The vocal ghosts
A review of On Heroes and Tombs
Nunez Christian
First chords
Thirteen years after the tunnel , Ernesto Sabato (Rojas, Buenos Aires, June 24, 1911 - Holy Places, April 30, 2011) published About Heroes and Tombs in 1961. Hallucinatory descent into hell, the main novel by Argentine tango is like a huge, incomprehensible, violent, influenced by surrealism and existentialism. Sabato had finally given up science with the publication of The tunnel, but On Heroes and Tombs was the masterstroke. Few authors have been validated as he saw literature as an alternative pathway of knowledge and a tragic poem simultaneously. Michel Houellebecq Perhaps this is accomplished with elementary particles in 1998. There is a kind of fiction that attempts to explore the crisis of our time, securing the historic moment must anticipate a future catastrophe and disaster. And On Heroes and Tombs recreates a crushing reality, claustrophobic. A world where the blind have taken power.
Martin and Alejandra
In the manner of Dostoevsky's characters, Martín del Castillo is the daughter of Fernando Vidal Olmos Alejandra Lezama in the park, a Saturday May 1953. And even is he who finds her, but she who is in your search. Martin thin as a character from Greco , melancholic, insecure, introspective, sensitive, son of a madrecloaca and a failed painter, I thought it would save Alejandra complexes, that love would give meaning to his life and through it would perform. "He (Martin), who wanted something strong to hold all in the midst of catastrophe and a warm cave to retreat, I had no house or land. Or, what was worse, had a home built on manure and frustration, and a trembling and enigmatic country. So feel alone, lonely, lonely : only words clearly felt and thought, but certainly, expressed it all. And like a drowning man at night had rushed on Alejandra. But it was like to seek refuge in a cave in the bottom of which had burst suddenly ravenous beasts. "
victim of incest which is not discussed openly in the novel, Alejandra seizures and nightmares, his inner world is populated ghosts, hates his father and the mention of Fernando, or blind, has produced an instinctive rage. With the ghost of Fernando on them, increasing emotional distance and Martin is confused. "What happened to the blind? Something important was that he had no doubt, because she had been paralyzed. Would the mysterious Fernando that blind? And anyway, who was that Fernando that she seemed unwilling to appoint to that kind of fear that some people do not name the divinity? "
In Sabato, thought and storytelling , Cabral Nicolás Alejandro character associated with the symbol of the absolute. If you already Sabato The Tunnel features endowed totes Mary Iribarne, the woman killed by Castel, in On Heroes and Tombs absolute load represented by Alexandra adjectives, unfathomable contradictions: "It is an absolute adjective in all its complexity, "says Cabral.
One night, watching her sleep, Alejandra Martin believes to see a princess dragon, a dual being, monstrous, ambiguous, exposed to fire it himself. A bonfire. Martin fails again and again from a sexual and emotional level when you try to go beyond the fire. "But this attempt at communication, ending in shouts almost hopeless, and began from the moment that preceded the crisis, not only by the words that were said but by the looks and gestures, touch and even by tears in their hands and mouths. And Martin was trying to reach, to feel, to understand Alejandra touching her face, stroking her hair, kissing her ears, her neck, her breasts, her belly looks like a dog sniffing a mysterious treasure hidden area, that area full of hints, clues too obscure and subtle, yet for those not ready to feel them. And as the dog, when suddenly feels closer searched the mystery begins to dig and almost mad with feverish fervor (outside and the outside world, alienated and insane, thinking and feeling in this unique and powerful mystery now so close) rushing and Alejandra's body was trying to enter it until the dark background of the painful riddle: digging, biting, penetrating frantically and trying to feel increasingly weak near rumors of secret and hidden soul of that being so close and so disconsolately bloody far. And while digging Martin, Alejandra perhaps struggled from his own island, shouting code words for him to Martin, were unintelligible to her, Alejandra, probably useless, and for both desperate. "
Report The blind
The third part narrative report entitled blind, delusions of persecution is a sui generis , reported by Fernando Vidal Olmos, which tells how a Blind Sect governs the sewers of Buenos Aires and plans to rule the world. Of course I said so, in a phrase, it sounds ridiculous. Fernando is believed haunted by the blind, says a researcher from the dark powers and reveals that everything will end with his death. The report is a testament. "I am a Job without friends, without God and leprosy," says Cioran, and the maximum may be caught by the father of Alexandra, an anarchist, forger of money, bank robber, misogynist and paranoid.
The metaphor of the blind, full of dreamy reverb, defend a world view founded on instinct, death and sex, the gods that rule the subconscious. In Paris, as a researcher in the laboratories Joliot-Curie, Sabato was linked to surrealist groups and used to say that science and art show opposite truths. The oedipal experience is a waiver of the light, the whiteness of the clear and distinct ideas, as Fernando describes it:
"And so, while the other boys spent long, boring, forced by teachers, by Homer's pages, I, who had punctured eyes of birds, I felt my first thrill when the man describes with terrifying force and almost mechanical precision, perversely connoisseur and vengeful sadism, when Ulysses and his companions are thrown down and boil the great eye of the Cyclops with a burning stick. Was not Homer blind? The next day, opening at random the large volume of mythology of my mother read: "And I Tiresias, as punishment for having seen and liked to Athens while bathing, I was blinded, but compassion on the Goddess gave me the gift of understanding prophetic language of birds, and therefore I say unto thee, Oedipus, but do not know, you're the man who killed his father and married the mother, so you must be punished. "And I never believed in the chance, even as a child, that game, that I thought made per game I found an omen. And I could never out of my mind the end of Oedipus, eyes pricking with a pin after hearing the words of Tiresias and attend the hanging of his mother. Nor could my spirit and set aside the conviction, growing stronger and grounds, that the blind ran the world: through the nightmares and hallucinations, plagues and witches, fortune tellers and birds, snakes, and general, all the monsters of darkness and caverns. "
incestuous cycle which had begun with Ana Maria, mother of Fernando, and then extends to Georgina, her cousin, and their daughter Alejandra closes with fire. Thus, the author of the report is intended for symbolic castration and goes to meet Alejandro to be killed, as he tells the news story that precedes the first chapter. As in Tunnel, announced the tragedy Sabato On Heroes and Tombs from the beginning and, again, this narrative device tense action and leads to an ending of mythic resonance, which is not uncommon read several passages about the progress of Legionnaires dragging the body of General Lavalle. "A huge black dream," as Fernando rate your Report, correspondence with the reality of Argentina, as of turbulent and bleak.
Bruno
l E contemplative character who observes laconically the course of events, is the one who tells the childhood of Fernando in the fourth part of the book a conclusion drawn many years later. Bruno, in love with Ana María Georgina first and later, Alexandra believed he saw in the flashes of those two platonic love. His voice, silent, corresponds to the philosopher who looks at the ruins and engaged in a dialogue with the sole survivor, Martin. "Now, after nearly thirty years, little events of that time, seemingly random and inconsequential, reveal its meaning to the one you just read a long novel, once the targets are permanently closed, as with death in real life, charge a profound and often tragic, words as trivial as' Alejo Karamazov was the third son of a landowner in our district. " You never know until the end, if what happens to us any day is a simple story or contingency, if at all (however trivial) or it is nothing (however painful it may be). "
On Heroes and Tombs is not a perfect novel, but a painful study on humans with the philosophical view of existentialism. Sabato occasionally mentioned that phenomenology applied to literature, and his work explores the reality with a melancholic and disenchanted perspective, where the only redemption is in the fire and exile. Therefore, I can not think of a better tribute to the writer that this poem recited by Bruno Martin at some point in the plot:
Perhaps our death the soul migrates:
an ant,
a tree
a Bengal tiger;
as our body disintegrates
between worms
and seeps into the ground without memory,
to climb after the stalks and leaves,
and become heliotrope or brush,
and then in livestock feed,
blood so anonymously and zoological
in skeleton,
in feces.
Maybe you touch one more dreadful fate
in the body of a child
will one day poems or novels,
and in their dark distress
(unknowingly)
purge his past sins
warrior or criminal
or revive terrors,
the fear of a gazelle ,
the disgusting ugliness of weasel,
its murky status of the fetus, Cyclops or lizard,
his fame as a prostitute or witch,
its remote wilderness,
forgotten their cowardice and betrayal.
Rest in peace, Ernesto Sabato.
