Sabato, the master of kaleidoscopy

The work of Ernesto Sabato cannot be viewed outside the framework of the philosophy of science. Perhaps this profound insight between his literature and physics began in that distant year of 1938, when he obtained his doctorate in Physics from the National University of La Plata. This was followed by a series of works on atomic radiation at the Curie laboratory in Paris, and his stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You see, Sabato's universe was always the universe that Albert Einstein called "ich zeit," or "the time of each one." Sabato was the master of the "self."

Sábato's jokes against science led to his first book, "We and the Universe." The year was 1945. Physics had proven to be a terrible instrument for the construction of the atomic bomb. Sábato revolted against the supposed independence of science and pointed to it as an ideological state apparatus, as Althusser would postulate almost forty years later. From then on, Ernesto Sábato was not satisfied with a science based on an act of faith. He then turned to Einstein's great enemy, Niels Bohr. Einstein, initially so dear to the physicist Sábato, vindicated his "der liebe würfelt nicht mit der welt" ("my dear God does not play dice with the world"). Since the atomic bomb, the physicist Sábato has renounced his faith in Einstein: he prefers to believe that God does indeed play dice with the world. He bows before Niels Bohr and, along with him, he was obviously right. The great genius of the 20th century, contrary to what the media says, was Bohr, not Einstein. Your iPad, your iPhone, your cell phone, your internet sprang from Bohr, not Einstein. Our technological daily life was built upon quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle: something Niels Bohr had been advocating since at least 1905. Sábato's work must be read as that of an Argentinian physicist, a resident of a continent of violent dictatorships and equally violent outbreaks of instability – but who, by fate, had access to the best that the developed world produced in culture and science. Sábato was a canary in a coal mine.

It was after the atomic bomb that Sábato vindicated his resplendent and resolute discipline in following existentialism, the "ich zeit" (time) that he still followed in Einstein, and the deepest psychologism of individuals, against the objectivities of what we conventionally call the "objective world." It was from this "melting pot" between science and Latin absoutisms that his first novel, "The Tunnel," sprang. This first perjuration by Sábato against objectivity was undeservedly forgotten by the yawns that Argentina produces in literature today. But his digressive pen, still thanks to the traumas of the post-45 nuclear deterrent, sought what Sábato learned by idolizing Niels Bohr: the pre-Socratic philosophy of Pyrrho, Zeno of Elea, and Protagoras. Moreover, Sabato loved to repeat Protagoras' unequivocal axiom, for whom "only man is the measure of all things: of those that are what they are and of those that are what they are not."

For almost 15 remarkable years, Sábato foresaw the emergence of an unfathomable novel. He was already plotting to blend existentialism with the endless Latin American chronicle that so moved Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. The military shortcut to contain the uncertainties of a continent plunged into darkness and brilliance. All of this simmered in Sábato and is present in his work "On Heroes and Tombs," from 1961, considered to this day the best Argentine novel of the 20th century. General Juan Lavalle was, first and foremost, an epigone of the well of contradictions that was a Latin America immersed in alternations of liberalizing dictatorships and democracies restoring conservatism.

Sábato's work never asserts; it always suggests. His narrative is an imperious struggle between an abysmal, quantum self, immersed in kaleidoscopies, and an objective reality, always in search of results. Ultimately, Sábato sought a mixture of the two: he was a nihilist of results. As the father of subatomic physics, Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, whom Sábato so admired, said, “no one here is Apollonian and/or Dionysian. We are and are not both: we are Odyssean.”

Ernesto Sábato always nibbled at the edges: he was a master at highlighting undertones. After all, he was a follower of quantum mechanics and the idea that the world will never be at rest: always friction – as two of his masters so strongly advocated: Walter Pater, in the 19th century, and Benedetto Croce, in the first five years of the 20th century.

Sábato and Borges never got along. And one was afraid to quote the other in the most public of circles. But perhaps the best definition of this suggestive Sábato is found in the last ten lines of the short story "The Wall and the Books," precisely by Jorge Luis Borges. "Certain people, certain places, faces marked by time, mythologies, want to tell us something, are about to tell us something, or have been told something that we cannot grasp. The imminence of this revelation, which will never happen, is perhaps the aesthetic fact." This is why Sábato's work endures, like a cabal whose keys are revealed with each new reading. A rereading of Sábato's work reveals another work. And so on, like in the quantum labyrinths that he learned to appreciate so much by admiring the work of his master Niels Bohr.