[In the following essay, Lértora addresses Donoso's questioning of the traditional functions of narrative fiction in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnival.]

A characteristic trait of the narrative produced by Spanish American writers like Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Julio Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, M. Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso, is its attempt to explore human experience by way of the secret codes associated with the instincts, the unconscious and magic. The discourse that founds these narratives is situated in the labyrinthic space of the characters' consciousness. Characters are no longer conceived as representatives of social class or as psychological types, but as subjects of inner conflicts for which they cannot always find lucid or logical understanding or expression. Consciousness is assumed as chaos; it has its corollary in the language that expresses it, whose categories contradict the rational, “objective” thinking of a positivistic discourse in order to explore a new “logic” that, as paradoxical as it may seem, has its constantly changing center in human ambiguity. There is where this new coherence dwells, in the inner space created by new, sometimes dizzying associations that generate new meanings.

The narrative discourse is not monologic and assertive about the world it deploys, but polyphonic (in Bakhtin's sense of a “plurality of voices and consciences independent and distinct, expressing different worldviews”). The space of the discourse is shared by multiple narrators (or different and contradictory manifestations of one consciousness) that sustain different view points without a prevalent enunciating instance (or authoritarian narrative voice) that would sanction one particular discourse as carrier of the truth about the represented world. This multiplicity of discourses is yet another expression of the fundamental ambiguity that Donosian narrative develops and that has as a corollary the manifold or labyrinthine confusion of personal identity.

To this consideration of human being, unreachable in its complexity, corresponds a treatment of a narrative time that, heavily influenced by Henri Bergson's theory, flows and stands still at the same time. A broken chronology, inconstant flow, that disperses itself repeatedly, is consonant with the nature of the human situations it narrates: time and space are conceived as inseparable entities, constituting, as Bakhtin defines it, the chronotope. It is in this coordinate that José Donoso's narrative should be placed.

From the outset Donoso's narrative fiction has challenged the institutions and conventions that regulate language and determine our response to it. Even in such early works as “The Blue Woman” and “The Poisoned Pastries” (both written in English), as also in his collection of short stories—Summertime—, and his first novel, Coronation, a number of characteristic concerns begin to appear.

These early works deploy a constellation of recurrent meanings, which are also present in the later works, according to which the world is perceived as ominous, deteriorating, mad, grotesque. These categories signal the fundamental precariousness of the world and of human existence. They form the basis of a nihilism that finds expression in the merciless destruction of myths and beliefs which are customarily introduced in order to hide from us the tragic ambiguity of the human condition.

In Donoso's narrative, human relations and social institutions are considered by means of a discourse which finds, in the rupture of conventions, its best definition. In Donosian fiction characters who defend (and believe in) an apparent order of the world are relentlessly destroyed. Tragedy is brought on by the search for rational meaning in a world dominated by instinct and irrationality. The world is inevitably destined to end in the decadent, the absurd and the abominable, the zones whence characters derive their definition and destiny. The tragedy of human being is basically provoked by an obstinate search for a rational explanation in a world in which the instinctual and irrational prevail.

Already in Coronation, with its grotesque and carnivalesque ending (the crowning of a dying crazy old woman by her servants who dress her as a Queen), Donoso's narrative sets itself apart from the characteristic traditional realism of the previous generation of Latin American novelists. It explores yet other existential dimensions which place the fiction in a marked frame of irrealism, penetrating reality from a new, obverse perspective. Another work entitled This Sunday subverts the interior consciousness of its characters while revealing their degraded existence and their anguish before the terror which alienates them from the world they inhabit. Later works would refine tendencies that are unmistakably a part of Donoso's distinctive voice and vision.

Given the nature of the world he depicts, the exasperating quality of his narrative situations, and the ambiguous condition of his characters, the Donosian narrative is connected in a decisive way to the carnivalesque tradition, with all it contains of spectacle, transgression, fragmentation, transvestism, defiance of all rules and hierarchies, inversion of whatever is established; in sum, le monde á l'envers. That is why, in Donoso's fiction, antithesis and parody are central figures. Certain categories of the carnivalesque, again as formulated by Bakhtin,¹ are central to the understanding of this aspect of Donoso's narrative: “eccentricity, like intimate relations, is a special category for perceiving the carnivalesque nature of the world; it allows itself to open up (and to express itself in concrete form) to all that is normally repressed […] It is necessary to add another category, that of profanity, sacrilege, and the whole system of debasement, carnival mockery, and the inconveniences having to do with generational forces of the land and of the body, the parodies of texts and sacred words.”

El lugar sin limites² represents a considerable breakthrough for Donoso into the realm of the carnivalesque as described by Bakhtin. Its pessimistic portrayal of the condition of personal existence through the presence of the absurd and the total disintegration of the self goes further than his earlier works in its depiction of a world corroded in all its components. This novel is itself an anguished metaphor of an inverted utopia, an impossible paradise without God, love or solidarity; it is a version of a lost Paradise, or the antibiblical prediction.

Desecration in the novel works at all levels: that of the body, of identity, and of the official discourse that attempts to impose a false sense of order and generosity. The novel depicts the inversion (which along with transvestism and antithesis are, at the figurative level, its basis) of all social roles, and bitterly shows the absurdity of absolutes.

By showing the impossibility of categorically limiting dichotomies such as man/woman, good/evil (which in Donoso's earlier works functioned as structuring principles based on a clear appearance/reality opposition), El lugar sin limites presses towards a radical perception of the ambiguity which, for Donoso, is essential to the human condition. There is no one identity; there is no authenticity; we are all fragments, pieces, a human kaleidoscope.

This conception generates narrative structures without center, works in continuous self-transformation and mutation, and a discourse in constant displacement that shows the emptiness of everything, the nothingness which finds its greatest expression in The Obscence Bird of Night. In this work, the reader cannot differentiate between what is dream or hallucination, “reality” or fantasy; between what supposedly has taken place, and what can only be conjectured. This is a novel in which Donoso's grotesque realism achieves the standard defined by Bakhtin: “The images of the Romantic grotesque,” Bakhtin writes, “usually express fear of the world and seek to inspire their reader with this fear”; “madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation” and “discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads men out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity of the indisputable and stable.”³ Donoso's obsession with the diffuseness of individual identity gives shape to an alienating view in which the monstrous and the obscene, ritual and magic, regularly interact with objective reality.⁴

The novel depicts a world of hallucinatory indeterminacy, of constant interruption of narrative sequences, the elimination of absolute dichotomies, so that the “same” and the “other” complement each other, “are” each other. The rupture of chronology, and the total elimination of the narrator-protagonist-witness are but components of a relentless procedure in terms of which reality and fantasy freely intermingle. This is, of course, also the case for much contemporary Latin American fiction, a tendency described by the labels of “Magical Realism” or the “Fantastic.”

In this novel reality is perceived from its underside, as it were, at a level prior to, even resistant to, that of coherent formulation. It depicts profanation of the body, or identity, but also profanation of any official language that attempts to impose the appearance of order, of harmony, of human generosity. Chaos rules, relentlessly producing substitutions, transformations, and distortions of personality. “El Mudito” is the unreliable narrator, character and witness of different stories that have, as a common element, ambivalence and sequential instability. Inversion, transvestism and transgression are structuring categories of the novel; accordingly, the configurating narrative discourse is also ambiguous, the “other side” of what traditionally constitutes narrative discourse. In The Obscene Bird of Night the reader has no way to formulate valid reading hypotheses, or to come up with definitive answers to the questions raised. Everywhere the reader is confronted by narrative procedures that interrogate themselves and continue to open up disturbing questions.

The Obscene Bird of Night expresses a deeply pessimistic conception of the world and of human being as essentially anchored in the absurd. The ceaseless, maze-like changes in spatial structure are just one more manifestation of the novel's lack of center; the subject of discourse is plural; in the discourse there is always a displacement of center. If there is any order in the novel, it is of a precarious sort whose fragile membrane is constantly threatened. At best, we are given an illusory, transitory order which in the end cannot sustain itself. Most of the story corresponds to the delirious inner discourse of the narrator-protagonist-witness, a discourse delivered without sequential organization and originated from different levels of a fragmented inner consciousness, the reflection of a disintegrated identity. Donoso creates a series of substitutions at both the level of énonciation and the level of énoncé (—Humberto Peñaloza/writer/secretary/the seventh hag/giant head of papier maché/son of Iris Mateluna/dog of Iris Mateluna/“imbunche”/light ashes dispersed by the wind—) so that the subject of the narrative enunciation is never fixed, and the narrative discourse does not have a stable generating center. Julia Kristeva explains this narrative feature when she says that “The mechanism of this mutation is insured by a shifter or specific connector: the MASK, which is the mark of alterity, the rejection of identity”.⁵ Bakhtin claims that the mask is related to “the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries.”⁶

In The Obscene Bird of Night, the mask does not have a single specific symbolic value; it does not constitute a concrete entity. It gives way to other masks but there is no concrete personality at the end of this permutation process, no unique or authentic identity. As Donoso puts it: “It is my obsession with the no unity of human personality. Why am I so interested in disguises? Because they are ways of dissolving the unity of human being, of undoing the psychological unity, that horrible myth we have invented”.⁷

This view of human life as fragmented is sharply shown in Sacred Families. In “Chatanooga Choo Choo” the characters are like manikins whose faces can be erased and later be painted in different ways ad infinitum, and whose limbs can be assembled and disassembled whichever way one wants. In “Gaspard de la nuit,” the main character exchanges his identity with a clochard of identical appearance, thus losing his own identity while “the other” is now “himself”. With this, Donoso expresses his rejection of the myth that assures the unity of the self and emphasizes, instead, dispersion and ambiguity as main features of our condition.

By refusing to acquiesce in a stable image of apprehensible reality, Donoso's narrative questions the mimetic nature of fiction in general, and poses new ways to explore its possibilities. One interesting aspect of the larger theoretical problem is nicely signalled in The Obscene Bird, where the character “El Mudito” (“The Mute”) is the narrator; but as his words can't be spoken, there can be no communication. And if that is so, can there be narration? At this level the Obscene Bird stands as a metaphor of the impossibility of conveying deep inner experience, the experience of an identity in crisis, for example. What seems real is narrated from the other side of language, not from the side that “tells” but from the side that cannot “tell,” that can give at most only an incomplete view of what we might call “Reality.”

By denying the traditional mimetic condition of narrative, Donoso seeks to convey what is essentially a project of liberation or, in bakhtinian terms, the “carnivalesque spirit”: “The carnival-grotesque form exercises the same function: to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted. This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.” It is this freeing of the individual from the stifling weight of conventions, from the rigidity and falseness of institutionalized rituals, a salient aspect of Donoso's fiction, which finds its best expression through a discourse that seeks to break away from that other discourse, generated from power, that presumes to hold the truth.

The image of power and its carnivalesque transgression is the organizing principle of A House In The Country. The novel is organized by means of a narrative-authorial discourse that attempts to control all components of the represented world, but which the fiction itself contradicts. Complementary to this discourse there is another, multilevel discourse, which gives the novel a polyphonic structure, generated by different groups of characters. Characters are organized in a series of circles, or rings, which in turn correspond to the structures of power in the society; accordingly, their discourses represent the variety of social discourses, the social heteroglossia. The novel becomes, then, the space in which different discursive practices meet. The old members of the Ventura family, representative of the old aristocracy, owners of the gold that they exchange for money to foreign investors, are at the outer circle. Inside this hierarchical ring we find the younger thirty-three Ventura cousins, who already are, in essence, a micro version of what they will be when they grow up: just like the old Venturas. At the time the story takes place, they plan an endless game whose title corresponds to Valéry's well known line: “La marquise est sortie á cinq heures.” Among them, there are transvestites and homosexuals, some sadistic, some greedy, in anticipation of what their life will be.

The next circle consists of the servants who, by not owning anything (not even their lives), have no identity; they are anonymous to the Venturas, and they are “recognized” only by the function they have in their domestic tasks. However they do have some power: to watch the children after a certain hour at night and punish those who are caught breaking the house rules.

House In The Country is the space whose limits separate two worlds, two intertwined social orders, generating a chaotic rebellion which is quickly quelled, and whose end is also the dissolution of an aristocratic dynasty which gives birth to another that, in turn, destroys the former. This example of social cannibalism belies the standard understanding of cannibalism used by the aristocracy as a way of reinforcing its power. Ironically enough, the so-called “cannibals” of the novel, who constitute the last of the three “circles” of characters, are revealed to us late in the novel as “vegetarians.”

House In The Country is a novel open to different readings; it transcends a simplistic interpretation which would bind it, in a mechanical way, to a historical pre-text that might function as its referent; that is to say, to Chilean history after the military coup. Even so there are plenty of “winks to the reader's complicity,” as Cortázar would put it, and a number of “coincidences”: The initials of Adriano Gómara, the doctor being held in a tower for the “insane” and “dangerous,” correspond to the initials of the assassinated President, Allende Gossens; the servants would be the military; the Venturas, the richest of Chilean society; the darkening of the home, an allegory of Chile's isolation, an image of death, etc. More important, the novel symbolizes the structuring of human relations based mainly on the exercise of power at all interpersonal levels. But the different discourses that organize the novel are structured in such a way that ultimately it is the nature of fiction that emerges as the text's final objective. The narrative discourse explores its own structuring possibilities as textual productivity regulated by the needs of writing.

It is this same principle that supports the represented world of La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, and certain novellas included in Sacred Families and Cuatro para Delfina. These are not political texts in any traditional sense. However, they do express both an “historical and ethical responsibility,” quite as Roland Barthes saw it as the task of writing to do. The more overt manifestation of this responsibility is to be found in Curfew, Donoso's latest novel. The action takes place in twenty four hours, and is centered on the wake and burial of Matilde Urrutia, Pablo Neruda's widow. As an allegorical novel, Curfew depicts life in Chile after more than a decade of dictatorship, showing social contradictions, misery, and most importantly, hopelessness. The main character, Mañungo Vera, is a returned exile who embodies many characteristics of the well know composer and singer Victor Jara, brutally assassinated by the Military Junta in the first days of their murderous coup. Here, as elsewhere in Donoso, political concerns are enmeshed in a matrix which contains a range of other issues, equally compelling and disturbing.

Donoso constantly questions the ontological status of fiction and challenges its traditional mimetic function. This questioning informs his conception of reality as incapable of allowing for true insight and of power as the main obstacle to genuine human interaction. The obsession with power, inauthenticity, masquerade, irrationality, and the fragmentary makes for a persistent and painful exploration of the dark side of human existence. The language, which is equal to the large purpose assigned to it, is the final mark of Donoso's mastery and of his commitment to the excesses and obliquities of the carnivalesque.

Notes

1. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais And His World.

2. Since there is no English translation for this novel, or for La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, or Cuatro para Delfina, I refer to their Spanish titles.

3. Bakhtin, Ibid.

4. As Donoso has stated, Ernesto Sábato's work in part influenced him as he was writing The Obscene Bird of Night. Donoso shares with Sábato the notion that the irrational is also a valid aesthetic category. Donoso states that Sábato's On Heroes And Tombs “made me realize that, to attempt to give rational form to something that I was living as an obsession, was a mistake not only of behaviour, but of literature; that the irrational could have the same, or greater, intellectual value than the rational, and sometimes can masquerade as the unclear rational; intelligence and irrationality are not contradictory terms. The irrational, the obsessive may have the significant literary status, that Sábato conferred upon it in On Heroes And Tombs.” José Donoso, Historia personal del Boom.

5. J. Kristeva, The Text of the Novel.

6. Bakhtin, Ibid.

7. “Novel as Happening”, an interview with E. Rodriguez Monegal.

Fernando Alegría (eassay date summer 1992)

[In the following essay, Alegría says that, in his later novel Curfew, Donoso abandons his usual metaphorical technique and offers an obvious condemnation of the Pinochet regime.]

For years José Donoso has beaten the path of metaphor to express his way of feeling and understanding Chile, a path both difficult and dangerous. In a bold effort he produced a beautiful and well-structured synthesis of nostalgia, emotions, and sorrows. It was called A House in the Country. It deeply impressed readers in Spain and Latin America, but Chileans did not seem moved. They were dazzled and amused by the novel; yet they couldn't get over a feeling of playfulness, of clues to be deciphered, and failed to grasp the profound tension that surely seized the author when he opened and closed the doors to his risky maze.

Today Donoso lays cards on the table that the reader will have to stack up again but that in the process will open wounds and leave scars, for Curfew is a detailed account of a love affair with Chile that Donoso held in reserve up to now. But the matter is no longer the loose threads that lead to the ruin of aristocratic families confronted by the onrush of lower-class daring. The uneasiness is of a different kind. The sadness that reverberates like an echo in Donoso's stories here begins to be recognized not in the issue of origins and traditions but in wrongs committed, lack of will, and recent failures in today's Chile.

For those who wonder if Donoso finally makes a pronouncement in this novel on the bleak record of Pinochet's military dictatorship, the answer is loud and clear: not only does he take a stand but states it in the harshest terms. Such a change, which might surprise some of his readers, was to be expected. The general's image—coarse, stubborn, cranky—is crumbling today, at century's end, eaten away from within. The country of Curfew is the survivor of a bloody and brutal nightmare in which everything is possible—torture, disappearance, treason, murder—under the drab cloak of a clever and monstrous lie. Perhaps the important thing is not so much to remember the facts (the media repeats them constantly) but to examine objectively what those crimes have done to the character of the Chilean people as they deal with the crisis. It is in this connection that Donoso abandons his typical metaphoric strategy and confronts the collapse of Chilean society in images and portraits bound to cause a stir—and resentment?—among his compatriots. Let me make clear that I'm not referring to literary clues of the kind proffered by the book's jacket to serve as bait for the reader's curiosity. Donoso is too experienced and skillful to fall into that trap. His portraits are like Picasso's: multiple planes and angles, a nose where one expects an eye, a grill in place of a head of hair, a profile that is not a profile but the smudge of a face, and a resemblance dissolved along collective lines.

Who are the characters, the singer Mañungo Vera, the collector Freddy Fox, the minor poet Don Celedonio, the tragic Judit, the legendary Fausta? Those familiar with Santiago's social and literary menagerie will have a field day identifying them—a somewhat useless pastime. To my mind, it is not the who that matters but the what they represent. Mañungo, for instance, is the artist who lost the motivation and inspiration for rebellion in his years of exile. So much time passed! So many guitars wielded like machine-guns! People got tired, but the charismatic performer grew even wearier, and now he suddenly returns to Chile without knowing the why or the wherefore. He will find the reason—will he ever! He will inadvertently become part of the drama, he will plunge into it, thinking to save himself thanks to his art and his boldness—he, the superstar of guerrilla rock—without realizing that he has fallen headlong into a fight to the death against the dictatorship. And Mañungo dives into it with Judit and Fausta, the ugly duckling Lopita and Don César, and the cherub Jean Pablo. In Chile no one seems to be able to help coming face to face with abuse, derision, the thrust of the knife, or escape hearing the death knell of curfew.

The narrator seems not to take sides. But in his own way he does. He skillfully keeps his distance in “Evening”—one of the three parts of the novel—and a little less in “Night.” In “Morning,” after a scene of torture, imprisonment, and death, the narrator goes along with Judit and joins the resistance. He covers a lot of ground. And he rubricates his commitment with a master stroke: the metaphoric tableau entitled “Chile in Miniature.”

History is smoothly framed by the description of Matilde Neruda's funeral [January 1985-Ed.]. Neruda and Matilde always received José Donoso with a cordial embrace and offered him an unwavering friendship. Donoso witnessed the outrages committed against Matilde and watched her struggle till the end. Matilde and Pablo unwittingly gave the Chilean people the occasion to protest with all their strength and soul and without risking a major confrontation: their funeral in Santiago's General Cemetery. As is well known, Neruda and Matilde are buried in a wall just a short distance from Victor Jara [the popular folksinger tortured and killed by military henchmen in the National Stadium in the hours following the coup—Ed.], in the grounds that elsewhere I've called “the slum of death.” It is the field of the poor, of wooden crosses, red geraniums, and little paper flags.

Donoso gathers his characters in La Chascona, the Nerudas' house at the foot of the San Cristóbal [a hill just blocks from downtown Santiago—Ed.]. There he lays out their lines of communication and alienation; that is the stage for their loving and forgetting, for their disdain and their rebelliousness; there one can measure what's left of the old social classes, and more than one life falls apart as others come together. From there the characters go out wandering through the leafy streets of the Barrio Alto [Santiago's wealthy district—Ed.] surrounded by the fragrance of flowers and watered lawns. They stop off at garbage dumps that once were palaces, share in the tasks of beggars and trash can inspectors, conspire, make love, flee, and disappear. La Chascona is an island: breached, devastated, besieged, defending with invisible weapons the integrity of an already defunct Chile. Its owners don't rest and neither do their living kin. The city is the site of a free-for-all between the living and the dead.

To orchestrate this vast and agitated danse macabre Donoso displays arresting allegories: a hellish interlude in which an aroused pack of street dogs rape an aristocratic but seedy little bitch. Judit saves her by shooting her dead, Judit, who lives in order to avenge her own interrupted violation. A ghost ship, the Caleuche, signals its witchery from the waterways of Chiloé, and a small scale model of Chile, inspired by Walt Disney, shows off next to a Burger King.

The final dialogue between Mañungo and the journalists defines the novel:

“Why did you come back to Chile at this particular time?” the reporters asked.

“To stay here.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

“Didn't you say last night in Neruda's house that your visit would be short because you didn't understand the situation your country was in?”

“Now I understand it.” He thought for an instant and then went on. “I've changed my plans. In any case, after twenty hours in my country, I can assure you that I have never been clearer on any subject than I am on this matter of staying.”

“In order to define your political action?”

“Could be.”

“Armed struggle?”

“No, except in self-defense or to defend someone else.”

“Songs?”

“I'd like that. But who knows if bombs won't turn out to be the only alternative? It's their fault. Because what can we do when they force us into violence by taking away all our hope? I am not justifying bombs, but I do understand them.”

(trans. Alfred MacAdam)

This dialogue defines one novel among others, because there are several novels in Curfew. The main one is explanatory, mournful, and one might say, tough, if it didn't leave such a lump in one's throat.