SOURCE: Magnarelli, Sharon. “How to Read José Donoso.” In Understanding José Donoso, pp. 3-13. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

[In the following introductory chapter to her full-length study of Donoso, Magnarelli discusses several common themes in Donoso's work.]

Critics disagree, often vehemently, about how to read the works of José Donoso. Many, particularly his early critics, have insisted on perceiving his works in a traditional, realistic, or naturalistic mode, specifically as social realism whose goal is to critique the Chilean bourgeois society. Donoso maintains, and it would be hard for the careful reader to disagree, that on some level his work always encompasses a fissure with realism or social reality and that the social message is only one aspect of his work. For Donoso, reality is little more than a word, and not a very reliable one at that. Unlike the static, tangible, objective entity implied by the term as it is generally used, reality is for Donoso always fluid, always provisional, always subjective—that is, subject to the individual's perception, which is frequently metamorphosed, if not created, by language. Thus when his character Santelices looks out of his office window, he perceives not a dark, mundane, empty, quiet patio in its nighttime tranquillity (as another might view it) but a jungle teeming with ferocious beasts and fraught with danger. Although the two perceptions are contradictory, one interpretation of the physical surroundings is no more valid than the other. As presented by the author, neither vision is completely accurate nor completely erroneous. Both evoke, if indeed on different planes or within different focal points, our complex world, which includes the psychological as well as the physical and, as Donoso recognizes, is a world that can never be grasped in its totality at any given moment or by any given perceiver. It is for this reason that Donoso's fiction invites, indeed exacts, such disparate and multivocal readings.

Thus Donoso's prose can never be read simplistically on one level alone. On the contrary, it demands multiple readings and interpretations (as does any good piece of literature). Although his fiction creates a cosmos that may parallel the realities of quotidian experience, those literary worlds are unequivocally different and subject to their own rules. Donoso's narrative universe is not simply a reflection of some external referent (generally labeled reality) but rather an artistic invention in which he employs metaphors and other literary tropes and figures in order to embody multifarious meanings and thereby highlight the plurality of that world.

For that reason, Donoso specifically deplores readers' attempts to reduce and simplify his prose by “boiling down the complexities of a metaphor to the false lucidity of one word.”¹ As a result, he refuses to deal with symbols that have an exact correlative in reality. Furthermore, he wants his readers to see not just the “what” and the “why” but also the “how” of his prose. For him style and technique are as important as his thematic concerns. How we perceive is as much an issue in his prose as what we perceive. That is why the questions of art (literature), artistic (literary) techniques, and artistic materials (language, discourse) are so frequently the subject as well as the material of his work.

MASKS AND CHANGING FACES

The “how” in Donoso, his technique, is often an endless superimposition of layers or levels—hence the mask or the disguise that figures in so much of his work and that ultimately is less a mask than simply another version or perception. The result of this technique is often a multilayered product in which the layers have become either inseparable or indiscernible, and thus the hierarchy implicit in the layering or masking (first layer, second layer, one above the other) is rendered null and void. At the same time, the mask consistently functions in a paradoxical fashion. It not only distorts the purportedly hidden, covered “face” but also inevitably allows that veiled layer to peek through. In this respect, both his thematic and his stylistic masks emphasize the gesture of disguising while they blur the ostensibly distinct and separate layers, as they produce new perceptions that combine the previous ones. This technique is perhaps best metaphorized in the image of the package in The Obscene Bird of Night. In that novel numerous packages are wrapped again and again, becoming ever more bulky and unwieldy, not with the goal of hiding or protecting anything but rather just for the sake of wrapping, as one stratum is superimposed on another. Similarly, for the Chilean author, human personality or selfhood (ontological being in the world) is a series of masks or disguises, ever changing and ever (inter)changeable, with no ultimate coherence or integrity.

Thematically the question of mask is treated in two principal ways in the works of Donoso. At times the characters are shown to be so rigidly restricted by social structures that their “authentic” selves cannot show through; nor, perhaps, are they even conscious of having an “authentic” self apart from the social role. Again one of Donoso's points is that the mask is or becomes the self. Humberto of The Obscene Bird of Night wants nothing more than to don the mask of Don Jerónimo and to be him. The brothers of “Paseo” (“The Walk”), like those of This Sunday, never disclose their emotions but feign a self-sufficiency they surely do not feel. In other words the motif of the mask reveals itself in a form of transvestism. Sometimes it is a transvestism in the traditional sense of wearing the clothing of the opposite sex, as in Hell Has No Limits, but at other times it is an interchangeability of characters when one character places himself in the clothes and thus the social position of another, such as Mauricio and his double in “Gaspard de la Nuit.” A similar commutation of characters is apparent in the relationship between Peta Ponce and Inés as well as that of Humberto and Don Jerónimo in The Obscene Bird of Night, while the device reaches its apogee in “Chatanooga Choo-choo,” in which not only are the characters replaceable one with another, but even their individual body parts are detachable and reusable on other characters.

On the level of technique this layering or mask manifests itself in a number of ways. One is the framing technique by means of which Donoso embeds one narrative within another. An example of this can be found in This Sunday, in which the grandparents' stories are embedded within the grandson's. Similarly, in The Obscene Bird of Night the story of the landowner's daughter and the nanny/witch is inscribed within the larger narrative of Inés's attempts to have her ancestor canonized, a narrative which in turn is embedded within the still larger frame narrative that tells the tale of the Casa de los Ejercicios Espirituales, the asylum for old servants and other discarded possessions. Within this frame narrative the story of the Rinconada is embedded, much as its narrator, Humberto/Mudito, is enclosed within the Casa and its tale. By enclosing this series of tales one within the other, Donoso produces a Chinese box effect while at the same time he highlights both the metaphoric and the metonymic relations among the stories. The stories relate to each other metaphorically in that they exhibit significant similarities and metonymically because they exist in physical proximity. Yet the metaphoric similarities tend to blur the differences among the stories and lead us to an erroneous assumption of identity between the frame story and the embedded one. In turn, it is the metonymic relation, the embedding or layering, that underlines the error of this assumption and reminds us that the individual situations are only similar in appearance (surface, mask) and not in essence.

Another stylistic layering technique is found in Donoso's frequent utilization of the simile X is like Y. More than the metaphor (X is Y), the simile evokes similarity while underlining difference. By saying “X is like Y,” one concurrently implies that X is not Y. Thus, to say X is like Y is to allow us to perceive both X and Y, their points of contact and their divergence, as so many Donoso masks do. Although the two entities blend, to some degree, neither totally loses its unique qualities while we are led to a new perception.

Although the mask is one of the most important techniques and motifs in Donoso's works, my reading of his fiction will necessarily center on seven additional topics. Like the question of mask, each of these seven topics must be analyzed as both content and technique, for the issues he raises are always treated in both dimensions.

THE BOURGEOISIE IN CHILE

It would be impossible to comprehend Donoso's works without some understanding of the Chilean bourgeoisie to which his family belonged and from which the majority of his characters proceed. Like many Latin American countries, Chile is defined by a rigid class structure and the institution of the extended family with its numerous servants. In this extended family system, unmarried female relatives and less affluent relatives reside with the more prosperous members of the family in a home governed, nominally at least, by a male patriarchal figure. Like most upper-middle-class children in Santiago, Donoso spent much of his childhood in a large home surrounded not only by his immediate family (parents and brothers) but also by relatives, predominantly female (two of them elderly), as well as numerous servants, also predominantly female. Because the female servants are frequently charged with the care and early education of the children, they inevitably exert considerable influence over those children, as his prose demonstrates. Yet this system of household servants should not to be confused with the slavery system of the Southern United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Servants in Chilean society, in spite of their lack of education and the fact that they belong to a different socioeconomic class, consider themselves members of the family they serve and on some level are considered by the family as members, though honorary ones. The esteem granted those servants is surely evidenced by the fact that Donoso dedicated his first book to Teresa Vergara, the servant who effectively raised him. It is noteworthy too that traditionally, even in their old age, after they have outlived their function and usefulness within the household, the servants are provided for by the family. This structure is reflected in his works: in The Obscene Bird of Night one finds an asylum for aged servants, while in This Sunday the elderly Violeta is comfortably established in a house provided by the family she had long served.

Such a family structure, marked as it is by the presence of numerous female relatives and servants, combines with the frequent absence of the father figure (because of responsibilities away from the home or simply his greater freedom and mobility) to imbue the Chilean bourgeois society with a distinctly matriarchal flavor. Children grow up surrounded by figures of immediate if not ultimate authority who are female. It is for this reason that the old servants in The Obscene Bird of Night are characterized as witchlike with a combination of natural powers (probably those actually wielded by the female servants over the children) and supernatural powers (perhaps those the child feared the female servant might exert).

Throughout Donoso's work the complex status of the servants is underscored. Subordinate to their “masters,” they nonetheless enjoy a position of tacit, though not always recognized, power to the extent that the life of the household and the family could not continue as it is without them. At the same time, they assume much of the responsibility of caring for the young children and enjoy a dimension of influence in this respect. In fact, in A House in the Country, they tyrannize the children, especially after curfew, when their jurisdiction is total. More important, as Donoso himself has noted on several occasions, the subculture of the servant class not only provides an inverted mirror of the dominant culture but also exposes the children of that dominant culture to set a of “unorthodox,” alternative cultural myths, value systems, and hierarchies. By means of their interrelationships as well as the stories they tell the children, the servants provide and represent the “other,” alternative society that exists contingent to but separate from the dominant one, both metaphorically and metonymically. The servants bridge the two worlds, belonging to both, yet are never completely subject to the rules, rituals, and social decorum of the dominant class. It is presumed the servants can do things and feel emotions denied to their more rigidly masked masters. This is perhaps the germinal experience from which Donoso has developed his perception of the world as a series of tangential layers.

For those members of Chilean society not privy to an extended upper-middle-class family with servants, a different, if indeed parallel, social structure is available: the pension, which simulates the extended family in many ways. It is generally governed by a matriarchal figure who either presides over the servants or performs the labors of cooking and cleaning herself. This same woman frequently controls, to a greater or lesser degree, the activities as well as the moral conduct of her lodgers. Because of their close living conditions, the boarders at the pension mirror the family in that each is likely to know the intimate details of the others' lives while, like siblings, they alternately support and rival one another.

Nevertheless, in Donoso's prose fiction, the pension often marks the inveterate isolation and impotence felt by protagonists such as Santelices. Although there is probably no moment in Donoso's work when the social, familial structure is presented in a positive light—it is always either a sham (as in A House in the Country) or on the brink of destruction (as in “The Walk” and This Sunday)—the institution of the pension is perceived as little more than an unfortunate imitation of the family structure.

NANNIES AND WITCHES: FEMALE POWER AND THE SUPERNATURAL

The matriarchal bent that characterizes the social institutions of the home and the pension results in a society of females who maintain, or at least are perceived to maintain, quite a different position from that of women in the United States. Although it is doubtful that women wield or have wielded control in any significant measure on the national level in Chile (at least not overtly), they apparently wield significant control on the familial level, and that produces an awe, if not fear, of those women, particularly in the male child. Thus in Donoso one finds the repeated themes of the nanny and the witch. Throughout Donoso's works it is women who are the powerful ones, often in an evil fashion, while men are frequently portrayed as weak, ineffectual, and pathetic. When, on rare occasion, the text depicts an ostensibly strong, powerful man, that power is undercut by females. For example, Don Jerónimo's power in The Obscene Bird of Night is effectively nullified by the nanny/witch Peta Ponce, and masculine “strength” proves to be a sham that masks latent homosexuality in Hell Has No Limits. At other moments those males are openly controlled or emasculated by powerful mother figures, like Santelices or Andrés (Coronation).

CHILDREN, GAMES, AND RITUALS

Children frequently assume leading roles in Donoso's fiction. A House in the Country and a number of his short stories provide examples of this thematic concern. At times the events of the plot are even told from a child's point of view, as in This Sunday and “The Walk.” There are several reasons for this procedure. First, the child's perspective provides a means of manipulating point of view; the child can share the adult reader's values, tell events as she or he sees them, and yet be incapable of comprehending their significance. Obviously, the narrator who cannot grasp the meaning of an experience is incapable of selecting those events and details that merit narration. As a result, readers are left, as they often are in life, with a mixture of relevant and irrelevant information from which to draw conclusions. Through the child's eyes, then, not only can readers understand their own limited comprehension of what surrounds them but at the same time, paradoxically, they can come to a new understanding. Clearly, such is both the theme and technique of This Sunday, in which the story of the last years of the narrator's grandparents—their personal demise and the end of a social era—is embedded within his adult speculations about those moments of his childhood. The result is a multilayered and multivocal tale that dramatizes not a moment or even a process of comprehension but an ongoing state of ignorance. As in “The Walk,” the narrator understands little more at the end of the process (the narration from his adult perspective, the contemplation of things past) than he did at the beginning or as a child.

Another professed motivation of Donoso's for focusing on children and their antithesis, the elderly, is that both groups live in a form of anarchy. Like the servants, children and the elderly exist on the fringes of society and are not subject to all the rules, role playing, and hierarchies to which adults are subject. Their actions and language tend to be freer, less self-conscious, less manipulated and manipulative. At the same time, however, the children imitate the adult world and reproduce it on a microcosmic level. As a result, the reader is proffered a new perspective that underlines the absurdities of adult (the reader's) society.

His concern with children also leads Donoso to employ the motif of the child's game. Again, however, he proffers a thinly veiled allegory of adult life, for he posits that children's games reflect, in structure and content, the more formalized ritualistic behavior (social decorum) that shapes adult lives. Thus the games are simultaneously similar to and different from adult rituals, but it would be difficult to decide which exerts more influence over the other. Think, for example, of La Marquise Est Sortie á Cinq Heures (The Marquise Left at Five o' Clock), the theatrical game of A House in the Country, or the games in This Sunday. Donoso's suggestion is that each makes the other problematic: adult rituals are absurd because of the traces they retain from childhood games; the latter are perverse because they resemble, perhaps even consciously imitate, adult rituals.

THE INEXPLICABLE: THE CALL OF THE WILD

Throughout Donoso's works, one encounters an element of the inexplicable, often depicted (or at least interpreted) as an element of supernatural power. None of our empirical experience seems to provide explanations for the strange allure of Maya in This Sunday, the interchangeability of physical parts in “Chatanooga Choo-choo,” Mauricio's strange whistling in “Gaspard de la Nuit,” Matilde's fascination for the dog in “The Walk,” or the protagonist's obsession with pictures of wild animals in “Santelices.” What leads Andrés to opt consciously for insanity in Coronation? What does the father hide behind his poncho in The Obscene Bird?

Questions such as these necessarily punctuate any reading of Donoso's fiction. One of his points is surely that one can never “know” anything unequivocally. In many cases this inexplicable something, this call to another level of nature or reality, is resolved both stylistically and thematically by eradication or disappearance. The texts often end without resolution, or the characters simply disappear while their world disintegrates. This Sunday and Coronation both conclude with the death of the characters and the disintegration of the world as they knew it. The Obscene Bird of Night concludes with the burning of all the packages and papers that presumably were the text the reader has just finished; Marta and Roberto disappear into the night in “Atomo verde número cinco” (“Green Atom Number Five”), as does Matilde in “The Walk.”

The unusual conclusions, or even nonconclusions, of so many of Donoso's works pose a curious contradiction. On one level his works seem to open up, letting in the unexpected and the unnatural or supernatural. Yet all his works close up around that possibility and somehow cover or negate it. Indeed, in many of the works in which the main character disappears, a new closure is effectuated in two ways. First, on the level of plot, the society or family depicted turns its back on the disappearance or erasure and carries on with life as if nothing had happened. Thus the brothers return to their ritualistic existence in “The Walk” after Matilde disappears and never make any direct reference to her disappearance. After the highly unusual happenings in A House in the Country, the parents return and life ostensibly goes on as usual—for a while, at least, until nature (the thistledown) “swallows” one group and perhaps the other. This erasure functions on the stylistic level too, for the reference to the disappearance or inexplicable event is frequently followed by a number of paragraphs about mundane events and written in the most apparently naturalistic, prosaic, and transparent of languages. In this way, the discourse of the text also denies that anything unusual has happened and lures the reader back into a false sense of complacency even after having shattered that complacency.

SPACE

The ostensibly circular structure that dominates much of Donoso's work is reflected in his use of space. The majority of his works take place either within the city or inside a carefully delimited and defined space—most often the home or a building that evokes a homelike structure. Generally the outside, be it a natural setting, the city, or the rest of society, is viewed as threatening and dangerous. Still, on the few occasions when the action takes place out of doors, even that exterior space tends to be markedly limited and confined. For example, the vineyards of Hell Has No Limits are bounded even as they surround the town. The Venturas' fence defines the “safe” spaces and separates them from the threatening outside, nature. Significantly, once outside the physical confines, characters tend to disappear, to be swallowed by the external world.

Surely the enclosed physical spaces evoke closed psychological spaces. Characters in the Donoso texts can function only within a rigidly ordered society and universe. The outside or exterior always threatens to destroy that social, psychological order and control. Nonetheless, Donoso's works are also characterized by the number of windows and doors (or even fences) that allow the characters to glimpse the “external” world and feel its allure from a safe distance. At the same time, physical space tends to close in upon itself, as in The Obscene Bird of Night, in which Mudito's physical enclosure becomes ever smaller as the book draws to a conclusion. Obviously the delimitation of physical space mirrors the space limitations of the literary work, also closed, structured, and excluding the threatening outside while it paradoxically proffers a relatively unthreatening glimpse of that threatening other, the world outside the confines and rigid structure of the book or society. Space in Donoso's works is necessarily a projection of the mind, as is dramatically demonstrated in Santelices's projection of the jungle onto the patio of his office building (an enclosure within an already severely delimited world).

ART AND LANGUAGE: THE BLENDING OF CONTENT AND FORM

This depiction of space and the projection of mental rigidity reflect Donoso's preoccupation with art and literature or language. In much of Donoso's work the world is depicted as already a reproduction of some earlier works of art or literature. Western aesthetics, particularly since the nineteenth century, has generally viewed art as a reproduction or mimesis of reality, but Donoso continually demonstrates the degree to which the opposite is also true: reality (or what we perceive as and then insist is reality) is frequently a reproduction or mimesis of artistic works. For this reason, in many of his works the principal action is presented as fiction, as fantasy even within the work. For example, the principal action of This Sunday, the relationship of the grandparents to each other and that of the grandmother to Maya, is presented as the recollections, not necessarily reliable, of an adult who reviews his childhood. Within that principal action the narrator includes the grandfather's memories of his youth. The continual embedding of one story within the other, combined with a repeated undermining of the reliability of the narrators, marks the fictitiousness of those tales and their distance from what might be labeled reality. It marks them as already reproduction. In this way Donoso suggests that art is not merely a mirror of some external reality; art and reality mutually influence, shape, and mold each other.

At the same time, language and the embedding technique, like the fences, doors, and windows, frequently provide limiting structures, for, consciously and intentionally or not, Donoso continually proposes that we perceive what we have words for and tend not to perceive what we cannot name. Like art and literature, language shapes and limits perception. When confronted with a situation for which we have no word, we perceive nothing. Thus an inability to name leads logically to the erasure or disappearance that so often marks the conclusion of his works.

As we examine the trajectory of Donoso's prose over the course of forty years, we shall find that some combination of these eight characteristics is present in every work.

Note

1. Ronald Christ, “An Interview with José Donoso,” Partisan Review 49, 1 (1982): 30.