[In the following essay, Kadir deconstructs the theme of the “other place” in The Garden Next Door, drawing parallels to the work of Dante, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and George Eliot.]

Next door is always in another space, another yearned-for place of the other yearning in perpetual unsituatedness. Writing's difficulty must inevitably be brooked in the writing. The predicament finds no necessary and sufficient conditions of absolution or amelioration in its predication. The assuasive slave does not reside in what is written but in what writing does not give up, in what and where writing does not yield, in the indomitable and untenable otherness that writing insinuates only as trace and never as presence or outright representation. The only hope is a partial and borderline suggestion, a promise that reverberates at the far and always further end(-lessness) of writing's unpredictable alterities. Thus, the passage from the “unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters” (Henry James, Sr.) next door to “the laughter in the garden [of] echoed ecstasy / Not lost, but requiring” (T. S. Eliot) is no less an attempt to indemnify the scriptor's damned project, to recoup the light in the darkness, the dancing in the stillness, the hope in the enervation of hope, the scrawl in the blankness of the page. Donoso's peregrination from the locus damnificus of The Obscene Bird of Night, epigraphized by Henry James, Sr., to The Garden Next Door, punctuated at its pivotal turning point by Eliot, does not figure a felicitous pilgrimage to a locus aomenus that lies beyond the howl of requirements or the unrequited need for ragged salvaging. Writing's personification, as authorial persona or as hapless scribe, is always already circumscribed by a yearning world of writing that will never yet relinquish its differential otherness to the writer's solicitation. Thus, whether walled in, wrapped up, and packaged tightly—as is the case of Mudito the scrivener—or shut out, exiled, kept at voyeuristic distance—as is the writer and would-be novelist Julio Méndez in The Garden Next Door—there is a breach to be brooked, an impossibility to be countenanced, a divide to be negotiated. Traversing from here to there always figures a stray travesty that suspends the goal, extenuates distance, and attenuates direct bearing. The trajectory, then, becomes inexorably elliptical, the path unpredictably misleading.

This is Donoso's itinerary through The Garden Next Door. And his pilgrimage echoes in the citations of its epigraphs the circuitous journey of two wayfarers, Cavafis and James Joyce, two whose Virgilian services Donoso engages with allusive pathos throughout his peregrination. For launching as he does from the nightmarish port of his wakeful history, his exilic wanderings will have taken him by the end of the novel to the mare nostrum's enchanted other shore, “next door” to the indigent home of the Alexandrian poet and its haunted geography. And Donoso's scriptor will have been baptismally immersed and metamorphosed in Ovidian fashion in the mysteries of the Kasbah of Tangier, leaving behind the trace of his impossible novel, the chronicle of its impossibility that elicits the sanction of an ambiguous and androgynous writing as coincidental script, the published novel of the “Glorious” other we retrace in readerly consumption. But if the antipodic mirror of Joyce and Cavafis opens as double door to the antechamber of Donoso's dark wood-become-a-garden-next-door, it is Eliot's Dante that serves as mirrored lamp and supple guidepost in steadying the wayward voyage through a shadowed forest and a sinuous path. And as the enervation courses through néant, through writing degree zero and blankness of the page, the recourse for the energy to salvage the journey citationally harkens to the third part of the second quadrivium from Eliot's Four Quartets. It is here, where the infernal whiteness ogling the scribe darkens to infernal shadow with triple intensity in its incipit and enjambs its first verse with a Stygian verve: “O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark”; there, where the opened abyss of the ensuing verse proffers its ineluctable promise to be won and its unhurried challenge to be vanquished: “The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.”

Donoso's self-conscious evocation of Dante's Eliot in this “middle way”—at the midpoint of his novel (page 111 of the Spanish edition) and in midcareer—enjoins his exilic itinerary to one of exile's most emphatic poets who, banished from his native Florence, would begin “Nel mezzo del camin” (Inferno 1:1) to explore the byways of the wayward path (“la via smarrita” [Inferno 1:3]) in the human comedy's divine way stations, or in “the divine comedy's human leaps and lapses” (the phrasing here belongs to Dante's inimitable translator Allen Mandelbaum), as he went on enduring the salt taste of exile's bread and the vicissitudes of the path that descends and ascends the stairs of others (Paradiso 17:57-60). Eliot's Four Quartets, certainly its “East Coker” evoked by Donoso, is a polyphonous lament in which authorial predicament, historical circumstance, and epigonic anxiety converge into a scribal threnody with incorrigible hope:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres—

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision and feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered …

(“East Coker,” V)

Eliot goes on to end “East Coker” in an encyclical tone whose anaphoric tempo and driving cadenza leave Dante behind to echo in Ecclesiastes, but with a decidedly historical twist which resounds with the baneful circumstances of exilic experience and political trials that perennially haunt the dispossessed other among others' prepossessions. I refer to Eliot's coda here that gives voice to the motto of Mary Queen of Scots in the Tower of London: “In my end is my beginning.”

Donoso's circuitous harkening to the beleaguered Dante and the woeful Mary Stuart through this Eliotic incorporation into the midsection of his novel underscores the emphatically political character of his writing. And by political here we are to understand a highly textured site whose map includes, at once, the politics of writing, the politics of gender, the politics of historical torsions, and the ideological distortions of political power whose self-serving claims displace and ostracize even would-be alterities as insufferable threat. Donoso's Obscene Bird of Night has already dramatized this allegory of power in the juxtapositions of oligarchical privilege to the desultory discards of social dispossession. In The Garden Next Door, he rends the allegorical mask, baring the clef of his roman-fleuve to the point that more than likely proves unbearable for some, not only for politicians and petty dictators, but for stalwart wardens of the literary institutions, as well as for homophobic machos. A writerly text that confronts its world and wordly circumstance, The Garden Next Door indeed unfolds within the reckoning of history's nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus, transposed to the epigrammatic head of Donoso's novel, is still trying to awake. And it unfolds, too, with the almost fateful inexorableness of ancient tragedy which that other Greek, Cavafis, at the epigraphic gateway of this Donoso script stoically embodies as Necessity. Donoso is not oblivious to this political constancy, to the allusive byways plotted by his novels that on the abacus of some might come up redundant. His response lies at the threshold of his Eliotic citation; just where Donoso stops citing, Eliot continues with studied and insistent reiteration:

You say I am repeating

          Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
          Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
          To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
               You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
          In order to arrive at what you do not know
               You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
          In order to possess what you do not possess
               You must go by the way of dispossession.
          In order to arrive at what you are not
               You must go the way in which you are not.
          And what you do not know is the only thing you know
          And what you own is what you do not own
          And where you are is where you are not.

(“East Coker,” III)

Eliot's antithetical enigmas undergo a transformation in Donoso. The Garden Next Door elevates this counterpoint to a high order of desperate intensity, to an instrument of cultural and historical diagnosis, to an austere device of authorial confession, to severe measure for probing the somber intensities of writing's vocation. The soundings of this scrutiny figure an echoic discourse, a heterocosm of crossed antitheses that resound in a mirror: splenetic yet compassionate, melancholy yet desiring, despairing yet auspicious, desolate yet expectant. As more extended antithesis, disconsolate pathos finds its antidote in the manifold otherness of juxtaposition. Disbelieving in the possibility of an apocalyptic absolution, shunning the univocal word of the self-convinced, suspicious of the ideological talisman, the orthodox emblem, the canonical cameo and the unproblematic deliverance they would proffer, Donoso's scripture is hellbent not on resolution but on rummaging, not on sacred salvation but on heterodox salvaging. As such, the site of this writing is a shifting ground, a mobile locus for the convivio of alterities. And the problematic mutability of this restive seeking that always devolves upon exilic shiftlessness finds its animation on the edgy and exercised marginalities of the dispossessed, the contiguities of otherness that, instead of converging, engage in a compensatory exchange of their histories, in a conversative trade in sundry versions of their otherness and its unremitting difference. Thus, the garden next door in the Old World city in the heart of Spain is also the garden at home in the exilic memory of the New World city in Spanish America's Santiago, Chile. “Home is where one starts from,” Eliot avers. But in the beginning is also the end, and in the end is the beginning. Eliot knew the atopicality of the predicament quite well, born as he was in Saint Louis, Missouri, a New World home, traveling as he was to “East Coker,” Somerset Village, England, an Old World home of the Eliots' birth. The alterities are confounded and confounding. Antipodic (mirrored) symmetry implodes, problematically, into the disjunctions of a superimposed filiation that refuses to cohere; the antistrophe denies to be rendered into harmonized epode; the antithesis that stubbornly tries to cling to its adjacency comes up against its indomitableness. The garden next door scurries unremittingly next door; the home garden is no more at home and the next-door garden never has been home. Both are elsewhere, in antithetical filiation through mind's eye and memory's recollection. And the amenity of the genial garden now turns to “unsubdued forest” and “dark wood” where the wolf still howls and the obscene bird chatters once again. Thus, the neat antitheses derail from the straight path, Euclidian parallels flee into random ellipses, ordered dichotomies crisscross helter-skelter opening up to exponential increments of contingency. Within this complex, this novel's Stephen Dedalus—Julio Méndez's uncomprehended and unassimilable son—wanders off into his own creative exile only to haunt his parents' homeless homefront as deracinated and dispossessed supplement, as androgenous ephebe, as ambivalent hermaphrodite and scatalogical jewel out of Cavafis. For Bijou, Méndez's substitute son of ambivalent gender and unpredictable acts, of fathomless yet unassailable vulnerability and invisible resources, floats in randomness and contingency. He bursts on the scene as wayward waif and exile's scapegoat and ends as Virgilian father to his would-be paternal substitute. It is (s)he whom Julio Méndez invokes as psychopomp to guide him in his transformational passage through the infernal other world of the multifarious Kasbah of Tangier, just as he had done previously through the kasbah of Madrid, the multitudinous Rastro. Intrusively mercurial, like his kleptomaniac prototype Hermes, Bijou serves as catalyst in Julio Méndez's transvaluation of his bourgeois values, to the unveiling of the faux-semblants that dissimulate the sanctioned little criminalities of bourgeois decency. It is through this hermaphroditic adolescent, this generational other to the middle-aged Julio Méndez that the latter begins the arduous and often painfully hysterical process of demythologizing the foundational myths in which his middle-class ethos and neuroses find their legitimation. And in a more profound and cataclysmic sense, it is this would-be Rimbaud of the Verlaine-Mathilde triangle, this angelo musicante, as Julio dubs him, who sends a seismic shudder to the complacently self-centered sexuality of Julio and Gloria Méndez's droll marriage (78). Though peremptorily repressed and dismissed, this awakening may well have been, nonetheless, the spark that would lead to Julio's acceptance of his own ambivalent and ambiguous sexuality and to his recognition of the rightful claims of the generic other, of Gloria as legitimate alterity, as real other and superior scriptorial talent. Any recognition of one's creative limitations as a writer figures an agonistic trial, especially exacerbated when coupled with the concession of primacy to the creative powers of the “weaker gender” on the part of a phallocentric agonist at midlife plagued by the insecurities and ambiguities of his own sexuality, as is the case here with Julio Méndez. On this reckoning, the antithetical stress within sexuality and scripture, gender and engendering, writing and authorial potency, serves as the animating force that propels the itinerary of Donoso's novel through the embattled way stations of its cathartic and purgatorial plot.

The Garden Next Door is a chastening scene of writing become a scene of recognition that, in turn, transmutes, again, by brawn of re-incorporation into a scene of writing. It figures a writer's self-recognition in a trial by fire which is the threat of failing potency. At the far end of this alchemical trial, however, Donoso's plot offers no orthodox purities in the “depuration.” One finds, instead, a heterology, a heterodox intermingling of differential multiplicity, of “unnatural” ruptures that transgress received hierarchies of domesticity. And the exercise of writing falls to the subservient other; it devolves upon the dispossessed alterity, as it did once before in the case of Mudito the secretary, amanuensis and general domestic in the institutional hierarchies of oligarchic order. And, as was the case in The Obscene Bird of Night, institutional order(ing) in The Garden Next Door becomes subjected to a politics of substitution through the mediate pressures of writing's agency—the agency of scriptor and of scripture as sundry pharmakos: expiatory sacrifice and witness, martyr and attestor, dependent and scribal deponent. In the earlier work, the institution of power traces a clearer dialectic of antitheticality, rooted, as it is, in the destitution of those who would confer its privilege. Potency, whether sexual, generative, or scriptive, is not a possession but the consequent by-product of dispossession and, as such, its authority lies in the “powerless” other. In The Obscene Bird, the politics of this order finds its dramatic foregrounding, now as discursive predication, now as apostrophe: “[W]itnesses are the ones who have power” (205); “don't leave the room, Humberto, watch me … lend me your envy to make me potent … you're the owner of my potency, Humberto, you took it just as I took the wound on your arm, you can never leave me, I need your envious eyes beside me if I am to go on being a man” (185). And while the privileged apprehend the indispensable nature of the “dispensable” other, the latter is no less cognizant of the authorizing necessity of his otherness: “[S]tripped of everything of the Humberto I used to be, except the still active principle of my eyes. I am just another old woman, Don Jerónimo, I'm Iris's dog, let me rest … I've already served you, being a witness is the same as being a servant” (62); “sew me all up, not only my parched mouth, but also my eyes, especially my eyes, so their power will be buried deep under my eyelids … sew them up, old women, in that way I'll make Don Jerónimo impotent forever” (65).

Now, in The Garden Next Door, the antithesis moves beyond a linear dialectic or, one could say, it becomes truly dialectical in changing to a reversible scripture whose politics of substitution entail a mutual implication, a capability of the pharmakos (writing and scriptor) to author(ize) and usurp the other as the other at once, to privilege the other through a self-effacement which is simultaneously self-privileging of one's own position. In short, a typical strategy of the ironic turn. Within the reversibility of this scriptive convivio, otherness attains to a domesticity of unpredictable exchange that proscribes the possibility of domestication. The scribing “domestic” could well be, through the ruse of indeterminacy, the purveyor of the script for a master(ing) narrative. And what ultimately salvages Donoso's novel from the dirge of splenetic monody is precisely this indeterminate surprise, the irony of a Jamesian turn (Henry, Jr., this time) that catapults the narrative and its history into the “echoed ecstasy” of this oscillation within as well as between otherness. In this emphatically conversative economy of writerly compensation, a process of exchange constantly (re)capitulates writing to its otherness, the novel of the writing and the writing of the novel apprehending each other without monitory apprehensions. I do not mean to imply by this “capitulation” that writing crystallizes into immobile self-seizure whereby the novel in the writing and the writing in the novel mutually grip each other with inextricable and solipsistic stricture. Much to the contrary, the process I describe is indeterminately gripping, one in which every instance of attained security or privilege engenders a dispossession not only of the other but within the “secured” position, within the authorized and authored privilege itself. For, if this scriptive self-seizure figures a self-writing of writing, an “autograph,” autography, as with autobiography, ultimately figures a critique, a critical enterprise and, as such, it is always bent on critical apprehension, always on a course of decision, adjudication, evaluation that does not run, cannot run out its course. The diagnostic project is always that, a dia-gnostic that proscribes a definitive gnosis. By virtue of its analytic task, diagnosis works as “anacalypsis” rather than as “apocalypsis,” as cover-up, that is, rather than as disclosure. As diagnosis, in other words, the critical examination is always augmentative rather than subtractive. It figures a parting discernment that necessarily compounds rather than one that renders a reduction. And as writing, it is by its very nature redactive rather than reductive. In this sense, writing as autograph engenders not only the transgressive frames of the provisional diagnoses it inevitably must transgress, but it becomes generative, too, of a problematic and nonreductionist synonymity between critique and eros—because writing is a desperate demand for love. Certainly so in Donoso and unmistakably in The Garden Next Door, where exilic writing clamors for acceptance by and of the other. (“No necesito su amor para terminar mi novela,” Julio Méndez cloyingly protests at one point [215].) Writing is always exilic by virtue of necessity. Necessarily exilic because it is engendered by an irredressable plaint, an insecure insufficiency with an unrequited necessity to become necessary. Destined to founder in this seeking, writing invariably encounters the greatest necessity of all, impossibility—the impossibility born of betrayal and self-betrayal, the impossibility of decisively and decidably breaching otherness, of comprehending and being comprehended by “next door” into home. If indemnifying acceptance can be an impossibility, there is, of course, the venue of surreptitious usurpation. And this is the recourse adopted by Donoso in The Garden Next Door. But, in the end, this Hermetic strategy proves no less treacherous. (Gloria must write a second novel that “confirms” the present, surreptitious first one. Does a writer ever know which is the “second” novel of confirmation? Is not each one a furtive first novel?) Thus, writing must go on seeking conciliation and indemnity in desultory versions of its own production, a production in which betrayal itself becomes scripted, embedded as a curse on the wandering exile in exile's multifarious contingencies. The Garden Next Door dwells precisely in/on this adversative site of writing's adversity, rehearsing the writer's betrayal by writing's insurmountable demands in the rendering of experience to scripture. Scribing itself entails more than sufficient indomitable adversity to allow for its domestication into instrumentality, into tractable medium for chronicling experience. In the end, as novel, The Garden Next Door does not comprise or circumscribe the novel being rewritten in the novel by the beset Julio Méndez. It is comprised, instead, by the (other) scripture of the other, the writing “next door” inside one's own borrowed home, if you will, that chronicles the vicissitudes of the novel's impossible writing, its precluded completion. We are left, in fact, with the incompletion and the impossibility of the novel being written, with the unbreachableness of Julio Méndez's revisioning and revisions as he goes on to essay endlessly revisionary versions of writing as a professor of literature, as professor of writing's insatiable desire that knows no closures and admits of no indemnity. In this sense, Julio Méndez, the former political prisoner and exiled writer, recapitulates to writing's sententious sentence; he becomes “reconciled” to writing's irreconcilable corpus as yet another reading and writing scrawl. The story he leaves behind is a surreptitious production that displaces him as authorial persona, as will the many turns of textuality that inevitably will have undermined the proprietory authority of his professional/professorial illusions of mastery, turning him out, yet again, into exile's nowhereland. If writing be a demand for love, reading is no less a desperate clamoring to brook exclusion, to breach unbreachable otherness in unrequited yearning. As a professor of literature, Julio Méndez cannot escape this insight. It becomes doubly poignant, then, that he should be reading out loud to Gloria (214-15) the revised versions of his impossible, would-be novel while she, in fact, as it turns out, is the one authoring the novel of his writing's impossibility.

Within the economy of this reversible scripture, the novel we read is the ensuing difference, as in the above-cited enigmas of Eliot's antithetical way stations, that issues from the other's ineluctable intrusion to salvage writing's enterprise. Like Julio Méndez, like his most significant other, like Donoso, we oscillate between the writing's novel and the would-be novel in the writing. Rather than a ruse on the part of a self-privileging authority—authorial or feigned—this differential situation of unsituatedness translates into the fact that we all inhabit (and are inhabited by) a predicament of being caught between alterities, between here and there that leaves us in neither place. It is a volatile habitation, its predicament subject to the contingencies of unpredictable commutation. What Donoso's Garden Next Door does is to allegorically dramatize the allegory of this predicament. And, of course, I consciously emphasize “allegory” in the reiteration, lest we forget the shifting otherness this word's root etymons connote. Need I repeat Donoso's Eliot? I shall repeat Donoso's Eliot:

In order to arrive at what you are not
          You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not

Within Donoso's text, this Eliotic allegory of scurrying finds its echoic parenthesis in another Eliot, George, on the one hand, the other parenthesis being Henry James. For Donoso situates the internal displacements of his novel between Middlemarch and The Spoils of Poynton. And what sustains, literally, materially, his tandem scriptors—the would-be novelist, Julio, and the novelist, Gloria—of his novel is a “tedious translation of George Eliot's Middlemarch, done in tandem with Gloria, a task that seemed eternal, but one which provided a modest but sure income” (13). When, finally, at long length, the reversible significance of this scriptive tandem is revealed by dint of a Jamesian twist, and Gloria's writing that gives voice to Julio's narration displaces the latter altogether from the ruse of narrative performance, then we read: “And while I [Gloria] read and write, he puts the final touches to his translation of The Spoils of Poynton.” And then, in tandem, a self-referential reflection, an autographic-interpretive moment of reflexivity: “Some relationship to the sold Roma home [the family home in Santiago, Chile], whose sale allows us to live a bit better, with the auctioning and dispersal of its furnishings that might be Poynton's? I have read Julio's translation: it is daring, creative, a masterpiece. [¶] While I write this, I see him totally absorbed in its revision” (215).

Sustained by a version of Middlemarch in the beginning, “totally absorbed” into a revision of The Spoils of Poynton in the end, Donoso's ostensible scriptor and his ostensible script straddle in oscillation the vicissitudes of a family romance of Torys and Reformers in political strife, on the one hand, and of the dispersal and dispossession of a homefront and its heirlooms on the other. The first, authored by a woman writer, Marian Evans, with a male persona, George Eliot, becomes incorporated into The Garden Next Door, a novel with a male author and an ostensibly male narrator but with a female scriptor. The second, an equally androgynous script scripted by a Henry James whose authorial gender has its animus in the ambiguities of his own sexual otherness. This, too, subsumed by Donoso into the equivocal ruse of his graphic figures and into the ambiguity of Donoso's/Gloria's revising and “revised” scriptor. The Garden Next Door, the garden next door itself, comprises a daring embrace equally of the other and of its parentheses, allowing a suggestion of the multifarious other to which it situates itself in parenthetic relation. In that topical relationship, its problematic, internal otherness inverts its parentheses, turning its parenthetical bookends outward, opening up and up to a writing that endlessly seeks to unveil what may lie next door, and beyond the next.