THE TUNNEL OF ERNESTO SÁBATO

Link

FROM SCIENCE TO LITERATURE

Ernesto Sábato (1911-2011) has become one of the most popular and read authors of contemporary Argentine literature, even though his literary production turns out to be quite limited: it is reduced to three novels and a few essays.[1] But his work does not stop being meaningful. His three novels, although mainly The tunnel and On heroes and tombs, are true masterpieces that reveal an author with a worldview or weltanschauung extremely complex and profound.

However, before deciding on literature, Sábato had devoted himself to the exact sciences. He studied in the Faculty of Physical-Mathematical Sciences of the University of La Plata and in 1938 he obtained a PhD in Physics. Through the intercession of Nobel Prize winner Bernardo Houssay, he obtained a scholarship to carry out research work at the Curie Laboratory in Paris.

But, evidently, their concerns went beyond the scientific field. In his university days, his social concerns had led him to join the Communist Party, from which he would later disillusion with the direction taken by Stalin's Russia. Then, in those Parisian times in which he worked in the Curie Laboratory, he approached the surrealist movement; movement that opposed reason and that, questioning the scientific method as a valid way to understand the complex reality, proposed a technique based on automatism. "It is no coincidence that I approached Surrealism when, in 1938, my fatigue and even my disgust for the spirit of science culminated" (Sábato: 1964, 50).

His satiety led to an existential crisis that led him, in 1943, to definitively abandon his work in the scientific field to dedicate himself fully to literature and painting. Strictly speaking, according to Sábato himself, his vocation had always been artistic; his contact with the physical and mathematical world would explain him as the need for order and clarity experienced by a tumultuous spirit such as his: "You crave what you do not have, and the order and clarity that at some point in my life I looked for in the mathematical universe were precisely wanted because of my tumult".(9)

A few years before abandoning his scientific work, he had already begun his literary career with the collaboration in different graphic media, such as the newspaper La Nación and the magazine Sur.

In the year 1945 published One and the Universe, volume that collects several of the articles he wrote in those years. This book was awarded by the Argentine Society of Writers.

Three years later he published his first novel: The Tunnel, in the magazine Sur. This novel was praised by Albert Camus, who had it translated into French, and by Thomas Mann; in this way Sábato gained international recognition.

The tunnel is the object of study of this work. We will focus primarily on revealing the connection established in the novel between the existentialist metaphysics on which it is based and the derivations of psychic order that take place in it.

Human beings can never represent metaphysical anxieties to the state of pure ideas, but they do so by incarnating them, obscuring them with their feelings and passions [...]. Metaphysical ideas thus become psychological problems... (14)

According to these words of Sábato himself, an inevitable correspondence must be understood between the metaphysical ideas and impressions that inspired his narration and the mental processes and behaviors -material prima of which psychology uses- that are defined in the narrative development itself. Possibly this circumstance is what caused the critics not to agree on whether The Tunnel should be considered as a purely psychological novel or primarily a metaphysical one.[2]

We will hold here that both aspects, the metaphysical and the psychological, coexist in it and are related as the two sides of a coin. More specifically, we will notice that the metaphysical ideas on which it is based are those that suit the existentialist philosophy (the novel addresses central issues that touch this current: existential angst, loneliness and incommunicability) and that these ideas come to fruition in a individual (protagonist) immersed in a certain circumstance, take a form that can be definable through the particular psychological analysis of the character.

METAPHYSICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

It should not be strange that Sábato, who objected to the sufficiency of the scientific method to explain reality, has been influenced for the conception of his novel by the existentialist movement and that at the same time has deepened for its achievement in the field of psychology.

Let us point out, first of all, that existentialism is a philosophical current that is based on the perception of a disconnection between the pure abstraction of thought and the concrete experience of I in the world.

… pure thought is a thought that nobody has thought, a thought where the whole personality is diluted [...]. And this is what, from its beginnings, existentialism has not wanted. Existentialism is a philosophy in the first person, and in the first person concrete that puts everything in his philosophy, and not his, as abstract thought demanded (Fatone: 1962, 10).

So, existentialism arises as a reaction against that scientific rooted thought, which turns out to be as pure and objective as it is abstract, to situate oneself in the concrete and subjective existence of man.

On the other hand, from Freudian psychoanalysis, the field of psychology came to displace consciousness to place the unconscious as the fundamental rector of the psychic functioning of the individual and of his acts. Freud (1991) would say: "... the psychic processes are, in themselves and by themselves, unconscious, and the conscious processes are just singular acts and parts of the total psychic life" (19). With it the very principle of reason was questioned; he could no longer associate it with a fully conscious subject, but rather he had to deal first with a logic hitherto ignored: that of the unconscious. So that the propositions and concepts to which the scientistic thinking arrogates universality originate for the modern psychology in an insufficient conception of the rational subject that defines them. That is why Freud says: "I can assure you that with the assumption that there are unconscious psychic processes, a decisive reorientation has begun in the world and in science" (19).

What has been said allows us to see the connection between existentialist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. Both seek to understand reality in a more complete sense than that which emerges from pure conscious reason; the first one does so focusing on the concrete experience of the man who is "thrown" into the world and the second investigating in the depths of his unconscious.

It is worth mentioning in this point the logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic theory developed by the psychiatrist Viktor Emil Frankl that bases its principles on a conception of the human being strongly influenced by phenomenological-existentialist philosophies. Frankl postulates that the human being is motivated by the search for meaning.

The problem of the meaning of life, whether posed in an express way or in a simply tacit way, must be considered as a truly human problem. Therefore, the fact of putting on the table the problem of the meaning of life should never be interpreted, in any way, as a symptom or expression of something sick, pathological or abnormal in man; far from it, it is the true expression of the human being of itself, of what is truly human, of more human, in man (Frankl: 1978, 47).

We see here then that metaphysics has influenced psychotherapeutic theory; but before, as the French psychoanalyst René Major reminds us, it was philosophy that was influenced by psychoanalysis:

The discovery of another logic, an unconscious logic that, with its own laws, governs most of our psychic functioning and our actions, represented an important threat to philosophy. It was thought that it was the end of philosophy, since, from now on, reason could not be associated with a subject that is only conscious, free and autonomous. Since then philosophy has been forced to abandon some of its fundamental certainties to start thinking with the reason of the "irrational". The concepts of metaphysics, taken up and rethought by Freud, no longer had the same meaning. The "unconscious" would no longer be what was outside of consciousness, but what parasitized it.[3]

Just as in the historical evolution of the human being these two branches of thought, the philosophical and the psychological, evolve influencing each other; also in the individual, the metaphysical worldview and the psychic aspect, far from being excluded, coexist in a dynamic of reciprocal exchange. "The psychic and the spiritual of man can only be separated from each other in a heuristic sense, since in the real unity of human existence considered as a whole they are inseparably intertwined" (Frankl: 1978, 38).

Consequently, when it comes to defining or qualifying a novel such as we have to examine, and in virtue of making an analysis as exhaustive as possible, we should not neglect one feature of it in virtue of the other. It would be insufficient to understand it simply as a psychological novel, since we would miss discovering in it the problematic of the contemporary man that presents us; likewise, it would be unfortunate to observe it for its study exclusively from the metaphysical scope, since its full understanding demands to be internalized in the psychological mechanisms that feed and give life to the plot. Therefore we will identify it as a metaphysical-psychological novel, which will allow us to approach its analysis from an inclusive perspective of both aspects.

---

[1] It must be taken into account that Sábato's scarcity of publications is not due to the fact that he has written and elaborated little, but because he had a self-critical spirit that led him to destroy most of what he produced.
[2] We can cite as examples of works in which the metaphysical aspect is prioritized to "The structure and the existential problematic of The tunnel by Ernesto Sábato" by Marcelo Coddou and "Incommunication and solitude: Evolution of an existentialist theme in the work of Ernesto Sábato" by Óscar Barrero Pérez. As studies that focus on the psychological aspect of the novel we will mention "The Tunnel of Sábato: More Freud than Sartre" by Fred Petersen, "The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato: In Search of the Origin" by Ana Paula Ferreira and "The four dreams of Castel in The tunnel of Ernesto Sábato" by Agustín Seguí.
[3] Fendrik, Silvia "The logic of the irrational" (interview with René Major) Cultural Supplement of La Nación. Available in: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/214687-la-logica-de-lo-irracional

>>

---

BIBLIOGRAPHY CONSULTED

BOOKS

• CHESTERTON, Gilbert Keith (1998) Ortodoxia, México: Editorial Porrúa
• FATONE, Vicente (1962) Introducción al Existencialismo, Buenos Aires: Editorial Columba
• FOUCAULT, Michel (1968) Las palabras y las cosas, una arqueología de las ciencias humanas, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores
• FRANKL, Viktor Emil (1978) Psicoanálisis y Existencialismo, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica
• FREUD, Sigmund (1991) Obras completas (Volumen 15) Conferencias de introducción al psicoanálisis, Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores
• LAMANA, Manuel (1967) Existencialismo y literatura, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina
• SÁBATO, Ernesto (1964) El escritor y sus fantasmas, Buenos Aires: Aguilar
• SÁBATO, Ernesto (1985) El túnel, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral

MAGAZINES

• BARRERO PÉREZ, Óscar (1992) “Incomunicación y soledad: evolución de un tema existencialista en la obra de Ernesto Sábato”, Cauce, Revista de Filología y su Didáctica, 14-15: 275-296
• CODDOU, Marcelo (1966) “La estructura y la problemática existencial de El túnel de Ernesto Sábato”, Revista Atenea, CLXII, 412: 141-168
• FERREIRA, Ana Paula (1992) “El túnel de Ernesto Sábato, en busca del origen”, Revista Iberoamericana, LVIII, 158: 91-103
• RODRÍGUEZ MARTÍN, María del Carmen (2005) “La angustia existencial: sendero hacia la locura”, El Catoblepas, 41: 15
• SEGUÍ, Agustín (1992) “Los cuatros sueños de Castel en El túnel de Ernesto Sábato”, Revista Iberoamericana, LVIII, 158: 69-80

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

• Fendrik, Silvia (1999) “La lógica de lo irracional” (interview to René Major) [on line], Suplemento Cultura de La Nación.
Available in: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/214687-la-logica-de-lo-irracional
• Sartre, Jean Paul (1946) “El existencialismo es un humanismo” (conference) [on line], Weblioteca del Pensamiento.
Available in: http://weblioteca.com.ar/occidental/exishuman.pdf