Between immersion and explanation. Tragic duality in Ernesto Sabato’s the tunnel

Abstract

The article is concerned with Ernesto Sabato’s transitional works One and the Universe [Uno y el Universo] and Man and Mechanism [Hombres y engranajes] in relation to the distinctive features of The Tunnel [El túnel]. In the latter, Juan Pablo Castel embodies the tunnel of his own existence from the perspective of two equidistant and overlapped points: the immersion he performs as an artist when he paints –a possibility that challenges all logics– and the explanation, understood as the necessity to see through an uneasy and lonely woman. The previous elements might contribute to an understanding of the way in which Juan Pablo Castel moves towards two necessary directions that admit no synthesis. First, the direction me-universe that refers to the necessity to govern the world through abstraction and the pressing need to explain the profane man who wakes from a dream; second, the direction universe-one that refers to the quest for what is human, the coming and going that is not exhausted in these two intertwined and ambivalent tendencies.

Keywords

• Ernesto Sábato
• existencia humana
• inmersión
• explicación
• arte.