Sobre fantasmas e homens: Passado e exílio em Onetti

Abstract

The text analyses the relationship between history and fiction in the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti's (1909-1994) work through the representation of the past and the exile. To accomplish this, the text examines two tales, written almost twenty years apart: "La cara de la desgracia" (1960) and "Presencia" (1978). In "La cara de la desgracia", memories disturb the narrator, who glimpses, in a casual meeting with a young girl, the possibility to rebuild his memory and to free himself from the possession of the past. In "Presencia", a political tale written in Onetti's exile in seventies, the protagonist - who is also an exile-recreates reality through a fake investigation, to "compensating for disorientating loss by creating a new world to rule" (Edward Said). In the two tales, Onetti emerges as an "impertinent writer", foreign to the tradition of the Latin American boom and able to explore the boundaries of history and fiction.