Santa María

Juntacadáveres was published, three years after El astillero (1961), the novel I shall be looking at in the following chapter. My reason for choosing to work on what is apparently the later novel first is this: like many of Onetti's works, these two share virtually the same setting and some of the same protagonists, but in terms of plot, El astillero actually follows on from Juntacadáveres. In an interview with Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1973), Onetti talked of this apparent anomaly, saying: ‘Yo estaba escribiendo Juntacadáveres y la llevaba más que mediada cuando de pronto, por una de ésas (uno puede tener cosas detestables), hice una visita a un astillero que existía en Buenos Aires …’ [‘I was writing Juntacadáveres and was more than half way through when suddenly, in one of those moments (we all have those terrible moments), I visited a shipyard which was in Buenos Aires …’]. The image of the shipyard caught his imagination to such an extent that he left off writing Juntacadáveres and only returned to it after having completed the other novel.

While El pozo is a reflexive, inward-looking work set in an ill-defined urban context, which could almost be any large city in the Western world, Juntacadáveres is situated in a much more clearly defined space. This is Santa María, product of Onetti's imagination, a small, provincial town which first appeared in another of Onetti's novels, La vida breve (1950). At this point, in Juntacadáveres, it has just achieved the status of a city.

There are many links that join Onetti's different works. These occur not only in the repetition of the setting, Santa María, but also in the recurrence of a number of protagonists, perhaps most noticeably the eponymous hero, or anti-hero, of Juntacadáveres, Larsen, who has already appeared briefly in Tierra de nadie (1941) and in La vida breve, and is to reappear in El astillero. Two of the other important protagonists from Juntacadáveres, Jorge Malabia and the doctor, Díaz Grey also recur in Onetti's works.

This practice creates a kind of self-referentiality, and brings to mind the use of this same device by nineteenth-century writers, particularly Galdós, and the French Naturalist, Zola.