Loneliness, Creation and Communication in Carlos Rojas

Carlos Rojas is the creator of highly imaginative, intricately wrought and richly written novels. Their thematic structure could include a range of subjects from dream and reality to history and religion, and be woven with a personalised style whichx is unmistakeable. But the themes underlying most of his work are those elemental problems of man: loneliness and alienation, selfexamination, communication and creation. It is through an examination of these themes as explored by Rojas in his fiction and other writings, that the source of his artistic inspiration and style may be discovered. I intend in the following three chapters to reveal how a sense of loneliness and alienation contributes greatly to his creative urge, and how this feeling of aloneness, together with the allied themes of self-examination and communication, has a basic influence on the wayin which he writes. The two novels I will refer to mainly are La ternura del hombre invisible and Adolfo Hitler esta en mi casa. In the first chapter I will discuss the question of character identification and communication. Within these novels, the characters come to realise that communication with others must be preceeded by ..confrontation with the self. Rojas is as convinced of this truth as his characters. For in this way communication can be seen as a creative force; for man in his relations with himself and other men, for the writer with his public. The concept of creative force will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter Two. Here, through structural and stylistic analysis of the symbolic pattern of fertility, I hope to show that fertility symbols and images are carefully and consistently used to consolodate the hope in creation as the solution to a lonely and barren existence. They are, in effect, an essential part of the structure of the novels. In Chapter Three I propose to examine his non-fiction in the light of his fictional writings, and to relate the meaning of life with the means of living. For Rojas, communication is an important meaning of life in a world where man lives with himself and with other people. In his non-fiction, he relates the problems of communication which he explores in his novels, to the means of living, which is the manner in which man lives out his life. He emphasises the necessity of an understanding communication as a prerequisite to the harmonious co-existence of mankind. He discusses this not only in the universal brotherhood of man context, but with particular reference to isolationist states of mind in communities of his native country