Over a period of some sixty years, Mario Benedetti's writing output has been extremely varied in terms of genre. At the same time there is consistency: a frequent theme is the everyday experience of ordinary folk. For example, they might argue over a modest inheritance; or witness their divorcing parents’ acrimonious arguments; they seek their first sexual experiences; they struggle to make ends meet and to find time for their family. Certainly, in later works Benedetti's characters may experience dramatically different circumstances such as imprisonment or exile. However, extreme as these experiences are, they would become the lot of ordinary people as the stagnant, bureaucratic neo-Batllista Uruguay of the 1940s and 1950s crumbled, leading to political polarisation, military takeover, mass imprisonment and exile.

In that first period, Benedetti – as the title of this chapter suggests – saw the bureaucratic mentality as paradigmatic of Uruguayan society. This is reflected in several short stories from two early collections, Esta mañana (1949) and Montevideanos (1959); in Poemas de la oficina (1956); the novel La tregua (1960); and essays in El país de la cola de paja (1960).

Although dating from 1960, El país de la cola de paja is a useful starting point, since in it Benedetti expounds his ideas. The discussion will then move to the short stories and poems, which are snapshots of aspects of clerks’ home and office lives, and of different stages of life. Finally, I consider La tregua, in which the arguments expounded in El país de la cola de paja are brought to life through the fictional context, and where themes and figures sketched in the stories and poems are further developed. There are two further important features of La tregua: historical perspective; psychological study of the protagonist. There is no doubt that Benedetti's novel is the most ambitious exploration of the urban-bureaucratic condition in River Plate literature.

El país de la cola de paja

This collection of eleven essays criticises various aspects and institutions of Uruguayan society. In one, ‘Rebelión de los amanuenses’, Benedetti, with an almost Onettian bitter humour, describes the behaviour of the bureaucracy, the class he identifies as being at the heart of Uruguayan society; and yet, because the members of this group do not prosper, they simultaneously corrupt and undermine society in the attempted furtherance of their interests.