The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

First published:El astillero, 1961 (English translation, 1968)

Type of plot: Existential allegory

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: The fictional city of Santa Maria and its hinterland, modeled after the River Plate basin towns of Argentina and Uruguay

Principal Characters:

• E. Larsen (Juntacadaveres, a name which means “corpse-collector”), the protagonist, a former pimp in declining middle age
• Don Jeremias Petrus, the aged owner of the idle shipyard
• Angelica Ines Petrus, the idiot daughter of Don Jeremias, who is courted by Larsen
• A. Galvez, the nominal administrative manager of the shipyard, who is bent on revenge against Petrus
• Galvez’s wife, who is unkempt and pregnant, and whose given name appears to be Maria; she is also courted by Larsen
• Kunz, the nominal technical manager of the shipyard
• Dr. Diaz Grey, a Santa Maria physician

The Novel

The narrative focus of The Shipyard provides a closely detailed, agonizing, but simultaneously ironic inside view of Larsen’s doomed attempt to make a comeback and acquire respectability in the Santa Maria area, from which he was exiled five years earlier for his connection with a brothel there. Having returned to Santa Maria for a day at the beginning of the novel, Larsen goes upriver to Puerto Astillero and obtains the meaningless post of general manager of an idle shipyard. Its decayed plant is presided over remotely by its owner Jeremias Petrus. The only employees on hand are the administrators Galvez and Kunz, who do not receive their salaries and perform no work except occasional clandestine sales (for their own survival) of the rusted parts that remain from the days when Jeremias Petrus, Ltd., was a bustling enterprise.

Larsen throws himself into a senseless routine at the several degraded locales which provide the grotesque setting and the recurring chapter titles of the novel: Santa Maria, the shipyard, the summerhouse, the house, and the shack. At the shipyard, he pores over yellowing contracts and faded blueprints from times past and continually tells himself that a good managerial hand is all that is needed to set the phantom enterprise in motion again. Each afternoon, he visits the summerhouse of the Petrus estate in a comically decorous ritual of courtship with Petrus’s feebleminded daughter, Angelica Ines. From the grounds, Larsen gazes at the Petrus house, which he hopes to inherit and occupy, “to devote the rest of his life to revenge without consequences, to sensuality without vigor, to a heedless, narcissistic power”—aspirations which reflect the severe limits of Juan Carlos Onetti’s fictional world.

With no salary, Larsen soon finds it necessary to take his meals in the shack occupied by the sardonic Galvez and his wife, a Faulknerian stoic female, whom Larsen also courts. Larsen slips back into Santa Maria in an attempt to save Petrus from imprisonment for an old forgery, and despite the vague danger of apprehension and new expulsion, he cannot resist looking up former acquaintances such as Dr. Diaz Grey, whose conversation fills Larsen with memories of his Santa Maria past. The river— reminiscent of the tributaries of the actual River Plate—also functions as an important symbolic setting, most notably when a defeated (or, in the alternate ending provided, a still somewhat game) Larsen takes his last, presumably fatal trip north on the ferryboat, away from the Santa Maria country.

The Characters

The Shipyard belongs to that large group of contemporary novels which express loss of self. Onetti, however, is less radical than some of his contemporaries—a Samuel Beckett, for example—in his creation of depersonalized characters. The denizens of The Shipyard may have only an initial for a first name, but their selfhood acquires enough unity to make nearly round characters of them. Onetti sustains character and situation even as the text is expressing, directly or indirectly, that the characters are not persons, have no real identity.

Larsen is the antihero of both The Shipyard and Onetti’s 1964 novel, Juntacadaveres. (Only in this later novel were the events preceding the action of The Shipyard and the nickname “Corpse-collector” fully explained: Larsen, then manager of Santa Maria’s first and only brothel, put together a collection of metaphorically dead female bodies.) The intense third-person account of Larsen’s thought process in The Shipyard reveals the stubborn deliberateness and absurd logic that rule his self-defeating outward actions. With his low-life swagger, carrying his concealed pistol, Larsen walks through interpersonal roles that are models of deception and self-deception. Long experience in the lower depths should perhaps have left him thoroughly cynical before the action of The Shipyard begins. Like most Onettian protagonists, he does have a good dose of cynicism, but he is also a kind of degraded artist, even an oblique projection of the author. In the most hopeless circumstances, he resorts to his imagination in order to project a better world. Despite the many ironies that undermine conventional characterization, real sympathy is generated for Juntacadaveres Larsen, whose nickname identifies him as a vestigial exemplary sufferer, a post-Christian Jesus Christ.

The other male characters may all be read as doubles of Larsen, variations on his existential dilemma. Petrus, too, engages in deception, fostering in himself and others the chimerical project of resuscitating the shipyard. He plays an empty role, the capitalist with no capital, the man of affairs with no affairs to manage. Petrus is a caricature of the ruthless entrepreneur, and his surname marks him as a kind of pope—a Saint Peter—in the cult of self-betterment and prosperity to which Larsen adheres.

Galvez, the more vocal and sarcastic of the cynical pair formed by himself and Kunz, harbors deep resentment against Petrus and against his own condition. Like Larsen, Galvez is acutely aware of the abiding inauthenticity of the life he leads, but he responds differently. Larsen plays at the game of capitalist faith. Galvez’s only hope is in the forged bond, the evidence against Petrus, with which he sleeps every night. After finally making his denunciation, he has played his part, and he drowns himself in the river.

Dr. Diaz Grey, a key character of Onetti’s novel La vida breve (1950; A Brief Life, 1976), which began the cycle of Santa Maria novels, appears in one chapter of The Shipyard as yet another double of Larsen. Diaz Grey’s dreary nightly routine as a bachelor is broken by the visit of the former brothel-keeper. The point of view in this scene is that of Diaz Grey, and the doctor’s reflections on Larsen provide perspective on the former pimp’s paradoxical, degraded form of heroism:

This man who lived for the last thirty years on the filthy money which filthy women were glad to give him . . . this man of unknown origins, hard and brave, who had one kind of faith and now has another, who was not born to die but to succeed, to impose himself, who at this very moment imagines that life is a territory infinite in time and space, in which it is necessary to advance and gain advantages.

Larsen realizes at one point that Angelica Ines Petrus and Senora Galvez are “only one woman, they come to the same thing.” Both the privileged mental defective who lives in the big house and the impoverished, loveless woman in the shack are typical Onettian females, condemned to represent the inexorable misfortune that is the basis of existence in the Santa Maria country. Angelica Ines would be Larsen’s access to Petrus’s fortune and respectability if Petrus had either and if there were any real possibility of a relationship with a woman whose virtual inability to articulate sentences brings her close to the status of an infant. She is an extreme figure of the madness of Larsen’s entire world. Galvez’s wife has few qualities other than endurance and her physical being, which Larsen continually imagines washed, combed, and clothed in other than the man’s shoes and man’s overcoat uncomfortably fastened with a pin over her pregnant belly. The Galvez woman sees through the desultory hypocrisy of their relationship.

Critical Context

In 1963, Onetti deservedly won the William Faulkner Certificate of Merit for El astillero. The novel is an innovative transmutation of the themes and techniques of Faulkner, the Uruguayan author’s most influential literary model. Onetti’s Santa Maria country is a fictional locale suggested by but not simply copied from Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. The religious allegory of The Shipyard is Hispano-Catholic in content, but it has technical precedents in Faulkner novels such as Light in August (1932). The multiple point of view of The Shipyard also can be traced to Faulkner. Criticism has not always pointed out the differences between Onetti and Faulkner, but The Shipyard displays some, such as the greater measure of pessimism present in Onetti, and the Uruguayan writer’s more pointed reflexive dimension. The distinctive Onettian narrative voice repeatedly comments on the progress of its narration, which itself seems tainted by the arbitrariness and insubstantiality of the lives being told:

Now, in the incomplete reconstruction of that night, as part of the whim of giving it historical importance or meaning, as part of the inoffensive game of cutting short a winter evening, manipulating, combining and playing tricks with all those things which interest no one and which are not indispensable, there comes the testimony of the bartender of the Plaza.

Onetti is the best of the River Plate writers who quite independently of the French developed an existential fiction in the 1940’s and 1950’s. He is one of the earliest and most redoubtable craftsmen of the Latin American New Narrative, and for all its reminiscence of Faulkner, the Santa Maria saga was itself highly influential long before the 1980’s, when Onetti’s life work was awarded Spain’s Cervantes Prize and Uruguay’s National Literature Prize. With Santa Maria, Onetti stimulated the equally ambitious projects of younger writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. No novel of the saga is as intense as The Shipyard, or more successful in maintaining Onetti’s ambiguous play between disintegration and imaginative attempts to prevail against it, between the somber theme of mortality and the comic treatment of it.

Bibliography

Adams, Michael I. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Adams presents a sociopsychological critical interpretation of three Latin American authors whose works share similar themes. Includes a chapter focusing on Onetti’s view of spiritual disillusionment as inevitable in the urban setting.

Ainsa, Fernando. “Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994): An Existential Allegory of Contemporary Man.” World Literature Today 68 (Summer, 1994): 501-504. A tribute to and biographic profile of Onetti as well as an analysis and evaluation of his work.

Jones, Yvonne P. The Formal Expression of Meaning in Juan Carlos Onetti’s Narrative Art. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentación, 1971. An overview of Onetti’s narrative technique, use of language and voice. Includes a bibliography.

Kadir, Djelal. Juan Carlos Onetti. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Kadir provides a critical and interpretive study of Onetti with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Lewis, Bart L. “Realizing the Textual Space: Metonymic Metafiction in Juan Carlos Onetti.” Hispanic Review 64 (Autumn, 1996): 491-506. Lewis compares Onetti’s style to Boris Pasternak. Lewis asserts that through his works, Onetti reveals that there are many openings to be filled in the fictional scheme because fictional characters live in a web of words.

Murray, Jack. The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Celine, and Onetti. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Includes a chapter on Onetti that explores The Shipyard and the psychological games the characters in the novel play on each other. Murray examines the ways in which the shipyard represents the state of the Uruguayan nation.

Murray, Jack. “Onetti’s El Astillero as an Ideological Novel.” Symposium 40 (Summer, 1986): 117-129. Examines the ideological perspective of The Shipyard.

Verani, Hugo J. “Juan Carlos Onetti.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Onetti. Includes analysis of his works and a bibliography.