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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
In its obscure complexities, El obsceno pájaro de la noche conceals the tale of the Bildung of an author, which passes through four stages. In the first, the protagonist attempts to find his identity in society, symbolized by the mask. In the second, he turns to his own psychological resources, only to find chaos and monstrosity. In the third, like the figure of the old woman in the novel, he abandons his own individuality for hearsay and the commonplace. Finally, he ends in a solipsistic isolation represented by a nonce symbol, the Imbunche—a creature that has had all its orifices sewn shut by witches. This novel proposes that the author, who has become identified with language, has lost touch both with his inner self and with his ambience.
1 In addition to Coronation, Donoso's early work includes El veraneo y otros cuentos (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1955); El Charleston (Santiago, Chile: Nacimiento, 1960); Este domingo (Santiago, Chile: Zig Zag, 1966); and El lugar sin limites (Mexico City: Joaquin Mortiz, 1966). One hardly needs to cite critics who find the early Donoso traditional, for they are numerous enough to make the notion commonplace. In fact, Alexander Coleman finds it necessary to qualify the supposed traditionalism of Donoso by pointing out that his work not only revises the past but also contains a genuine personal thematics: see “Some Thoughts on José Donoso's Traditionalism,” Studies in Short Fiction, 8, No. 1 (1971), 155–58.
2 (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1970). The translations from the novel included in this essay are mine. There is, however, an excellent translation into English: The Obscene Bird of Night, trans. Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades (New York: Knopf, 1973).
3 Of the many comments on the incomprehensibility of the work, this is perhaps the most remarkable example: “The only fact you can assert about The Bird, once you have finished reading it, is that you have read it” (Review [Fall 1973], p. 11). An exception to the more or less general puzzlement is the intelligent article by Alicia Borinsky: “Repeticiones y mascaras: El ob-sceno pâjaro de la noche,” Modem Language Notes, 88 (1973), 281–94. Adolfo Frigani provides us with a characteristic reading of El obsceno pâjaro as a novel without precedent: “Séria difîcil, en efecto, encontrar un punto de referencia literaria con el cual cotejar y enjuiciar esta obra. Ella sera la que marque un nuevo hito, un nuevo punto de referencia, una nueva y profunda dimension” ‘It would be difficult, in effect, to find a point of literary reference with which one could compare and judge this work. The work itself shall be a new landmark, a new point of reference, a new and profound dimension’ (Vision, 39, No. 6 [1971], 46).
4 The Imbunche is a creature that has had all its orifices sewn shut by witches. Although one is intended to believe that it is derived from Chilean folklore, it is in fact an invention of Donoso, created as a nonce symbol for his novel.
5 Monsters (or, more specifically, deformed human beings) are of course an important theme within the novel, and in this self-reflective work they come to represent the work itself. Donoso has said that the sight of a deformed man in a limousine provided the pro totype of Boy and the first impulse for what ultimately became El obsceno pâjaro.
6 Names figure large in this novel. Jerônimo Ascoitia was called Boy in Europe, when he was as faceless as his name. When he chose to be resorbed into his family and its traditions, he reacquired his last name. Conversely, Humberto Penaloza is transformed into Mudito in the course of his Bildung, becoming voiceless as well as faceless. In El obsceno pâjaro, the assumption or rejection of one's last name is an external sign of the acceptance or refusal of assimilation into tradition.
7 Appropriately, when Humberto describes Jerônimo's impotence, he evokes an empty sleeve: “el sexo flâccido como una manga sin brazo” ‘his sexual organ as flaccid as a sleeve without an arm in it’ (p. 97). And in an inversion typical of the novel, it is Jerônimo's empty glove that “wounds” the young Humberto when it touches him, thus conferring his first symbolic castration (p. 104). Humberto's power to “fill” Jerônimo's empty clothing is coeval with Humberto's personal impotence.
8 Just as Peta Ponce assumes the disease that supposedly afflicts Inès' womb, Humberto Penaloza is wounded for his master's sake. The symbolic impotence of these male and female counterparts is the paradoxical source of the power we are describing.