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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2023
Illusions
In a work entitled The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean- François Lyotard (1986: 80), notes a certain dichotomy within the realms of the avant-garde of which he says:
What I have in mind will become clear if we dispose very schematically a few names on the chessboard of the history of avant-gardes: on the side of melancholia, the German Expressionists, and on the side of novatio, Braque and Picasso, on the former Malevitch and on the latter Lissitsky, on the one Chirico and on the other Duchamp. The nuance which distinguishes these two modes may be infinitesimal; they often coexist in the same piece, are almost indistinguishable; and yet they testify to a difference (un différend) on which the fate of thought depends and will depend for a long time, between regret and assay.
If, as I believe to be the case, Onetti's work can be deemed to belong to that rather vague category, the avant-garde, then there is little doubt that his work, and particularly El astillero (1961) belongs to the first part of these oppositions, that is to that of melancholia and regret.
El astillero is first and foremost a novel of nostalgia, of regret for an age of certainty which, if it ever existed, no longer does. So that this work, which, like Juntacadáveres, begins and ends with the arrival and departure of Larsen, takes the form of an odyssey, a search through a world of symbols for some kind of transcendence or of a god, a search which is ultimately fruitless.
The novel is divided into different sections each of which has a heading, SANTA MARÍA-1; EL ASTILLERO-1; and later on, for example, one which bears the heading LA GLORIETA-111; LA CASILLA 11; and each of these settings, of which there are five, the above-mentioned and LA CASA, refers to the space in which most of the action within that section takes place. This device draws the reader's attention to an almost Brechtian theatricality, giving a heightened sense of a backdrop rather than of any Realist depiction of a ‘natural’ landscape.
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