SOURCE: Oberhelman, Harley D. “José Donoso and the ‘Nueva Narrativa.’” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 9 (1975): 107-17.

[In the following essay, Oberhelman says that Donoso's El obsceno pájaro de la noche shows both a concern for national social problems and an adherence to the so-called “new narrative” of contemporary Spanish American letters which combines realistic and metaphysical elements.]

The latest novel of José Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche, is a complex statement of the metaphysical problems faced by humanity in the twentieth century. Published in 1970 at a time when Chile's political system was turning to state socialism in search of solutions to age-old nagging social and economic injustices, a careful reading of Donoso's text reveals a deep concern for national problems and at the same time marks the author as a major practitioner of the “nueva narrativa” in contemporary Spanish American letters.

Donoso, whose Coronación (1958), Este domingo (1966), and El lugar sin límites (1967) announced his principal theme, the inner world of the collapsing Chilean oligarchy, achieves a masterpiece of major proportions with El obsceno pájaro, a work which required some eight years to produce. It is clearly within the current of the innovative Spanish American novel of today in its cataloguing of the decline of bourgeois systems and values and in its creation of a new realism based on multiple mutations of the author's (and the reader's) creative imagination. There is a double axis on which Donoso's concept of reality is based; the novel moves simultaneously on an exterior and an interior plane, leading eventually to a negation of both levels of action. A new socio-economic system must replace the exterior reality of Chilean life just as the negation of the traditional protagonist points the way toward new novelistic forms.

The great complexity of El obsceno pájaro offers the critic a variety of approaches to its interpretation. The present study will limit itself to a consideration of the aforementioned dual aspects of exterior and interior reality which form the framework, as it were, of this innovative work. Action in the novel is fragmented so that the reader must constantly reconstruct the basic thread: a history in retrospect of the wealthy, landed Azcoitía family and especially of the family's charitable asylum for aging women, the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación de la Chimba. The origin of the Casa is lost in centuries of myth and folklore, but it was most certainly founded as a refuge by eighteenth century progenitors of the Azcoitía family for their only daughter who was described diversely by regional folklore as a witch, a deeply religious saint, or the mother of a bastard child. Through various generations the Casa remained in the hands of the family's male heir while the Church enjoyed usufructuary rights to the institution. Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía and his wife, Inés Santillana de Azcoitía, are the twentieth century heirs to the refuge and its forty old women, three nuns, and five orphans.

A second important setting in the novel is La Rinconada, Don Jerónimo's own artificial world created as a home for his son who was born a distorted monster. La Rinconada has a complete staff of servants, administrators, workers, and a doctor, who themselves are all carefully selected monsters. Boy, the Azcoitías' only issue, is therefore to grow up in a hermetically sealed environment where the grotesque is the norm, and where his own horribly deformed face and body will never cause him unhappiness or anxiety.

If the principal purpose of the contemporary Spanish American novel is to chronicle the profound transformations which are causing a restructuring of a whole society,”¹ then this latest novel of Donoso fully measures up to the assignment. While it fails to offer dramatic linguistic innovations such as those seen in Julio Cortázar's Rayuela and Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres, it does create an effective picture of the decay of an entire society similar in many respects to the vision of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez and of Comala in Juan Rulfo.

Chile at the time of the action of most of the novel, roughly the decade prior to 1970, was still effectively in the hands of an oligarchy, which in the words of the author had been “incapaz de reunir más que mugres aquí.”² If the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales is to be considered the primary legacy of the Azcoitía family, this affirmation is entirely apropos. The decrepit existence of the forty old women, whose interminable monologues and dialogues fill nearly two hundred pages, can be reduced to the musty packages containing their nondescript earthly possessions which each jealously guards beneath her bed. Hanging over the Casa is the threat that Don Jerónimo may never produce a male heir and that at any time he may decide to demolish this monument to his family's eleemosynary concern and subdivide and sell the land it occupies.

There are rays of hope, however. Inés, Don Jerónimo's wife, is in Rome, ostensibly for the purpose of convincing the Holy See that the Azcoitía ancestor for whom the institution was originally founded should be beatified and ultimately canonized. Such action would most certainly save the Casa, and at the same time it would seem appropriate for a family whose right to a giant's share of Chile's land and wealth is considered divine: “El repartió las fortunas según él creyó justo, y dio a los pobres sus placeres sencillos y a nosotros nos cargó con las obligaciones que nos hacen Sus representantes sobre la tierra. Sus mandamientos prohíben atentar contra Su orden divino …” (Pájaro, p. 174) Rome, nevertheless, fails to grant this signal recognition to the Azcoitía family, which would incidentally have been a boon to Don Jerónimo's candidacy to the national congress.

It is through Don Jerónimo's secretary, one Humberto Peñaloza, that the complicated relationship between exterior and interior reality in the novel comes into focus. Peñaloza is one form of a multiple protagonist whose constant metamorphoses create a series of unusual characters: Mudito, the mute caretaker of the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales; a yellow dog which follows one of the orphans from the Casa, Iris Mateluna, on a series of nocturnal wanderings through the streets of Santiago; Iris Mateluna's “miraculously” conceived baby; one of the old women in the Casa, the seventh in an unholy coterie organized to care for Iris' baby; a humid spot on the wall—the mutations are endless. Other cases of the multiple protagonist will be pointed out later, but the Humberto Peñaloza episode is of special significance in the question of social and economic injustice.

The son of an impoverished elementary school professor, Peñaloza was from the days of his childhood faced with the desire to be “someone,” to escape from the limbo of the masses. But an insurmountable barrier stood between the masses and the Chilean middle class; few were able to reach this promised land where there existed the possibility of a dignified career. Peñaloza vividly recalls the first time he laid eyes on the debonaire figure of Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía shortly after his return from Europe and just prior to his marriage to Inés Santillana. Peñaloza makes the inevitable comparison: “Yo, en cambio, no era nada ni nadie” (Pájaro, p. 105).

It is years later during Don Jerónimo's congressional campaign that the cleavage between the oligarchy and the masses reaches its climax. Peñaloza, now his secretary, accompanies him to a mountain village where the rival Radical party has aroused the miners and where the boxes containing the ballots were stolen during the course of the election. The situation is tense. Don Jerónimo as a representantive of the Conservative party is persona non grata in the village. Violence appears probable as Don Jerónimo takes refuge with his cohorts and secretary behind the doors of the Club Social in the central plaza. The confrontation which follows results in one serious injury: a bullet penetrates Peñaloza's arm.

In the confusion that follows, Don Jerónimo is quick to take advantage of the situation; blood from Peñaloza's wound is liberally applied to his arm. The sight of the “wounded” candidate is enough to quell the forces of rebellion; it is also enough to elect a new senator. Peñaloza views the event as “el momento culminante del poder de una oligarquía que, a partir de entonces, comenzo a declinar.” (Pájaro, p. 105) Donoso in this incident conveys the thesis that the strength of the oligarchy was possible only at the cost of the sacrificial blood of a commoner. But such an unwilling sacrifice would not always rescue Chile's aristocracy.

Humberto Peñaloza, one of the principal forms of the central multiple protagonist, provides an entrée into the vertiginous inner world of Donoso's novel. The almost endless succession of metamorphic changes results in a variety of narrative points of view, all of which ultimately coalesce into a single undefined “yo.” Paralleling these changes is a similar line of development in the multiple character of Inés Santillana de Azcoitía, who throughout her lifetime was so influenced by her mysterious, witch-like nurse, Peta Ponce, that she eventually assumed the personality of the person who ultimately destroyed her mind. Donoso chronicles the change in the following manner: Inés, Inés-Peta, Peta-Inés, Peta, Peta Ponce. The confusion of characters reaches its zenith in the mysterious process of the procreation of Boy, the monstrous “version of chaos” who is to continue the noble Azcoitía lineage. Jerónimo and Inés are unable to bear a child without the intervention of a variety of “substitute” progenitors. At one point Humberto Peñaloza and Peta Ponce serve as the physical agents of Jerónimo and Inés in the act of conception. Others also intercede in the act; Iris Mateluna, the promiscuous orphan in the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales, lends her body as a place for the unborn Boy to grow. Mudito, the caretaker who is really another form of Humberto Peñaloza, serves both as witness to Iris Mateluna's participation in the “miraculous” conception of Boy and as the suspected father of the child. Near the end of the novel it is even announced that “El Mudito es el hijo (de Iris Mateluna) que estuvimos esperando tanto tiempo y nació hace tanto tiempo que ya no hay nadie aquí en la Casa que recuerde cuándo nació. …” (Pájaro, p. 512).

Such a juxtaposition and multiplicity of characters results in a confused, schizophrenic world of inner reality. Inés suffers from advanced schizophrenia as the novel ends, and Boy is clearly the deformed product of a chaotic society in the last stages of decay. In a sense La Rinconada, the artificial world in which Boy is to lead a Segismundo-like existence, is a universe in miniature which should be viewed as a copy of Chilean society. Its staff of carefully chosen monsters duplicates the political and administrative bureaucracy which dominated Chile under the hand of the oligarchy. Donoso meticulously delineates the guidelines which governed the special world enclosed within the walls of La Rinconada: “El niño debía crecer encerrado en esos patios geométricos, grises, sin conocer nada fuera de sus servidores, enseñańdole desde el primer instante que él era principio y fin y centro de esa cosmogonía creada especialmente paraél … era una sola su exigencia: que Boy jamás sospechara la existencia del dolor y del placer, de la dicha y de la desgracia, de lo que ocultaban las paredes de su mundo artificial, ni oyera desde lejos el rumor de la música” (Pájaro, p. 235).

Under the careful tutelage of Emperatriz, a distant relative of Don Jerónimo, the whole enterprise moved ahead despite the fact that the directress was a dwarf with an enormous head and distorted features, and her cohorts were the most gruesome collection of monsters ever assembled. In such a hermetically sealed world of the grotesque, Boy theoretically would never recognize his own deformities.

Donoso's creation of La Rinconada with its false system of values and goals is a direct attack on a system of government which exploits the unfortunate masses as a foundation for its power. Boy ultimately escapes from La Rinconada and discovers for himself the joys and sorrows of the world. The monsters realize that they have all been victimized by Don Jerónimo, but in the end it is Don Jerónimo himself who is a victim of his own creation, drowning in a lagoon on the grounds of La Rinconada, probably as a result of too much drinking at a masquerade ball organized by Emperatriz.

The national consternation caused by the death of Don Jerónimo is reminiscent of the turmoil which followed the death of Mamá Grande in the celebrated short story by Gabriel García Márquez. His death also represents the end of an era in Chilean politics, and at the same time it heralds the termination of the power of the oligarchy. The relationship of the event to a masquerade ball underlines a secondary motif in the novel: the need for masks to establish the idea of personal values in an impersonal world. Perhaps the most cogent example of this idea is in the form of a papier-mâché giant's head which makes the rounds of the district near the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales. Originally a commercial advertising stunt, the head falls into the hands of neighborhood boys who acquire a feeling of strength and manhood by wearing it. Iris Mateluna on her nightly wanderings near the Casa readily succumbs to the amorous advances of anyone who wears it. Its ultimate destruction leads to the end of Iris's promiscuity, and at a later point in the novel the lack of masks leads Humberto Peñaloza to question the belief in a God “que fabricó tan pocas máscaras, somos tantos los que nos quedamos recogiendo de aquí y de allá cualquier desperdicio con que disfrazarnos para tener la sensación de que somos alguien. …” (Pájaro, p. 155).

Following the death of Don Jerónimo, the announcement of plans to demolish the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales marks the final negation of the legacy of a decadent aristocracy. Significantly, the occupants of the Casa are to be moved to bright, new quarters made possible by the bequest of one of the late residents in her final will. This monument to the Azcoitía family and to the memory of their ancestor for whom it was first constructed is doomed to die amid the rubble and dust of the Casa itself. Coupled with the symbolic destruction of the physical representation of external reality is a most surprising final scene which negates the multiple “yo,” i.e., the narrator of the novel. Abandoned in the vacated Casa, the narrator is placed in a series of sacks, all of which are carefully sewn shut. “Me meten dentro del saco. Las cuatro se arrodillan alrededor mío y cosen el saco. No veo. Soy ciego. Y otras se acercan con otro saco y me vuelven a meter y me vuelven a coser … este paquete soy yo entero, reducido, sin depender de nada ni de nadie. …” (Pájaro, p. 525).

Donoso reduces the inner level of reality in the novel, the first person narrator, to the physical limitations of a bundle which a nameless old woman carries from the Casa into the brisk winter night. The final action develops under a bridge where a fire has been built to warm the bodies of a group of impoverished drifters. The old lady offers the contents of her sack to increase the fire: sticks, boxes, stockings, rags, newspapers, trash. Such is the ultimate form of Donoso's protagonist, and the destruction of inner reality is complete in the ashes of a sputtering fire.

In El obsceno pájaro de la noche Donoso reaches a new level of achievement within the framework of the “nueva narrativa.” His use of fragmented and distorted protagonists parallels his destruction of temporal unity. He accuses Peta Ponce of taking the same liberties with time which he himself takes in the novel: “Las viejas como la Peta Ponce tienen el poder de plegar y confundir el tiempo, lo multiplican y lo dividen, los acontecimientos se refractan en sus manos verrugosas como en el prisma más brillante, cortan el suceder consecutivo en trozos que disponen en forma paralela, curvan esos trozos y los enroscan organizando estructuras que les sirven para que se cumplan sus designios.” (Pájaro, pp. 222-223) The negation of time is an aspect of the more general negation of reality which abounds in the novel. For Donoso the complete rejection of the traditional social and economic order points the way toward a “new” reality; it is suggested that the new home to which the inhabitants of the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales are to move is symbolic of the new social and economic systems which must replace the decadent past.

In an interview granted by Donoso shortly after the completion of El obsceno pájaro, the novel is described as a “happening” both for its author as well as for its readers. “Yo no escribí esta novela. Esta novela me escribió a mí. No podía elegir una estructura determinada porque las estructuras me estaban eligiendo a mí.”³ As is so often the case with the contemporary Latin American novel, the work itself takes on life and rushes forward spontaneously to ends not originally envisioned by its creator. Ernesto Sábato describes a similar experience in the genesis of his own works. “Y así sucede que los planes que inevitablemente empezamos haciendo para escribir, que en buena medida son cerebrales, terminan por ser arrollados por los personajes, que una vez en marcha cobran vida propia. Es muy difícil decir, en tales condiciones, lo que una novela significa en cada uno de sus aspectos, aún para el propio autor.”⁴ What is certain is that Donoso in no instance seeks to present his protagonists as single psychological unities. His statement, “… soy una persona y soy treinta,”⁵ clarifies the reasoning behind the multiplicity of characters in this work, which goes back directly to Carlos Fuentes' Aura for a model of the metamorphic protagonist. As readily admitted by Donoso, this novel would not have been possible if he had not previously read Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Julio Cortázar, José Lezama Lima, and Mario Vargas Llosa. El obsceno pájaro is, in a sense, a synthesis of the new realism described by Fuentes in the following terms: “Lo que ha muerto no es la novela, sino precisamente la forma burguesa de la novela y su término de referencia, el realismo, que supone un estilo descriptivo y sociológico de observar a individuos en relaciones personales y sociales.”⁶ Fuentes' description of the death of traditional realism aptly describes the metaphysical contents of El obsceno pájaro de la noche.

Notes

1. For a more complete statement concerning this point see the prologue to Luis Harss, Los Nuestros (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana 1969), pp. 9-50.

2. José Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1970), p. 26. Subsequent references to the same edition of this novel are cited in the text itself.

3. Donoso, “José Donoso: La novela como ‘happening.’ Una entrevista de Emir Rodríguez Monegal sobre El obsceno pájaro de la noche,” Revista Iberoamericana, 76-77 (julio-diciembre 1971), 518, 527.

4. Ernesto Sábato, El escritor y sus fantasmas (Buenos Aires: Aguilar, 1964), p. 20.

5. Donosa, “La novela como ‘happening.’ …,” p. 521.

6. Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1969), p. 17.