"I, too, wished to flee from the world. All of you stopped me with your letters, with your words in the street, with your defenselessness."
I propose to you then, with the gravity of the words that come at the end of one's life, that we embrace in a commitment: let us go out into the open spaces, risk ourselves for others, hope, together with those who have open hearts, that a new wave of history will pull us up. Perhaps it is already doing so in a silent and subterranean way, like sprouts that pulsate under the winter earth.
Something still worth suffering and dying for, a communion among men, the pact among the defeated. One tower only, it is true, but one that is resplendent and indestructible.
In dark times we are helped by those who have known how to walk in the night. Read the letters Miguel Hernández sent from the prison where, in the end, he met his death:We will again celebrate all that is lost and found: freedom, chains, joy, and that hidden affection that drives us across the whole earth to seek each other out.
Think always about the nobility of these men who redeem humanity. Through their death, they give us the supreme value of life; showing us that obstacles do not impede history, they remind us that man's only place is in utopia.
Only those capable of embodying utopia will be fit for the final battle, to take back all the humanity we have lost." (1)
With these words Ernesto Sábato closes Antes del fin (Before the End) [1999], which joins La resistencia (The Resistance) [2000] as his latest work. In both books he reviews his life and the state of the world from the perspective of his years and the wealth of his experience. Sábato's literature offers the testimony of a man who, having been a scientist, philosopher, writer and intellectual, says of himself: "I am not a philosopher and anything but a man of letters." (2) In constant struggle with his own demons, this author has fought to restore dignity to all men who long for Beauty and Justice in an age steeped in material and spiritual crisis. Neither the positive macroeconomics indices of powerful nations, nor the glittery advertising campaigns, nor the triumphant news programs can hide this crisis from anyone who observes the world with the least degree of rigor: "Shipwrecked in darkness, man advances toward the next millennium with the uncertainty of one who glimpses an abyss." (2)
Ernesto Sábato, born in Argentina in 1911, earned a doctorate in Physics and also studied Philosophy. He was a member of the Communist Party until 1934, when Stalism and Socialist Realism swept away any hope for a true revolution. During this period, while associating with the Surrealists, he worked at the Curie Laboratory in Paris, "sheltered in the clear city of towers... the territory of Light... in the artificial paradise of ideal objects," (2) as he describes his scientific activity. In 1938, dissatisfied once more and disillusioned with scientism, he broke with the champions of Progress and Science, for he had begun to recognize that Science not, as it had been praised, as having "come to liberate man from all physical and metaphysical suffering," (2) but as the future tool of mechanized slaughter and the "scientific" extermination of millions of human beings in the Second World War.
His literature is grounded in a personal style that mixes narrative and essay. Thus Sábato's fictional and discursive works compliment each other in his creative universe. Like Kafka, Sábato views himself as a castaway in a century plagued with horrors. This is the origin of his personal commitment against all forms of totalitarianism, which he demonstrated by presiding over the "Truth Commission" that investigated cases of torture and "disappearances" during the Argentine dictatorship.
In non-fiction works such as Uno y el universo (One and the Universe) [1945] and Hombres y engranajes (Men and Gears) [1951], "a spiritual aurobiography... a diary of a crisis, personal and universal at the same time, as a simple reflection of the fall of Western civilization in a man of our time," (2) he analyzes the decline of the impulse of hope that the Renaissance had held for humankind, and the rise of the current social paradigm in which the man of flesh and blood begins to disappear, metamorphosing into a numbered being, a gear in the "Great Machinery" that he himself created to dominate the world, and which ultimately dominated its creator through the alliance of Money and Reason. The commercialism that seeps into every pore of existence and the idolatry of a "hard science" that is increasingly abstract and incomprehensible for the great majority of even educated people are the foundations of a Dark Power in which man is only a quantifiable particle, a number in a computer, a statistical digit, the actor and subject of "the dehumanization of humankind."
Sábato's narrative work is shaped by three interconnected volumes. The first of these, and the most famous, is El túnel (The Tunnel) [1948]. In this novel, written in the form of a police story, Sábato reveals the obsessions that would become the hallmarks of his writing: the radical solitude of man, the darkest side of human passions, and art as an enlightened transcendence of reality.
All of these themes culminate in his next novel, De heroes y tumbas (Of Heroes and Tombs) [1961]. Using a multitude of voices and characters, he undertakes a merciless metaphysical investigation of the presence and propagation of Evil. The symbolism contained in "A Report on the Blind" submerges the characters and even the reader in a conspiratorial nightmare they can escape (and never fully) only through the redeeming power of love and art, which for Sábato is, to a large extent, reflection.
Abbadón el exterminador (The Angel of Darkness)[1974] closes and gives meaning to the literary trilogy. In this novel, the fictional elements of the author's previous works mesh with the events of his own life. He is just another character in the kaleidoscope of existences and dreams that include memories of childhood, political conflicts in South America, his contacts with the Surrealists in the 30's, and even his own epitath, which we hope will not be engraved for some time: Ernesto Sábato
wished to be buried in this earth
with only one word on his tomb
PEACE(3)
Endnotes
1. Antes del fin, Biblioteca Breve - Ed. Seix Barral, 1999.
2. Hombres y engranajes, El libro de bosillo - alianza Editorial 445, 1951.
3. Abbadón el exterminador,Biblioteca de Bosillo - Ed. Seix Barral, 1974.
Translated by Liam Moore
