[In Donoso's] early fiction, a limpid style and straightforward narrative technique provide the matrix for the portrayal of complex characters, who are often, and variously, obsessed: a fat man who dances himself to death, a youth whose ambition is to do nothing but sleep, a transvestite who earns his keep by doing flamenco dances in drag, and so on…. [Critics] wídely proclaimed the largely traditional nature of his narrative. The delirious and intractable complexity of his most recent novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche, is consequently all the more startling, for this is clearly a work intended to confound the reader. The narratorial voice, adrift in time and space, confuses past and present, fuses distinct characters, and proliferates events with a manic inventiveness that utterly disregards verisimilitude….

[A] disjunctive leap from tradition to monstrosity is itself internalized in the themes and structures of El obsceno pájaro; in the last analysis this work belongs to that characteristically modern variety of fiction which, in presenting the Bildung of its author, defines the preconditions of its own existence as well as the necessities of its nature. By reflecting upon the revolution that engendered it, the novel reflects upon itself. The principal character is a would-be author, Humberto Peñaloza, who begins his career in the attempt to identify with the traditions of his society, only to reject them; eventually he ends in nightmarish isolation as a servant of retired servants in a former convent (la Casa), where he is ultimately sewn into burlap bags and transformed into that physical correlative of solipsism, the Imbunche [a creature invented by Donoso as a nonce symbol for this novel]. It is there, in squalor and confinement, that he deliriously evokes his former life…. El obsceno pájaro is both process and end product. The process is the tale itself, which presents, in parallel, the Bildung of the author and the birth of a monstrous son to the traditionalist Jerónimo Ascoitía. The end product—the recall, representation, and deformation of that process, that is to say, the novel—is analogically as monstrous as that child. Humberto (later called Mudito, the mute one) imagines his past, his prospects as a young man, in a retrospective present whose disillusionment shatters the author's own image as if reflected on broken water. (p. 33)

Humberto's luckless quest for personal existence threads the labyrinth of El obsceno pájaro; it has two initial stages, which one might call sociological and psychological. In the first, Humberto considers himself a member of society, existing to the degree that he incarnates its norms and traditions. At this stage his existence is his normality, his likeness to others; it follows that, insofar as he is unique, he is both indefinable and ephemeral, a shifting, shadowy thing. In the second stage, after the abandonment of society, Humberto turns to self-reflection and feels that he exists to the degree that his many notions of himself—his selves—are like one another. In consequence, he perceives inner difference as alienation. Donoso's character therefore becomes a kind of interface between an outer (sociological) and an inner (psychological) dimension. In both directions, he confronts dramas of difference and identity that have the same paradoxical structure; in both, the notion of personal existence is assimilated to that of likeness, of identity. We have arrived at the premises that are successively explored in El obsceno pájaro: to be is to be like others and to be like oneself. The existential dilemma posed by these assumptions is essentially taxonomic, for it is based on the relationship of concrete singularities to the generalizations that describe their likeness to other members of a class; that is to say, Humberto is like others and like himself only at a relatively high level of abstraction. Consequently, the X equals Y of Donoso's paradox applies to the genus or species and is not a concrete equation; it is made possible only by virtue of ignoring uniqueness. It is, however, precisely the uniqueness of the singular that makes it necessary that X not equal Y…. These premises granted, Humberto is indeed in a quandary, for existence, which is likeness, presents itself to him as abstraction, as virtual nonexistence. And his anguished predicament is exacerbated by Donoso, who not only contrives to have him opt between the singular and the norm but further exaggerates these possibilities for existence into the extremes represented by the monster and the mask. Humberto must therefore choose between normality and aberration run rampant. (p. 34)

The dominant obsession of Humberto Peñaloza, like that of his father before him, is ['that impassable barrier that separates us from the possibility of being someone']; as his desires become self-conscious in his youth, they will be structured by a discontinuity, symbolized by a vertical, architectural surface. This first obstacle is a class barrier….

In El obsceno pájaro social identity is most often represented by a mask, a persona. In one example of many, Humberto says to his father: … '… I swear to you that I shall be someone, that in place of this sad, featureless face of the Peñalozas I'll acquire a magnificent mask, an enormous, luminous, smiling, well-defined face, which everyone will have to admire.'… His desire takes on mock-heroic form in the Gigante, an enormous, grotesque pasteboard mask worn by a man who distributes advertisements. This artifact, which towers over the first third of the novel, is both imposing and empty. Any nobody can slip it on to acquire a presence larger than life. Its face can give any nobody definition, but in turn it masks whatever individuality the wearer might have. The containing form, like a dictionary definition, includes every individual it defines, but only by virtue of blotting out singular characteristics. By implication, social visibility entails a renunciation of the self; the visible man is identified with his class. (p. 35)

In El obsceno pájaro clothing plays a symbolic role not unlike that of the mask; it also conceals the self with fabric cut to patterns informed by both tradition and norm….

El obsceno pájaro organizes itself about a space: a mask, a wall, a surface that appears both normal and harmonious from the outside, but only by virtue of concealing inner abnormalities. Humberto Peñaloza is privileged not only to penetrate the facade and become a witness to the interior but also in a sense to be its keeper, for he is put in charge of the Rinconada. (p. 36)

Humberto … is painfully cognizant of the hollowness of masks, which reduce existence to an exterior surface. From the time of the Gigante's end, Humberto turns with increased and hopeless anguish to the possibilities of identity offered, not by exteriors, but by what is behind faces and facades. From this point in the novel society at large, the phenomenal and normal world, becomes virtually inaccessible to the narrator; and we pass from a reality typified by an interior invisible behind a wall to one that almost hermetically excludes outsides. In Donoso, walls are formidable and nearly perfect barriers between mutually exclusive worlds. (p. 37)

As a normal man who has abandoned the normal world, Humberto is a fitting keeper for the Rinconada. Like Mudito, he is a kind of turnkey controlling access to the outside world. Indeed, he exists at the juncture of two worlds; he looks out, looks in, and belongs neither out nor in. He is the excluded interface…. Donoso has executed a clever about-face upon the reader, for as it turns out, both the world without and the world within are void—the former of uniqueness, the latter of normality. The reality upon either side of the walls of the Rinconada defines and contains the absence of the other. Humberto, normal to those outside, monstrous to those inside, can be identified with those walls to which he has the key; he faces upon two realities defined as absences, that is, as excluding each other. Humberto is consequently an interface between voids.

Needless to say, in El obsceno pájaro the outside world is not so normal or the Rinconada so monstrous as this presentation would make it seem. They are the abstracted extremes of those modes of being toward which Humberto successively tends. In due course, the second tropism manifests itself in the Rinconada, where he finds that he is slowly and inexorably being invaded by monstrosity…. The kind of definition provided by norms is … decomposed into an indefinable multiplicity. Characteristically, Humberto becomes (or imagines that he becomes) not a monster but, rather, many monsters. He loses (or imagines that he loses) his normal identity, without attaining singularity. In other words, the abandonment of the norm, as seen from his obsessive perspective, leads not to unique individuality but to disintegration and chaos. In El obsceno pájaro the first alternative to existence as a public figure, a hollow man, is the invasion of the inner man by forces that multiply his image in a nightmare of mutation and metamorphosis. (pp. 37-8)

[His flight from the Rinconada] concludes the second stage of Humberto's search for personal existence. He enters the Casa. His father and Jerónimo, who personifies all the father wished for in Humberto, are abandoned. From the time that the Gigante's head is destroyed, the narrator addresses himself to the Madre Benita. In effect, he abandons the masculine principles of social harmony, normality, and public visibility, as well as monstrosity, its demonic inversion, to adopt new principles altogether, which are associated with the feminine. (p. 38)

[In the Casa, the] chattering crones translate the past as well as the present into language. Their personal memories imperceptibly merge with those of their oral tradition to produce a linguistic world with long perspectives on the past, perspectives that are confused since their recreation is not exact. The imprecisions of memory, the decay of facts in oral transmission, the willful embroidering upon events too tame or too often repeated to be interesting—all conspire to blur the distinction between history and invention. (pp. 39-40)

Unlike the garrulous old women, [Mudito] supposedly does not speak. But he is not kept from generating language in some fashion, for he is the narrator of the novel. And there is a more important difference in Mudito; he is conscious of the relation of language and being. The old women—petty greed and squabbling aside—are satisfied with what they are and are not. They do not reflect on the language that babbles through them. Mudito does not assume, as they do, the unison of words and things. He is all too painfully aware of the fragmentation and elaboration of facts that take place in the Casa. In short, he knows that words are nothing in themselves and that beings who exist in language, as these old women do, are nothing. And it is this knowledge that will take on the reality of fiction, as he becomes weaker and more wizened, progressing toward the culmination of effacement in that demonic womb the Imbunche. (pp. 40-1)

As the cocoon grows and tightens about him, his capacity for creation grows in proportion. Finally, tightly sewn in burlap, an Imbunche, he is absolutely sealed, absolutely a world to himself, tattered rags about a hoard of garbage. And we can imagine him, paradoxically, finally capable of authorship.

The need for this autistic end is rooted deep in the novel. In one sense, the Imbunche is a womb. Mudito recapitulates his life in reverse in order to return to it, growing younger as he ages, and ultimately becoming a newborn. In this return he is living out a lasting fascination with the procreative process embodied in Iris, whom he obsessively sees as little more than an ambulant womb. (p. 41)

What Mudito creates in his version of Iris is a model for a kind of creativity that remains implicit: authorship. And the womb must be rejected as its correlative—even when parthenogenesis is granted—for two important reasons. The womb both creates a being and expels it into the world. The Imbunche, on the other hand, excludes the world and, in including only Mudito, includes nothing. Or rather, the Imbunche includes Mudito become language, for when the Imbunche is opened, it yields only foul rags, tattered paper, castoffs such as the former servants hoard, counterparts of the idée reçue. Humberto's Bildung (perhaps more suitably an Untergang) is a process that, having explored the possibilities of existence in society and the psyche, finally substitutes language for existence itself. As a model for literature, the Imbunche signifies the absence of both world and author from the work; the language that supplants Mudito succeeds him as the interface between voids. And since language must have a source and referent to be language, the novel concludes by figuring forth its own annihilation.

El obsceno pájaro means to deny its source and referent and therefore, as a verbal construct, its own existence. The Imbunche, the symbol of that annihilation, represents a figure exhausted by language, and that language, in turn, is exhausted by the possibilities of retrospect. It is fitting that this creature, whose only powers lie in recall and revision, comes into being at the novel's conclusion, for having no prospects and no contact with the world, he could never provide the substance for narrative. His peculiar mode of consciousness, however, suffuses the novel in attenuated form. From the perspective of El obsceno pájaro's conclusion one discovers that retrospect is much more than a function of the novel's end and that hindsight indeed informs the structure of the work. Embedded in the mutations and permutations of this apparently untidy novel, there is a remarkably precise morphology of memory…. We note that, in terms of narrative sequence, the future is prologue to the past and that, in terms of chronology, Mudito provides a perspective on the Rinconada from the Casa. We can conclude that El obsceno pájaro, through recall and recreation, carefully jumbles the progression of time in such a way that recall itself is made into a structural, synchronic constant of the novel. Plotting the novel opens a space in the tightly woven surface of the text, across which the work contemplates itself, a space that becomes distinctly visible only from the work's conclusion. The function of such fiction is to lead the reader to the final realization that the end has been present from the beginning, that the distance, the perspective of the end, is the distance and perspective of the narrator from the start. Such a novel conceals the distance, tangling time with time with such diabolic enthusiasm that one could think the knot forever raveled. But ironically, the confusions are themselves a function of the distance and a key to its meaning, for it is the anguished awareness of a disintegration of the self that is the product of the Bildung, and it is this awareness that decomposes the chronological simplicities of the narrator's personal history. And the reader, once he is aware of the presence and meaning of the distance, can proceed to take its measure. The perspective of retrospect, which enabled the narrator to encode the significance of his Bildung as confusion, enables the reader to decode that message in analysis. (pp. 41-3)

The devolution of being that Humberto experiences passes from a social to a psychological state, from external norms to internal chaos. Mudito makes the process into a precondition for authorship by adding a third stage, in which the distance from the self is memory and ultimately narrative invention. We have arrived at the structure of an author's Bildung that equates synchronic and diachronic distance. The coming into awareness of oneself is the diachronic image, and it is reflected upon synchronically by a form of the final stage of consciousness. Such authorship is made possible by the end, which originates and structures the vehicle for the image. The irony of the end, however, is so radical that it must be curbed to enable it to recreate the naïve image of youth, since the alternative to that innocent belief in norms, as we have seen, is chaos. The author, in other words, cannot portray his present self, for he has come to see himself as undefinable. He can no longer be the content of a work, but only its vehicle. (p. 44)

El obsceno pájaro maintains a precarious balance between its desire to come into being (projection of the self as other, as norm) and its desire to undo itself (rejection of the self as other, as norm). In the last analysis the monster is a fitting image for the novel, as a figure of that ambivalence. To the degree that it is normal, a monster is both viable and recognizable; it is always a monstrous something, a product of an order that it does not absolutely violate. But a monster is defined as deviating. Its superficial aberrations are sustained by the deeper constraints of its species, which abnormality threatens but cannot destroy without itself suffering destruction. A novel of this genre proposes to communicate through its familiarity but sabotages that process through its deliberate strangeness. El obsceno pájaro is normal only that it may exist. Its aberrations are the relative manifestations of a strangeness that is desired as absolute. With an eye to the etymology of "monster," one could say that the novel is demonstrous: it points out, in the work, the impossible absence of all but the work itself. (p. 45)