THE TUNNEL OF A MURDERER
COSMOVISION AND PSYCHE OF CASTEL
With the first sentence of the novel Castel presents himself as someone whom the reader should remember as the author of a crime: "Suffice it to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed María Iribarne; I guess the process is in everyone's memory and that no further explanations about me are needed" (11). But he immediately notices that people tend to forget about bad things, which makes them look at the past with longing —"all time past was better"— something that does not happen to him: "I characterize myself by remembering the bad facts" (11).
He is different from the ordinary people, he is not fooled like them; it shows us the crude way in which it sees reality, without evasions or forgetfulness, to conclude saying:
That the world is horrible, is a truth that does not need proof. It would be enough to prove it, in any case: in a concentration camp a former pianist complained of hunger and then they forced him to eat a rat, but alive (12).[4]
Already from the first chapter Castel is prefigured as someone who, although some would label as pessimistic, with a broader and less prejudiced criterion, perhaps we should qualify as realistic. In fact, we are presented above all as a person who stands in front of reality unambiguously, with authenticity, which refers directly to the facts without taking refuge in intellectual abstractions. This concrete attitude of the protagonist coincides with the way in which the existentialist current conceives the reality of man.
We would like life to be something necessary, that the world in which our life develops was within our rational conception; the existentialist authors show us that life is "like that" simply, that is, as we are, without that desired harmony becoming evident. In front of that world we have to face, we are immersed in it and it would be fatal to deny it. [...] If we close our eyes, if we do not want to realize the ugliness that surrounds us, we fall into a false attitude... (Lamana: 1967, 10).
That is to say that this way of looking at the reality on the part of Castel, that is revealed to us from the beginning of the work, is first of all a philosophical position that finds sustenance in the existentialism. But at the same time, Castel's particular psyche is outlined in this attitude. An individual who differs from the rest of the people, placing himself above them, bares a certain arrogance; we can infer a narcissistic temperament in those who see authenticity in themselves and superficiality in others.
This feeling of superiority that nests in Castel is often expressed in a marked misanthropy. In numerous passages this characteristic of the protagonist is clearly reflected. For example, when in the second chapter it responds to a hypothetical accusation of vanity on the part of readers: "Think what you want: I do not give a damn; I have not cared for a while about the opinion and justice of men". (Sábato: 1985, 13); also when he speaks contemptuously of art critics and, more generically, of all groups or conglomerates of people: "I detest groups, sects, brotherhoods, guilds and in general those sets of critters that gather for reasons by profession, taste or similar mania"(19); in one case he plainly and simply acknowledges: "... in general, humanity always seemed detestable to me" (47).
This particular philosophical-psychic way of meeting the reality that is evident in the protagonist puts him on a plane of solitude and isolation, the central problem that the novel deals with. This theme is the germ of the story: "My initial idea was to write a story, the story of a painter who went crazy because he could not communicate with anyone, not even with the woman who seemed to have understood him through his painting" (Sábato: 1964, 13). And as the author encouraged him to write this novel the issue of incommunicado, the narrator urges him to elaborate his story the hope of being able to communicate: "... I am encouraged by the weak hope that someone will come to understand me. ALTHOUGH IT IS A SINGLE PERSON [...]. There was a person who could understand me. But it was precisely the person I killed" (Sábato: 1985, 15).
In such words the despair of one who tries vainly to achieve a full encounter with others is reflected and, when he fails to do so, he notices his loneliness. This loneliness and incommunicability, far from being an obstacle of psychological origin that can be attributed simply to a neurotic or paranoid mind, is a state experienced by man by recognizing his own subjectivity and confronting it with that of others.
When reality is observed from the existentialist perspective, there is no place for pure and universal ideas that explain it, but this is discovered from the concrete experience of the individual in the world.
The abstract thinker forgets that for an existing being there are truths that in the abstraction are not truths; The whole truth, for that abstract thinker, is in the pure being. And this happens because the abstract thinker forgets that he exists. But man is forbidden to forget that he exists (Fatone: 1962, 12).
To the essential truths produced by objective abstraction, the existentialist puts the evidence that the mere existence of the subject throws up. This is how the famous Sartrian definition takes place: "What they have in common [the existentialists] is simply the fact that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that you have to start from subjectivity".[ 5] By means of this formula: "the existence precedes the essence", is facing the man in direct and concrete relation with his world, without abstract mediations. It is from there that he discovers his existential solitude, his being naked in the universe, without given and universal truths, and, therefore, without the possibility of reaching a communication that leads to an absolute understanding.
This theme, to which philosophy arrives through existentialism, has been a fundamental subject of twentieth century literature. We find it in various authors, such as Kafka, Dostoievsky, Camus, Borges, and it has given rise to different literary movements, such as surrealism itself, which Sábato adhered to at the time, or the so-called theater of the absurd that was associated with works of renowned intellectual playwrights such as Ionesco and Beckett.
In its direct relationship with the contemporary novel we can refer to Sábato's own words:
By dispensing with a suprahuman point of view, by reducing the novel (as it is life) to a group of beings who live reality from their own soul, the novelist had to face one of the deepest and most distressing problems of man: that of his loneliness and lack of communication (Sábato: 1964, 88).
Sábato sees in literary fiction the instrument that allows man to know himself with a penetration that science does not achieve, given that it is confined to the abstract terrain of pure reason, and neither is philosophy, except when philosophers renounce "To his abstract treatises to humbly write fictions" (89), as would be the case of existentialist philosophy. It is that this current, leaving the field of clear and definite ideas that are in pure abstraction to deal with the dilemmas of concrete man, has been forced to set aside any possibility of exposing their thoughts in a corpus objective and systematic to express itself through a literary and, certainly, subjective language: "... in the same historical moment in which literature began to become metaphysical with Dostoevsky, metaphysics began to become literary, with Kierkegaard" (82).
So that the philosophical root of the problem suffered by the protagonist is clear, which does not mean that there are both manifestations and derivations of a psychological order (we explained earlier that both aspects coexist and are related in the human soul) and As we will see, the psychic process that breaks out in Castel will ultimately lead to madness and crime.
It is important, however, to realize that what ultimately loses him is his desire for totality. He experiences his loneliness and the impossibility of being understood, but apparently he does not interpret that experience as a reality that he must accept with resignation and that is why, starting with the appearance of María Iribarne in his life, in whom he believes he finds the person who understands and completes it, as if they were the two halves that would make up an androgynous being,[6] it will relentlessly seek to establish full communion with it. Thus Maria becomes for Castel the object that can save him from his anguished loneliness.
It is at this point that the existential angst that Castel suffers begins to drift towards madness. While Castel had lived resigned in his solitude and incommunicability, assuming them as inescapable realities of the human condition, his personality would not have been revealed to us with a certain arrogance and misanthropy. But, with the appearance of Mary in his life, he was seized by that desire for absolute fulfillment that, by charging the expression of an obsessive behavior, would push him towards a paranoia that would progressively take over his thoughts and actions.
[4] Later Castel would confide to Maria that this anecdote of the rat inspired him to paint the scene in the window. He will then talk about the absurdity of the world: "Sometimes I think that nothing makes sense. In a tiny planet, that runs to nothing since millions of years, we are born in pain, we grow, we fight, we get sick, we suffer, we suffer, we scream, we die, we die and others are born to start the useless comedy again" (42).
[5] Sartre, Jean Paul “El existencialismo es un humanismo” (conferencia) Weblioteca del Pensamiento.
Available in: http://weblioteca.com.ar/occidental/exishuman.pdf
[6] Sábato says: "Castel expresses, I imagine, my adolescent and absolutist side, María the mature and relativized side" (Sábato: 1964, 13). So, what Sabato sees in himself as two poles that make him up as an individual, in the novel he is split into two characters and he gives the narrative voice to the most intense of them.