Mark I. Millington

Masculinity and the Fight for Onetti's ‘Jacob y el otro’

The fact that Onettis writing in ‘Jacob y el otro’ is dense and allusive can be immediately corroborated by a curious and resistant textual detail.1 On two separate occasions (1376 and 1394), one of the characters mentions the canvas of a wrestling ring and alludes to the existence of two words to refer to it, ‘tapiz’ and ‘alfombra’. The purpose of this double designation and of the double mention is far from clear, though just how one might respond to this detail in reading is something to which I will return when the question of reading is explicitly addressed. In seeking to read ‘Jacob’, I have drawn on certain notions from psychoanalysis (particularly post-Freudian psychoanalysis), not in an effort to render the story transparent, but in order to establish a flexible and questioning attitude towards it and towards reading itself. For, if Lacans re-reading of Freud has shown anything, it is notably the complex interaction that takes place in the analytical process.2 Moreover, one of the crucial eleme...