one's understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse" (5).