The Tunnel (El túnel) by Ernesto Sabato - Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

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[00:00:00]This is one of those little books that is so rich in symbolism that you could apply virtually any theoretical framework and easily yield an intellectual feast.

[00:00:27]Hey everybody, thank you for watching Leaf by Leaf. My name is Chris and I am thrilled that I can't stop reading, especially when it comes to books from the seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of talent down in Argentina. There's Bourhees of course, but also Cortazar, Bio, Casares, Ira, Lamborghini, Maria, Dominguez, Okampo, Bonamini, D Benadetto, and Beron Biza. All of which appear on this channel, by the way. And today I get to add to this luminous and impressive roster by taking on Ernesto Sabat's Elunel or the tunnel translated by Margaret Seers Pedin the same translator as my copy of Pedro Paramo by the way which also appears on this channel. This is one of those little books that is so rich in symbolism that you could apply virtually any theoretical framework and easily yield an intellectual feast. It's also a rather crafty book that borrows from the detective novel and even the pot boiler to give the reader immediate accessibility and constant propulsion.

[00:01:53]yet it studs these greased rails with inongruous depths. This one is very similar to a great many of the roster that I rattled off there at the beginning, I'd say, especially BIO Casay. But where El Tunel offers its own flavor is in how it flips the classic who done it into a fresh why done it.

[00:02:18]For we learn the very first sentence, who done it? And for the first person narrator, Juan Pablo Castell, this confessional becomes a sort of how done it. While for us, the readers, again, it's an invitation to a why done it. And it's notable that in the very second paragraph of the book, Castell acknowledges the faultiness of human memory. That is to say, he obliquely declares not only himself, but every narrator as unreliable. In fact, he quickly sweeps our attention to the disbelief in the collective consciousness and sort of away from his own memory. Because we're inside his head, he will guide all of our attention, all of our thinking. So we can easily get swept along by his interpretations which like the best of fiction of this nature are presented in a highly plausible fashion such that we not only find ourselves agreeing with the killer but also sympathizing with him from time to time. The premise of the book is extremely simple. A successful but misunderstood artist notices a woman connecting with a subtlety in one of his pieces. It's an element of the painting that everyone else overlooks and Castell becomes absolutely obsessed with her. As the confession unfolded, I found myself thinking of Castell initially as the Rascolnikov of Buenos Iris. But while there are similarities, the parallel ultimately breaks down. Though the indebtedness to such Russian novels is both implicit and hilariously explicit in the text and similarly when Maria initially resists the relationship on grounds that they will hurt each other I found myself thinking of her as a sort of fem fatal in the manner of Ke's label dam Sami but that parallel also sort of peters out the scene in the fateful painting called extremely evocatively and provocatively motherhood is given early in the confession and it maybe because it was at the beach and there's an element of nihilism minimalism existentialism it immediately put me in the mind of Camu's lean and coincidentally Kamu was an early champion of Eltonel in the upper leftand corner of the canvas was a remote scene framed in a tiny window, an empty beach and a solitary woman looking at the sea.

[00:04:59]She was staring into the distance as if expecting something, perhaps some faint and far away summons. In my mind, that scene suggested the most wistful and absolute loneliness. And that tableau is brilliantly echoed on the penultimate page of this novel as we go from art to life. Through the small window of my jail cell, I watched the birth of a new day with a cloudless sky. Like I said, the form of this book is such that you could easily glide right through it in one intense sitting. Even the sentences are short and simple. Yet Sabat sprinkles in just enough flourish to bejul the minimalism. My brain is in constant ferment. And when I get nervous, ideas role in a giddy ballet.

[00:05:58]Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars? Life is a process of constructing future memories.

[00:06:10]Again, the book is so expertly knotted with symbolism, but I want to pick at just two strands to highlight in this video. One, the paradox of the misunderstood visionary, and two, motherhood. The paradox of the misunderstood visionary is that they have to be misunderstood to be a visionary, yet they need to be understood to be declared a visionary.

[00:06:36]So, the misunderstood visionary scorns the rabble of critics for not truly understanding their work, but yet feels that their visionary status is jeopardized when someone comes along who does understand it. Maria says to Castell, "You complain, but the critics have always praised you." To which he responds indignantly, "Worst luck for me. Don't you understand? That is one of the things that has embittered me and convinced me I'm on the wrong track. And earlier there was one person who could have understood me, but she was the very person I killed. And then there's motherhood, which is perhaps the most densely symbolic element of this novel.

[00:07:21]We are given the description of the painting, of course, and there's two different parts of it. The background, which I've already read, and the foreground. And then we are given two different responses to it. No one seemed to notice the scene. That is the upper leftand corner with the tiny framed uh tableau. But then it says the large figure of a woman in the foreground, a woman watching her child at play. Thus the foreground of the painting sort of expresses the external view of motherhood. what the masses or what society affirms motherhood should look like. But the background depicts the interior world of motherhood, the one with which Maria resonates. And we note that Maria's namesake is of course the Virgin Mary or the Holy Mother. So, in this one pivotal scene in the art gallery, we have a lone artist looking at a lone woman who's looking at a lone woman overlooking the sea. And if you consider yourself the lone reader looking through the tiny window of your book, Sabato implicates you in his dark, clever misanim.

[00:08:42]So with El Tunel, we would do well to remember Nietz's famous quote from Beyond Good and Evil. He who fights with monsters must take care lest he become a monster. And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you.