Irony, Satire and humorismo in Sábato's El túnel
2009; Routledge; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14753820902783993
ISSN1478-3428
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema History and Criticism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Ernesto Sábato, El túnel (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Planeta, 2003 [1 ed. 1948]). All quotations are from this edition. 2From the volume of critical work written on El túnel the following studies have been chosen because they represent the general trend of theoretical thought applied to the novel over the last forty years. In general terms, the critical approaches can be placed under the following two headings: the psycho-existential approach and the psychoanalytical. Critics belonging to the former camp have read the novel as an expression of existential angst in reference to the philosophical work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Anderson Imbert, for example, argues that Castel's madness is ‘un símbolo de una metafísica desesperada’ (quoted in Fred Petersen, ‘Sábato's El túnel: More Freud Than Sartre’, Hispania [USA], 50:2 [1967], 271–76 [p. 271]). Mariana Petrea from a different perspective states: ‘consideramos que la novela gira en torno al tema del abismo de la vida actual, sugerido además por la imagen del título. En este sentido, la soledad y la incomunicación representan las caras de la Nada, las consecuencias del quebrantamiento de la civilización moderna’ (Mariana D. Petrea, Ernesto Sábato: la nada y la metafísica de la esperanza [Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa, 1986], 102). Hugo Méndez Rámez meanwhile, in his article on El túnel and Onetti's El pozo, asserts that ‘El túnel y El pozo se convierten en la metáfora de ese mundo soterrado, alienante y deshumanizado, mientras que Castel y Eladio son la metáfora o encarnación del hombre moderno y su angustia existencial ante la inanidad de la vida’ (Hugo Méndez, ‘El narrador alienado en dos obras claves de la narrativa latinoamericana moderna’, Hispanic Journal, 16 [1995], 83–93 [p. 91]). The following list is a sample of other critical works that consider the novel along similar lines: Beverly J. Gibbs, ‘El túnel: Portrayal of Isolation’, Hispania (USA), 48:3 (1965), 229–63; Norberto M. Kasner, ‘Metafísica y soledad: un estudio de la novelística de Ernesto Sábato’, Revista Iberoamericana, 58 (1992), 91–103; William Nelson, ‘Sábato's El túnel and the Existential Novel’, Modern Fiction Studies, 32 (1986), 459–67; Albert Fuss, ‘El túnel, universo de incomunicación’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanas, 391–93 (1983), 324–39; Gustav Siebenmann, ‘Ernesto Sábato y su postulado de una novela metafísica’, Revista Iberoamericana, 48 (1982), 289–302; Marcelo Coddou, ‘La estructura y la problemática existencial de El túnel de Ernesto Sábato’, Atenea, 43 (1966), 141–68. As far as the psychoanalytical approach is concerned, Fred Petersen (article cited above) attempts to explain the novel's themes of isolation and madness through Freud's Oedipus complex, dream work and the aggressive impetus of Castel's sexual drive. Other critics explore Castel's manias in light of more specific mental illnesses: Augustín Segui, concentrating on the four dreams of the novel, suggests that Castel suffers from various psychoses (Augustín F. Segui, ‘Los cuatro sueños de Castel en El túnel de Ernesto Sábato’, Revista Iberoamericana, 58 [1992], 68–80). James R. Predmore's diagnosis for Castel is schizophrenia (Un estudio crítico de las novelas de Ernesto Sábato [Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa, 1981]). Susan Stein, in turn, detects evidence of hysteria in the novel, while Ana Ferreira applies Lacan's notion of the ‘mirror stage’ to Castel and traces ‘su falso ascenso al orden simbólico que remite Juan Pablo a un sustituto del anhelado útero materno–su prisión’ (Susan Isabel Stein, ‘Polysemous Perversity and Male Hysteria in El túnel’, BHS [Liverpool], LXXIII [1996], 427–45 [p. 445]). For further psychoanalytical interpretations see also Ana Paula Ferreira's ‘El túnel de Ernesto Sábato en busca del origen’, Revista Iberoamericana, 58 (1992), 91–103. To my knowledge, the only article that broaches the subject of humour in El túnel is Encarna Abella's study of parody in the novel. Abella's principal aim, however, is to show how the novel parodies the type of detective fiction popular in Argentine literature during the 1940s (Encarna Abella, ‘Sátira y parodia de la novela policial en El túnel de Ernesto Sábato’, Romance Linguistics and Literature Review, 1 [1998], 66–75). In contrast with the focus of my article, Abella does not attempt to correlate the role of humour, parody and irony with the existential themes of El túnel. 3Bakhtin links all Dostoevsky's works to the Menippean satire and carnival, emphasizing the importance of laughter in the Russian's polyphonic prose and its serio-comic content. The Underground Man is explored with specific references to the Menippean satire (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. L. W. Rotsel [New York: Ardis, 1973], 129). In his introduction to a collected study of modern comedy, Wylie Sypher discusses the work of Dostoevsky and Kafka in the following terms: ‘Kafka's novels are a ghastly comedy of manners showing how the awkward and maladroit hero, K, is inexorably an “outsider” struggling vainly somehow to “belong” to an order that is impregnably closed by some inscrutable authority. Kafka transforms comedy of manners to pathos by looking, or feeling, from the angle of the alien soul. He treats comedy of manners from the point of Dostoevsky's “underground man” and his heroes are absurd because all their efforts are seen from below, and from within’ (‘The Meanings of Comedy’, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher [New York: Doubleday, 1956], 1–24 [p. 14]). From a more postmodern perspective Patrick O'Neill defines Kafka's work as an example of ‘a comedy of epistemology’ (Patrick O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy: Humour, Narrative, Reading [London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990], 261). In his work on modern comic fiction, James Wood highlights the cruel humour and anti-religious nature of Dostoevksy's novels, in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 44–59. 4‘La similaridad con Kafka es visible. Tal como el protagonista de La metamorfosis, Pablo está diciendo: no soy humano, soy distinto, soy dos personas, nadie me entiende’ (Angela B. Dellephiane, Ernesto Sábato: el hombre y su obra [New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1968], 99). Other critics who have identified similarities between Sábato's work and that of Dostoevsky and Kafka are the following: Hannelore Hann, ‘La metamorfosis de Franz Kafka y El túnel de Ernesto Sábato’, Revista de Cultura, 24 (1995), 80–85; Tamara Holzapfel, ‘Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Sábato's El túnel’, Hispania (USA), 53:3 (1968), 440–46. 5The full definition given by the OED is as follows: ‘7. That quality of action, speech, or writing which excites amusement, oddity, jocularity, facetiousness, comicality, fun. 7a. The quality of action, speech or writing which excites amusement; oddity, jocularity, facetiousness, comicality, fun. b. The faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, or of expressing it in speech, writing, or other composition; jocose imagination or treatment of subject. Distinguished from wit as being less purely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic quality in virtue of which it often becomes allied to pathos’ (OED, 20 vols [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], 486). 6William Makepeace Thackeray, in his first essay on the subject defines humour in this way: ‘If humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest in and about humorous writers than the private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned who possesses in common with these the power of making you laugh. But the men whose lives and stories for which your kind presence here shows you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a growing number of other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy’ (‘Lecture the First. Swift’, in The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century [London: Smith & Elder, 1867], 1–59 [p. 2]). 7Interestingly, in his treatise on the dialogic nature of the novel, Bakhtin argues that one of the most striking features of the comic novel is the continual use of and change between distinct registers or as he defines them, ‘speech genres’. The comic style, insists Bakhtin,‘demands of the author a lively to-and-fro movement in his relationship to language, it demands a continual shifting of the distance between author and language, so that first some, then the other aspects of language are thrown into relief’ (M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981], 302). 8In her essay on Bakhtin's theory of the novel Kristeva observes that the ‘way in which European thought transgresses its constituent characteristics appears clearly in the words and narrative structures of the twentieth-century novel. Identity, substance, causality and definition are transgressed so that others may be adopted: analogy, relation, opposition, and therefore, dialogism and Menippean ambivalence’ (Julia Kristeva, ‘Word Dialogue and the Novel’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi [Oxford: Blackwells, 1986], 34–61 [p. 56]). 9Macedonio Fernández, ‘Una teoría para la humorística’, in Teorías (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1997), 260–305 (p. 261). 10Fernández, ‘Una teoría’, 305. 11Enrique Araya, Humor y literatura: conferencia (Santiago: Ediciones Ateneo, 1993), 13. 12Aldolfo Bioy Casares, while he avoids giving a strict definition, suggests that humorismo ‘es una forma de cortesía’, but the majority of the examples he gives are humorous anecdotes involving scenes of death, linking his notion of humour loosely to that of Freud (Alfredo Bioy Casares, ‘El humor en la literatura y en la vida’, La Gaceta, 232 [abril de 1990], 26). Florencio Escardó, who denies a place for laughter, irony, satire and it would seem comedy in his definition, says this of humour: ‘el humorismo, pues, es una seriedad mucho más seria que la seriedad. Se puede ser serio en serie […] De ahí también que la amarga sea uno de sus componentes más recónditos; tiene la tristura de todos los caminos de regreso y la melancolía es uno de los integrantes más escondidos pero más lógicos de humor’. Humorismo, according to Escardó, is also invested with a corrective quality but above all entails ‘una actitud optimista’ (Florencio Escardó, ‘El humor y humorismo’, La Nación, 20 de febrero de 1989, p. 7). Alfredo Bryce Echenique, in his inaugural speech to the Julio Cortázar conference in 2002, distinguishes between the humorist and the satirist: ‘En estos dos no se origina el sentimiento de lo contrario. Si se originara, se volvería amarga la risa provocada en el primero al advertir cualquier anormalidad; y la contradicción que en el segundo es únicamente verbal se volvería efectiva, sustancial, y por tanto dejaría de ser irónica; y desaparecería la indignación, o cuando menos la aversión que está en toda la sátira’. Humour and irony, both associated with ambiguity and the irresolute, also ‘consiste en el sentimiento de lo contrario, suscitado por la especial actividad de la reflexión que no se oculta, que no se convierte […] en una forma del sentimiento, sino en su opuesto, aun siguiendo paso a paso a ese sentimiento como la sombra sigue el cuerpo’ (Alfredo Bryce Echenique, ‘Sobre el humor y la ironía’, La Nación: Cultura, 14 de mayo de 2000, pp. 1–4 [p. 3]). Marcos Victoria argues more conventionally that the important ingredients of humour are comedy and ‘el amor o la simpatía’ (Marcos Victoria, ‘El humorismo en la literatura argentina actual’, in Variaciones sobre lo sentimental [Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1944], 230–55 [p. 230]). Arturo Torres-Rioseco is of the same opinion. For him ‘cuando el artista ve lo ridículo y simultáneamente demuestra un sentimiento de comprensión y piedad por la especie humana, estamos en presencia del humorismo superior’ (Arturo Torres-Rioseco, ‘El humorismo en la literatura hispanoamericana’, in Ensayos sobre literatura latinoamericana [México: Tezontle, 1953], 150–71 [p. 150]). 13Isodoro Blaisten, Cua ndo éramos felices (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1992), 88. 14Luigi Pirandello, On Humor, trans. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1960). 16Enrique Méndez Calzada, El humorismo en la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1962), 22. 15For an in-depth study of the relationship between costumbrismo and humorismo see the following: Eduardo Romano, ‘Fray Mocho. El costumbrismo hacia 1900’ and Jorge B. Rivera y Eduardo Romano, ‘El costumbrismo hasta la década del cincuenta’, 169–92, both in Historia de la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1980) 265–88 and 169–92 respectively; Jorge B. Rivera, ‘Humorismo y Costumbrismo (1950–70)’, in Historia de la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1967), 601–24. 17Rivera and Romana, ‘El costumbrismo hasta la década del cincuenta’, 175. 18Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1980), 26–29. 19Sartre, Existentialism, 29. 20Bryce Echenique, ‘Sobre humor y la ironía’, 4. 21It is worth mentioning here that according to Bergson the principal source of comedy is repetition, that he defines as ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’. In this respect, Bergson argues that laughter is corrective in that it seeks to shame inflexible and unnaturally mechanical behaviour since man's naturally evolved nature is one of flexibility and fluidity, of adaptability. For this reason we find Molière's characters or fixed types funny. If Bergson is correct, which I believe he is from a certain point of view, then Hunter is one such type, created only for ridicule (Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell [London: Macmillan Press, 1911], 37). 22Romano, ‘Fray Mocho’, 282–83. 23It will be of interest to note here that incongruity is regarded as one of the most important elements of comedy. Generally referred to as the incongruity theory, Immanuel Kant and John Moreall are exponents of this train of thought. However, it is Schopenhauer who gives us the most specific version of the theory. He argues that humour arises from the apprehension that a concept fails to account for an object (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, trans. R. B. Haldane [London: Routledge and Kegan, 1950], 71–81). Furthermore, this theory can quite easily be applied to language register in the novel as does Salvatore Atardo in his study of humour and register (Chapter VII, ‘Register-Based Humour’, in Linguistic Theories of Humour [New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994], 230–53). From this perspective, humour might be said to arise when the reader apprehends that a register is used inappropriately: for example, the act of changing a baby's nappy described in strict legalese. 24Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. P. Firchow (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991). 25For Kierkegaard irony or the ironic outlook is only a stepping stone on the way to the authentic personal existence of faith (S⊘ren Kierkegaard, ‘The Truth of Irony’, in The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Capel [London: Harper & Row, 1966], 336–42). 26For Sartre irony is seen in terms of a perpetual negation of the human personality. It is a form of self-negation par excellence (Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Bad Faith’, in his Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes [London: Routledge, 2002], 47–67 [p. 47]). 27Booth defines unstable irony as an ironic statement or expression from which ‘no stable reconstruction can be made out of the ruins revealed through irony […] The only sure affirmation is that negation begins all ironic play: “this affirmation must be rejected”, leaving the possibility, and in infinite ironies the clear implication, that since the universe (or at least the universe of discourse) is inherently absurd, all statements are subject to ironic undermining. No statement can really “mean what it says” (Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony [London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974], 241). 28Booth defines this mode of irony in respect of the reader's interpretation. ‘If he is reading properly’, states Booth, ‘he is unable to escape recognizing either some incongruity among the words or between the words and something else he knows. In every case, even the most seemingly simple, the route to new meanings passes through an unspoken conviction that cannot be reconciled with the literal meaning’ (Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony, 10). D. C. Muecke calls this the ‘irony of simple incongruity’, in The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1980), 100. 29Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 158–59. 31Pirandello, On Humor, 113. 32Pirandello, On Humor, 130. 30Pirandello, On Humor, 113. 33Pirandello, On Humor, 124. In his essay on the difference between Pirandello's idea of humour and the general nature of comedy, Umberto Eco debunks the notion that comedy and the carnivalesque are truly transgressive because their transgression in reality confirms the transgressed rule. Rather he sees Pirandello's definition of humour as truly transgressive. ‘Humour’, he writes, ‘does not pretend, like the carnival, to lead us beyond our own limits. It gives us the feeling, or better, the picture of the structure of our own limits. It is never off limits, it undermines limits from inside. It does not fish for the impossible freedom, yet it is a true movement towards freedom. Humour does not promise us liberation: on the contrary, it warns us about the impossibility of global liberation reminding us of the presence of a law that we no longer have reason to obey. In doing so it undermines the law. It makes us feel the uneasiness of living under a law–any law’ (Umberto Eco, ‘The Comic and the Rule’, in Travels in Hyper Reality [London: Picador, 1987], 269–78 [p. 278]). In this respect, the dark humour of El túnel could be seen as transgressive since it highlights both the futility, tragedy and, at the same time, the inevitability of living under such laws and cultural codes. 34M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (London: Ardis, 1973) 93–99.
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