Dilemas de la identidad y construcción de ‘lo masculino’ en ‘El posible Baldi’ de Juan Carlos Onetti

Abstract

The Uruguayan novelist and cultural anthropologist, Teresa Porzecanski, a recent addition to JILAR's international advisory board, outlines how an early 1936 story by the then young Juan Carlos Onetti anticipates what would become the themes of his major fiction as well as a compelling portrait of the sense of self under pressure from the lonely urban crowd. Combining her expertise as analyst and creator of fiction and her academic knowledge as anthropologist, Porzecanski shows how the protagonist of ‘El posible Baldi’ reacts to his sense of the anonymity and powerlessness of his bureaucratised life in the crowded streets of his River Plate city. Thanks to the attentions of a conventionally attentive and submissive woman, Baldi is able to fantasise both for himself and his audience a series of more virile selves based on well known cultural models that remove him ever farther from the realities of a life, both anticipated and feared, with his girlfriend in the suburbs.