SOURCE: Swanson, Philip. “José Donoso and La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria.” In The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom, pp. 92-113. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

[In the following chapter from his book on Latin American literature after the “Boom,” Swanson presents a semiotic reading of La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, including commentary on the ideas of previous critics of the work.]

In a newspaper article in 1982, José Donoso lamented the almost exclusive association of Latin American fiction with long, complex, experimental, ‘totalising’ works and asked: ‘¿No ha llegado un momento de ruptura para la novela latinoamericana, de cambio … ?’.¹ A couple of years previously, in 1980, he had published La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, probably the most surprising departure from his very own long, complex, experimental, ‘totalising’ novel from the height of the Boom, El obsceno pájaro de la noche. Though much Donoso criticism, partly due to a compliance with the ahistorical agenda of certain schools of literary theory, stresses the continuity of his work, it is pretty plain that there is a quite dramatic change of some kind in his writing after 1970.² In particular, there is an apparent reduction in complexity in the shape of the utilisation of popular or conventional genres and the abandonment of tortuous narrative structures. In Casa de campo, for instance, which replaces the technique or gimmick of authorial effacement, typical (in part) of the Boom, with the foregrounding of a conventional narratorial or authorial figure, the narrator comments: ‘en la hipócrita no-ficción de las ficciones en que el autor pretende eliminarse siguiendo reglas preestablecidas por otras novelas, o buscando fórmulas narrativas novedosas …, veo un odioso puritanismo que estoy seguro que mis lectores no encontrarán en mi escritura’.³ Yet, as has already been proposed in the opening chapter, the narratorial/authorial stance of Casa de campo is, despite the relative accessibility of the text, highly problematic. This is dramatised most obviously in the encounter between the narrator-cum-author as character ‘José Donoso’ and Silvestre, one of his own literary creations: the author is (impossibly) on his way to his publisher's with the final manuscript of the novel under his arm, but his plans are derailed by the insistences of Silvestre, who, incidentally, bears little relation to the Silvestre of the rest of ‘Donoso's’ narrative. What this suggests is that there is, after all, continuity with the ideas of the earlier work, most notably the question of the relationship between art and society or reality, but that they are being treated or explored in a new or, indeed, novel way. The post-Boom Donoso can be seen, in other words, as, rather than fragmenting the notion of authority through a conspicuously labyrinthine narrative structure, destabilising it instead via the subversion of narratorial power from within. La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria can thus be seen, as with the novels by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes and other novels considered in this book, to similar and differing degrees, as a power struggle between ‘author’ or, as it really is in this case, narrator and the rival claims of character(s) within the text. Donoso's novel pits an implied male narrator using both the sense of closure implicit in the popular and the authority implicit in High culture to keep in check or even destroy a potentially threatening female presence who is herself associated with the popular and has her own pretensions to authority. The seemingly lightest, most titillating and least openly political Donosian post-Boom text, then, problematises the popular and becomes political through the very processes of its own deceptive articulation.

As in other works by the Chilean author, La marquesita de Loria, as we shall from now on call it for short, is based around a false binarism which one might dub order-versus-chaos. One pole (identity, power, convention, rationality, order—often linked with masculinity and adulthood) is opposed to and threatened by the other (fragmentation, rebellion, instinct, irrationality, chaos—often linked with ‘femininity’ or ‘femaleness’ and youth or old age). The distinction is, of course, a myth and therefore the former, dreading rupture and contamination, seeks to impose itself on and therefore create the illusion of separation from the latter. The familiar and/or popular tone of the present text may be taken as an attempt to naturalise and thus disguise and neutralise this process. For example, the documentary style gives a comforting impression of truth and knowledge. The novel opens with this tone (‘La joven marquesa viuda de Loria, nacida Blanca Arias en Managua, Nicaragua, era …’⁴ and repeats it in the account of the marquis’ death: ‘Ese invierno andaba mucha difteria por Madrid: falleció dos días después del miércoles de carnaval, Francisco Javier Anacleto Quiñones, marqués de Loria, antes de cumplir los veintiún años, dejando a toda su parentela desconsolada, muy especialmente a su joven viuda - nacida Blanca Arias, hija del recordado diplomático nicaragüense …’ (40-1). The narrator seems to come across as a compiler who is effortlessly familiar with his material: ‘si queremos ser rigurosos hay que precisar que …’ or ‘sería demasiado tedioso describir las ocasiones en que …’ (13, 35). Yet the same casual strain with which the final chapter opens (‘Todavía corre por Madrid la leyenda …’ [173]) gives the game away. The legend referred to is that of the strange grey dog with golden-grey eyes who disturbs courting couples in the Madrid park, the Retiro. The redundant adverb ‘todavía’ indicates a certain over-anxiety behind the narrator's jocular tone. Moreover, in designating the legend, highly ambiguously, as ‘una alucinación histérica que, hay que confesar, puede no ser fruto sólo de fantasías coincidentes’ (174), he appears to deny its veracity while trying to look as if he is not. Why does he introduce the story if it is only immediately to problematise it? Could it be to slur the integrity of his own protagonist, Blanca, who the reader knows thinks she has a relationship with a grey dog with golden-grey eyes which no one else seems to have seen? But why should the narrator want to discredit Blanca? Possibly because she represents a threat to the sense of order inscribed in the documentary style. Partly, this is the threat to the male of female power and sexuality, but it is also that Blanca undermines order by dissolving the binary division: synthesising Europe and Latin America, power and submission, even human and animal and male and female, she is drawn to a male dog with a female name, Luna (see 77), she is reflected in him and possibly is him (insofar as it is hinted that he may be her unconscious) or maybe becomes him at the end (when she is alleged to be devoured by a dog-like creature), and, in any case, seems to find union with the dark, unexplained ‘other side’ he represents (e.g. 163). In a sense, then, she brings the narrative face to face with what it would prefer to ignore or not to see. Why else is her shocking and unexplained disappearance simply passed over and displaced by the cheery epilogue of the conventional documentary narrator wrapping up the life-stories of the ‘normal’ characters who remain behind? The disappearance, indeed, is the crucial fulcrum of this contest. Given the documentary style, the title of the book suggests a case history, yet the words ‘misteriosa’ and ‘desaparición’ imply a problem and no solution—order threatened by chaos again. Furthermore, the two main sources of popular culture utilised here are those of erotica and detective fiction.⁵ Both involve (in different ways) concealment and uncovering, their culmination being closure through disclosure (climactic fulfilment in the former, solving of the mystery in the latter). In La marquesita de Loria there is only closure: erotic fulfilment does not take place and the mystery of the disappearance remains unexplained. The ‘official’ narrative tidies things up neatly by ignoring what it would rather not see, but an implied reader might feel that what the novel is really about is what it keeps secret, what it hides, what it suppresses.

The broad outline given above can now be developed in more detail. The key issue is the significance (or lack of it) of Blanca's disappearance. The question is whether it is in some way wilful (on Blanca's part) or contrived (on the part of the narrator—or perhaps other characters acting as his surrogates). Sharon Magnarelli—in what must, nonetheless, be credited as a superbly constructed essay—denies Blanca much agency of substance. She does not really separate her from the literary forms the novel parodies or pastiches. Adding Spanish American modernismo to erotic and detective fiction (Rubén Darío is referred to on a number of occasions and his ‘Era un aire suave …’ is quoted playfully in the penultimate chapter and parallels aspects of the story of the novel), she claims that all three forms are predicated upon the urge to disguise an inherent absence and, by extension, the vacuity of the society they echo (102). Blanca, who is virtually synonymous with the text in Magnarelli's reading, is much the same. In a Barthesean nod to the idea of eroticism as a form of discourse, the critic gives Blanca's autoeroticism a linguistic meaning, saying that, in the novel, ‘many of the linguistic constructs are devoted to the protagonist's self-admiration, as she “sees” herself, either mentally or in mirrors and pools of water, and as she “writes” herself in her internal monologues, carefully edits the script, sets the scene and then watches herself perform, both sexually and otherwise’ (105). With Magnarelli's trademark linguistic parallel established, it is not long before there is talk of language ceasing to signify and becoming mere covering (117), Blanca herself, as her name suggests, representing this very state of affairs (though somewhat peculiarly, one might be forgiven for thinking, if language does not ‘signify’ anything). Blanca, as a kind of pseudo-narrator, narcissistically projects her own erotic desire on to others, needing to be and assuming she is being seen and lusted after by them. The closeness of her relationship with Luna epitomises this condition, for his eyes—with which she becomes utterly fascinated—are blank, like mirrors, empty reflections of her. With no identity other than the stereotypical practices and consumer items she sports, ‘Blanca herself is an absence, enshrouded in signifiers which evoke not her but rather the elite society in which she moves’ (107). And, moreover, that society is itself given over to burying its emptiness or ‘nothingness’ with layers of meaningless covering or adornment. So, for Magnarelli, Blanca's disappearance is the conclusion of the theme of absence made present. Blanca did not really disappear. Because she was never really there.

Notwithstanding the central contradiction concerning the representative or otherwise powers of language, Magnarelli marshalls considerable textual evidence which could be seen to support her argument (especially with regard to the projection of the wish to be seen and desired). Her point is reinforced by the link forged between Blanca and modernismo as well as with erotica and mysteries. A number of swan images crop up in relation to Blanca's life and, at one stage, echoing her earlier erotic adventure at the opera Lohengrin she sees herself, now widowed, in the waters of the Retiro as ‘un maravilloso cisne negro entre tantos blancos’ (46). The swan, of course, is the classic modernista image, so Blanca is again living in reflections, in literature rather than life, in a literature, moreover, that is most commonly associated with ‘l'art pour l'art’, style, surface, decoration—not with depth or substance. The language of the novel might even be said to mimic that of modernismo. There is the quotation in the penultimate chapter and Blanca's ‘cuerpo fantaseoso’ is at one stage said to be in an ‘estado de sinestesia’ (47), while Magnarelli identifies a proliferation of adjectivisation. A feature of the text is indeed the qualification of nouns by unnecessary adjectives or adjectivisation, as in, for example: ‘sacó de su bolsillo un peine de carey y brillantes’ (65). The qualification is, like Blanca in Magnarelli's reading, non-functional, sheer excess, mere supplement—if anything, it points to the absence or emptiness that characterises the high society in which the marchioness moves. Erotic and detective stories, the conventions of which the novel also mimics, are similarly surplus to meaningful requirements. ‘All three forms of discourse are privileges of a leisured class—a class which consumes them and is portrayed within them, a class which has time, money and energy in excess of those used in “productive” or reproductive activities’ (Magnarelli, 113).

Reducing La marquesita de Loria to ‘empty signifiers’ (122), Magnarelli's conclusion would seem to be that there is no significance to Blanca's disappearance, that it merely follows the internal logic of a narrative that the protagonist herself appears to dominate or even manipulate. Yet even Magnarelli acknowledges that ‘Blanca is portrayed as conditioned by and a product of the social, artistic mythology which envelopes (sic) and surrounds her’ (107). This may not seem to grant her much agency, but it opens the way for a reading that might begin to. An aspect of Blanca's ‘conditioning’, should one choose to read it this way, is that her ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ Latin American self is swamped and distorted by European values (symbolised most obviously by the clothes, accessories and perfumes with European names with which she ‘covers’ herself). On the very first page it is said that, after her parents leave her in Madrid to return to their native Nicaragua, the marchioness

se había convertido ya en una europea cabal, sustituyendo esos ingenuos afectos por otros y olvidando tanto las sabrosas entonaciones de su vernáculo como las licencias femeninas corrientes en el continente joven, para envolverse en el suntuoso manto de los prejuicios, rituales y dicción de su flamante rango … - en el fondo todo había sido tan fácil como descartar un huipil en favor de una túnica de Paul Poiret.

(11-2)

Lucrecio Pérez Blanco sees the novel as being about loss of an American identity: ‘si Blanca, símbolo de Hispanoamérica, desaparece y no se encuentra rastro alguno suyo, es porque la descomposición no deja rastro del propio ser. El mestizaje de sangre, que pide un comportamiento coherente y distinto de quien mezcló la sangre, puesto que el nuevo ser es distinto, se destruye, se descompone por falta de coherencia’.⁶ The difficulty here is that the novel can also be seen as problematising the very idea of an ‘authentic’ ‘Latin American’ identity that Pérez Blanco appears to believe in. Surely if European identity (which seems here to amount to little more than a stream of conventions, fashions and designer goods) is a construct, then so is a Latin American identity which takes for granted ‘las licencias femeninas corrientes en el continente joven’ or, in a later example, ‘esa pasmosa vocación para las perversiones que suele darse aparejada con la ternura en las hembras del trópico’ (34). Examining Blanca's enraptured look at the opera, Casilda ‘no pudo sino meditar cómo algunos seres muy primitivos, por ejemplo esta linda muchacha, tienen una pureza tal que les facilita la comprensión de lo más inaccesiblemente selecto del arte’ (23). Of course, the reason for Blanca's rapture is not any primitive tropical purity but the fact that she is being surreptitiously masturbated by Paquito. Given that it is later revealed that Casilda has the hots for Blanca and given the Frenchwoman's fetishistic use of the term ‘primitivo’ to describe the young widow's image (115), it can be seen that Blanca's native primitiveness is itself a cultural invention: it is little more than the erotic cliché (especially in the arts) of the member of a dominant group's fetishistic desire for ‘difference’ in the form of a ‘young girl’, a ‘bit of rough’, a ‘black man’ or whatever (it is worth noting, especially for Casilda, that Blanca and her family are also bound up with notions of cultural and racial inferiority). In fact, Blanca's sexual adventures, following the series format typical of erotic literature, rehearse many of the usual clichés. By the time she is faced, in the second-to-last chapter, with a ménage-à-trois involving a lesbian romp and male cross-dressing, she is ‘mortalmente aburrida’ (162). In the final chapter, it is after the clichéd violent encounter on the back seat of her Isotta-Fraschini with her own ‘bit of rough’, the chauffeur Mario, that she walks away and disappears forever. Does this not intimate some degree of consciousness and action on the marquesita's part? And does not the relieved tone of the tacked-on epilogue of the final four pages, which restores order and surveys the smug and materially satisfactory lives of the characters who survive the marchioness, also imply Blanca's challenge to and rejection of the lifestyle of the others? As Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat comments, referring to erotic play, though he could equally be referring to material indulgence, ‘ante este aburguesamiento del carnaval erótico, a la marquesita no le queda otra solución que protagonizar el misterio de su propia desaparición’.⁷ And in this respect modernismo, for Gutiérrez-Mouat, has a wider sociopolitical significance beyond that suggested by adjectivisation. What Darío represents is the propagation through literature of a falsely naturalised myth of Latin American identity, ‘la impostación de un yo ficticio y artificial, y la apropiación de esta impostura a través de la lengua poética’ (267). Blanca, it might be argued—in her rejection of social and sexual clichés, her relationship with Luna and her disappearance—breaks with both normalising social constructs and with the artistic constructs that underpin them. In one sense she is clearly the marquesa Eulalia from ‘Era un aire suave …’, ‘maligna y bella’, who toys with her lovers and ‘ríe, ríe, ríe’. Yet Darío's poem ends with the lines: ‘Yo el tiempo y el día y el país ignoro; ❙ pero sé que Eulalia ríe todavía, ❙ ¡y es crüel y eterna su risa de oro!’.⁸ As Magnarelli has already pointed out (115), these lines indicate that the poet sees Eulalia as nothing but his own personal literary creation. If Donoso's novel uses the language of Darío's modernismo, one might therefore be inclined to infer that Blanca's actions in the text represent a rebellion against her linguistic construction and fixing. Her struggle is to transcend the restrictions that the narrative seeks to impose on her.

The relationship between protagonist and narrator raises important questions about representation. In particular, it raises questions about High and Low and about male representations of the female or, indeed, the ‘feminine’. The implied narratorial perspective of La marquesita de Loria can be taken as masculine. This is, by and large (and with some notable exceptions), the usual viewpoint of erotic or detective fiction; the tone here is purportedly authoritative and clearly masculine in, say, its comments on women; and the real author is, of course, a man. Also the theme of Blanca ‘being seen’, as well as the motifs of painting, the female model and the male artist, all suggest the male gaze. As has already been mentioned, the marquesita tends to perceive herself in terms of other people's looks of desire and, on top of this, she pictures herself as a Paul Chabas baigneuse and poses nude for the painter Archibaldo Arenas. Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin comments that ‘the acceptance of woman as object of the desiring male gaze in the visual arts is so universal that for a woman to question, or to draw attention to this fact, is to invite derision, to reveal herself as one who does not understand the sophisticated strategies of high culture and takes art too “literally”, and is therefore unable to respond to aesthetic discourses’.⁹ For a woman to challenge the validity of the female nude or the sexualisation of the representation of the female, this would be ‘undermined by authorized doubts, by the need to please, to be learned, sophisticated, aesthetically astute—in male-defined terms, of course’ (Nochlin, 32). Applying the painter-(female) nude relationship to the narrator-(female) character relationship in Donoso's novel, we can deduce that Blanca's sexual exhibitionism and narcissism is simply her internalisation of the implied male narrator's urge to see and portray her as sex object. What appears to be narration from Blanca's viewpoint in her sexual fantasies may actually often be the subtle and naturalising imposition of the dominant masculine narratorial viewpoint, which is not as neutral, distant, detached or playfully light-hearted as it seems. This is the Foucaultian notion that ‘symbolic power is invisible and can be exercised only with the complicity of those who fail to recognise either that they submit to it or that they exercise it’ (Nochlin, 2). Yet this is equally a pattern of power and potential resistance. To quote Foucault:

In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately upon others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. … A power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that ‘the other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognised and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up.¹⁰

Blanca, then, can acquire consciousness and contest her representation. She sees through the painter Archibaldo and leaves him; and she abandons too the narrator's attempted imposition of an erotic narrative by forsaking sexual high jinks, turning to Luna and disappearing.

What is beginning to emerge from behind the mask of a seemingly straightforward and amusing sophisticated pastiche of a popular genre is a more complex picture in which the mask itself is the very ploy activated to disguise the underlying reality of a power battle. Essentially a battle between a male narrator and his female protagonist, it is revealed by the (absent) presence of a further implied narrator (or, rather, implied author) who appeals to the insight and understanding of an implied reader. The reader is encouraged to see between the lines, in other words, and spot the limitations or inconsistencies of the projected narrator. The reader is the real detective in this mystery story and the villain he or she catches in the act is none other than the male narrator himself. An obvious example is the epilogue. The official narrator tries to ‘close’ the narrative by adopting a chirpy tone and describing a society enjoying harmony and satisfaction. Yet the alert reader cannot fail to notice his complete avoidance of or inability to explain or discuss the nature or implications of the marchioness's disappearance. The casual final line of the text, referring to the walks taken by Archibaldo and his new wife (incidentally, Blanca's sister—perhaps a more ruly and socially appropriate version of the marquesita?) ‘seguidos por Luna, su gran y fiel perro gris’ (198) is another pointer for the reader to pick up. The sheer unproblematic timbre of this statement must prompt the reader to feel that the official narrator is concealing something or refusing to face something, for he is simply glossing over the fact that Luna had previously appeared (at least) to have gone off to Blanca's, been involved in her disappearance, and is possibly still—in some phantasmal manifestation—haunting the shady corners of the Retiro to this day. A clue to assist the reader in deciphering this tendency is already given earlier in the presentation of Archibaldo Arenas. As a painter of portraits, he is like the narrator as compiler or chronicler, that is one who copies or reproduces reality in his art. Yet a detail reveals that he actually falsifies reality: he paints Tere Castillo as a ‘pescadora gallega’ when she is in fact a high society ‘andaluza’ (57). The implication is that the narrator does the same sort of thing. An example is the story of the death of the marquis, Paquito. Paquito's death is caused by complications arising from a bad cold which was aggravated when, insufficiently dressed, he left a fancy-dress ball early with Blanca in poor weather conditions. But two differing explanations as to why he left are given.¹¹ The first, fleetingly given shortly before the documentary-style death announcement quoted earlier as if by the official narrator, is that he ‘fled’, ‘pegado a las faldas de Blanca porque tanta algarabía le causaba desazón’, too scared to tell his mother he is going (40). This is a clear image of male weakness. The second (and more memorably expressed) version, presented more from Blanca's point of view, is that his determination to confront his mother and her alleged lover fills him with strength and energy, producing a huge erection and the determination to take his wife straight home and ‘violarla’ (51). What this indicates at the very least is that the narrator is at some level untrustworthy. Or, worse, that he is uneasy and manipulative. If the second version is from Blanca's viewpoint, then the narrator has manufactured her internalisation of the supposedly typical female (but actually male) fantasy of powerful male sexual potency. Blanca's ‘point of view’ here is really a narrative manipulation so that she is made to validate what is actually a projection of the male narrator's desire for sexual security. But surely, in the narrator's own terms, the first ‘official’ version, rather than Blanca's, should be the truth. This version though would confirm male weakness—which seems to be the truth anyway—for Paquito is, in fact, impotent. Thus the driving force behind the narrative power struggle is actually male sexual anxiety.

Fundamentally, it is the sense of order guaranteed by faith in binary logic that is felt to be in jeopardy. Political historian Carole Pateman says women have traditionally been perceived as ‘potential disrupters of masculine boundary systems of all sorts’, while Elaine Showalter, quoting Toril Moi, states that ‘women's social or cultural marginality seems to place them on the borderlines of the symbolic order, both the “frontier between men and chaos”, and dangerously part of chaos itself, inhabitants of a mysterious and frightening wild zone outside of patriarchal culture’.¹² It follows that the more the ‘presence’ of woman, the greater the sense of peril in man. Hence the narrator's need in La marquesita de Loria to impose himself on Blanca and assert his own presence in the epilogue. His anxiety suggests two possible things: that he is threatened by Blanca's leaving him, her independence, her departure from his familiar erotic narrative into an altogether less sure world; or that he gets rid of her himself, that he makes her disappear rather than confront what she is exposing herself and therefore exposing him to. The threat of greater female presence can be related to Showalter's comments on the emergence of the so-called New Woman at the fin-de-siècle (a world not dissimilar from the 1920s Madrid setting of Donoso's novel and with explicit parallels in Showalter's book to the current fin-de-siècle). Echoing the earlier remarks here, she discusses misogyny in fin-de-siècle painting: ‘there images of female narcissism, of the femme fatale and the sphinx, of women kissing their mirror images, gazing at themselves in circular baths, or engaging in autoerotic play mutate by the end of the century into savagely “gynecidal” visions of female sexuality’ (10). This is all remarkably like what happens to Blanca. Her self-consciousness and solitary sexual experiments do evolve in a deadly direction: two men die after sex with her and she, on a number of occasions, mentally verbalises the fatal power of her flesh. Moreover, Showalter's New Woman was particularly worrisome because her anarchic sense of sexual independence was thought to threaten the institution of matrimony (38) and presumably the male privileges that traditionally went with it. It is interesting in this respect that Blanca's thirst for carnal knowledge, ‘este enloquecedor anhelo de lo desconocido’ (46), takes off after the death of her husband. The widow is a traditionally troublesome image for the male: the idea of the Merry Widow, like Blanca, financially and therefore sexually independent, sexually experienced but unconstrained. Or there is the Black Widow, bringing death and associated with dark forces, again like Blanca with her mysterious canine companion, her links with the moon and the black women of the Caribbean with their tarot cards. The widow, of course, traditionally wears a veil, as does Blanca in her mourning outfit. Veils are strongly identified with female sexuality and the male gaze. According to Showalter, the veil traditionally represented the hymen (hence the conventional link with chastity) and ‘Nature’ in scientific or medical discourse was often likened to a woman whose secrets would be yielded when unveiled by man. But the veiled woman also connoted mystery and her ‘secrets’ were linked to the riddles of birth and death. Indeed Freud's reading of the image of the veiled woman in terms of the myth of the Medusa is the background to his theory of the male castration complex. To unveil woman is to confront the genitalised head of the Medusa, the upward displacement of the vagina dentata. The discovery of the female sexual organs incurs simultaneously the fear of decapitation or castration. This may well explain all the talk of penises in La marquesita de Loria—a projection of the narrator's male anxiety on to Blanca. Hard, ‘iron’ rods are frequently evoked yet the truth is that don Mamerto's penis is tiny, Almanza needs a corset to keep his up and Paquito's goes flaccid at the crucial moments. As Mary Ann Doane says, in her study of femmes fatales and veiling in cinema, ‘the phallus actually becomes important only insofar as it might be absent, it might disappear. It assumes meaning only in relation to castration’.¹³

Veils, sexuality, decapitation and castration, decadence and the idea of the femme fatale are elements which all combine in the story and myth of Salome (a focus of Showalter's analysis), which finds interesting echoes of itself in La marquesita de Loria. As Showalter reminds us, she was painted by Gustave Klimt as an elegant lady of the Belle Epoque who holds the severed head casually by her side—another parallel with the narratorial fear that underlies the glamorous portrait of Donoso's 1920s high-society marchioness. More intriguing still is Oscar Wilde's play Salome, particularly his 1893 edition accompanied by the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. La marquesita de Loria is also accompanied by illustrations from old editions of La Esfera, which—though much less sinister and suggestive—display certain period similarities with Beardsley's. The first drawing from Salome depicts the moon in a somewhat sexual context and its title was changed from The Man in the Moon to The Woman in the Moon, again echoing aspects of La marquesita de Loria: fear and mystery represented by the moon and Luna, sexual ambiguity and the dissolution of binary divisions. A further vague connection is the linking of the moon to death and disappearance. The Page of Herodias urges Narraboth to look at the moon rather than at Salome and later laments: ‘… now he has killed himself. … Well, I knew that the moon was seeking a dead thing, but I knew not that it was he whom she sought. Ah! Why did I not hide him from the moon?’ This makes us think both of Blanca's withdrawal from sexuality in favour of a disappearance involving Luna and the male narrator's dual fear of female sexuality and chaos. But what Salome represents above all is the enthralling and terrifying unveiling of the female self. The widow's veil of the marquesita de Loria expresses not only her disquieting blurring of boundaries (the veil is neither complete exposure nor complete concealment) but is also relieved of its connotations of chastity, modesty and unavailability: ‘la joven marquesa viuda de Loria paseaba por los senderos del Retiro luciendo para ojos desconocidos … el misterio de su luto. Pero de sus orejas se cimbraban dos lágrimas de oro facetado cuyo brillo trascendía los velos del duelo con perversos guiños impuestos por la ligereza del paso de la joven’ (55). Within a few pages, the wind has lifted her veils and she is receiving copious piropos (59). Then she initiates her post-marital sex life and causes the death of the diminutively-endowed don Mamerto. All of this is a symbolic returning of the male gaze and part of a process of breaking with the self-image of woman as male sex object. What is more, it exposes the constructed nature of the masculine othering of women. The face behind the veil is probably normal after all. As Cixous says, ‘You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing’.¹⁴ It is the fear of looking straight on that makes the marquesita disappear or at least makes the disappearance be ignored.

Effectively, what happens in La marquesita de Loria is that Blanca is both object and agent. She connotes what Laura Mulvey terms ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ in her seminal essay on female representation in film, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,¹⁵ while at the same time marks the transition from heroine as reflection of the hero's dynamics to heroine with agency. Yet even without or before agency, so the theory goes, the male unconscious has to deal with castration anxiety (based on ‘the visually ascertainable absence of the penis’), since even ‘the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified’ (Mulvey, 13). Mulvey sees two avenues of escape for the male unconscious, both of which would seem to correspond to strategies employed (or attempted) by the implied male narrator of La marquesita de Loria. One is fetishistic scopophilia, ‘a complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous’ (Mulvey, 13-4). This is clearly essayed in La marquesita de Loria but does not seem to work. The other is voyeurism, involving ‘preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object’ (Mulvey, 13). Certainly, the narrator subjects the case of the marchioness to investigation and tries to devalue her by presenting her as sex-crazed and shallow. It is important to remember that the narrator adopts a playful, ironic tone more often than a documentary approach: this, coupled with the mocking adjectivisation mentioned earlier, allows him to appear superior and deflate Blanca. Yet he fails to demystify her mystery and fails, it can be argued, to devalue her. Perhaps then he manages to punish her. Salome ends with Herod calling for the woman's death. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, another fin-de-siècle work with evident links to La marquesita de Loria, Lucy's sexualised vampiric impurity (echoes of Blanca and Luna) is corrected by men decapitating her (Freud's Medusa-related castration anxiety again) and driving a stake through her heart (the relieved flaunting of the phallus). Blanca, meantime, is destroyed by a horrific monster (so Mario claims) and the world is put right again by the epilogue.¹⁶ Returning now to the sketches from La Esfera, their arrangement suggests a similar urge to punish and regain control. The drawings, which precede each chapter, all of women, all suit the period tone of the text and may be taken to parallel it closely. The first three (of eight) all correspond to the action in the chapter concerned—widowhood, a masked ball, a woman alone in her bedroom. This all suggests strong narratorial control and organisation. Yet in the third chapter, the woman portrayed appears to be looking out straight ahead. This is the only picture in which the woman's eyes are not covered or turned away. Is this a breakdown in the power of the male gaze (control) and a pointer to Blanca's self-discovery or self-assertion? It could well be, because the illustration preceding the next chapter (the fourth)—a woman in a tennis dress—indicates a crumbling of the rigidly ordered parallels since it refers to an episode which does not take place until the sixth chapter. Indeed the next three illustrations bear no clear-cut relation to the chapters at all. Narratorial command of the entirety of the text is being undermined, it seems. But the placing of the final illustration reestablishes control. It is of a woman and a sporty motor car, alluding to Blanca's final and probably fatal journey in the last chapter. And here the woman is looking away and, for the first time in the drawings, is veiled. The inference may well be that the male narrator is back in charge, female modesty is restored, the female threat will be destroyed. Not so fast, though. The veil is an ambiguous image, problematising boundaries as much as fixing them. And, in the most important illustration of them all, the one in colour, on the cover, the female figure is looking right out at the other looker, eyes wide open and clear, returning the gaze, even, given the intensity of the eyes, acting as the gazing subject rather than the gazed-at object. Maybe the protagonist does get one over on her narrator after all.

The point is that there is something of a truth to both views of the outcome of the battle, for Blanca does not score a ‘triumph’ in any conventional sense and the narrator does manage to restore a semblance of order. The outcome is similar to that of Donoso's early story ‘Paseo’ (and maybe, too, a variation on it, Este domingo) where an orderly but strangely uncomfortable narrator recalls the unexplained disappearance during his childhood of his aunt with a mysterious dog. The narrator's life is controlled but wanting, while the aunt's disappearance is seen as both a collapse into chaos and a glimpse of fulfilment or meaning. So what Blanca achieves is to transcend false, sterile and limiting notions of order, but that achievement—though potentially meaningful for her—is presented as dark and perturbing because it erodes the order-predicated binary logic upon which conventional narrative, society and even ‘civilisation’ depend. Turning now to examine this process more closely, the first thing to notice—before even considering Blanca's ‘alternative’—is the unsettled nature of the narrative itself. The narrative depends in part on the illusion of documentary realism. Also, in mimicking a popular genre, it depends on the illusion of a comfortingly familiar format. Yet many narratorial interventions have a tongue-in-cheek quality about them (simple random examples would be the references to ‘el banquete—si de banquete puede calificarse tan rústico ágape’ or Almanza's ‘retazos de fandangos absolutamente irrepetibles’ [31, 155]). The language too is often exaggeratedly stylised (a good example here is the account of Blanca's erotic-cum-romantic visit to Archibaldo's studio where a short time lapse is described four times in eight pages as ‘un siglo’, there are three ‘maravillosos’ in a single paragraph and the first kiss (‘dulce beso’) of the encounter ‘los haría—como lo aseguraban todos los novelistas—vibrar al unísono’ and ‘parecía haber encendido otra luz en el estudio’ [122-30]). Moreover, there is a dramatic intervention towards the end in the report of the chauffeur's reaction to the disappearance: ‘… montó en el Isotta-Fraschini para ir a toda velocidad al puesto de policía más cercano, donde contó lo que el autor de esta historia acaba de contar en este capítulo y que está a punto de terminar’ (193-4). In one sense, such interventions reinforce narrative authority, by signposting a relaxed and superior organiser or creator. At the same time though, they disrupt the mode of documentary realism, question the popular genre feel of the text, conflict often—in terms of tone—with the events narrated, and betray an anxiety over narratorial presence (the last quotation immediately preceding the narratorial imposition of the order-restoring epilogue in the face of Blanca's chaotic disappearance). The text then seems to lack the ‘colle logique’ which Barthes sees as fundamental to the ‘readerly’ text.¹⁷ It is this rupturing of narratorial security which allows us to read Blanca's story as that which generates the textual discomfort.¹⁸

The essential feature of Blanca's story is the displacement of her sexual or material quest (voiced as a quest for knowledge and fulfilment [e.g. 12, 46-7]) and linked to a desire for gratification through power (e.g. 14, 58ff) by its opposite.¹⁹ Sexual situations from the start are juxtaposed with instances of death or the appearance of morally sterile characters like Almanza. The lengthy and delayed build-up to the highly-charged description of the eventual sexual rencontre with Archibaldo Arenas (which promises to be the pinnacle of satisfaction) is almost immediately undone by Blanca's sense of disappointment and virtually instant abandonment of him. This is a pivotal encounter, for Archibaldo not only represents the meaninglessness of the sexual-material quest, he also provides Luna, the key figure in the displacement of the quest. Luna, of course, may not exist as such in a conventional sense (none of her staff notices him, Archibaldo does not miss him and he is still with him at the end).²⁰ He is, thus, part of Blanca, the unconscious side she has learned to suppress but is now beginning to see. Either way, it is what he represents that matters. And it is the opposite to Archibaldo. The painter's lemon-grey eyes turn out to be merely black and empty (120, 166, 168); instead Blanca immerses herself in the lemon-grey eyes of ‘ese perro terrible y maravilloso’ in a way she never could in anyone else's (166). The eyes (which are like two moons) are linked to the black or half-caste women who read tarot cards and talked of witchcraft to Blanca as a child:²¹

… las mestizas de su niñez en las noches de miedo le señalaban las dos lunas idénticas en el horizonte (i.e. the moon and its reflection) para calmarla. ¿Pero por qué había producido esta hecatombe doméstica, Luna, su Luna, su perro querido a quien, ahora se daba cuenta, había echado de menos durante todo el día, sobre todo a sus ojos suspendidos en el horizonte mismo de su imaginación.

(141-2)

Luna is part of a dark other side and is wreaking havoc in her world yet is what she really wants. He is an alternative to the material (he literally destroys the sumptuous but redundant elegance of her ‘alcoba de raso color fraise ecrasé’ [12] converting it into ‘esa fétida ruina que la satisfacía’ [170]) and the sexual (increasingly tiresome erotic incidents are juxtaposed sharply with the thrill of her return to Luna [140, 162-3, 184] and the erotic—or pornographic—cliché of the sexual encounter of woman and animal pointedly does not materialise [143]), offering her a unity or possibility of completion—‘dos lunas que eran una sola’ (106)—which she has been lacking in her life so far. The climax comes when she abandons the known world altogether by disappearing with the animal into ‘la oscuridad total donde sólo podían existir los remansos lunares de los ojos de Luna’ (189), seemingly devoured by a dog-like creature (193). All that remains of her are an ornate handgun, a silver clasp, a French shoe and a classy gold watch—all fetishistic images of the material and sensuous world she has left behind. There is no body. The narrator may have got rid of her.²² But her ‘absence’ might also be his castration fear and her assertion of freedom from the male gaze. Blanca rejects the role that is written for her and undermines the very epistemological and ontological categories that give shape to society's script.

A final point concerning the narrator-marquesita dialectic is its relationship to that of Europe and Latin America. As has already been suggested, the post-Boom and even the postmodern in Latin America are concepts very much wrapped up with questions of intertextuality and cultural transnationalism, with two broad tendencies (sometimes different, sometimes convergent) emerging, one involving play and interaction with popular or mass culture, the other supposedly more popular-rooted and involving greater local cultural and political specificity. La marquesita de Loria is certainly not the latter (in the sense that, say, testimonio is) but it does come between two books dealing very obviously with Latin American politics (Casa de campo in 1978 and El jardín de al lado in 1981), the latter precisely dealing with the link with European perspectives. And interestingly enough, Donoso has defined the modern Latin American novel as ‘being about identification, a search for national identity and for personal identity’.²³ Blanca's personal identity does have a strong continental and intercontinental dimension. Denoting and connoting her tropical provenance, her beauty is routinely described with terms like ‘sus lindos brazos de criolla’ (14) and her genital region is referred to with terms like ‘vegetación’ and ‘selva’ (at one stage ‘su vellón casi no animal’ [101]). The dangerous beauty and sexuality of the femme fatale, which needs to be contained, is thus identified with ‘Latin Americanness’. The containment is effected by European discourse. Blanca is like a ‘continente vacío’ (167), to be filled with European signifiers. Displaying the complicity characteristic of the Foucaultian notion of power, she allows her identity to be remodelled via European fashions and practices and rewritten via the European-style narrator's pastiche of Spanish erotic fiction. However, while Blanca is moulded by Europe as she is by the narrative, her Latin Americanness is resistant. Even the fragrance of L'Heure Bleue cannot conceal her ‘ardiente aroma de criolla’ (57). And she vows to hit back at accusations of cursilería (96): ‘ella, al fin y al cabo, era una bravía hembra del continente nuevo, del que no se avergonzaba pese a que eligiera cubrirlo con un barniz de civilización, barniz que estaba dispuesta a romper en cuanto le conviniera’ (74). Part of the marquesita's challenge to narratorial authority, then, is also implicitly a challenging of eurocentrism. Again, if the narrator is implied as European or Europeanist as well as male, then the implied reader will recognise the (implied) author as Latin American. The truth is, though, that Blanca, educated as she is ‘tanto por las negras del trópico como por las monjas de España’ (13), is both. As is the author, who is as much part of a European and North American cultural tradition as he is of a Latin American one.²⁴ Indeed the entire Blanca-narrator dialectic and the issues it has raised here draw attention to the deeply intratextual and intertextual construction of the novel. ‘You must acknowledge’, Donoso has remarked, ‘that my novels, especially the last ones, on one level are postmodern and are involved with the confusion of the telling and the told, but on another level, they preserve a sort of sociological and, somehow, political meaning’ (Montenegro and Santí, 12-3). Perhaps Donoso manages to achieve this balance—in this work at least, if not necessarily in the more overtly political Casa de campo—because the novel neither seeks the inscription of a strong authorial voice as in La tía Julia y el escribidor nor particularly seeks to reconcile a clear political agenda with the problematisation of the relationship between literature and reality as in La cabeza de la hidra. Oddly enough, La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria has received very scant critical attention. This is probably because it has been considered frivolous and superficial. Yet it is the very subtlety of the interaction between the surface and what lies behind it that makes this novel one which does manage, without undoing itself, to be European and Latin American, popular and serious, at the same time.

Notes

1. José Donoso, ‘Dos mundos americanos’, El Mercurio (Artes y Letras), 14 Nov. 1982, p. 1.

2. Sharon Magnarelli's impressive work is an obvious example of the application of a theoretical model which brings out similar ‘themes’ across a variety of differing works. See her Understanding José Donoso, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1993. All references to Magnarelli in this chapter will be to her ‘Disappearance Under the Cover of Language: The Case of the Marquesita de Loria’ in Studies on the Works of José Donoso, ed. Miriam Adelstein, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter, 1990, pp. 101-29. For a discussion of the evolution in Donoso's work from Boom to post-Boom, see, for example, my José Donoso: The Boom and Beyond, Francis Cairns, Liverpool and Wolfeboro, 1988.

3. José Donoso, Casa de campo, 3rd ed., Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1980, p. 54.

4. José Donoso, La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1980, p. 11.

5. Donoso himself describes the novel both as a take-off of Spanish erotic fiction of the 1920s and as a whodunnit in ‘A Conversation between José Donoso and Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier’, in The Creative Process in the Works of José Donoso, ed. Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliú, Winthrop Studies on Major Modern Writers, Rock Hill, 1982, p. 15.

6. Lucrecio Pérez Blanco, ‘Acercamiento a una novela de denuncia social: La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria de José Donoso’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, XVI, 1982, p. 400.

7. Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat, José Donoso: impostura e impostación, Hispamérica, Gaithersburg, 1983, p. 252.

8. Rubén Darío, Poesías completas, Aguilar, Madrid, 1961, pp. 615-17.

9. Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, pp. 29-30.

10. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983, p. 220.

11. Magnarelli offers a more or less opposite interpretation to the one given here, though her comments on the point of view in each version concur roughly with mine. See pp. 103-4 and pp. 124-5 n. 11.

12. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, Penguin, New York, 1990, pp. 7-8. Showalter quotes Carol Pateman from Susan Aiken et al., ‘Trying Transformations: Curriculum Legislation and the Problem of Resistance’, Signs, XII, 1987, p. 261 and Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, Routledge, London and New York, 1985, p. 167. My comments on the New Woman, the Veiled Woman, Salome and Dracula draw on Showalter. The quotation from Oscar Wilde is from Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 155.

13. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, New York and London, p. 45. The central fear of the disappearance of the phallus becomes a literal reality in Donoso's ‘Chatanooga Choochoo’ from Tres novelitas burguesas, another story inverting traditional notions of sexual power.

14. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1980, p. 255. Quoted in Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 156.

15. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, XVI, 1975, p. 11.

16. The pattern of this epilogue is inverted in an interesting way in Donoso's El jardín de al lado, where the narrative of an insecure male author turns out, in the final chapter, to be actually that of his wife. In a remark which may intimate male sexual insecurity, Donoso has commented that: ‘Julio (the author character) se transforma en mujer. … Él busca una transformación todo el tiempo, quiere ser otro: no se da cuenta de que quiere ser otra en el fondo’. See my ‘Una entrevista con José Donoso’, Revista Iberoamericana, LIII, 1987, p. 997.

17. Roland Barthes, S/Z, Seuil, Paris, 1970, p. 162.

18. This sort of pattern is discussed in more detail in my ‘Structure and Meaning in La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies,LXIII, 1986, pp. 247-56.

19. The quest is both material and sexual in that both are perceived as sources of possible satisfaction and forms of power, but—more fundamentally—the latter depends on the former, since it is wealth and status which allow for unquestioned sexual freedom and adventure.

20. Intriguingly, though, Luna does not appear to be present when Blanca visits Archibaldo's studio.

21. It is a motif of much Donoso fiction that women, servants, the elderly, the poor, blacks or other races are associated with witchcraft or the dark side: in other words, they represent an alternative or threat to the dominant order whose sense of survival depends on the repression of that which it would prefer not to have to deal with.

22. Given that the novel can be seen as a whodunnit, Blanca's ‘killer’ might well be the narrator. The fact that a shot is heard and a gun is found might, on the other hand, indicate a suicide, reinforcing perhaps the idea of Blanca's agency and choice and her rejection of society. Magnarelli suggests a possible scenario wherein Casilda would be the killer (p. 126 n. 22), presumably framing Mario—whose prosecution she vigorously pursues (Marquesita, p. 194)—for the crime.

23. Amalia Pereira, ‘Interview with José Donoso’, Latin American Literary Review, XV, 1987, p. 58.

24. In a recent interview, Donoso admits also that his generation of writers from Latin America were exploring the ‘already-made vocabulary of images’ of the European and North American novel of experimentation. See Nivia Montenegro and Enrico Mario Santí, ‘A Conversation with José Donoso’, New Novel Review I, no. 2, 1994, p. 13.

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