[In the following essay, Meléndez discusses the multiple texts and subtexts of El jardín de al lado.]

To introduce the concept of palimpsest in a technological and computerized era might be perceived as an unnecessary irony or as the sign of reliance on an already exhausted metaphor. But the proliferation of intertexts, both perceptible and veiled, in José Donoso's El jardín de al lado (1981) reveals an archaic system, the palimpsest, linked to a process of writing or “publishing.” This system functions as a literary metaphor in which the substitution of the object and its referent for one or more other objects and referents does not imply the disappearance of the first set. Although in the medieval practice of “scraping again” the text substituted is not necessarily linked to what it covers, the dialectical implications suggested by the palimpsestic metaphor in Donoso's novel connect and unmask the multiple covert/overt texts that demand to be read. The recognition of texts over a text is, in essence, an incomplete enterprise, since the established fictive boundaries between them disappear with the identification of each fragment as a single entity. This contradictory phenomenon—boundaries vanish just as they are discovered—leads us to juxtapose the multiple texts and their readings and simultaneously reveals the subordinate nature of both the explicit and implicit discourses. Therefore, within this framework, literary intertextuality becomes a useful notion only if conceived not exclusively as an echo of other texts or as mere sharing of a stock of literary codes and conventions, but as a nonhierarchical interplay of discourses. The illusory discovery of footprints, of ruins, submerges the observer (reader) in a world that has apparently disappeared and upon which new worlds—or texts—have been built or written.¹

The recognition of a consequent multiplication of texts and subtexts imposed by the palimpsestic metaphor obliges us to heed warnings in Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading against the debate that opposes intrinsic to extrinsic criticism, which in formalistic terms states that “form is now a solipsistic category of self-reflection, and the referential meaning is said to be extrinsic.”² From the standpoint of the inherent plurality implied in the title of the present essay, my concern is the “obligation” of reading and decoding both the superimposed text and the one(s) being removed. That is, I shall be dealing, not with the inside/outside metaphor that de Man seriously questions—although he often has recourse to it—but with the notion of covert and overt writing, which has more to do with a rhetorical development than with a structural one. The relationship between the act of interpretation and the use of the metaphor of the palimpsest suggests a process of elucidation, of revealing something else.

But my goal is not to “translate” into intelligible or familiar language what has been explicitly presented or indirectly concealed, even less to put the overt discourse in the place of the one that remained obscured. It is to expose a proliferation of texts that thematically and formally clash with one another and, in this encounter, to examine their genesis/destruction as linguistic and fictive entities. Nevertheless, the possibility of reading these multiple “manuscripts” that are constantly emerging and simultaneously being substituted presents the reader with a rhetorical dilemma. The metaphorical and/or literal nature of the text's language creates another level of intra- and extra-textual structures that are part of the overt/covert writings. The garden, for example, not only characterizes the proliferation and elusiveness of its meanings but also questions the distinction between what is understood as literal and what is figural. In other words, which one is the “real” garden, who represents the authoritative voice of the text, which novel are we, in any case, reading?

In El jardín de al lado the protagonist and narrator, Julio Méndez, is a slightly recognized Chilean writer whose most recent novel has been rejected for publication by the well-known editor from Barcelona, Núria Monclús, although she encourages Julio to revise and rewrite his text. Five of the first six chapters of Donoso's novel consist of Julio's narration of the ordeal of revising his manuscript during a summer in Madrid. Parallel to his need for writing, the other strong force in Julio's life is his wife, Gloria. Fusion and confusion of past and present events transforms Julio's narration of his professional and personal life into an autobiography. But when, in the sixth chapter, we discover that it is Gloria who has written and implicitly narrated the entire preceding text, El jardín de al lado's clear commentary on its self-begetting and fictional nature becomes problematic. What was first taken for Julio's autobiography—Julio's text and narrative voice—turns out to be Gloria's recreation of their survival as writers. This moment of recognition, which coincides with the end of Donoso's novel—and also with that of Gloria's work—invites the reader to look for an alternate and more reliable writing that has been concealed. The act of rereading, either literal or metaphoric, implies substitution of the former interpretative text (where the garden was observed by Julio) for a text where the narrative discourse has been drastically altered and where the point of view (that of the observer of the garden) has been replaced. “Erasing” the first reading to set forth a new interpretation is reminiscent of Julio's painful exercise of rereading and rewriting his rejected text.

Overt thematization of the acts of writing, reading, publishing, and interpreting in El jardín de al lado leads us to pose a question similar to the one de Man proposed while trying to “explain” the passage in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu where Marcel engages in the act of reading a novel: “The question is precisely whether a literary text is about that which it describes, represents or states” (p. 57). In his attempt to answer his query, de Man examines the possible coincidence between the meaning read and the meaning stated in the Recherche. If, as de Man says, “reading is the metaphor of writing” (p. 68), then El jardín de al lado is a clear example of an act of reading both explained and redefined by its counterpart, the act of writing. The process of interpretation becomes, therefore, a paradigm of both reading and writing. De Man's Proust is comparable to Donoso: El jardín is a work in which the story-telling and the story-told are intermingled, the meaning read and the meaning stated blend together. Gloria's fictionalization of Julio's political and existential dilemmas documented in his rejected novel reveals the difficulty of writing about a writing saturated with historical and political overtones. It is Julio-narrator who reproduces part of Núria Monclús' verdict of his novel: “Falta una dimensión más amplia, y, sobre todo, la habilidad para proyectar, más que para describir o analizar, tanto situaciones como personajes de manera que se transformen en metáfora, metáfora válida en sí y no por lo que señala afuera de la literatura, no como crónica de sucesos que todo el mundo conoce y condena, y que por otra parte la gente está comenzando a olvidar. …”³ De Man's concerns for autobiography as a genre—“what is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history”⁴—highlight not only the autobiographical connections between Donoso's own life and El jardín but, more substantially, Julio's inadequacy to recreate his political experience within his literary creation. On the other hand, to what extent does Gloria's own text succeed or fail to make of her literary discourse a metaphor—something that, as she immediately discovers, Julio is incapable of doing? Can we, as readers of Donoso's novel, recognize our own forgetfulness of historical events that are foreign to our experience, or that, even if experienced, are eventually buried in our memory? Can we describe the ethical/aesthetical dialectic that obsessed Julio and Gloria as an aporia which, in spite of its contradictions, they both try to reconcile in their writings—Julio through overt incorporation and description and Gloria through a false act of rejection?

Julio's “intention” in writing his novel-document (as he alludes to it) is precisely to transform the six days spent in a Chilean jail into what he calls a source of telling, in other words, a discourse. But this enterprise is threatened not only by the course of time (which turns the narration pale and causes it to fade away), but more evidently by the superimposition of other texts, by the invasion of other “experiencias menos transcendentes y más confusas, mezquinas experiencias personales que no me aportaban otra cosa que humilliación …” (p. 31). The weakening of Julio's “heroic experience,” the weakening of his initial hate produced by the imprisonment, begins to transform itself into a marginal text where the remains and footprints are being replaced by other writings: “todo este cúmulo de vejaciones se había sobreimpreso a aquella experiencia cuya jerarquía yo tan desesperadamente trataba de mantener mediante las páginas de notas que escribía como quien riega una planta moribunda, pero que, ay, al fin se iba secando pese a tanto esfuerzo” (p. 32).⁵ It is not until Julio completes the revision of his novel that he is able to criticize his manuscript, recognizing in it the lack of two central aspects of the creative process: “Al avanzar por mi copioso escrito se me fue haciendo indudable que la pasión que pretendía animarlo no era ni convincente como literatura ni válida como experiencia” (p. 114).

As de Man suggests, Marcel's act of reading reconciles imagination and action. Marcel realizes that the sedentary act of reading is powerful enough to recreate the outside world and even to draw a more holistic perception of it. Although in El jardín de al lado Julio's ethical conflict between imagination and action is restructured in a different manner, it also dramatizes the confrontation of the inner and the outer worlds (jail-garden) as experienced by the protagonist. Julio's anxiousness to transform his political experience—which is not transcendental—into a transcendental writing is precisely what establishes the parameters and the inevitable failure of his text. But one of the ironic forces of El jardín is that Julio not only fails to recreate asthetically his Chilean imprisonment, but also fails to participate, while in self-imposed exile, in an active political life. Gloria constantly accuses him of his ideological “impotency,” of his weak liberalism, and describes his “moderate humanism” as pedantic cowardice. Therefore, the emptiness of both his literary work and his own life is filled neither by imagination nor by action. Contrary to Marcel's relationship with the act of reading, neither of these activities is capable of satisfactorily replacing the other. When Julio mentally blames Gloria for living her life in his shadow—that is, through him—he is ironically describing his own pseudoliterary discourse which lies under the shadow of historical facts and, indeed, is eclipsed by Gloria's successful story. In a similar way, the garden translates into metaphor and simultaneously deconstructs its own allegorical meaning, particularly in its dual incarnation of the literal and the metaphorical and of the action and the imagination.

After a long period of procrastination, provoked by his weaknesses, his abuses of drugs and alcohol, his mother's death, his contemplation of the garden, Julio completes the revision of his novel. But his second version is the result of an imprisonment different from the one that inspired the original text. The endless series of dramatic events in Gloria's life—from Julio's refusal to sell the family house after the death of his mother to Bijou's theft of one of Salvatierra's paintings—pushes her to a state of depression, having as one of the consequences her absolute silence, particularly towards Julio. In their own special ways, both Julio and Gloria become convalescents from different “diseases,” prisoners of different jails where, as Julio says: “Incomunicada [Gloria], sólo tolera su situación de encarcelamiento dentro de su enfermedad. Pienso en mis seis días de calabozo en Santiago, en lo distinto y en lo igual a esta enfermedad que fueron, y lo igual que son, también, a esto en que se está transformando mi novela” (pp. 208-09). Not by mere coincidence, El jardín is divided into six chapters. This fact suggests the possible infinite exchange between the literal and figurative vision of the garden and the six days spent by Julio in jail—a substitution that can even take place in the title. Julio asks himself: “¿Hubiera podido terminarla sin el silencio de su enfermedad, sin la paz que me ha proporcionado su dolor y su encarcelamiento?” (p. 212). Once his novel is revised and Julio recognizes his wife's symptoms of recovery, he gives his new text to Gloria, whose muteness is now directed only toward him. Gloria's reading is staged, as de Man would have it, in his Allegories of Reading in “an inner, sheltered place … that has to protect itself against the invasion of an outside world, but that nevertheless has to borrow from this world some of its properties” (p. 59). The jail, in Gloria's text, has become a garden. But the garden turned out to be as oppressive for Gloria as she had intended to make it for Julio. In other words, the metaphorical connotation of the garden has expanded to include both the creation and the creator.

Gloria's reading of the new manuscript—that took place after Julio's revision of his own text—questions the first act of rereading that he experiences, since it suggests that the end result will not only be an act of criticism on her part but also of re-writing. We are forced to ask then: to what extent is Gloria's novel—that is, her writing—the consequence of her reading of Julio's novel? Is her own creation a “revision” of her husband's defective text? Núria's negative response to Julio's novel comes precisely from Julio's inability to “see” his own creation. Since he is incapable of “looking over” his text, his rewriting is as faulty as the first version: “No sé lo que he escrito, ni lo que a mí me ha ocurrido al escribir. No logro verme, ni ‘verla’” (p. 211).

But the reader does “see” and recognize the confused causality of the acts of (re)reading and (re)writing in the identities, also confused, of Julio and Gloria. Their marital struggles, where harmony and discord coexist as a single entity and where dissatisfaction with the physical and sexual decadence of the partner's body can only be destroyed by the other's presence, dramatize their battle to reconcile their antagonistic discourses in a single body—or text—as a means of becoming one. Julio repeatedly questions himself about his tendency and Gloria's to invade the other's very being, to deny it by their intrusions: “¿Por qué sólo nos satisface la devoración mutua, el escarbar incansable de uno dentro del otro hasta que no queda ni un rincón turbio ni oscuro ni privado, ni una sola fantasía conservada como algo personal, sin exponerla?” (p. 234). The duality—reading and writing and their repetition—exercised both by Julio and Gloria, represent part of that struggle of identity where there is a confusing relationship between creator and reader. Within this profusion of readings, writings, and interpretations, Gloria raises these acts to the level of themes in her novel and experiences them in her chaotic life:

Escribí mis quejas en mi diario, tan desgarrador que ahora no me atrevo a releerlo; pero al releerlo entonces para escarbar mi rencor, y al volver y volver a escribir esas páginas, y darles vueltas y más vueltas, fui como depurándolo todo, en ese tiempo tan largo que las estaciones me han obsequiado junto al Mediterráneo, depurando la imagen de mí misma, la de Julio, la de nuestro matrimonio, hasta darme cuenta de que para que este examen tuviera fuerza de realidad era necesario que yo construyera algo fuera de mí misma, pero que me contuviera, para “verme”: un espejo en el cual también se pudieran “ver” otros, un objeto que yo y otros pudiéramos contemplar afuera de nosotros mismos, aunque todo lo mío sea, ahora, en tono menor.

(pp. 252-53)

This is precisely why the famous editor of Latin American fiction, Núria Monclús, is willing to publish Gloria's novel. In opposition to the accomplishments of her text, Gloria realizes that the only footprint left by Julio's manuscript was a vague chronicle of injustice. But is Gloria's success, in any case, the result of her refusal to give Núria access to her diary and in a way risk a rewriting of her text by an “outsider,” as they both did to Julio? Or is this not what actually happens when, during a meeting between editor and writer, Núria expresses dissatisfaction with the end of Gloria's novel, and after listening to her narration of Julio's vicissitudes in Tangiers, suggests that this become the end of the novel:

—¡Please do not disturb! ¡Qué irónico final feliz para una novela tan amarga!—dijo [Núria].

—¿Cómo … ?

—Bueno, ¿no es éste el capítulo que falta, el que no has escrito … ? preguntó Núria Monclús.

(p. 264)

Needless to say, this also happens to be the end of El jardín de al lado. Ironically, Núria-(re)reader has provided her own writing; she has imposed her own ending to Gloria's novel. But, is this a metaphor for what the reader of fiction experiences while engaged in the act of (re)reading—that is, the imperative to interpret and rewrite what (s)he is reading? When Núria suggests that Gloria's real challenge is to write a second novel, is she implying that the public's reading of her first text will immediately produce an infinite number of rewriters demanding their active participation in the process of creation?

This “struggle for authority,” or even the recognition of it—to use Lucille Kerr's terms⁶—is not limited to the two narrator-writers, Gloria and Julio, who represent the overt powers. But the causal line of development between the act of (re)reading and the need to (re)write unveils the fragility of those powerful overt structures of creation which, ironically, become subject to the strength of other readings and writings, such as Núria's or even our own. The “new” texts discovered do not represent the substitution of the original one, but an interplay of discourses that weakens the entire system of authority, including the authorial figure.

According to Kerr, when we finish reading El jardín de al lado and discover Gloria's voice as creator and manipulator of the narration, “we virtually see one image of authority usurp the position of the other: an apparently secondary subject of authority replaces another whose primary position seems to have been authorized and then denied by that very subject who literally follows, but also virtually precedes, him as the ‘original’ author(ity)” (p. 44). The truth of this statement is subject to an endless process of substitution that is not limited to Julio and to Gloria's manipulations or even to the direct or subtle allusions to Donoso's reality as a Chilean writer, but to the very nature and power of reading and writing. In this case, Donoso is equally subject to the process of substitution, and his text is also threatened by our reading and inevitable rewriting.⁷ The ironic overtones of the readers' discovery of Gloria's new position provoke the dismantling of the first reading, where the autobiographical first-person narration becomes a biographical account presented by one of the characters of the “former” text. Gloria's takeover demands an act of rereading—which for de Man (Allegories, p. 57) is “a play between a prospective and a retrospective movement” (p. 57)—an act of revising not the truth or falseness of the overt and covert texts, but their rhetorical structures. As already implied, Gloria's literary account is also subject to a process of dismantling and reconstruction.

To decode the layers of rhetorical structures that a plurality of narrations—through the proliferation of readings and writings—imposes on the text, has been one of my tasks. Let us turn now to the recurrent trope of the garden. The first allusion to the duke's garden, which is next to Salvatierra's apartment, is immediately diverted to a different garden populated by other flora and by other figures:

Mientras Gloria termina de abrir la cortina me levanto de la cama y miro: sí, un jardín. … Florecillas inidentificables brotan a la sombra de las ramas. … Ramas de un jardín de otro hemisferio, jardín muy distinto a este pequeño parque aristocrático, porque aquélla era sombra de paltos y araucarias y naranjos y magnolios, y sin embargo esta sombra es igual a aquélla, que rodea de silencio esta casa en que en este mismo momento mi madre agoniza.

(p. 65)

Julio's memories of his Chilean house and its inhabitants (his dying mother, his dead father, his German-speaking niece, himself as a youth) come forth through the presence of an immediate and physical space already mentioned in the title. In addition, the fusion, confusion, and multiplication of gardens and feelings remind the reader of a parallel proliferation of texts and narrative voices in El jardín. But this frantic reproduction of spaces and referents ironically creates a sense of oppression, isolation, claustrophobia, which is reflected in Julio's perception of the outside world through various windows or, as he later says, “desde mi ventana chileno-madrileña de exilado” (p. 144). As a space of enclosure, the garden is where Julio's historical past, his political experience, and his imaginative world clash to recreate the linguistic and narrative paradox of the text.⁸

When Monika Pinell de Bray, that is, “la condesita,” leaves with her family for the traditional summer vacation out of Madrid (their departure also coincides with the death of Julio's mother), Julio experiences a profound emptiness as he faces the deserted garden. His new enigma is how and with what he should fill the empty space. Surprisingly, what comes to Julio's mind is Marcelo Chiriboga's poetics of writing: “Al fin y al cabo uno no escribe con el propósito de decir algo, sino para saber qué quiere decir y para qué y para quiénes” (p. 159). The uninhabited garden, in Julio's words, is available now for a luminous inquisition; he is now “free” to write his own text—his own garden.

The garden represents the linguistic and narrative paradox of the text. Throughout the novel, this particular space is destroyed as a single unit while its various expressions become the paradigm of the emerging texts already conceived in the palimpsestic metaphor. In other words, the literal and metaphorical presence of the garden also works as a mirror image of the figural and literal meanings of the multiple overt and covert texts. Within this rhetorical distinction, what has to be taken into account is that El jardín, with all its linguistic and literary images—above all, the garden—is inherently metaphorical and its literal dimension impresses us also as a metaphor. The notions of reading and writing—an overt theme in Donoso's novel—compel Gloria and Julio (characters, writers, narrators) and us as readers, to engage in a process in which both of these activities are challenged by their own repetition. Rereading and rewriting endlessly multiply those subtexts that we have been in search of through the medieval practice of “scraping again.” The text's deconstruction of its own writing is achieved in the infinite replacement and flow of previous writings that show no hierarchical bounds but which have been rhetorically concealed.

De Man's allusion to the traditional meaning of the metaphor sheds light on El jardín's ultimate expression of the palimpsestic structure: “Conceptualization, conceived as an exchange or substitution of properties on the basis of resemblance, corresponds exactly to the classical definition of metaphor as it appears in the theories of rhetoric from Aristotle to Roman Jakobson” (Allegories, p. 146). The exchange or substitution that takes place in the act of conceptualizing, of metaphorizing, leads the reader to ascertain Julio's strong desire to become someone else (Bijou, Pato, Gloria, Chiriboga, or the “guapo-feo”), to possess other people's bodies, discourses, identity, as he simultaneously erases his own decadent codes and footprints, which had traced his failure as a writer, a father, a husband, and as a political activist. Julio suddenly discovers the meaning of his attraction for Bijou: “De repente comprendí … que no era tan sexual mi atracción por Bijou sino otra cosa, un deseo de apropiarme de su cuerpo, de ser él, de adjudicarme sus códigos y apetitos, mi hambre por meterme dentro de la piel de Bijou era mi deseo de que mi dolor fuera otro, otros que yo no conocía o había olvidado; en todo caso, no mi código tiránico ni los dolores que me tenían deshecho …” (p. 84).

Julio's desire for transmutation is not only dramatized by his obsessive desire to become a Cortázar and write a Rayuela for Gloria, or to possess García Márquez or Vargas Llosa's literary discourse. It is in Julio's last chapter as narrator that the reader is confronted with his almost insane willingness to get lost in a jungle of unintelligible codes, which, in the eyes of a Westerner, are represented by the enigmas of the Arab world. Julio's desire for anonymity is not provoked by his fame as a writer but, ironically, by his endless failures. As he constantly suggests, his disappearance alone will guarantee freedom from his unsuccessful life. But is the need for transformation a way of searching for another mask, for another disguising source, or is it an act of unmasking that is indirectly linked to the activity and nature of literature?

His eagerness to unfold himself and experience a mental and physical metamorphosis reaches its highest point when, on a Tangiers street, he glimpses a scene in which a beggar is lying beside a rubbish dump and is accompanied by a naked one-year-old child who is feeding (his father?) with garbage: “Envidia: quiero ser ese hombre, meterme dentro de su piel enfermiza y de su hambre para así no tener esperanza de nada ni temer nada, eliminar sobre todo este temor al mandato de la historia de mi ser y mi cultura, que es el de confesar esta noche misma—o dentro de un plazo de quince días—la complejidad de mi derrota …” (p. 239). Julio goes a step further and even contemplates the possibility of killing the beggar. He recreates the scene: while he exchanges his breath and soul with the dead man, they also exchange their identities, allowing Julio to walk away from himself. The garden—in all its forms—and Tangiers are the two spaces in which signs are deprived of their traditional meaning and values: the former by the juxtaposition of past experiences with an unreadable present (the duke's garden with all its characters), and the latter by cultural differences. Who is Núria Monclús or Marcelo Chiriboga, Julio asks himself, in a space ruled by a completely different set of codes? Parallel to the unexpected narrative transition from the fifth to the sixth chapter in El jardín de al lado, which demands a rereading and reinterpretation of signs and “messages,” the mysterious gardens and the indecipherable happenings at Tangiers challenge the reader to retune his/her reading codes or habits.

Similarly, the narrative, psychological, and existential unmasking that characterizes Julio's discourse can be compared with his claim for physical transformation. Julio's writing tries arduously to detach itself from bourgeois codes and Western standards as a way, among other things, of challenging the “boom” writers. But as readers watch Julio disappear from the scene, witness Gloria's takeover, and later discover her husband's return to the hotel at Tangiers, they realize that Julio's search for otherness has also been a failure. What he seems incapable of appreciating is that one of the effective ways to become someone else (a metaphor of himself) is achieved through writing. Even Gloria's success does not come without pain and a certain fear of experiencing that same transformation that she will later embrace with determination: “Tuve la certeza, en esos minutos que siguieron a su desaparición del hotel, que no volvería a ver a Julio nunca más. … ¿En qué se transformaría Julio? ¿En ese mendigo que ni siquiera sé si vio, tirado a la puerta de una mezquita, mientras yo me transformaba en una señora latinoamericana, sola y madura, dedicada a traducir o a los telares en Sitges?” (p. 260).

The profound irony of El jardín de al lado is that Gloria, the writer of Julio's desire for transformation, is ultimately the one who experiences metamorphosis. As the creator of Julio's narrative voice, she (to some extent out of envy) impersonates his discourse, codes and sufferings, but only to free herself from anonymity. She happens to be the observer, the reader of the next-door garden which, as she suggests at the end, inspired the writing of her novel. As I have been stressing, the proliferation of intra- and extra-textual readers, narrators, and writers in El jardín and their constant exchange of roles not only creates a flow of texts within texts demanding to be read but also gives language a sense of otherness, where a frequent transformation toward aesthetic discourse takes place: the garden is framed through the image of the window; Gloria becomes the perfect “Odalisca de Ingres”; Bijou the angelo musicante; and Monica Pinell “la Brancusi.”

Because El jardín de al lado's main concern is the dialectic between reading and writing and the endless repetition of these two acts, the characters' explicit discussion of the ethical/aesthetical question in relation to both art and their own lives cannot be ignored. For example, it is Julio, himself, who poses the ethical/aesthetic conflict at the beginning of the novel: “¿Por qué—me preguntaba cada vez que hablaba con él [Pancho Salvatierra], cada vez que veía su casa o su pintura—, por qué Pancho tenía la terrible virtud de replantearme el problema, que yo ya daba por resuelto, de la relación entre arte y ética?” (p. 18). In Pancho's world—by contrast with Julio's philosophical views of art and life—things lack history, purpose, and even future (p. 15). And it is in this absence that the antagonism between Pancho's art and Adriazola's becomes even more evident. The tension between Adriazola's weekly murals, permeated with propaganda against political and social injustice, and Pancho's lack of compromise represents one of Julio's moral conflicts. Julio's attachment to his political experience in Chile hinders his writing. But, ironically, when Gloria confronts him with his lack of political commitment, he indirectly associates himself with Pancho's perception of art and life: “No nací para héroe, ni siquiera para tener razón, lo que puede señalarme como un ser limitado y comodón, pero qué le voy a hacer: es lo que soy. Después de todo lo que ha pasado, es muy duro darse cuenta que me interesa más la música de piano del romanticismo y las novelas de Laurence Sterne que tener razón en cualquier campo que sea” (p. 116). Julio's allusion to Sterne should not go unnoticed, since that eighteenth-century author's art represents one of the most important efforts to break with traditional literary codes. Tristram Shandy is an overt exaltation of literariness and of self-conscious fiction that has often been interpreted as a departure from a contextual commitment.

Not by mere coincidence, one of Salvatierra's most discussed paintings in the novel is precisely the one that reproduces a deceptive reality: between the two symmetrical and barred windows of his apartment there is a painting—of the same dimensions as the windows—that reproduces the white curtains of the entire house. Pancho Salvatierra, through his paintings, and, surprisingly, Gloria, through the text that “we” are reading, are perceived by Julio and Núria, respectively, as successful reconcilers of the “dual” scheme of art and ethics. Gloria acknowledges: “Te quiero explicar que yo, como persona, no es que no siga exaltada, políticamente, y sobre todo en relación a Chile. Haría cualquier cosa para que la situación cambiara en mi país. Pero sé que eso es ajeno a la literatura, quiero decir, ajeno por lo menos a mi literatura” (p. 262). Far beyond this confession, what she actually does is closer to what Julio and Núria perceive than it is to her own statement. Gloria's achievement is the incorporation of a political discourse through apparent rejection. That is, her own text about Julio's failure as writer incorporates—through storytelling—those same elements that contributed to his novel's unsuccessful outcome. Although Gloria theoretically pretends to stay away from nonliterary discourse, the reader is constantly exposed to the ideological developments of the protagonist creating, not a contradictory level of expression, but a dynamic relationship between ethics and art.

Within a thematic context the ethical issue is frequently translated into a deep sense of guilt, particularly expressed by Julio. Although he forcefully condemns Bijou's immoral behavior, Julio commits similar crimes. Directed by Bijou, Julio uses a “fixed” phone to call his mother in Chile; he steals Salvatierra's painting the way Bijou stole one sometime before, but with the additional burden that Julio falsifies the object painted, selling it as Gloria's portrait. Directly or indirectly, the idea of fraud is always present: fraud in the political development of Latin America, in Julio and Gloria's marital relations, in the subtle allusions to plagiarism, and even fraud on the part of the narrator-creator, inevitably posing the question of the intrinsic falseness of literature.

But our interest goes beyond strict concern for a moralistic view of ethics, to the multiple texts and subtexts unveiled and substituted, and their demand to be read and deconstructed. The “reconciliation” of ethics and aesthetics that the reader experiences both in Donoso's novel and in Gloria's is not the result of a mere fusion but the claim of each text to be (re)written and (re)read. The act of writing and reading represents the literal and figurative space where the creative process is conceived. But it is simultaneously the space that also generates its own destruction. The reader's perception of Julio's guilty conscience is not so much the recognition of the protagonist's incapacity to write a text that accurately fuses the ethical/aesthetical dialectic, but the realization that Gloria's multiple levels of narration, of writing, and of reading incarnate the ethical demands of a fictional enterprise; that is, to reread and rewrite Donoso's and Gloria's El jardín de al lado.

Paul de Man's discussion of the image of the fountain in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu suggests that the fountain—similar to the garden in El jardín de al lado—is not subject to the synthesis of the literal and the figural senses (Allegories, p. 71):

The shimmering of the fountain then becomes a much more disturbing movement, a vibration between truth and error that keeps the two readings from converging. The disjunction between the aesthetically responsive and the rhetorically aware reading, both equally compelling, undoes the pseudo-synthesis of inside and outside, time and space, container and content, part and whole, motion and stasis, self and understanding, writer and reader, metaphor and metonymy, that the text has constructed. It functions like an oxymoron, but since it signals a logical rather than a representational incompatibility, it is in fact an aporia. It designates the irrevocable occurrence of at least two mutually exclusive readings and asserts the impossibility of a true understanding, on the level of the figuration as well as of the themes.

(72)

Beyond de Man's notion of unreadability, both the garden and the novel(s) studied characterize the proliferation of texts and intratexts in which to write, to read and to narrate about writing, reading, and narrating become the story-telling and the story-told. To write and to read the palimpsest is to rewrite and to reread El jardín de al lado.

Notes

1. We can see how Henry James explores a poetics of rereading through the image of replotting the footprints that were “originally” traced. See The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (1934), foreword R. W. B. Lewis, intro. Richard P. Blackmur (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984).

2. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 4.

3. José Donoso, El jardín de al lado (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981), p. 29. All subsequent parenthetical page references are to this edition.

4. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94 (1979), p. 919.

5. Another scene where there is an evident exchange and superimposition of texts takes place at the house of a Peruvian movie producer. Julio and Katy are watching slides of the jungle, which are part of an unsuccessful project for a film based on Vargas Llosa's La casa verde. Katy diverts Julio's attention from the slides to her own story (confession) of the political assassination of her lover: “A medida que avanzaba el relato de Katy sobreimpuesto al relato del peruano, estas afectaciones se van perdiendo y Katy queda como desnuda, comovida, haciendo un alegato apasionado, certero, en contra del estado policial en que se ha convertido su país” (p. 183). What we see in the end, through the slides of La casa verde, are the footprints left by Katy's painful experience, rather than a fictional recreation of another pseudopolitical endeavor.

6. Lucille Kerr, “Authority in Play: José Donoso's El jardín de al lado,” Criticism 25 (1983), pp. 41-65.

7. In his “El jardín de al lado: La escritura y el fracaso del éxito,” Revista Iberoamericana 49 (1983), pp. 249-67, Oscar Montero presents, among other things, an examination of the correlations between Donoso's Historia personal del “boom” (1972) and El jardín: “Se trata, en cierto modo, de … una nueva versión de los hechos en la cual el fracaso del escritor Julio Méndez, cuyos valores literarios recuerdan los del Donoso de Historia, corresponde implícitamente al éxito de Donoso según otro modelo del quehacer literario” (pp. 451-52).

8. The reader is constantly reminded of the contrast between the beauty of the garden(s), Chile's political turbulence and Julio's internal storm as an exile. The images of the garden, the jail and the novel are framed within one space that struggles to contain both the intra- and extra-textual manuscripts that are being written and read.