SOURCE: Murray, Jack. “Onetti's El Astillero as an Ideological Novel.” Symposium 40, no. 2 (summer 1986): 117-29.

[In the following essay, Murray analyzes aspects of El astillero that appear to focus on political and social issues in Onetti's native Uruguay.]

El astillero no fue una profecía, ni tampoco un juego en el campito ilimitado de la futurología. Se trataba de la sensación de que algo hedía muy fuerte, no sólo en Uruguay o en Dinamarca. Hoy, el olor aumenta. Es indudable que los embalsamadores llegarán puntuales y que la hedentina será disimulada durante un tiempo.¹

Several specialists in Juan Carlos Onetti's works took exception to a review of the 1968 English translation of El astillero in which David Gallagher proposed a possible reading of the novel as the depiction of the collapsed condition of Uruguay. It was true, after all, that the country that had once been a model welfare state in the early twentieth century (“the Switzerland of South America,” as it was often called) had slid subsequently into a long and troubled decline after the ravages of inflation, bankruptcy, and excessive bureaucracy. As if anticipating objections to his thesis, however, Gallagher added: “Onetti … gives us a graphic, ominous symbol of Uruguayan decay, but he does much more. For one, he skillfully deploys a sense of clinging gloom of which Uruguay need have no monopoly.”² This is a critical point, not only because it complements and is supported by Onetti's statement in the epigraph of the present essay, but also because Gallagher was saying in his article that, ideologically, the text encompasses a far broader field than Uruguay alone.

It was as if Gallagher was urging a reading of Onetti's works that transcended the purely aesthetic, the self-reflexive or metafictional, or even the old-fashioned “intentional” focus (i. e., squaring off the works with Onetti's own declared intentions or the perceived intentional framework of his works as a whole). Gallagher might also be said to have relegated to a siding the themes of existential Angst and absurdism in the author's works, aspects, in any case, in danger of identifying Onetti with a period long past, whereas his works have continued to have considerable relevance. What now becomes clear in Gallagher's review is that a reading of El astillero is long overdue that undertakes to join the literary aspects of the work with its cultural and ideological ones. Indeed, remarks from Onetti himself, such as the one that serves as epigraph above, would encourage such a reading.

One of my main arguments is that Onetti's ideological evolution had a deep effect on his literary evolution, particularly since, at a point vitally important for El astillero, he came to feel that a writer must have a properly focused position within his own culture, as well as in world culture, and that the ideological derives naturally from this (and not the reverse, as is generally held). It is therefore necessary to deal first with the author's ideological evolution.

A brief review of what is known of his development shows that Onetti evolved from the leftist idealism of his youth to one of grave ideological scepticism. This evolution became clear around 1940 when he began to show disgust with the Uruguayan (and South American) political scene and with leftist causes generally. From then on he would be opposed to all kinds of political or ideological engagement in literature.³ Such disgust, however, implied his increasing awareness that it was not so much the ideological base that contaminated the culture but rather the reverse: a contaminated cultural base could lead only to a false, and ineffectual, ideological position. Hence, to do battle on the ideological plane required profound adjustments in the local culture, adjustments in which literature ideally (though, alas, not practically, from Onetti's viewpoint) could play an important part.

Already a member of a kind of platense Lost Generation that felt suffocated in what they perceived as a cultural vacuum, Onetti saw the need of a local literary medium that was neither derivative of a greater Spanish culture nor rendered ineffectual by authors who contented themselves with conforming only to the mediocre standards of their own culturally remote area.⁴ At the same time, this medium was expected to transcend narrow regional limits and enter into dialogue with the dominant world culture—in short, achieve world-class status.

But, even while urging the creation of a far more reputable literary scene in the platense area, Onetti's ideological scepticism led him to take so despairingly wry a view of that world that it quickly became satirical. In the 1940's his columns for Marcha, a Uruguayan weekly on which he worked, gleefully mocked the idea that South American writers could be effectual in any true sense (even as later he was to make fun of the elitist fiction produced during the South American boom of the 1960's and 1970's).⁵

This satirical impulse, as I hope to show, has an important relationship with the metafictional aspect of Onetti's writings, an aspect that anticipates the later emergence of the metafictional or fantastic in South American fiction generally. Indeed, the increasing formalism of Onetti's works, in comparison with European or American works written during the same period, would be a particularly striking example of Georg Lukács's observation that an author's ethical (or, as I prefer to say here, ideological) preoccupations are turned into the aesthetic problem of his works.⁶ Ideological scepticism and novelistic form thinking reflexively about itself have always gone hand in hand in Onetti's case.

This rapid summary of Onetti's ideological development reveals important diagnostic features: a bitter post-idealist reaction that led to scepticism; scepticism in turn produced a satiric impulse. The sense of living in a locale without its own literary medium allowed Onetti to perceive a ludicrous gap between pretense and reality in cultural expression. However, even one who has become disenchanted with an ideology or cynical about the world to which it applies is no less ideological in his outlook for that. The thematic decay of so many of Onetti's works is direct evidence of that degradation of ideological values in the modern Western world that Goldman sees both Lukács and René Girard as emphasizing. Specifically, values have become reified, and novel protagonists, while powerless to acquire an outlook untouched by reification, find themselves problematical presences in their own society, a noticeable feature of Onetti's works and specifically of Larsen in El astillero.⁷

In this framework, we may see why Onetti was destined to use his gift for satire for an ideological unmasking of the system of reified values plainly at work in a culture that went on living resolutely in ill-fitting delusions about itself. But he did not address the problem in a frontal ideological assault so much as in the framework of world literature and with a semantic reach that transcended the immediate boundaries of that culture with its specific historical, social, or political problems. One may therefore call El astillero polysemic, if only because it is rife with ideological ironies that a literal or even straightforward allegorical reading will fail to bring to light. For this reason, Onetti's satiric impulse exploits that very satirical tradition in which Bakhtin places the origin of the modern novel. Onetti's text carries out this intent by a calculated deconstruction of stylistic mode, narrative structure, and, especially, treatment of space. The parodic bent at work in the novel's style is transformed into a semic filter of decay on the narrative and descriptive levels. The satirical aspect, however, assures that these different areas are always subject to an ideological coloration.

The narrative mode being subverted in El astillero is realism. Onetti subjects it to deconstruction not only by narrative uncertainty about what is usually certain in realist accounts (e.g., the narrator's own claims of uncertainty about his documentation, his general scepticism, even helplessness), but, on the more formal level, by adoption of metafictional devices that serve as a kind of counter-discourse. El astillero is situated in one of the many semi-imaginary worlds born out of Brausen's head back in the earlier Vida breve, and Onetti keeps drawing the reader back into this framework by periodic intrusions of reflexive devices, particularly those that make us aware of how fiction can periodically begin thinking about itself.⁸

This confrontation of modes recalls, on the one hand, Bakhtin's notion of polyphony and, on a somewhat more specific level, Irène Bessière's view of the fantastic mode as confronting realism and engaging it in an historical ideological debate.⁹ The spectacle of the real being invaded by the fantastic suddenly affords the reader a conceptual command of troublesome aspects of his own reality and even allows some kind of ideological coming to terms. Indeed, the potentially antagonistic relationship between real and a contrary subversive mode might be seen as illustrating, in a peculiarly modernist way, Lukács's thesis that a mythology arises when two stages in an historical movement exist side by side for which there can be no concrete mediation—hence, the need for a mythological “solution” (in Onetti achieved by formal—as opposed to “mythological”—means, through a metafictional, rather than fantastic, undermining of what might have been a realistic account of the basic conditions of existence in a recognizable part of the reader's world).¹⁰

The purpose of such subversion, as Patricia Waugh would have it, is to problematize the very notion of reality, a notion resting in the modern period, where realism is concerned, on the ultimately ideological implications of its materialist, positivist, and empirical world view. Seen in the metafictional framework, Onetti's procedure might be said to weaken the monosemic discourse of realism by introducing formal and, from the cognitive viewpoint of the reader, conceptual conflict that the realist mode disguises so completely.¹¹ Josefina Ludmer sees such calculated disturbances of the mimetic surface of traditional realism as acting like Brecht's distanciation.¹² In this way one might say that Onetti is laying traps for those who persist in the monosemic reading associated with realism, a reading that reduces all types of often conflicting discourse to a single level of seamless, even transparent objectivity.¹³ Realism's homogenizing tendencies, according to Ludmer (p. 125), simply reinforce the prevailing social order. Seen another way, Onetti inserts satiric distortion at the very point where the reader, ensconced in his realistic reading habits, first enters the game of the text but with an ideological end in view.

Turning next to the narrative content, we find it clear that there is a kind of parody at this level as well, observed above all when El astillero enters an intertextual relationship with prior or contemporaneous literature and acquires the polyphonic quality already mentioned. This result is not unlike the restoration of contending voices by insertion of the metafictional into the realist mode. In the intertextual relationship, these prior texts are transformed by the parody into satire where everything becomes distorted by the “low” focus of what is sometimes called the Menippean (particularly its essentially cynical outlook).¹⁴ It is in this way that decay, as a semic focus, continues to play a structural role in the novel.

In order to observe this process at work, one has only to think of El astillero as a parody of the stereotypical Horatio Alger story.¹⁵ So conceived, it could be seen as satirizing the ideological basis of the story. In the intertextual framework—of critical importance for Onetti who, like so many South American authors, practices a kind of narrative “syncretism”—that story too might be viewed as a parody of heroic romance or tales of high adventure. And, delving even more deeply, within its shadowy design we might even perceive the parody of something still more remote: a salvation tale (a failed version) in which a lost soul, with misplaced zeal, attempts to find salvation in material success, itself already an example of reification that stands as a kind of symptom of cultural errancy. Onetti stresses the debasement of the Horatio Alger tale by the semic filter of decay: the “young” hero has become an aging pimp, the boss's fair daughter a slobbering middle-aged imbecile, and the boss himself who will perhaps give him her hand (or, again, perhaps not) a scheming, and doubtless mad, old codger.

To be more precise about the stories El astillero is parodying, at least three different types may be perceived—the heroic romance, the vindication tale, and the “trickster tricked” story. If we follow Erich Auerbach in Mimesis here, and attribute each type to a different level of discourse, the heroic romance, of course, would be classified as “high,” the vindication tale as somewhere inbetween, and the “trickster” story as low. That the first two decline into the third confirms the general movement of decay in the novel.

The heroic romance is seen not only in Larsen's courtship of Angélica Inés but also in his efforts to win her through his assiduous services to her father, Petrus. But this tale, as well as the tale of vindication (i.e., Larsen's efforts to legitimize himself in the community that had expelled him some years before), collapse under the weight of their own hopelessness, an outcome in total conformity with the general aura of decay and disintegration hanging over all aspects of the novel.

It is the “trickster tricked” story that introduces reification as a burlesque element in the novel, since Angélica Inés's hand, an element from the heroic romance, is simply an object, a means to an end: Larsen will thereby become Petrus' heir. And the shipyard, once inherited, will become an object standing for Larsen's vindication before Santa María. It is in this way that the cynical intention, a vital Menippean ingredient, infects the higher tales.

Of course, in the trickster tale sometimes the trickster succeeds, sometimes he fails. But the end of the story always has him, in his turn, the victim of a trick, a suitable punishment in a world where justice is even-handed, if grim. Not only do Petrus and the others see through Larsen from the start—hence, are too wily for him (and what else could they be, given what everyone knows about him?)—but Angélica Inés and Gálvez offer those random blows which Larsen could not have foreseen and which prove fatal to him. In short, he ends exactly where he should in this type of tale.

At the most obvious level, Onetti's novel might be seen as giving the lie to the promise of the Horatio Alger tale and thereby serving as an indictment of the ideology it attempts to spread. It does so by creating a disparity between that ideology and the mock heroic romance usually employed to present it favorably. This is brought about by parody: Larsen becomes a parody of the rosy-cheeked hero, the other characters in turn reflect comically on the rest of the familiar figures in the story. All the heroic aspects of the tale have been stripped away, its crass venality has been brought to the fore. The filter of decay makes clear that superannuated values or forms of behavior, always dubiously grounded, have turned into a tragic travesty where appearances have been invaded by a reality so cruel and corrosive that they slide off into disintegration and even outright collapse. This pattern, as we shall see, is also at work in the spatial aspect of the novel.

If we understand the spatial aspect of El astillero to mean the “represented world” of the novel, then here too we have an instance of pregnant disparity. As an “actual” place, the setting consists of the shipyard itself and the half-finished and already decaying “company town” built around it, the whole place bearing the name of its founder Jeremías Petrus. This time decay is allowed to serve as a kind of satiric foil whereby pretense—in this case, the reified value system that keeps the rusting shipyard going—is shown for the absurd humbug it is. But, as in the case of narrative content, something far deeper is at stake. The fact that the shipyard is a plainly capitalist enterprise, with an actual capitalist at the helm, conveys something about the whole ideological system behind it and, beyond that, about ideological systems in general. It does so through satire, as suggested, and concentrates on the deeper effects a given ideology may have on an underlying culture.

Since space or the represented world of a novel is always an area of major ideological investment, we may say that in El astillero the ruined shipyard allows us to see how the ideological values at work in, or informing, a given social and economic entity operate like the cultural values at work in any given society. Here we have Petrus' capitalist values, clearcut products of reification, holding sway in the shipyard where their material corollary stands in ruins. The problem then becomes the legitimacy of these values, even as would be the case in a much larger social framework. Specifically, throughout much of the narrative the characters in the shipyard pretend that the values asserted by Petrus are legitimate, so that the values almost take on the aspect of shared delusions or eccentric articles of faith.

Petrus' values inform the shipyard in much the same way that a Menippean character's mad and obsessive delusions inflect the world around him with his own folly. We see Petrus as one of those capitalist survivors from the earlier entrepreneurial phase. Within the space of the shipyard, he may be said to be the “guarantor of meaning,” since his ownership of the works, a basic “fact,” is adequate grounds for others to tolerate and play along with his fantasies. In short, at least until it is taken away from him, the shipyard may have whatever “reified” meaning Petrus cares to give it: even that of a bustling enterprise.¹⁶ We find, typical of the shrewd capitalist at the head of a prosperous company, the usual calculations, the forward-looking vision, the dedication to the task of production. Taken collectively, his cant or delusions provide the “signified” to which all the “signifiers” of the collective pretense or game refer.

On the special matter of calculation, Lukács (p. 102) has pointed out that it always operates on the assumption that the abstract, reified system of rational relationships (working, it need hardly be added, according to rational laws) is a valid one and reflects the true reality of things. Yet this whole system is meant to confront a totality—the market—which is unknowable. In short, we deal with a sudden and irrational leap from solid ground into unsupported, even free-falling faith. Petrus attempts to induce such a faith in others (and, for all we know, in himself) by playing on the legends of spectacular turnabouts in the market. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the rusting shipyard too could enjoy such a happy metamorphosis.

The ruined shipyard reminds us continually of the void into which this faith is inserted. Because of the impossible disparity between the shipyard's actual condition and Petrus' claims, two incompatible arguments appear to exist side by side: (a) not only that the market could always take a turn for the better and the shipyard be restored to prosperity,¹⁷ but also (b) that the old man does not believe in anything of the kind but has an almost superhuman faith in the power of his own wits. Since the shipyard is plainly no longer viable as an enterprise, Petrus' situation depends on the latter, particularly in so far as he is able to inspire faith in others.

Petrus' ambiguous position in relation to his own faith, or lack of it, is best illustrated by that special language he always speaks. Of course, here we are dealing with what must be called cant. It is especially in respect to language that El astillero becomes a burlesque of reification. Onetti is insisting on the absence of any relationship between the cant statements and the reality behind them. The following example of Petrus' language is from an early section of the novel, but it is not very different from the way he speaks at all times:

Todo indica que muy pronto el juez levantará la quiebra y entonces, libres de la fiscalización, verdaderamente asfixiante, burocrática, de la Junta de Acreedores, podremos hacer renacer la empresa y darle nuevos impulsos. Cuento desde ahora con los capitales necesarios; no tendré más trabajo que elegir. Es para eso que me serán importantes sus servicios, señor. Soy buen juez de hombres y estoy seguro de no arrepentirme. Pero es necesario que usted tome contacto con la empresa sin pérdida de tiempo. El puesto que le ofresco es la Gerencia General de Jeremías Petrus, Sociedad Anónima. La responsabilidad es muy grande y la tarea que lo espera será pesada. En cuanto a sus honorarios, quedo a la espera de su propuesta tan pronto como esté usted en condiciones de apreciar que espera la empresa de su dedicación, de su inteligencia y de su honradez.¹⁸

Petrus' speech provides an illustration of how a reified system of values, being self-sustaining even in the face of its total lack of substantiation in reality, may permit thoroughly successful, though essentially empty, exchange. In this context, one might mention Habermas' view (p. 10) that language, in addition to the content it conveys, also retails a “metacommunication about interpersonal relations.” In this instance, since we are dealing with satire, it is the game aspect to which the official language used in the shipyard must conform. Here again it is fitting to recall what Lukács calls the “formalism” of reification in order to understand the game Larsen is expected to play, once he begins work at the shipyard. It is now time to turn to reification as Lukács defines it.

In History and Class Consciousness (p. 63) Lukács sees reification as the effect of the transformation of labor, what labor produces, and the men who labor into mere commodities or things. The relations between men and men, men and things, then take on a “phantom” quality—i.e., an autonomy that is in total contrast to the ‘natural’ relations between real people or people and actual things. The ironic result is that what has been reified (i.e., literally turned into things) in fact has been transformed into abstractions as delusional as Don Quixote's windmill-giants.

To have any plausibility at all, reification depends on the existence of an economic community or enterprise of a certain magnitude. We associate it nowadays with factories employing thousands of workers or even vast economic communities. Onetti's inspired master stroke—and a chief instrument of his satire—is to reproduce the reified state in a theatre of activity far too small for it to look anything but absurd: a ruined shipyard with its owner Petrus and a total of two employees (to which Larsen is added as a third). In this framework, nothing is more ludicrous than Petrus' inability to recognize the individual persons working for him, although this difficulty is totally consonant with reified attitudes. These establish relations among people that are based on the relations between commodities.¹⁹

The phantom objectivity of the reified relationship now takes on a literal cast in the phantom production yard and the phantom ships it produces—or rather does not produce. The two employees, Kunz and Gálvez, are the phantom chief engineer and chief bookkeeper respectively. They do imaginary labor for which their salary is in perennial arrears: hence, phantom work for phantom pay. A crucial step in workers' alienation—their loss of contact with the end of production—also an important element in reification, is particularly comical here where nothing is produced at all.

What is of particular interest in El astillero is the novel's way of showing how reification can prevail over a legitimation crisis. Legitimation depends, at the very least, on the economic viability of an enterprise, the only rational basis for workers to show loyalty to the company or accept management's directives as rational. Otherwise, everything is again thrown back on faith as it is with Petrus' boasts about the impending improvement in the company's fortunes. As for the few workers still there, they are so mesmerized by the reified values prevailing in the shipyard that they derive a kind of purpose from the phantom work and, in any case, earn a small income from selling off parts of the rusting works to a scrap-dealer behind Petrus' back. In short, they have something to gain from pretending to accept the legitimacy to Petrus' authority. The entire situation serves as a wry gloss of Habermas' assertion that rational authority will be looked upon as legitimate if “the normative order” is “established positively” (p. 98). If not, Habermas observes, legitimacy is at the mercy of the purely psychological where it depends on the convictions or beliefs of those associated with the enterprise. In the case of the shipyard, it has ceased to be serious and has all become a game.

Through the ludicrous scale of the shipyard, Onetti is able to show that, whether legitimate or not, a system of reified values can still exist where there is a kind of collective agreement that it does exist. Despite the legitimation crisis, the group manages to fend off what Habermas sees (p. 29) as the inevitable ideological critique a commercial organization is subject to when it fails to hold its own. To put it another way, there has to be some sort of esprit, a fragile thing, as it turns out. For, when Gálvez defects, the whole system threatens to collapse. Such disintegration, again, is related to the material and thematic decrepitude of the shipyard, the dangers of defection to the corrosive effects that a breakdown in legitimation, belief, and the resultant scepticism can produce. The psychological benefits of simultaneous delusion and disabusal apparently compensate—for a time—the lack of material benefits.²⁰ But there is clearly a breaking point for some.

Larsen takes up the hopeless task of seeking his own legitimation by becoming general manager (an echo, as I have already suggested, of some primordial salvation tale). He is daunted at first by the irreversible decay and is clearly aware of the bad faith game being played in the shipyard. But it is not long before he falls in with the game, even comes to enjoy it as he discovers it has a security of its own. He fills his days with absorbing activity, as he surveys obsolete files, and is soon parroting Petrus' optimistic way of discussing things with his co-workers. Larsen, of course, just like his employer, needs the others to keep the game alive.

Once the game becomes a way of life, it takes on the qualities associated with a reified system of values. Lukács (p. 105) has expressed the opinion that one who adopts the reified perspective engages in so much rationalization that he loses his adaptability and can never respond properly to unforeseen catastrophe. This might explain why Larsen is curiously unarmed when disaster strikes. For instance, the very day Angélica Inés bursts in on him in his office to attack him and destroy all his expectations, he has been spending lunch convinced he will be going to see Petrus that very afternoon to ask for her hand. He is so caught in the whole life pattern deriving from his schemes, game or not, that he has nothing to put in its place.

Gálvez also threatens the even playing of the game when, toward the end of the novel, he starts staying home from the office. His secession is enough to make Larsen aware of a devastating spiritual emptiness that lies just out of sight as long as they can all keep the game alive. When the game falls apart, the frightening void at the heart of life emerges, since there is nothing to mediate the resultant catastrophe.²¹

An unforeseen event, then, is enough to throw the entire game off course and the maniacally protected delusions that go with it. Once this has happened, Larsen not only sees clearly the ruination around him, but experiences it as the mirror of his own existential dilapidation. Lukács would say this is because the rationalization involved in reification creates a formalized world that prefers to disregard many concrete aspects of life. When moments of dislocation occur, all is revealed as pretense.²² Suddenly confronted by this unwelcome, but true, vision of himself and the shipyard, Larsen passes into a state of lucidity and even disabusal.

Reading El astillero as a burlesque of reification permits us to see how Onetti is able to bring ideological issues into play in the represented world of his novel, thereby generating the interplay of values that confers upon the work its satirical force, to say nothing of its extraordinary literary interest and power. The conversion of people and things, labor and its product, etc., into commodities or things-in-themselves produces a kind of abstract rationalization of everything that little by little has little relationship to actual facts. In the setting of a ruined shipyard with three employees all the delusional quality of reification stands revealed. Moreover, the formalism of appearances barely masks the self-lying, the mutual deceit, the conspiratorial esprit lurking below. But reification permits these various fantasies, bad faith ploys, and the collective confidence game to go their unhappy and perilous ways.

On the purely formal level, El astillero provides a demonstration of how the satirical mode, encoded in the modern novel, may enact a deconstruction of the genre itself. I have attempted to show how deconstruction is taking place in the areas of narrative mode and content and most particularly of space. It is not so much the sort of deconstruction that works by inversion of the basic values or elements at work in these three areas as by subversion of them through what has been described as the semic filter of decay. Specifically, the Horatio Alger story, shown to be already a perversion of earlier success or salvation tales, is itself subverted by the cynical “trickster tricked” story. The space setting of the novel, too, subverts the stories Larsen and Petrus are trying to live out. Its representation is shot through with elements that do not so much proceed from incongruous narrative modes (the fantastic, for instance) as from the subversive impulse itself conveyed by metafictional means on the formal level. It is the realist mode that is subverted. But the full effect of these disruptive factors on the mode can only be understood if we move to the ideological level.

Earlier we saw that the ideological question, as Onetti evolved, led not to espousal of a political doctrine or social commitment (solutions he came to scorn) but what I call ideological scepticism and a concomitant search for that very cultural base necessary in order for the question to be raised at all. While I have shown it is possible to ascribe to El astillero an anticapitalist bias, specifically because of capitalism's reified value system, nonetheless the novel shows how any ideology tends to follow the same pattern set here, when it continues to appeal for adherence from a society long after it has any relevance to the material, social, or political realities of the world in which that society lives. (Here, in fact, is the point of intersection between ideology and culture.) This invites hypocrisy, cynicism, and a corruption that brings everyone down with it. Certainly Onetti's novel has some application to Uruguay's attempt to persevere in its social progressivism long after the economy could no longer support it or the political parties do much more than speak reverently of it without any idea of how to preserve it.

In El astillero the true disaster is that there is no sociocultural framework to fall back upon once the values animating the shipyard have proved to be an empty abstraction and collapsed in a rusting heap. In this context, Onetti anticipates a more recent work such as Manuel Puig's La traición de Rita Hayworth where a woman, caught in the concrete and wracking tragedy of her own existence, has nothing to resort to but the values represented by Hollywood films from the old Dream Factory days. And yet this is quite a general process in the world today. One has only to think of all the failed paradises presently littering the world, whether in the Americas or in corrupt and disintegrating socialist worlds of tomorrow or in the mad jumble of squalor and insolvent grandeur in newly liberated Third World countries. Cultural forms, models, modes, paradigms are seen as failing, and Onetti transmutes this into a kind of formal decay proceeding, on the level of the novel itself, from a dispirited and deteriorating narrative voice. But, if the social model suggested by the shipyard is any example, all cultural means of expression must pass of necessity through the value system of some ideology or other on their way to attaining coherence. If that ideology has become superannuated, far-fetched, or baseless, the means of expression used by a culture will be deeply disturbed and require a parallel process of cultural and ideological self-criticism and renovation. El astillero, in this context, is the beginning step.

Notes

1. From an interview with Onetti in Juan Carlos Onetti, Requiem por Faulkner (Montevideo: Arca, Buenos Aires: Calicanto, 1976), pp. 198-99.

2. David Gallagher, “The Exact Shade of Gray,” New York Times Book Review (June 16, 1968), 4-5.

3. Onetti, Requiem por Faulkner, p. 20.

4. Onetti, Requiem por Faulkner, p. 16; Luis Harss, Barbara Dohman, Los nuestros (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968), p. 215.

5. Onetti, Requiem por Faulkner, pp. 43, 193.

6. Quoted by Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel (London: Tavistock, 1978), p. 6.

7. See Goldmann, pp. 2-3.

8. See Wolfgang Luchting's remarks on Onetti's “trucos” in “El lector como protagonista de la novela,” in Jorge Ruffinelli, ed., Onetti (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1973), p. 211.

9. Irène Bessière, Le Récit fantastique (Paris: Larousse, 1974), pp. 11-12.

10. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1968), p. 194.

11. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London & New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 6, 7, 40.

12. Josefina Ludmer, Onetti, Los procesos de construcción del relato (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1977), pp. 164-65.

13. Waugh, p. 6.

14. Julia Kristeva, Semiotiké (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 16, 165, 169.

15. See John Deredita, “El lenguaje de la desintegración: Notas sobre El astillero,” in Ruffinelli, ed., Onetti, p. 227.

16. Lukács, p. 92.

17. We might be said to be dealing with a variant of “commodity fetishism” as what Jürgen Habermas calls “a secularized residual ideology,” where economic catastrophe, as well as success, are looked upon as something like acts of God. Hence, while nothing can be planned, anything is possible. See his Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann; Boston: Beacon, 1975), p. 33.

18. Juan Carlos Onetti, Obras completas (México: Aguilar, 1970), p. 1064. It is interesting to note that Omar Prego and María Angélica Petit, in Juan Carlos Onetti o la salvación por la forma (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1981), p. 114, speak of Petrus' way of talking as a politician's language.

19. Lukács, p. 86.

20. See Habermas, p. 73.

21. See Lukács, p. 154.

22. See Lukács, p. 101.