SOURCE: Bacarisse, Pamela. “El obsceno pájaro de la noche: The Novelist as Victim.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 1 (January 1986): 82-96.

[In the following essay, Bacarisse examines Donoso's narrative devices to discover the relation of the narrator to the author, as well as the dominant emotional state in El obsceno pájaro de la noche.]

… es como si él mismo se hubiera perdido para siempre en el laberinto que iba inventando lleno de oscuridad y terrores con más consistencia que él mismo. …¹

One of the fundamental problems when reading José Donoso's El obsceno pájaro de la noche is that of sorting out what the author himself has referred to as the ‘múltiples versiones’ (p. 356) of what we are told and, even more important for the purpose of this essay, of discovering who is narrating them. Nothing can be sure. The ‘voice’ of the apparent narrator—el Mudito—is, so to speak, scrambled in order to defy recognition and his various chameleon-like personalities make the task of identification all the more difficult. Is he Humberto Peñaloza? Was he ever an author? Did he once control the closed colony of freaks called the Rinconada? Is he, in fact, deaf and dumb? Was he Jerónimo de Azcoitía's secretary? Was his father a primary school-teacher? Were he and his sister brought up by their parents in one of the poorer suburbs of the city? Or was he a foundling, brought into the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación de la Chimba to be looked after? Is he a hunchbacked, harelipped dwarf? Was he actually born in the Casa? Was he hawked around as a child by beggars who found his pitiful gaze profitable? Did he ever study Law? Is he really Jerónimo? Is he Jerónimo's son, Boy? Is he, indeed, anyone at all, or is the dumb narrator actually the text itself, with what Sharon Magnarelli has referred to as ‘the illusory depths of the first person pronoun’ representing an absence rather than a presence?²

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the complexities of this novel that not a few critics have classified it as self-referential, and some of their supporting arguments are undeniably convincing. ‘At last’, claims Magnarelli in her remarkable article, ‘the narrative I has overtly come to be what the structural linguists and some of the Russian formalists had proposed all along: a vacuum, an absence.’ She goes on to say that ‘the I in El obsceno pájaro emerges as a fluctuating entity, a compendium of voices, and appears to corroborate Benveniste's theory that the I has never had a referent apart from the moment of discourse’.³ El Mudito ‘becomes a dramatization of the very process of fictitious discourse’, his dictum that ‘lo importante es envolver’ because ‘el objeto envuelto no tiene importancia’ (pp. 30-31) takes on an extra dimension; it is significant that both the Casa and the Rinconada are closed areas ‘so that there can be no interaction with the outside world’, that the Mudito ‘tells of the other characters as he and then assumes their voices as I’ and that the Rinconada inhabitants are freaks, since they constitute ‘the word, twice removed from a referent or the possibility of a referent [the Rinconada is seen as existing only within the covers of the book Humberto has written], a double artifice [which] must engender monsters’. The white laboratory where el Mudito's black blood is taken from him is seen as representing the white page, with creation achieved by the blood, which is ink.⁴ Another critic who sympathizes with the self-referential interpretation of the novel, Alfred J. MacAdam, maintains that what the narrator actually says is ‘in effect irrelevant’. For him, what matters most is ‘the telling itself’, for ‘to tell “what happens” in El obsceno pájaro de la noche is virtually impossible’. The narrative is ‘a monstrous creator, incapable of doing anything except narrating, creating stories in its own image’.⁵ Yet another who supports this point of view is Alicia Borinsky: indeed, she was one of the first to express it. As we read the novel, she claims, the yo is ‘calificado como una persona que nombra el Mudito’, but ‘este yo … es una ilusión creada por el lenguaje’ and, when all is said and done, ‘no hay nada detrás’: there are ‘superficies [que] no guardan nada en su interior’ and ‘máscaras que al descubrirse presentan una nueva máscara y así sucesivamente’.⁶

It seems to me that some of the best Donoso criticism has been written by those who see El obsceno pájaro in this way. It all—or nearly all—appears to fit together and is very persuasive indeed. Furthermore, it is eminently reasonable that a solution of this kind should appeal, since the text is full of disconcerting pronominal shifts (sometimes within the same sentence) and apparently arbitrary selection of the first, second, and third persons for the narration. Then, too, it revolves around a protagonist whose identity is constantly fluctuating. El Mudito, if he exists, is an unknowable character. On the other hand, this ‘explanation’ fails to satisfy completely. Donald L. Shaw is convinced that it will not do at all: in his view its authors ‘rechazan todo intento de interpretación y se refugian en el cómodo concepto de una narrativa creadora de sí misma’. He rejects this, even as a possibility:

Digamos sin ambages que toda tentativa de presentar El obsceno pájaro de la noche como una serie de significantes sin significado está condenada de antemano al fracaso. Donoso es … un hombre con una cosmovisión muy definida, de la cual debe partir todo enfoque válido de su obra.⁷

My own position is, perhaps, a curious one. I should not be prepared to go as far as Shaw in rejecting the validity of seeing the novel as language for its own sake, but I feel that in fact this starting-point is not incompatible with the psychoanalytic approach I have elaborated elsewhere.⁸ The amazing thing about this novel, in my opinion, is that so many different and apparently mutually exclusive interpretations of it can coexist and that almost all of them are acceptable. So it is that I am prepared to see it as a text gradually bringing itself to an end while simultaneously struggling to survive; however, at the same time there is a human psyche occupied in precisely the same activity. The book is not totally self-referential; its referent is a combination of contagious and haunting human emotions that come together in an elusive, protean narrative voice. The present study of one of its linguistic features may at first glance suggest that I do see the work as self-referential, but ultimately it helps to reveal the nature and source of these emotions.

I should be prepared to go even further. My premise—that a linguistic device used by the narrative voice represents a particular emotional state—suggests that it is convenient and possibly profitable to see the novelist and the narrator as virtually one and the same, to consider Donoso's ‘message’ as one that comes to us directly. It goes without saying that there is never any excuse for the automatic identification of the narrative voice of a novel with the real author's, and even in those cases where it is extremely tempting to make this equation, most modern critics would prefer not to do so.⁹ They feel that it would represent an extremely ingenuous critical position and that it might well be seen as an indication of their ignorance of literary theory. Even avowed autobiographical material is often thought to be suspect at the very least, and evidence based on what the author himself says about his work is frequently dismissed as too subjective, too interested, or even irrelevant.¹⁰ The intentional fallacy is an ever-present trap. Furthermore, any critic utilizing the psychoanalytic approach runs the risk of being accused of reductionism, of diverting attention away from many of the important features of the text and in that way diminishing its possibilities, In a brilliantly-argued rejection of the psychoanalytic method, Harold Skulsky is sceptical of what he judges to be its various claims and he highlights the pitfalls that beset its practitioners. In the end, he admits that his basic objection is that the method is seen by some as ‘part of the transaction between writers and readers that is generally (if tacitly) understood to constitute literary communication’.¹¹ It is precisely because this is not the case with El obsceno pájaro, where—as I see it—the intention is to avoid communication, that this method is an efficacious interpretative tool. I do not assume that I have been totally successful in cracking some kind of code or opening a window onto all there is to know about the text or about the author himself. On the other hand, I am unrepentant in aligning myself with those critics who have fallen into what Harold Skulsky calls ‘the reductionist fallacy’, which claims that ‘semantic analysis may sometimes be “a question of building bridges between the poem and the psychic condition from which it arose”’.¹² Furthermore, I do not accept that a psychological approach necessarily excludes sociological considerations, or that a psychocritique emphasizes the division between ‘the psychic and the social, phantasmagoria and history, inside and outside’, as William Rowe has claimed.¹³ I am convinced, though, that some texts are more susceptible to psychoanalytic analysis than others, and that often the alternative methods are inefficacious when used in isolation: the self-referentiality explanation of El obsceno pájaro is acceptable, but this is one example of a novel where the use of several methods seems to be called for.¹⁴

If semantic analysis is suspect, how much more provocative is my claim that a stylistic study can achieve the same end? ‘El psicoanálisis alcanza sólo el contenido de la obra y no la forma’, claimed Yvon Belaval on one occasion with what appears to be some justification.¹⁵ If that is in fact true, it would seem that what we are left with after psychoanalytic criticism will be no more than an impression of the banality of human complexes in sharp contrast with what we see as the excitement of great works of art. After all, as Charles Mauron once observed, basically everyone shares the same complexes, just as we all have a liver or a spleen.¹⁶ Yet I am sure that at least some literature should be considered from the point of view of form as well as of content in the course of an attempt at a psychoanalytic interpretation. Art, it has often been said, should delight. With modern art in particular, ‘excite’ may be a more appropriate term, and Freud was surely right when he declared that although the artist's conscious intention is unlikely to excite us, if we discover what the text's real meaning is, this may well do so. Perhaps to understand a work of art, albeit only partially, is to go a little way along the path to both delight and excitement.¹⁷ As Mauron says: ‘La psychocritique … recherche les associations d'idées involontaires sous les structures voulues du texte.’¹⁸ It is clear that ‘idées involontaires’ can be attributed only to the original author: his ‘structures voulues’, the language used by the narrative voice can, and often should, be used in psychological analysis.

One of Skulsky's objections to this approach is that frequently a critic will ‘eke out his evidence … by admitting gossip and fortuitously available biographical information. The result will be a powerful temptation to annex these materials to the text in an arbitrary pattern of conjecture that can be called an explanation only if one defines “explanation” to match’.¹⁹ He is undoubtedly right that the temptation to use biographical evidence is great indeed, and it is one I cannot resist. My defence is that the method appears to work.

There are many superficial connexions between the author and the (literally) self-effacing narrator of El obsceno pájaro de la noche. It goes without saying that most of these prove nothing in themselves and, of course, all writers draw on personal experience for the creation of both plot and character. Yet in this case, I suggest, the numerous coincidences are significant and revealing. If taken all together they constitute evidence that it is difficult to ignore. Although it would be tedious to list them all it is, for example, worth bearing in mind Donoso's admission that with this book he was interested in ‘la experiencia de hacer un personaje que no pudiera ser personaje. Que fuera treinta personajes a la vez’ and which nevertheless would have to be remembered ‘como uno, como una identidad’. He followed this up with: ‘Soy treinta personas y no soy nadie.’²⁰ It is important, too, that the motivation of a search for identity that so many critics have attributed to him does not seem unacceptable to him.²¹ Less important, certainly, is the fact that Donoso spent his childhood in a rambling old house with eccentric elderly aunts, that his father was an obsessive card-player and gambler, that he was fond of assuming new identities by dressing up, or that he was irresistibly fascinated by his unbalanced cousin, Cucho, who used to lock the family cats inside minuscule drawers when he came to visit. Perhaps, too, it is not vital to our understanding to know that his maternal grandmother went gradually and distressingly insane, making life impossible for the family for many long years, or that, like Humberto Peñaloza, he managed to sell copies of his first book only by means of private subscription.²² But if we add that the stomach pains he feigned as a child in order to avoid going to school were diagnosed—and by his own father at that—as appendicitis and that he was forced to have an operation, and that some years later the pains got out of control again and he developed an ulcer so that, like Humberto Peñaloza, every time he tried to write his great work he was laid low, the parallels begin to look more interesting. Can it really be irrelevant that he underwent psychoanalysis in the early 1960s? Or that in more recent years he has suffered from hypochrondria and was kept ‘despierto sólo a medias’ for four months by order of his psychiatrist? Or that later, after emergency surgery, his hitherto-undetected allergy to morphia reduced him to a state of total insanity? He himself recalls that period: ‘Pasé varios días enloquecido, con alucinaciones, doble personalidad, paranoia e intentos suicidas. Cuando me recuperé … los efectos retardados de esta locura demoraron un par de años en desaparecer.’ Then, ‘todavía sufriendo de pesadillas y paranoia’, he started El obsceno pájaro de la noche all over again and rewrote it in only eight months.²³ Donoso's comments on the relationship between himself and his novel add weight to my argument. When asked by Jaime Alazraki if he could explain ‘cómo se dio el puente entre la obra anterior de José Donoso y El obsceno pájaro …’, he replied: ‘Responder esa pregunta equivale a contar mi vida’, and he goes on to admit that during his convalescence, after what he refers to as ‘un momento en que estuve loco’, he read R. D. Laing's Politics of Experience and, even more revealing, the same author's The Divided Self.²⁴

I emphasized the word ‘voulues’ in Mauron's distinction between the conscious and the unconscious intention of any author because the background to the writing of El obsceno pájaro suggests that here the ‘structures voulues’ are relatively few. The novel was incredibly difficult to write, the process suffered many setbacks, and in the end the author declared himself puzzled by his own creation. For the original version, ‘hice cuarenta borradores’, he admits;²⁵ then illness prevented him from concentrating on writing and the years passed. In the end, his comments reveal an extraordinary lack of planning and conscious control:

‘En el fondo no sé de qué se trata mi novela’; ‘Es algo que me ha sucedido más bien que he escrito’; ‘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’; ‘Escribí esta novela un poco para saber quién soy’; ‘La forma no cambió porque yo quise cambiarla, sino que la forma se me cambió’; ‘Escribo la novela para preguntarme si sería capaz de hacerme una pregunta’; ‘Es una novela en que me he buscado’; ‘Es una cosa que tenía que venir’; ‘El plan de la novela está dictado por el hecho de escribirla’; ‘Creo que el campo de la literatura es una cosa mucho más onírica, mucho más inconsciente [than that of merely expressing ideas]’; ‘El “hack” elige su tema, mientras que el escritor es elegido por su tema.’²⁶

One of the major elements in all Donso's writings is, indeed, lack of control. It is very clear that things can easily get out of hand and that, ironically, it is often a question of ideas, desires, inventions, even creations, that originally came from the person who, in the end, falls foul of them. Schizophrenic patients frequently complain of the sensation that someone or something outside themselves is controlling them. But in the Donoso novels and short stories, we go a step further with the sinister realization that we set our own persecutors in motion. Just one apparently positive and potentially fruitful move is all that is needed, one innocuous word, a seemingly safe idea, a misleadingly trivial-looking action—anything at all can set off hostile forces. The line between normality and abnormality is a narrow one, as the grotesque Rinconada freaks clearly demonstrate, and even Jerónimo's classically handsome features can turn into something abnormal in a split second (p. 504). Creating new life is fraught with danger, and the grossly deformed Boy, his son, is an example of this. To take up a new activity is to become vulnerable: the activity, or an element of it, will take over, as the gambling viejas in this novel and the female protagonist of the short story ‘Paseo’ show.²⁷ Literary creation is no exception. Humberto Peñaloza is constantly afraid that his fictional offspring may gain control over him: after all, ‘él los había inventado a ellos, no ellos a él’ (p. 255). Thus the great act of hubris when he tells Jerónimo that he is a writer is another moment at which he starts something that will turn out badly for him: it leads not only to the necessity of keeping his word (a significant phrase in the context of this study) and being obliged actually to get on with it and write something, but also to becoming a kind of servant to the characters he has created. Donoso has said of his own position that once he had written the phrase ‘El Mudito tiraba su carro’, that was that. ‘¡Qué sé yo! ahí empezó él [el Mudito] a dominar la novela, ¡y se comió la novela! ¡fue la novela! Pero, no sé cómo ocurrió.’²⁸ It is all a question of power versus impotence; this is a Donoso common denominator.

One aspect of this power struggle is made up by the way that language itself traps the narrator-author. Situations are actually created by language, and the vast majority of them are menacing. The much-quoted passage from Alice Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice is discussing language with Humpty Dumpty is particularly appropriate here again. Humpty Dumpty has no doubts on the subject of who is in control: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ The conversation then goes in a direction that is even more relevant:

‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is’, said Humpty Dumpty, ‘Which is to be master—that's all.’

In El obsceno pájaro de la noche, one of the ‘masters’ is language and there is a process of what I shall call ‘literalization’ throughout the work. Metaphors and idioms turn themselves into facts and events. The components of the weave of the plot trap the weaver himself like a spider's web that traps the spider, and the very language the narrator uses contributes to his downfall. It should, perhaps, be added that it is by no means the first time that an author has made use of this literalization device. Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio's Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí, for example, is a work full of what its creator calls ‘materialización de la metáfora’,²⁹ and a fascination for the process was what inspired him to write the book in the first place.³⁰

In the Donoso novel the user of language (the author) wishes to signify something and makes use of many metaphorical locutions which are apparently innocuous and which in any case are almost unavoidable if he is to express himself at all. The problem is that he finds that language is not doing what he intends it to do, and he is far from being in control. In the same way that his invented servants have power over their masters, language is stronger than he is, and dangerously so: we are reminded of the arrogance of his character Jerónimo ‘que se creía dueño del mundo porque sólo lo inventó’ (p. 493). And unlike Sánchez Ferlosio, Donoso is not writing in a lighthearted way. It is all deadly serious. There would be little cause for resentment, perhaps, if it could be claimed that he plays with language and that language then turns out to be one of the forces that play so horrifyingly with him. Indeed, there would be a kind of rough justice there. But that is not how it is: it is far more sinister and unreasonable. Donoso-el Mudito-Humberto merely uses language—something as normal as living itself—and in so doing loses his autonomy and security.

We can only speculate as to how conscious Donoso's use of the literalization device is. It is, of course, found with great frequency at levels far inferior to that of good literature, both in jokes and in advertising copy, and the author is undoubtedly aware of it in these contexts. Indeed, at one point in El obsceno pájaro we hear about ‘precios tan bajos que hay que agacharse’ (p. 83). Even jokes, though, can get out of hand.

There is a kind of intermediate group, examples of conscious literalization that although planned produce situations beyond themselves. For instance, the author is clearly aware of what he is doing when the concept of ‘the naked truth’ is literalized and the Rinconada freaks are not permitted to wear clothes. In fact, his character Emperatriz, in vengeful triumph (since she is jealous of her husband's interest in another), is delighted to note how flat-chested her rival is once she has undressed, and that her husband can now see ‘la verdad literalmente desnuda’ (p. 480). Then, when el Mudito burns a piece of newspaper that bears a photograph of a ‘líder barbudo con su mano en alto’, probably Fidel Castro, ‘el olor a barbas chamuscadas’ is carried away by the breeze (p. 79); the photograph, like the word, is a signifier but it is what is inadvertently signified that intervenes in the action.³¹ Furthermore, it is almost certainly intentional that the physical abnormality that afflicts the Rinconada telephone operator who might hear too much is ‘orejas enormes como alas de murciélago’ (p. 247). But what I have called the intermediate group is not very large; there are relatively few examples where the author is still, as it were, in command, and it is not long before the game can no longer be seen as amusing and it begins to reflect an increasingly speedy decline into total impotence and, in the end, annihilation.

There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that the protagonist of this novelistic search for survival should be a dumb man. If, as Freud and then Lacan have claimed, verbalization is essential for successful therapy, the presence of danger in both the spoken word and the written word does not suggest a happy outcome. There is yet another indication of a dreadful end to it all in Lacan's theory that ‘the unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier’.³² It is appropriate that what is perhaps the most striking example of el Mudito's vulnerability is found when he involuntarily utters one single word, and that word is reported as being ‘nada’. Verbalization brings no relief, and what is said could only too well act as a signifier for the subject. He is horrified that he might have betrayed himself, and the word burns his throat: ‘Nada, nada, esa palabra delatora que se me había escapado iba quemándome la garganta’, he recalls. It is no time at all before we find him with ‘fiebre, temblores [y] la garganta hinchada’, a condition that would prevent his talking even if he wanted to. ‘Imposible tragar con este dolor’, he goes on. ‘Las papilas de la lengua enrojecidas, el paladar sangriento, la laringe áspera, nada, nada …’ (p. 87). Another example of prophetic literalization comes when, later in the book, Humberto is alluded to metaphorically as a ‘montón de escombros’ after he has collapsed over his typewriter (p. 269). This locution truly tempts providence for at the very end, when Humberto-el Mudito's body has been burned, all that is left is ashes and cinders.

Some of the instances of the author's conscious use of the device are reduced similes, some even come from implied similes, though in the second group it is clearly impossible to say just how intentional the technique is. An obvious reduced simile is found when Dora, one of the old women in the Casa, is described as being ‘inclinada sobre sus rábanos, examinando minuciosamente los tubérculos sangrientos como muñones que las viejas devorarán’ (p. 304). This is referred to again later as: ‘La Dora y la Rita arrancando muñones ensangrentados’ (p. 307). Then Peta Ponce, an old hag who has always haunted the narrator, is said to be ‘viva como una hoguera’ (p. 471) and ultimately he is destroyed in an hoguera. ‘Me echas a la calle como a un perro’, el Mudito complains to one of the orphan girls, Iris Mateluna (p. 341), as he is ‘maniatado y con una correa al cuello guiándome como a un perro’ (p. 345); the next stage is that the old women leave plates of food around the Casa so that he can eat when he wants to, ‘como un perro’ (p. 447). There are more references to his being like a dog, and it is not long before this becomes the truth: one of the medallones, the versions of himself that the narrator gives us, is ‘el perro de la Iris’ (p. 89). Even if the author is aware as he uses the technique, he is not in command, as is illustrated by el Mudito's musings as he lies convalescing after his major operation: ‘Miré la ventana, la calle interminable, fija como la fotografía de algo cotidiano, sin interés, sin belleza, fotografía sacada porque sí, sin propósito …’ (p. 294). Soon he becomes aware of the ‘truth’: ‘pero la ventana no es ventana, ahora me doy cuenta del engaño, es la ampliación fotográfica de una ventana que han pegado en la pared de adobe’ (p. 302); and later he applies this ‘knowledge’ to his prognosis of Inés's immediate future in the asylum to which she has been taken: ‘Despertarás’, he says to her, ‘en una habitación blanca con una sola ventana que no será ventana sino una gran fotografía que creerás que es ventana de verdad’ (p. 470). The author-narrator knows what is happening but he can do nothing about it.

Where implied similes are concerned, it has to be admitted that some may exist only in the mind of the reader; some, though, are clearly intentional. For example, the bars of a hospital bed are, as everyone knows, similar to window bars. Here, ‘los cuatro barrotes del pie de la cama no son los barrotes del pie de la cama sino los barrotes de fierro de la ventana’, el Mudito discovers, and he adds: ‘me tienen prisionero en este cuarto’ (p. 279). Less consciously-worked, perhaps, is the text's development of Jerónimo's implied sangre fría when he apparently shows great courage during a dangerous skirmish in an election campaign. It turns out that the blood the crowds can see is really cold, since it is not his but Humberto's, and he has deliberately daubed it on his arm. What is not debatable is that all these locutions turn into something unpleasant—even Jerónimo's ‘cold blood’ is a source of distress to Humberto. When, as el Mudito, he is unable to see because he has been sewn into a sack, the implication is that he is like a blind man; it is only a short step to becoming one: ‘Me meten adentro del saco. … No veo. Soy ciego’ (p. 525). When Humberto's father cuts out the review of his son's published book from the newspaper, the implication is that the action resembles a surgical operation: ‘Pidiéndole la tijera a mi madre [like a surgeon with a theatre sister] la hincó con crueldad en el papel para recortar ese artículo’ (p. 283). This is then underlined when the narrator says: ‘Le grité que me estoy muriendo de dolor al estómago desde que usted me pinchó con las tijeras para robarme mi triunfo’ (p. 284). Ultimately, of course, the terrible operation materializes: ‘Sentí el dolor aquí, en un sitio que ahora está cubierto por capas de algodón y gasa y tela emplástica’ (p. 285).

Sometimes the chronology—if one can use the concept in relation to this novel—is reversed, and the ‘literal truth’ precedes the figure of speech. For example, we are well into the narrative and el Mudito is now weak and ill when Madre Benita comments: ‘El Mudito anda como si fuera otra vieja más’ (p. 362). Earlier he had actually become an old woman in one of his medallones: ‘Me permitieron ser la séptima bruja’, he tells us (p. 47), and then: ‘Soy la séptima vieja’ (p. 67). Another instance is when the experience, as it were, of Misiá Raquel and her old servant Brígida being identical and interchangeable comes before the locution that, I suggest, is its source. When recounting that she used to give Brígida all her discarded clothes, Misiá Raquel says: ‘Toda mi ropa le quedaba regia porque teníamos el mismo cuerpo’ (p. 309). That this is ‘true’ is underlined (and again this is before the phrase has been uttered) when we discover that her late servant has been buried in Misiá Raquel's family tomb: ‘Le cedí mi nicho en el mausoleo’, she explains, ‘para que ella se vaya pudriendo en mi lugar’ (p. 15). ‘El mismo cuerpo’ indeed.

Interestingly enough, there is another kind of reversal: this time is a question of those few cases where the truth is ironically turned into a metaphor. It is true, for example, even if it is not explicitly stated in the novel, that the shape or form of a child is something inherited from its parents. In El obsceno pájaro de la noche, this accepted fact becomes a figure of speech when Humberto says of his father: ‘Ansiaba legarme una forma’ (p. 99). Then it is ‘true’ that Jerónimo was not in fact wounded when fleeing from hostile voters, and the implied cliché that his injury was ‘nothing’ takes on an added dimension: ‘Él no se cansaba de insistir en que no era nada’ (p. 207). One of the most obvious examples of this particular kind of locution/truth connexion is found in the fact that the protagonist of any novel is unreal, an invention that does not really exist and cannot be heard. This is turned into a sort of linguistic game in El obsceno pájaro; when someone telephones the Casa and asks to speak to Humberto Peñaloza, this is what we find:

No pudieron hablar con Humberto Peñaloza porque al oír ese nombre huyó por los pasadizos hasta el fondo de la Casa, no existe Humberto Peñaloza, es una invención, no es una persona sino un personaje, nadie puede querer hablar con él porque tienen que saber que es mudo.

(p. 447)

The author, just because he is an author, sets inadvertent linguistic traps for himself; in the same way, living is seen by Donoso as a process of self-destruction. It is so easy for the world to be turned into chaos, for nothing is stable. The house of Azcoitía, in the metaphorical sense of the word, may well fall because of the lack of a male heir. The concept is literalized, or in this case truly materializes, and becomes a real house, the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales, which is going to be demolished. The birth of a child would save the metaphorical house, so a new-born child can save the convent: ‘Será dueño de esta Casa. La salvará de la destrucción’ (p. 98). When el Mudito's life appears to have been saved, he sees himself as literally conserved: ‘Me tendrán para siempre en este conservatorio’ (p. 289). When he thinks that Peta Ponce is increasing the speed of the flow of his blood transfusion, he turns red: ‘Abre la válvula un poco más, más, mucho, y me enciendo, me pongo rojo’ (p. 278). The theory that old women can be dangerous (‘el poder de las viejas es inmenso’ (p. 64) and ‘no son tan tontas como parecen’ (p. 66)) becomes something more than a theory when the old destitute women actually begin to terrorize the neighbourhood, a ‘bandada sangrienta’, a group of ‘pordioseras ancianas quién sabe de dónde’ (p. 523). The labyrinthine corridors of the Casa in which, metaphorically, one could lose oneself really do swallow people up: there was once a lady who ‘un buen día salió a andar por los pasillos y se perdió … y nunca más la volvieron a encontrar’ (p. 367). (We remember that, implausibly, even Madre Benita has no idea of where el Mudito's cell is.) When Boy wants an inconvenient and painful memory removed from his mind, this turns into a question of an actual surgical operation: ‘Tendría que extirpar un trozo grande de su cerebro’, the doctor warns him (p. 499). The usual meaning of the verb servir is extended when Humberto makes love to Inés: he has become the ‘servidor que le estaba sirviendo’ (p. 217). The concept of the spiritual Virgin turns into all-too-solid flesh when the old women assume that Iris Mateluna has given birth to a miraculous Christlike baby. When Iris sneezes, one of the viejas automatically says: ‘Ave María Purísima.’ And when the ‘baby’—el Mudito sneezes immediately afterwards, she adds: ‘Sin pecado concebida’ (p. 325). If the rich need the poor as witnesses of their luxurious and fortunate lives, this is soon turned into the literal need on the part of Jerónimo for the power of Humberto's gaze, which Humberto refers to as the ‘principio activo de mi mirada’ (p. 93).³³ At first it was true that Jerónimo and Inés were not capable, metaphorically speaking, of living ‘sin la presencia de [su] mirada envidiosa creando su felicidad’ (p. 84); later this is literalized in a situation in which Jerónimo is unable to enjoy sexual intercourse at all without Humberto's presence. ‘No salgas de la habitación, Humberto’, he says to him when they visit a brothel, ‘préstame tu envidia para ser potente.’ Then he adds: ‘Tú eres dueño de mi potencia … necesito tu mirada envidiosa a mi lado para seguir siendo hombre’ (p. 227). When Jerónimo was young and leading a somewhat bohemian life, many thought it a good thing for him to enter politics—after all, ‘ya tenía edad para hacerlo, asentara por fin cabeza’ (p. 178). It is, perhaps, a tenuous connexion, but it is difficult not to recall Jerónimo's later sortie wearing the huge cardboard head belonging to the Gigante, another figure of speech brought to life. When Inés grows old, she is not, as they say, herself any more. ‘No eres la de antes’, el Mudito comments (p. 427), and to him she actually is someone else: he accuses her of undergoing surgery so as to change into Peta Ponce ‘que siempre quiso encarnarse en ti y tú en ella’ (p. 429). Her hysterectomy, if that is what it was, converted her into an old woman overnight: the idea that this operation signifies the end of a woman's youth is literalized. ‘Tú … te internaste en la clínica del doctor Azula’, el Mudito claims, ‘para envejecer definitivamente’ (p. 428). Earlier, of course, when she was young, Humberto had desired her, had wanted to be her husband; this is made literal when he actually becomes Jerónimo, who is her husband. It is consistent therefore that when he does make love to her, it is after the political skirmish in which he took Jerónimo's place. When Inés says goodbye to him afterwards, he is sure that she knows: ‘Me lo dijo sin decírmelo, tú eres él’ (p. 215). Yet another example of the device can be found in the early relationship between el Mudito and Iris Mateluna. Sexy and provocative, she disturbs him by her very presence, perhaps even to the point where he is obsessed by her. It is implied that she haunts him, and this is converted into real persecution, which invariably takes place at night: ‘¿Por qué me seguías? ¿O me perseguías? … invadiendo el equilibrio de mi vacío nocturno?’, he asks her, as she trails him around the convent (pp. 75-76). Then when el Mudito runs away into the tangle of passages after the telephone call that terrifies him, his motivation is blind terror, so that he really is ‘sin vista casi … casi sin vista’ (p. 448).

Images and expressions connected with the question of identity are fruitful areas for literalization. Humberto, in one of the versions of his life story, was the child of insignificant parents. He is, in other words, one of the faceless masses: ‘Mi padre me aseguró’, he recalls, ‘que no tenía rostro y no era nadie’ (p. 433). And, of course, a set of features is essential, as the pressing need to paint them on the ‘rostros borrosos’ of the broken statuettes of saints found in the Chapel reveals (p. 327).³⁴ In Humberto's case, facelessness really is his condition when, as el Mudito, he tries to escape from his persecutors: ‘Huí solo, al frío, sin facciones ya porque el doctor Azula sólo me dejó el veinte por ciento’ (p. 297). The eighty per cent removed by surgery includes his face. Then to be without a name is also turned into a real condition: from not having an important name he moves to not having a name at all.³⁵ ‘Since when have you had a name?’ Humberto shouts at his father, slamming the door as he leaves the family home for ever (p. 284). Ultimately he becomes el Mudito, with no name and no means of knowing who he once was. He is a ‘sombra sin nombre’ (p. 447) and in the end admits that he is searching for (literally) vital information: ‘Hay alguien afuera esperándome para decirme mi nombre’ (p. 539). The point is underlined by the fact that in the case of another character of lowly birth, Brígida, no one can even remember her surname: the viejas argue about it, and her ex-employer, about to endow a home with money that actually belonged to her late servant, is at a loss as to what name to give it: ‘La “Institución Brígida … Brígida …”. ¿Va a creer que no me acuerdo ni siquiera de su apellido?’ (p. 314).³⁶ Another haunting truth for the narrator has always been that life is just a game of masks, or assumed social identities. His father once told him this, and he continues to believe it as the years go by. Real disguises, and especially masks, are the extension of this, and in a sinister way people can adopt another role and deceive their victims. For example the practical, medical masks of doctors and nurses hide their true identities. El Mudito, of course, is sure that he knows who his nurse really is: ‘Es ella. Pese a la mascarilla blanca, alzada sobre coturnos, disimulada por la toca …’ (p. 278); it is Peta Ponce. Later, he says: ‘Emperatriz, te reconozco bajo el dominó galante de raso blanco con el que pretendes hacerte pasar por enfermera’ (p. 299), for the monstruos, too, are ‘disfrazados de enfermeros con delantales y con mascarillas que no ocultan sus monstruosidades’ (p. 271); our social masks are turned into tangible, dangerous disguises. Humberto's present troubles were caused originally when he committed himself to a particular role: ‘Soy escritor’, he said to Jerónimo at their first meeting (p. 280), and he has, in a way, given his word and is bound by it. From then on images of binding imprisonment proliferate. In uttering this phrase, he now says: ‘me até a la Rinconada, a Inés, a la Peta, a usted [Jerónimo], a la Casa, a la Madre Benita, a estas figuras blancas del baile que Emperatriz dio hace años: “En el Hospital”’ (p. 280). Jerónimo's glove brushed against his arm, this turned into a challenge (pp. 104, 288), and then became a wound, ‘quemándome todavía después de tantos años’ (p. 104) on the spot where he is injured when he ‘becomes’ his employer: ‘Mil testigos me vieron encogerme con el dolor de la bala que me rozó el brazo justo aquí, Madre Benita, en el lugar donde años antes me había rozado el guante perfecto de don Jerónimo’ (pp. 204-05). Now he cannot escape. ‘¿Me tienen amarrado?’, he asks (p. 297), as he had previously asked: ‘¿Quién sabe cuánto tiempo me tienen amarrado en esta cama?’ (p. 289). When he sleeps with Iris in her bed, he is bound up like a baby, so much so that not only is he unable to move, but he is in great pain (p. 338). Lack of identity causes real pain, both here and in the scene when Jerónimo's features dissolve in the reflection in the Rinconada estanque:

Bajo los ojos para ver lo que sé que veré, mis proporciones clásicas, mi pelo blanco, mis facciones despejadas, mi mirada azul, mi mentón partido, pero alguien tira una piedra insidiosa al espejo de agua, triza mi imagen, descompone mi cara, el dolor es insoportable, grito, aúllo, encogido, herido, las facciones destrozadas.

(p. 504)

Lack of control is terrifying. The image of blood in the sense of caste, the source of personality and social class, becomes real as the monstruos donate their blood to el Mudito, and he is ‘cargado con sus monstruosidades’ (p. 292), acquiring their ‘caste’: ‘Me están monstruificando’, he cries (p. 271) and there is nothing he can do about it.

Before his total loss of identity, he passes through a phase where it is as if he were no one. No notice is taken of him and nobody will come to his aid. His voice, in other words, cannot be heard, and it makes little difference whether he uses language or he is dumb. He is sure that the old women are also conscious of this kind of impotence. They dislike the darkness of the labyrinthine corridors of the Casa because once lost ‘no se puede encontrar la voz para pedir auxilio’ (p. 25). If, as it seems, his dumbness is feigned, then this must mean that he is accepting this terrible possibility for the sake of the anonymity the consequent lack of identity means. Throughout the novel, mutually incompatible attitudes coexist: the need to be someone and the need to live only a vita minima for the sake of personal, ontological safety is one of these cases, ‘Quiero ser un imbunche’, says el Mudito, ‘metido adentro del saco de su propia piel’ (p. 433), and this becomes the sack into which the viejas sew him at the end of his days. The final scene, with the wind carrying away the remains of his identity definitively, is prefigured when he claims that ‘el viento se traga mi voz y me deja mudo’ (p. 46), and there are repeated affirmations that his voice ‘no se oye’, for he is too insignificant. The literalization of this statement is found after his major operation: ‘El doctor Azula me extirpó la garganta’, he says, and ‘no quiero gritar porque [this time literally] nadie me oirá’ (p. 303). Imitating the fears he once attributed to the viejas, he says to Madre Benita: ‘Mi voz no se oye en la oscuridad’ (p. 316);³⁷ and of course, it is true that light is needed to read a text!

Many literalizations are found when the narrator is recovering from surgery. In his half-comprehending semi-consciousness he hears the medical staff say they have extirpated ‘el ochenta por ciento’, and left ‘el veinte’ (p. 277). He is now literally reduced in size: ‘Tiene que ser difícil ver en una cama tan grande como ésta el veinte por ciento a que me dejaron reducido’ (p. 297). He is ‘reducido y enclenque, centrado alrededor de [su] mirada’ (p. 332), and at one point he declares: ‘Soy el Mudito … o lo que queda de él, menos y menos cada día’ (p. 348). He then begins to get even smaller, and we are reminded of Inés's diminishing hope earlier in the book of ever having a child. The author refers to this as the ‘cronología de la desesperación’, which was manifested in baby-clothes that were ‘disminuyendo de tamaño’ (p. 210). El Mudito, once referred to metaphorically as a ‘pedazo de hombre’, becomes just that on more than one occasion: he is either the Gigante's cardboard head or a phallus. It is very easy to become less than you really are.

Like the dance that goes on until the dancer drops dead in the early Donoso short story ‘Charleston’, the pretty puppy that turns into a wild animal in ‘Santelices’,³⁸ the plastic dog that becomes real in Inés's board game here (p. 418), and all the other interests, pastimes, and desires that get out of hand, to embark upon telling a tale is dangerous. ‘You listen to me because you think it is a novel’, says el Mudito to Iris, and truth is that it is a novel (p. 341). Characters are created and they take the creator over: ‘Estoy en tu poder’, he has previously said to Iris (p. 338). And when the demiurge is no longer in control, there can be nothing but disorder, the chaos of the abandoned Estación El Olivo in El lugar sin límites,³⁹ of the Rinconada when Humberto has left, of the casa de campo in the novel of that name when the parents leave the children alone, of the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación de la Chimba when Madre Benita temporarily abandons the inmates. As demiurge-author, Humberto created Jerónimo, who created monsters who, in their turn, control Humberto-el Mudito and the Casa (pp. 498-99). Language for the narrator is not neutral, but is one of the innumerable hostile forces that make up existence.

The only solution, apparently, is to be elusive, to attempt to escape from the countless dangers that threaten the individual and his fragile identity. It is here that paradoxes arise. A positive strategy is based on something negative—evasion, inaccessibility. The narrator searches for recognition and individuality while all the time realizing that his only hope of survival is a vita minima and anonymity. The text itself struggles on despite a pressing need to finish itself off. There is no escape when all is said and done, and this is one reason why the novel is claustrophobic and haunting, for this is powerfully communicated. On the simplest level, the aim to survive, both on the part of the text and the characters that comprise it, is doomed to failure. The reader's conventional expectation of termination in linear structures and his incapacity to appreciate circular infinity lead to what Frank Kermode has called ‘the sense of an ending’.⁴⁰ The text, and life, must end; the struggle exists for its own sake. Any attempt at a vita minima is also pointless, as the case of Boy incontrovertibly demonstrates: there was never any real hope of keeping him ‘en el limbo’ (p. 409). Secure anonymity, too, is a state that simply cannot be achieved. A protean existence, a series of metamorphoses, of shifting medallones, dumbness, actual disguises, isolation, are all too positive, are all part of the activity of living, however strange that may seem. To live, in however negative a fashion, is to be vulnerable, to be in danger. The portmanteau narrative voice of El obsceno pájaro de la noche can be seen as nonexistent in a way, but the fact that it uses language at all gives it enough of a claim to existence to make it a victim. It is made up of language, and language threatens it. Speech is voluntarily rejected, but language still traps its user.

The narrative voice, then, indulges in all kinds of evasive techniques but is doomed to annihilation. Its raw material delivers it up to what it most fears, and ultimately we are no nearer to locating any individual human being who could be seen as the source of that voice. Yet this is surely not the only interpretation of the literalization device. If it is no more than an exercise, a linguistic game, a set of patterns, there remains a great deal that is unexplained and, indeed, inexplicable. A psychoanalytic reading adds something to an understanding of the novel, for without it even the terminology of criticism and the semantic insights that come out of the text are meaningless. How can we discuss fear and panic, the desire to escape, the sense of an ending, of being trapped and being doomed, without the realization that this terminology refers only to human beings? Why have so many critics referred to this book as ‘haunting’ if there are no contagious human emotions in it? And if there are, what is their source? I suggest that, in more ways than one, they emanate from the real author. The reader's delight and excitement, faced with this book, are based on recognition and sympathy and a frisson of fear: they are reactions to a human predicament. There is a narrative voice that is controlled by language, but it is impossible, in my view, not to treat this voice as a person, or at least, as Donoso said, as ‘una identidad’. It is also a literary artefact, as those who support the self-referential view claim, but it is worth mentioning that most of these critics find it necessary to treat the narrative voice as a person for what they call tactical reasons. Can it be unworthy of consideration that the novel abounds with semantic examples of lack of control? The reader may suspect that few writers are as much in control as they themselves suppose, but in this case authorial helplessness is striking. The total incapacity of the novel's language to create a single, recognizable person can perhaps be seen as a reflection of the author's much-discussed and unsuccessful search for identity. Ultimately psychological insight comes about as a result of semantic and linguistic insight: linguistic insight is not enough on its own to provide answers for the many puzzles of the text or to account for the reader's emotional response to it. One of the accusations made by those who denigrate the psychoanalytic approach is that it makes the false claim that ‘the perennial concerns to which literature ostensibly owes its appeal are infantile preoccupations in disguise, and yield their secrets to psychoanalysis alone’.⁴¹ Largely about identity and fear, the Donoso novel certainly does appear to be concerned with these ‘infantile preoccupations’. It is a kind of Freudian censored text. If we reject neither approach, we may come closer to understanding why Humberto, or el Mudito, or—in my opinion—Donoso writes: ‘Lo que da más miedo de todo [es] que a uno lo persigan y uno se inventa motivos y urde dramas en que protagoniza hechos que jamás ocurrieron para justificar ese miedo …’ (p. 341).

Notes

1. José Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (Barcelona, 1970). Quotations are taken from the third edition (1972). The epigraph can be found on page 488. Unless otherwise stated, all italics are mine. This article is a revised and extended version of a paper given at the Annual Conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland at the University of Manchester, March 1983.

2. Sharon Magnarelli, ‘Amidst the Illusory Depths: The First Person Pronoun and El obsceno pájaro de la noche’, MLN, 93 (1978), 267-84. Donoso himself has said: ‘Yo no veo que mi novela tenga un narrador. Yo diría que es la novela de la búsqueda de un narrador.’ See Mercedes San Martín, ‘Entretien avec José Donoso’, Caravelle, 29 (1977), 195-203 (p. 198).

3. Magnarelli, pp. 267, 268. For Benveniste, see Problèmes de lingüistique général (Paris, 1966).

4. Magnarelli, pp. 269, 278, 279, 282.

5. Alfred J. MacAdam, Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason (Chicago, 1977), p. 115.

6. Alicia Borinsky, ‘Repeticiones y máscaras: El obsceno pájaro de la noche’, MLN, 88 (1973), 281-94.

7. Donald L. Shaw, Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana (Madrid, 1981), p. 147.

8. See my ‘El obsceno pájaro de la noche: A Willed Process of Evasion’, in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, edited by Salvador Bacarisse (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 18-33.

9. That El obsceno pájaro de la noche is indeed one of these cases is confirmed by William Rowe, ‘José Donoso: El obsceno pájaro de la noche as Test Case for Psychoanalytic Interpretation’, MLR, 78 (1983), 588-96. He collates personal and literary factors in his opening paragraph, citing the author's real-life psychological problems and the narrator's neurotic and psychotic symptoms in order to justify the choice of this novel for his investigation.

10. See, for example, Frederick Crews, Out of My System (New York, 1975): ‘Art is not … wholly explainable by reference to the troubled minds that made it’ (p. 168).

11. Harold Skulsky, ‘The Psychoanalytical “Reading” of Literature’, Neophilologus, 67 (1983), 321-40 (p. 339).

12. Skulsky is quoting from Meredith Anne Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven, 1981), p. 152.

13. ‘José Donoso’, p. 593. Clearly the social cannot be excluded in any psychoanalytic interpretation. Humberto's father's wanting him to be someone is a good example of a concept that contains both social and psychological elements.

14. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Against Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981-82), 723-42, argue that ‘the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and should be abandoned’. What I am suggesting, of course, is that there should not be exclusive adherence to one kind of theory.

15. See the Prologue to Anne Clancier, Psicoanálisis, literatura, crítica, translated by María José Arias (Madrid, 1976), p. 24.

16. Charles Mauron, Introduction à la Psychoanalyse de Mallarmé (Neuchâtel, 1950), pp. 25-26.

17. Freud expressed this view several times, but particularly in the ‘Paper on Applied Psycho-Analysis’, Collected Papers, IV (London, 1925), pp. 171-472. Another judgement of Freud that is relevant here is that ‘writers [have] the courage to give voice to their own unconscious minds’ (p. 192). P. D. Juhl, Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Princeton, 1980), is convinced that in interpreting any work critics are at the same time necessarily attempting to establish the author's intention (p. 12).

18. Charles Mauron, Des Métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel (Paris, 1962), p. 23.

19. ‘The Psychoanalytical “Reading”’, p. 331.

20. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ‘José Donoso: La novela como “happening”’, Revista Iberoamericana, 76-77 (July-December 1971), 517-36 (pp. 520, 521).

21. See, for example, Milagros Sánchez Arnosi's interview with Donoso at the time of the publication of El jardín de al lado: ‘José Donoso o la búsqueda de la identidad’, Insula, 416-17 (July-August 1981), 25.

22. José Donoso, Historia personal del ‘boom’ (Barcelona, 1972), p. 33.

23. See José Donoso, ‘Cronología’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 295 (January 1975), 5-18.

24. R. Luis Díaz Márquez, ‘Conversando con José Donoso’, Horizontes, 19, no. 37 (1975), 5-12. For Laingian connexions in El obsceno pájaro, see my ‘A Willed Process’. This article was published before I was aware of the Díaz Márquez interview.

25. Rodríguez Monegal, ‘José Donoso: La novela como “happening”’, p. 527.

26. Rodríguez Monegal, pp. 518, 527, 528, 529 (author's italics), 531, 536.

27. José Donoso, Cuentos (Barcelona, 1971), pp. 203-30.

28. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 522 (author's italics).

29. Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí (Madrid, 1951). The author's view of ‘la materialización de la metáfora’ is found on page 23 of the London, 1969 edition. Myrna Solotorovsky, in ‘Configuraciones espaciales en El obsceno pájaro de la noche de José Donoso’, Bulletin Hispanique, 82 (1980), 150-88, draws attention to literalization here as a means of expressing ‘el pensamiento mítico’, as it involves ‘la disolución de límites entre lo figurado y lo literal’ (p. 180). See too Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Poétique’, in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris, 1968), pp. 98-166, for a discussion of ‘littéralité’.

30. There are, in fact, many parallels between Alfanhuí and El obsceno pájaro: it is not just a question of literalization.

31. Photographs become real again in Donoso's latest book, Cuatro para Delfina (Barcelona, 1982). In ‘Los habitantes de una ruina inconclusa’ (pp. 93-147), the ‘hirsutos mendigos y peregrinos con su saco en la espalda y su cayado en la mano’ (p. 101) from a book of photographs of pre-Revolution Russia come to life as ‘lujosos personajes harapientos del libro de fotos’ (p. 138) and invade the comfortable world of a middle-aged Santiago couple.

32. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 126.

33. Though outside the confines of the present study, a consideration of the motif of the mirada in El obsceno pájaro de la noche based on the Lacanian view of the regard may well prove fruitful. Indeed, many images and other aspects of Donoso's writing could be interpreted in accord with Lacanian theory, even though Rowe does not concede that it provides ‘a rationality into which Donoso's text can be fitted’ (‘José Donoso’, p. 591, note).

34. This literalization is also found in Cuatro para Delfina: in the last story, ‘Jolie Madame’ (pp. 211-68), the subjects are the sinister fishermen who live rough on the beach at Cachagua. ‘No quiero verte’, says the female protagonist when one of them frightens her, and she tells her young daughter to close her eyes to them (pp. 264-65). They turn out to be literally faceless. ‘¡No tiene cara’, she says of one of her potential assailants, ‘por eso es que ni él ni los otros la muestran y miran siempre para otro lado!’ (p. 262). The danger of the faceless poor on the doorstep is a key image in two of the stories in this book and is the latest manifestation of a preoccupation that can be found in much of Donoso's work, for example in Casa de campo (Barcelona, 1978), where the servants are interchangeable and individually unrecognizable even to those who espouse egalitarian causes. See my ‘Donoso and Social Commitment: Casa de campo’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 60 (1983), 319-32.

35. As Rowe has noted, Humberto's writing ‘was first an attempt to acquire a Name’. This is literalized: ‘The hundred copies of his book on Jerónimo's shelves signify to him the repetition of his name thousands of times’ (‘José Donoso’, p. 592).

36. In ‘Señas de mala muerte’ (Cuatro para Delfina) a hitherto retiring nobody, Osvaldo, becomes someone when he discovers that he does indeed have a name and is from an old, monied family. His relationship with his fiancée changes. Now the dominant character, he makes love to her in an almost peremptory fashion and forces her to recognize him: ‘Osvaldo la mandó:—Dime cómo me llamo.’ After a pause: ‘—Osvaldo Bermúdez García-Robles—suspiró colmada.’ ‘Sólo entonces’, says Donoso, ‘él la besó en la boca …’ (p. 44).

37. In ‘Los habitantes de una ruina inconclusa’ (Cuatro para Delfina) great emphasis is placed on communication: the hippy who visits the protagonists’ house, a muchacho de mochila, speaks an incomprehensible language; when he returns some time later, it is only to show his hosts the bloody stump where his tongue once was. There may well be political implications here, as the Russian Revolution is seen as the event that destroyed free speech among the poor.

38. Cuentos, pp. 135-50, 255-84.

39. El lugar sin límites (Mexico City, 1966).

40. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967).

41. Skulsky, ‘The Psychoanalytical “Reading”’, p. 321.