[In the following essay, Rojo discusses the survival of the individual in the seemingly hopeless world of The Obscene Bird of Night.]

From time to time, in accordance with the prescription of the majority of the world's religions, all believers must perform a ritual of self-annihilation. This has to do, of course, with the enactment of death. Accordingly, practices such as fasting, sexual abstinence, physical penitence, silence, worldly withdrawal, and meditation often play a role. In general, these practices not only limit to a greater or lesser degree the natural appetites of the body, but also affect the social activities of the individual in everything from work to recreation. For a period of time the believer is supposed to remain in a state of limbo in which he negotiates with death, and one can call this Lent, Sabbath, or Ramadan.

After this metaphysical plunge the pious individual emerges convinced of the futility of worldly values and fortified in his faith. Though results are not usually enduring, the various religions provide innumerable opportunities to strengthen the soul in the daily renouncement of small pleasures and worldly honors. Any hour of any day can be used for prayer, penance, sacrifice, mystic trances, or meditation. In the Catholic faith one may recall the spiritual exercises instituted by Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

Of course not all of humankind believes in an afterlife; there are those who are atheists or agnostics, and those who subscribe in only a nominal fashion to some religion or belief. By this I mean to say that millions and millions of human beings do not feel obligated by any religious code to simulate death, in even the most trivial way. And yet all simulations of death, including deep reflections on the subject (which implies dying a little), are productive experiences. In effect, one must agree with the ancients that to submerge oneself under the crust of the earth, if possible while fasting, skeptically leaving behind the bulky garments of vanity, pride, and self-importance—even if only for a short time—will be more enlightening than any moral harangue arising from the fear of divine punishment. To approach death without the hope of eternal life, and brush against the ashen folds of its cloak as a ritual initiation to a higher plane of earthly existence, is the best moral exercise that anyone could undertake if one is sincere.

If one accepts this proposition, what incentive do the incredulous have to experiment with this useful and economic initiation? Here literary creation doubtless performs an important role, because it provides a half-dozen models that can successfully substitute for the most demanding spiritual exercises. Notice, from the Bronze Age to the present, the enormous number of heroes and heroines who descend to gloomy depths and later resurface in the warm light of victory. Or the affectionate feelings that characters like Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia arouse by the mere fact of having lived exemplarily in their madness, which is to say, in death. Or, beginning with the minotaur and ending with the lugubrious entities of Stephen King, the fascination that otherworldly creatures have for us, as if those who traffic in them are part of an unmentionable pact. Or the disturbing compassion we bestow on human freaks, no matter how low their condition. Isn't having been born Quasimodo a case of starting life half dead from the beginning? Or the suspicious tenacity with which we read expiatory books like Crime and Punishment and Under the Volcano, whose realism is perhaps more awful than any fantastic monstrosity ever imagined. Anyway, to continue, it's obvious that without being aware of it, the most skeptical reader has died and revived to his heart's content through the medium of literary catharsis. And of course for those who only read the newspaper, there are always the radio, movie, and TV versions.

In any case, world literature produces every now and then truly exceptional works within this popular and varied genre. In my experience as a reader, for example, I treasure the readings of the first editions of Nausea, Curzio Malaparte's Skin, The Tin Drum, The Subterraneans, The Plague, and The Obscene Bird of Night. If including this last work leaves me open to a charge of regionalistic or linguistic chauvinism, I can only respond sincerely that I have never read any book by a contemporary author more devastating than that novel by José Donoso.

On what do I base my judgment? Well, I think it's a matter of density, of saturation. This in the sense that Donoso's book superimposes several of the aforementioned models to induce in the reader the imaginary experience of self-annihilation. To begin with, there is the epigraph chosen by Donoso to inform the reader from where he took the title of his novel and, in passing, to prepare him for one of the most anguished journeys to nowhere ever seen in the history of literature. The quote isn't brief (it comes from a letter by Henry James, Sr., to his sons Henry and William) but it is necessary to recall it in its entirety to allow us to approach the novel productively:

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

The remaining 500-plus pages of text should be read as a pragmatic reflection on James Senior. If a reader, through excessive haste or carelessness, misses that passage, he could end up thinking that Donoso's novel is unnecessarily long, that it is repetitive, that its settings hardly differ among themselves, that the subject matter lacks suspense and excitement, that its characters are intolerably paradoxical, that its narrative structure is chaotic, and that its discourse is abstruse. However, it would never enter the reader's mind that he had just finished reading a minor work: frivolous, badly written, unoriginal, in short, forgettable. It is indeed possible that the reader will arrive at an unjust conclusion: too bad about that book; it could have been a masterpiece but the editor wasn't very good. Of course, if the reader considers the James quote as the first paragraph of Donoso's text, he will know very well what to expect. He will know that he has just entered Diogenes' tub, where he will have to accommodate himself for several days in order to meditate upon the irreparable indecency of the world and of that which we call reality—that abject convention we use to deny ourselves the most elementary answers: where did we come from? why are we here? where are we going? This takes for granted that the reader “has reached his intellectual teens” and “is capable of spiritual life.”

In any case, Donoso connects the epigraph with a shadowy antechamber to facilitate the reader's entrance to the rigorous labyrinth that is the novel. In effect, upon turning the page, one suddenly encounters the death of the aged Brígida, and one has no option but to attend her wake in the chapel or the House of Spiritual Exercises. Forty decrepit old women, three nuns, and five orphan girls live there. But, most importantly, the principal character, Humberto Peñaloza, lives there as well. His tortured body will serve as a sarcophagus for the readers both male and female through the grace of catharsis. It is obvious in the previous sentence that I have emphasized the idea that the reader's gender is not important. Either sex will be able to identify with the protagonist. The same thing happens with particulars such as age and profession because Humberto Peñaloza, like the narrator in Borges's “Lottery in Babylon,” has performed the most diverse moral roles (victim, executioner, sinner, penitent) and has worn the masks of man, baby, crone, giant, deaf-mute, and writer. In short, Humberto Peñaloza is everything and nothing, and his physical disappearance in the last night of the novel—a necessarily eschatological night—symbolizes the ethical initiation of which I have spoken, beyond which the individual has to go on living with the gnawing certainty that nobody knows anything and that life is nothing more than this: the existential frustration of knowing that nobody knows anything, beginning with oneself. Once the anguish has reached this extreme point, one should reach a kind of hopeless serenity that has favorable repercussions on the individual and, by extension, on society.

In reality, Donoso's novel is an inverted epic where the laurels do not belong to the victor but to the vanquished, to him who knowing from the start that all is lost tries, as Ernest Hemingway would say, to give it his best shot. And not to win accolades but for the sake of self-fulfillment. History, of course, counts for naught here since every event, once extracted from its manipulating discourse, lacks all organic meaning. For Donoso, in accordance with his fortunate metaphor, history is no longer anything more than a miserable sack stuffed with old newspapers whose photos and headlines tell us nothing.

To comment at length upon what happens in the novel goes beyond the intent of this quick rereading. Nevertheless, I would have to point out that the paradoxical behavior of the characters is due to the fact that in the text several worlds—or, if one prefers, spaces of seclusion—coexist: for example, the space of the Rinconada and that of the House of Spiritual Exercises, each with its own language and narrative model. The first is a kind of bestiary full of deformed and lewd people (dwarfs, giants, the grotesquely obese, hunchbacks), nightmarish creatures who drag their monstrosity through the luxurious pavillions and gardens of the place. But the lives of these defective beings are not far removed from our own. In reality, these beings are the moral monsters we carry within, that dark Other that wavers between elemental passions and the grossest sentiments, this perverse and crippled Mr. Hyde whom we do not always succeed in keeping at bay; this obscene bird of night of which James spoke to his sons.

Superimposed on the Rinconada is the House of Spiritual Exercises, a labyrinth of humid cells, tumbledown rooms, and patios full of rubble. At one time it was a structure of piety dedicated to perfecting souls. Now it barely functions as a shelter for a group of invalid and sterile women. In my reading—and possibly in Donoso's as well—these useless cellars that are about to be abandoned symbolize religion. I'm not referring only to Christianity but to any religion or belief, to any hope for a hereafter, or to any faith in a transcendental locus of eternal redemption. One could say that God once lived in these ancient cellars or, rather, someone passing himself off as God, taking advantage of kind souls. But that God, false or inefficient, has died and all that is left are his remains: tattered angels, onearmed virgins, patched sheets, rags, bits of string, burlap bags, old newspapers, broken objects, and leftovers.

Humberto Peñaloza resides simultaneously in both spaces. He suspects he is a sinner but doesn't know what his sin is. His life, minuscule and mediocre, never quite comes together in the eyes of reason; it is a coming and going full of sound and fury signifying nothing. From this precarious observatory Humberto Peñaloza mythicizes reality, that is to say, whatever he doesn't understand inside or outside himself. So his desire to become someone worthy (like Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía) and to be desired by someone estimable (like Doña Inés) not only compels him to live in La Rinconada and in the House of Spiritual Exercises, but also in a third space which, like the others, has its own language and narrative codes: the space of myth. In effect, lost in the night and the turns of an indecipherable labyrinth, Humberto Peñaloza lives the life of the minotaur. As in myth, the notions of time and space are blurred. Furthermore, the characters with whom he interacts allude more to transpersonal symbols than to real people. There inside, in the shadowy passages of the labyrinth, one never quite knows who is who and who is the Other. Consequently, all life is multiple, a sequence of masks that one must put on so that one can try to know oneself better. In the end, with the years and the vicissitudes of life, things seem to become simpler. The masks begin to disappear by dint of resembling themselves. It is precisely at this critical juncture that Donoso's narrative discourse apprehends Humberto Peñaloza. For a moment, the reader who accompanies him in his anguished adventure has the illusion that he is going to emerge from the text with an answer. A futile hope. Suddenly an old woman comes, grabs Humberto Peñaloza by the scruff of the neck, and stuffs him in a burlap sack. She immediately sews the mouth of the sack closed and puts the package in another bag, and so on. Then the old woman throws the bundle on her shoulder and begins to wander about aimlessly. Outside the bundle (which suffocates us and denies us access to any revelation) it is dark and cold. The old woman huddles over a bonfire, falls asleep, and soon everything turns into ashes which the wind disperses. In the end Humberto Peñaloza and the reader are reduced to a black smear on the stones, and the spiritual exercises that Donoso proposes for unbelieving humanity end right here.

Is The Obscene Bird of Night a pessimistic novel? I think not, but one must conclude that it lacks the sugary flavor of metaphysical explanation. Perhaps it could be taken for a pessimistic work if nothing remained of the human being. But something does remain: a black smear that the trip to nowhere does not succeed in blotting out. Well—the reader with certain expectations will say—a black mark and nothing are the same. And I nevertheless would say no, they aren't the same, and I would refer the reader to a curious belief of the Navajo Indians.

This belief or tradition is related to the beautiful blankets that the Navajo weave and that can be purchased in any store specializing in handmade textiles. These Indians believe that the weaver's dedication in carrying out her task is so intense that, thread by thread, her spirit passes into the cloth. So that she won't lose her spirit in the symmetrical labyrinths of the design (which to the Navajo implies losing one's reason) the weaver leaves a loose thread that interrupts the pattern of the cloth in some place. The Navajo believe that this loose thread provides the spirit with an escape route, and thanks to it the spirit can return to the artisan's body. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this belief is that the “lifeline” is, at the same time, the weaver's signature. Naturally one will say that such a practice is useless, given that ultimately the loose thread becomes part of the geometric pattern of the design. But it is also true that the thread, even though it can be read as a necessarily unsuccessful path of escape, also speaks of the individual's desire to leave an identifying mark, a signature, as an irrevocable record of his plan of escape. It is in this sense that I read in the black spot the name of Humberto Peñaloza and also that of the reader.