MARY MURATORE AUTHORIAL IRRELEVANCE IN SÁBATO’S EL TÚNEL This article tackles an under-explored aspect of Castel’s alienation in El Túnel: the con- flict between the author and his work. Like many artists, Castel finds himself isolated from the pedestrian mainstream. However, in opposition to other misunderstood artists who discover in their works an aesthetic connection that compensates somewhat for their social alienation, Castel is distanced not only from the public with whom he attempts to communicate via his literary creations, but he is no less so from the works themselves. At war both with society and the higher imperatives of his artistic impulses, Castel struggles in vain to connect with his art and those it reaches. He remains aesthetically disenfran- chised and socially marginalized throughout the work. As his narrative drifts off into an inconclusive silence, the reader comes to understand more fully the complex interweave that characterizes the aesthetic encounter. At the point where artistic consumers consider the quixotic work of a distant author, definitive conclusions matter less than the struggle to identify that elusive conjuncture between the explicit and the poetic, the accessible and the impenetrable, the chaotic and the coherent: bipolar tensions that endow the aesthetic enterprise with is enduring omnipotence. Juan Pablo Castel’s hyper-alienation in Sábato’s El Túnel has been attributed to a variety of neurological and psychological sources. Yet perhaps one of the more inter- esting and least explored aspects of Castel’s alienation is linked to his choice of pro- fession: artistic representation. The conflict between the artist and his society is a threadbare concept, one dating back to Antiquity. Like many artists whose uncom- mon talent and elevated perspectives isolate them from the pedestrian mainstream, Castel appears as a consummate loner, ill at ease in most social settings (“Todo era tan elegante que sentí vergüenza por mi traje viejo y mis rodilleras. Y sin embargo, la sensación de grotesco que experimentaba no era exactamente por eso sino por algo que no terminaba de definir” [21]). 1 Even the few friends he acknowledges once hav- ing consider him something of a misfit (“En la época en que yo tenía amigos, muchas veces se han reído de mi manía de elegir siempre los caminos más enrevesados” [59]). 0324–4652/$20.00 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Springer, Dordrecht Neohelicon XXXV (2008) 1, 205–219 DOI: 10.1007/s11059-008-3015-9 1 All references are to Ernesto Sábato, El Tunél (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1969). Mary Muratore, Department of Romance Languages, 143 Arts and Science Building, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA; E-mail: muratorem@missouri.edu