Quantum Mechanics and Literature: An Analysis of El Túnel by Ernesto Sábato

by Paul Halpern, Victoria Carpenter

We examine the nature of divergent timelines in El Túnel by Ernesto Sábato, focusing on three key incidents: the viewing of a scene in the protagonist’s painting ‘Maternidad,’ an excursion to the beach, and a letter. We explore ambiguities in these events and connections between them, commenting on the range of possible interpretations. Employing quantum mechanics as a metaphor, we show how temporal discrepancies in the order and interpretation of these pivotal occurrences can be modeled as bifurcations of reality into different wavefunctions, which collapse only upon observation. We discuss how the Copenhagen and Many Worlds Interpretations of quantum mechanics, along with the idea of branes in M-theory, represent distinct ways of representing alternative narratives. We show how Sábato’s readings of physics and of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges may have influenced his shaping of the timelines in the text. Taking the painting’s title as a clue, we also explore the role of maternity and mother figures in the novel. We conclude that Sábato’s triumph in crafting El Túnel was leaving it open to such a rich range of alternative interpretations.

25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 17, 2012

About the author

Acclaimed science writer and physicist Dr. Paul Halpern is the author of fourteen popular science books, exploring the subjects of space, time, higher dimensions, dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, particle physics, and cosmology. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Athenaeum Literary Award. A regular contributor to NOVA's "The Nature of Reality" physics blog, he has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including "Future Quest" and "The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special".

Halpern's latest book, "Einstein's Dice and Schrodinger's Cat," investigates how physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger battled together against the incompleteness and indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Their dialogue inspired Schrodinger's famous thought-experiment about a cat in a box that is in a mixed state between life and death until it is observed. They struggled to find a unified field theory that would unite the forces of nature and supersede quantum weirdness. Sadly they would never find success and their efforts would lead to a fiasco.

More information about Paul Halpern's books and other writings can be found at:
phalpern.com

Reviews

[BlackOxford]

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.

[Richard]

This fundamentally changed my perspective of Sábato's story.