The Tunnel By Ernesto Sábato, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden Penguin Modern Classics, 140pp, £8.99
JUAN PABLO CASTEL is a painter. He is also a convicted murderer confined to a prison cell. He lives in a state of torment. His victim was the love of his life, and she was the only person who fully understood his work. “You may wonder what has motivated me to write this account of my crime (I may not have told you that I am going to relate all these details) and, especially, why I want to publish it. I know the human soul well enough to predict that some of you will believe it is from vanity. Think what you want, I don’t give a damn.”
First published in 1948 and championed in France by Albert Camus, The Tunnel is a great European existentialist novel written by an Argentinian, Ernesto Sábato. Its tone of romantic idealism and insane jealousy establishes Castel as a man suspended between regret and paranoid logic. He sounds like a character from a Dostoevsky novel, but he is not. This is a strange, insistent work; the narrator personifies the plight of the artist as outsider while also being Everyman, tormented, despairing and angry.
Sábato in his many essays explored the concept of the metaphor as a way towards understanding truth. Castel is certainly attempting to arrive at some form of truth. Perhaps he didn’t kill his lover at all, perhaps he never managed to find the one person who understood his work, but the reality matters less than the search. The confession that shapes this compelling narrative is concerned with far more than a crime.
It is ironic that this major South American novel is so untypically Latin and that it bears no relation to the lushly fantastical magic-realist style; because of this he stands apart from his fellow South American writers. In common with Castel, Sábato was also a painter. Most ironic of all is that this new edition, published to mark his 100th birthday, on June 24th, has been overshadowed by his death a fortnight ago, at the age of 99. If ever a man had been expected to live forever, it appears to have been Sábato, who represented the artist as hero and was to speak on behalf of an estimated 9,000 victims of the military junta that terrorised Argentina.
The Tunnel became an immediate international best-seller, and along with Camus’s praise came endorsements from Thomas Mann and Graham Greene: it is an international book. As a study of obsessive love it is chilling, but beyond the passion and frustration of Castel’s failure to feel he can fully posses Maria, whom he shares with her blind husband and at least one other lover, is the overwhelming sense of loneliness that Sábato evokes. “Now that I have the opportunity to analyze my sentiments in tranquil surroundings . . . I feel that in a way I am paying for the madness of not having been content with that part of Maria that liberated me (temporarily) from loneliness. That surge of pride, that growing desire to possess her exclusively, should have warned me that I was taking the wrong path – governed by vanity and arrogance.”
BEFORE SÁBATO, always an intellectual by nature, became a writer he had distinguished himself as a physicist. He was born in 1911 into a wealthy Buenos Aires family. As a science student at university in La Plata he soon became political, not only in the sense of discovering radical ideas and becoming drawn to communism but also by developing a strong social awareness: La Plata had the largest meat-processing plants in Argentina, and the workers worked and lived in appalling conditions. It was his first experience of protesting against injustice.
Meanwhile, the army was beginning to take power, and the young Sábato, already a confirmed communist, was determined to take responsibility; he became secretary of the Communist Youth Federation. The ugly reality of what was really happening in Russia began to emerge, and instead of going to Moscow Sábato rejected orders and travelled to Paris, in an attempt to disassociate himself.
On his return to Argentina he completed his studies and accepted further research work in Paris. That he was destined for an academic career was obvious, and he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the National University of La Plata. But Sábato wanted to write.
He became friendly with another writer, Jorge Luis Borges, but their friendship faltered after Juan Perón was overthrown, in 1955. Borges, by nature detached – and possibly a model for the blind husband in The Tunnel – was, however, opposed to Perón. But Sábato publicly protested against the treatment of Perónist supporters under the new regime and took a stance over the murder of a student. Sábato’s views earned him a stay in prison.
He had become famous on the publication of The Tunnel and had consolidated his literary position with two volumes of essays. His next work of fiction, On Heroes and Tombs (1961), based on a real-life tragedy from 1955, when a daughter killed her father, who had sexually abused her, and then set fire to herself, again explored the theme of obsession and madness. The father had written a report on blindness, and, again, there is the possibility that Sábato was using blindness as a metaphor for moral indifference.
Although he would reconcile with Borges, it seems the obsessive narrator is based on Sábato’s sometime friend, sometime enemy.
The Angel of Darkness (1974) concludes a trilogy of sorts, the books sharing a preoccupation with blindness, isolation and an inability to deal with a succession of harsh realities.
Sábato is complex and sophisticated. Most intriguingly, his fiction evolves through a scientific logic that never conceals the humanity. And it is this humanity that sets him so far above most writers. Sábato was to prove not only that his writings had humanity but also that humanity was his personal code. In the period of healing that was to follow Argentina’s military dictatorships, it was Sábato who was appointed to lead a commission established by President Raúl Alfonsin. Its purpose was to investigate the plight of victims described as “the disappeared” – an estimated 9,000 Argentinians who had been killed or lost by the junta between 1976 and 1983. The findings of the commission, published in a report entitled Never Again (1984), which was accompanied by a powerful and measured preface written by Sábato, resulted in the 1986 trials of the junta leaders.
Ernesto Sábato throughout his long life and in his work revealed an extraordinary moral sensibility. In one of his last books, Before the End (1998), he reiterated his belief in the value of being human and in being humane. He was both, and he was also an artist, which explains why The Tunnel is such a remarkable novel.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
