Quantum Mechanics and Literature: An Analysis of El Túnel by Ernesto Sábato by Paul Halpern
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Novel of Profound Uncertainty?

In The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato has a mysogonistic, puerile, obsessive, apparently psychopathic murderer tell the reader his every thought about a folie a deux with his victim and its rationale. My first time through The Tunnel left me bewildered. Of what literary rather than ideological merit is this work? For whose edification or amusement is it meant? My original conclusion: It’s a difficult book to be interested in much less like.

But I picked up on a hint by another GR reader and found that Sabato was a scientist before he was a writer and had incorporated quantum physics in The Tunnel as a sort of hidden metaphor. Indeed there is a short book by Halpern and Carpenter which outlines the way in which the metaphor is meant to work at key points in the book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Mech...).

This led me back into The Tunnel for another look. Halpern and Carpenter suggest that Sabato followed Borges in his interest in the ‘labyrinthine’ character of history through which the world changes direction at critical nodes. They also point out Borges allusions to alternative and even parallel universes that were of interest to Sabato. They contend that Sabato builds on these Borgian tropes to create scenes of discontinuous time in his story.

Maybe so. But I find the argument of Halpern and Carpenter to be somewhat tenuous. But even stipulating their observations, I don’t see the point. The metaphor, if there, is certainly not central to this tale of murder and psychopathy. Of course there are always alternative trajectories for any story, or for any historical reality. But the idea of using the ‘collapse of the quantum wavefront’ as the signal for a decisive turning point seems to me trivial and fatuous.

True, the protagonist, Juan Pablo, is continuously analysing his situation in terms of alternative possibilities, as in this internal monologue:

“I constructed an endless series of variations. In one I was talkative, witty (something in fact I never am); in another I was taciturn; in still another, sunny and smiling. At times, though it seems incredible, I answered rudely, even with ill-concealed rage. It happened (in some of these imaginary meetings) that our exchange broke off abruptly because of an absurd irritability on my part, or because I rebuked her, almost crudely, for some comment I found pointless or ill-thought-out.”

But this is a symptom of madness not a symbol of impending quantum resolution. Even the speaker recognises that “this damned compulsion to justify everything I do,” isn’t normal

Consequently it seems to me that the metaphor of quantum physics does nothing to explicate Sabato’s very dark story. Juan Pablo is a misanthrope without any mitigating, not to say redeeming, features. The Tunnel, therefore, doesn’t get any more interesting with a possible metaphorical foundation. Unless of course sabato’s intention was simply to create a sort of quantum uncertainty about this very foundation. In any case: not terribly stimulating.

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