The tunnel (Sabato)

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The tunnel is a novel by the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato from 1948. It tells the short love story of a painter named Juan Pablo Castel to María Iribarne, at the end of which the painter kills María.

German translations appeared in 1958 under the title The painter and the window , in 1976 under the title Maria or the story of a crime and most recently in 2010 with the title Der Tunnel .

The book is considered an outstanding novel in Latin American existentialist literature. Some also consider it the best introduction to Sabato's literary work.

The novel and Sabato's intellectual development

The Tunnel is the first novel written by Sabato, followed by two more. It marks the beginning of a new chapter in Sabato's intellectual development. He is considered a “man with three lives”: first a physicist, who did his doctorate in 1937, who researched and taught about radioactive radiation , then in the 1940s he turned to literature and broke with physics, until finally Sabato's last at the end of the 1970s Text appeared and from then on he devoted himself only to painting.

publication

The publication of the novel turned out to be difficult. The publishers in Buenos Aires rejected the manuscript of Sabato, who was still unknown as a writer. It was published in Sur magazine . Albert Camus became aware of the text, had it translated into French and published by Gallimard. Thanks to the recognition that Sabato's novel received abroad, it was finally published as a book in Argentina.

Backgrounds and influences

At the end of the 1930s, Sabato received a scholarship to conduct research on radioactive radiation in Paris . There he made contact with surrealists such as André Breton and Óscar Domínguez . He begins to lead a double life: the day is devoted to scientific research, but the night is devoted to meeting the surrealists and writing. In addition to surrealism, Sabato also influenced psychoanalysis , existentialism and modern literature. He reads authors like Joyce , Proust and Kafka and deals with life in the modern big city, which oscillates between existential fears, feelings of crisis and the search for meaning. But it is also the time of World War II and fascism with the horror of the concentration camps . The Russian revolution has meanwhile led to Stalinism . For Sabato, communism as a social alternative, to which he had orientated himself during his time as a student, collapsed with the Moscow trials . Sabato perceives the world as a catastrophe, as torn and shaken by crisis, just like the people who live in it.

Novel plot

The novel plot begins, so to speak, from the end ( in ultimas res ). The respected painter Juan Pablo Castel is in prison in Buenos Aires for killing his lover María Iribarne and then surrendering to the police. Castel wants to give an account of his deed and tells how it came to his relationship with María and ultimately her murder - the woman who Castel says was the only person who could understand him.

A certain image of the painter plays a key role in this. On this a scene is shown (called by Castel window scene) in which a lonely beach can be seen through a window, on which there is a woman who looks out to the sea. The window scene is not noticed by the art critics. However, María is different, and one day she stands spellbound in front of it in an exhibition. Castel believes to recognize a kindred soul in María. They get to know each other and begin a love relationship. It turns out that María is married to an elderly, blind man. She also repeatedly eludes Castel by disappearing from Buenos Aires and driving to an estate belonging to a friend by the sea. When Castel visits María one day at the estate, she takes him to a place by the sea. She explains to Castel that she has often sat there and that this is exactly what she recognized in the window scene Castel painted.

Castel, in turn, when trying to analyze María's behavior, comes to the conclusion that he cannot be sure of María's love. He climbs into ever stronger fantasies of jealousy, in which the painter insults his beloved more and more violently in order to then ask her forgiveness and to seek all guilt in himself. Ultimately, fate takes its course. In a fit of frenzy, Castel destroys the picture of the window scene with a knife. Then he drives out to the estate where María is staying and stabs her.

In the tunnel of solitude

The novel plot described contains another layer of narrative. It is that layer to which the novel owes its title. This is about the great loneliness of a painter and a clever person who lives at a critical distance from the world. Because for him it is a world in which so-called art critics express themselves in an unbearable language of supposed recognition of Castel's works, so that the painter plays with the idea of ​​writing a text with the title About the way the painter is must protect against the friends of painting. A world in which different intellectual and political currents such as psychoanalysis, communism, fascism and journalism use a jargon that they try to impose on others. And a reality that is anything but simple, just complicated and confused.

The window scene painted by Castel expresses loneliness in an oppressive and radical way from the painter's point of view. María recognizes the loneliness of the window scene and the desire it contains for someone to talk to who breaks through the loneliness. From Castel's point of view, he and María had each lived for themselves in corridors and tunnels until they finally met at the end of the corridors - conveyed by the window scene painted by Castel, which thus became a window between the tunnels of their solitude.

When his relationship with María fails, Castel realizes that the encounter at the end of the tunnel was an illusion, unable to undo her loneliness and that nothing can get through the supposed window. Because it is really not a window, but a wall made of glass. Castel realizes that María is not a tunnel person like him, that she belongs to the big wide world, to normal life, while the only tunnel is the one in which his whole life has been from childhood. And he realizes that the loneliness of his life goes much deeper than he previously realized.

World as hell

Finally, a third layer of the narrative can be made out. This affects humanity in general in a very dark sense: the horror of the world, which consists in what people are able to do to other people. The concentration camp that Sabato mentions at the beginning of his novel functions as the term for this horror. Castel reports on a terrible incident in a concentration camp. Shortly after reading about it, he painted his window scene, which marks a turning point compared to his earlier work. As María recognizes, the window scene contains a message of hopelessness that can be stated as the deepest truth about a world that has become meaningless.

Tunnel and labyrinth - Sabato in the context of Kafka and Paz

Sabato himself was a reader of Franz Kafka, and it is believed that the title of the novel alludes to a text of the same name by Kafka. Kafka's parable The Tunnel describes the situation of mankind as that of rail travelers who have crashed in an almost endless tunnel. In the darkness of the tunnel, the beginning, the end and finally the entire orientation become confused. Questions about the right action or about whether it makes sense to do something right become irrelevant.

Kafka had clearly written his lines before the appearance of Sabatos novel, the result is The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz almost simultaneously with Sabatos tunnel . Paz understands the loneliness mentioned in the book title as "the feeling and consciousness of being alone, alien to the world and to oneself, even to be separated from oneself". Like Sabato, Paz addresses loneliness as one of modern society in whose labyrinth people are trapped. It is this "the confused loneliness of the hotels, offices, workshops and cinemas" that is ultimately the "mirror of a world with no way out".

Quotes

“The way it is, I've always thought there was no such thing as a collective memory, which may be a kind of defense of the human race. The phrase “everything used to be better” does not indicate that less bad happened in the past, but that - fortunately - people forget the bad. Of course, such a proposition has no general validity. For example, I distinguish myself by the fact that I prefer to remember everything that is bad, and so I could almost say that "everything used to be worse" if it weren't for the fact that the present seems just as appalling to me as the past. "

“I wonder why reality should actually be simple. My experience has taught me that, on the contrary, it almost never is, and even when something seems particularly clear, more complex motivations are almost always hidden behind an action that obeys an apparently simple cause. "

“Every time María approached me in the midst of other people, I thought,“ There is a secret connection between this wonderful being and me. ”And then, when I examined my feelings, I noticed that María had started to feel indispensable to me being (like someone you meet on an uninhabited island), only to be transformed into a kind of luxury that made me proud after the fear of absolute loneliness had passed. And that happened in this second phase of my love, in which a thousand difficulties began to arise. "

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Hummitzsch, Who Was Maria Iribarne? , in: Glanz & Elend - magazine for literature and criticism of the times
  2. ↑ François Bondy: Ernest Sabatos transition from atomic physics to literature. Painter and murderer. In: Die Zeit , October 15, 1976.
  3. ↑ Marianne Kneuer: specialist in sadness. Ernesto Sábato, the last of the great writers in Argentina. in: die political opinion , No. 381, August 2001, p. 81.
  4. ↑ Bondy: Ernest Sábato's switch from atomic physics to literature. , Die Zeit , October 15, 1976.
  5. ↑ Marianne Kneuer: specialist in sadness. Ernesto Sábato, the last of the great writers in Argentina. in: die political opinion , No. 381, August 2001, pp. 82–84
  6. ↑ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, from the Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , pp. 7-11, 12, 61, 112, 142, 151
  7. ↑ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, from the Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , pp. 12, 17, 20, 57
  8. ↑ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, from the Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , pp. 12, 112, 146-148
  9. ↑ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, from the Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , pp. 8, 41f.
  10. ^ Uwe Stolzmann, The painter who killed Maria , in: Deutschlandradio Kultur, April 22, 2010
  11. ↑ Anette and Peter Horn, Kafka's allegory of the cave , in: academia.edu, 2006
  12. ↑ Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude. Essay, translated from Spanish and with an introduction by Carl Heupel, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt 1998 (1950), ISBN 3-518-39472-X , p. 189
  13. ↑ Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude. Essay, translated from Spanish and with an introduction by Carl Heupel, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt 1998 (1950), ISBN 3-518-39472-X , p. 198
  14. ↑ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, from the Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , p. 7
  15. ↑ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, from the Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , p. 57
  16. ^ Ernesto Sábato, Der Tunnel, translated from Argentine Spanish and revised by Helga Castellanos, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8031-2639-9 , p. 107