“In El obsceno pájaro de la noche, Donoso created an implacable, sordid, devastating world—one that was absolutely unimaginable before he did so. Perhaps he hoped to lend a language to the mute language of the unconscious. And in a very Chilean manner of speaking.”
Donoso said: “I am one person and I am thirty”.1 He notes: “How I should like to have at least a modicum of certainty! I was born without it and I shall die without it” (7/21/67). Not a single doubt, then, but a thousand little doubts.
He said: “I do not believe I have a José Donoso style.”2 The Pájaro—as he calls, in his diaries, his novel El obsceno pájaro de la noche—is written completely differently from El jardín de al lado or Taratuta. He lacked “a” Donoso aesthetic. His diaries, published this year, show us a few of his many faces, and now come to form part of his literary oeuvre. And what they show us is extraordinary.
Cecilia García-Huidobro has done an indisputably excellent job. Notes, letters, translations, and indices broaden the diaries and put them in context, though I would have liked to know more about the selection criteria, and to have had an approximate sense of how much was left out.3
The first hundred seventy pages are full of suspense: this is the biography—to use Donoso’s own expression—of El obsceno pájaro de la noche. It is thrilling to follow the course of its constructions and destructions.
“I do not like the Pájaro. The form it has now taken seems to me poor, uninteresting, lacking in unity. What to do with it?” (1/8/66). “I am trapped in an atrocious confusion of the mind… a confusion that has been consuming me for four years now” (2/2/66). “Two things that bother me: 1) The problem of the point of view. 2) Humberto’s personality” (2/6/66). “The Pájaro is melting in my hands” (9/2/66). And then: “All of a sudden, all the material has opened up before me like a fan” (11/21/68).
An infrequent moment of happiness. The discontented writer predominates. He notes: “I must set about replanning the novel from start to finish and chapter by chapter (4/1/69). But then: “I have stood the whole novel on its feet… it is unrecognizable. And, I think, sensational” (7/26/69).
Donoso started writing his Pájaro in Chile in 1959. The diary entries start on 9/26/61.4 He writes: “I speak constantly with Ruth [his psychoanalyst] about El obsceno pájaro” (6/7/63). These conversations must have been crucial. In 1967, he published an excerpt from the work-in-progress in Mundo Nuevo, a magazine directed by Emir Rodríguez Monegal. He wrote the final version between April 16 and December 15, 1969. Donoso sent a copy to the same Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who showered it with praise, but also suggested he take out the stuff about the monsters and work on that as a separate novel.5 Donoso did not follow the critic’s advice, although it would give rise to the spectacular novel that became El lugar sin límites, which, at first, formed part of the Pájaro.
Before the novel was published, its translator, Hardie St. Martin, was already hard at work. Donoso rewrote, obliging him to retranslate. These were the days when the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York funded translations of boom works, including the Pájaro.
The finished novel was finally published in 1970 by Seix Barral, to great effect. Emir Rodríguez Monegal writes: “The overall critical approval it has received in the Hispanic world confirms this novel’s importance for contemporary fiction.” In a letter, Cortázar celebrated “the book’s admirable construction” and its “ceaselessly shifting point of view.” His only criticism was that “at times one feels a certain complacency… a sense of letting oneself drift towards the furthest extreme.”6 Robert Coover, in The New York Times, would call for its canonization: “It certainly deserves to take its place alongside the major works of Asturias and Fuentes, Cortázar, Borges and Rulfo, Vargas Llosa and García Márquez” (6/17/73).
Carol Janeway, Donoso’s editor at Knopf, tried to cut every scene featuring Dr. Azula out of the English-language edition. The author refused, but in the end, he came to accept several cuts. This English edition comes with an author’s note in which he says this version “will be used in any future editions of the book,” giving the impression that it was a definitive edition, correcting the version published in Spanish. This was not the case.
The recent edition from New Directions, reworked by translator Megan McDowell, brings the entire novel into English for the first time. For this reason, and because this is the hundred-year anniversary of Donoso’s birth, it is presented as the “unabridged, centennial edition”.7 Once again, the book has been met with a warm critical reception.
Donoso sees a deformed boy in the backseat of a luxury car. This is the starting point. The novel seethes with monstrous beings, brought together by Don Jerónimo at his estate, La Rinconada, such that his own monstrous son, Boy, should live only among fellow monsters, knowing no other world. In his youth, Jerónimo lived in Paris. He reluctantly accepted a parliamentary candidacy for the conservatives, since “in the end, those obligations are the only thing that endow one with nobility.” He marries the lovely Inés, but they are unable to have a family. When their monstrous offspring is finally born, his mother exits the picture. She will be in Rome, advocating for the canonization of an ancestor, then in a Swiss sanatorium, and so on… Humberto, or “Mudito,” Don Jerónimo’s secretary, manages this estate full of beings marked by congenital deformations, which are described in minute detail, as if the narrative voice took pleasure in doing so. This manner of seeing these people might be somewhat shocking. Donoso writes: “Canon for the monsters: they must provoke neither compassion nor pity, but rather weirdness and astonishment” (10/10/69).
Carlos Franz found a precedent in Mariano Latorre’s posthumous novel La Paquera, published four years before Donoso wrote the first lines of his Pájaro.
In a colonial-era mansion: “crutches, handcarts for the crippled, deformed heads, half-formed arms with little dwarven hands, mouths enormous or miniscule as a scarcely sketched line.” Thus are described the “wrinkled little old ladies, strangely still, as if frozen stiff… Some knitted beside their beds. Their hands, in stark contrast to their bodies’ immobility, gave the impression of monstrous, lively spiders, weaving dense webs of wool.” When one passes from her bed to her coffin, “another little old lady replaces her in the same bed and with the same knitting.”
One of the little orphan girls, who is half mad, escapes—as does the little orphan Iris in the Pájaro—and sleeps with a cop. Iris will do the same with whomever puts on the papier-mâché head of the “Giant”. Both end up pregnant, leading to fears a monster will be born.
Franz believes Donoso read this novel, “forgot it, and then forgot he had forgotten it.”8 Years later, Donoso would write, “We should give Latorre the credit he is due… he left behind a body of work that ought be revisited.”9
Incidentally, the narrator of La Paquera has nothing in common with that of the Pájaro, and this changes everything. In his diaries, we see Donoso making a very conscious effort to create and scrutinize his novel’s narrator, Humberto: “What matters is what is going to happen with this monologue’s point of view.” Everything flows in Humberto’s long, urgent monologue, within which all the novel’s other voices speak. All that happens in this novel is the presence of a voice that becomes other voices and then regains its own voice, only to lose it again. Everything is put together and taken apart in this voice that swallows up other voices. The novel is flowing lava, pushing on and on.
Donoso probes, writes, and rewrites as if he were digging. Humberto’s different versions of the same events place the reader in a dreamlike space and time. Like in dreams, the details are sharp but the full picture is hazy. It is a “fluctuating, hazy matter,” Humberto says. As McDowell attests, Donoso was writing about “something that can’t be looked at head-on, but only hinted at through images.”10
The story is disjointed, excessive, and gruesome, with surrealist inspiration. There is something of Buñuel to it; Donoso thought of sending him the Pájaro. “It very much lends itself to film. And Buñuel will like it. God! I hope this all works out” (11/21/68). “I am almost sure it will catch his eye. He’ll be interested” (11/27/68). But it did not work out: “The Buñuel thing was a definite fuckup. Great disappointment and shift in life’s path” (8/28/71).
He notes: “The Humberto-Jerónimo relationship is becoming clearer to me; it is my reaction to Hemingway’s virility, my envy and admiration for it” (4/6/66). He soon confesses which are the real-life models behind Jerónimo and his wife, Inés: the famous Chilean painter Nemesio Antúnez and his wife, Inés Figueroa. Both are attractive, well-read, successful, well-traveled, from “good” families. They are close friends with Neruda, who invites them over constantly. “Nemesio triumphant, rich in rigor, politics, definition, love, family, art” (8/25/67).
Donoso writes: “I am still obsessed with the personality of Inés (Inés Figueroa)… she needs a witness in order to love, she needs to be envied” (8/16/67). Later, once the novel is published, he will note: “I sensed that couple’s arrogance (Nemesio/Inés), and that the only real grounds of their relationship was to feel envied, carved up by the envious” (6/4/71).
This novel’s characters do not admire—they envy. In his diaries, Donoso often confesses his own envy, and not only of Hemingway. “Carlos [Fuentes] appeared on Time, with photo. I am consumed and undermined by envy” (1/29/68). He also envies the “virile accomplishments” of Vargas Llosa, and is “eaten away at,” for example, by “the polymorphous talent of [Gore] Vidal” (11/13/73).
Humberto’s father instilled in him the idea that he must “have a face”, he must “be someone.” Because Humberto is the son of a father who “had the heartrending certainty [that he would never] have a face”. He belongs to a social “limbo,” the place of the nameless, the nobodies. In contrast to this world, the novel shows us an elite social class that is abusive, moth-eaten, and decrepit, slipping down the slope of decadence.
In this context, Humberto’s mother “remained on the periphery.” She devalues his father’s aspiration: her son will never have a face. She nullifies both father and son. Humberto is left an orphan. Over time, Mudito will come to understand that “people with faces [are] almost like us”—when it is too late.
“The question that runs through the novel is that of identity linked to recognition. But there’s more. Mudito says so: recognition is given, in the end, through love.”
A face of one’s own is built under the gaze of and through interaction with the other. It is not a solitary task. Does it not fall to the mother, oftentimes, to somehow communicate the father’s desirability? Mudito lacks this foundational structure. The father’s place is empty. Mudito lives in a gaseous, restive stage. He has no way to stabilize his identity. The “father”—or the one who plays this role—is missing, and thus allows for a “self,” legitimizing it, but from the opposite side.
For Humberto, being someone thus means being someone in the eyes of Don Jerónimo, who indubitably is indeed someone. But, at once, the dominant entity—Jerónimo—requires the gaze of his inferior, without whom he is not superior. “Lend me your envy to make me potent,” Don Jerónimo tells Humberto. The superior’s dependence on the inferior runs throughout the novel, and connects it, possibly, with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.
Later, at a moment I find very meaningful, Humberto will become much more than a witness to Jerónimo’s sexual escapades: “Not only was I spurring him on and possessing, through him, the woman he possessed, but my potency entered him, I entered the virile he-man, I made him my sodomite.” His gaze penetrates Jerónimo like a phallus. It is impossible not to perceive that the relationship between employee and employer orbits a homosexual attraction—at least for Humberto.
“I have to entirely redo and revise the sinister night of substitutions, and no getting out of it: […] it is the book’s center, its neuralgic knot” (10/16/69). On this “sinister night,” Jerónimo is elected senator. But a brawl breaks out on the plaza and he falls, wounded; he has been shot. However, in a different version, Humberto takes the bullet; the people on the plaza thought he was Jerónimo. Don Jerónimo soaks his arm in Humberto’s blood. With this bandaged arm, he meets the press. There has been an attempt on his life, lending his figure great resonance.
The scar remains on Mudito’s body. “How could I not still bear the brand reminding me that a thousand eyes as anonymous as mine were witnesses to the fact that I am Jerónimo de Azcoitía?” Humberto departs for the estate. Inés anxiously awaits her husband’s arrival, but it is Humberto who gets out of the car. He tells her what happened. Humberto loves Doña Inés, who, as he speaks to her, goes beyond a “smile to the verge of laughter you never quite broke out into.”
That night, Humberto goes to bed with Doña Inés. But she calls him “Jerónimo.” “She went on saying Jerónimo, and Jerónimo penetrated her… leaving Humberto outside.” Humberto admits that his “fate […] is to remain outside the mutual acknowledgment of love, but not outside the mechanical act of love.” Sleeping with Inés allows Humberto to be someone. He crosses a social barrier. But, if Don Jerónimo plays the role of stand-in father, is sleeping with his wife not a sort of incest?
In a second version, posed in a more speculative tone, it seems that perhaps he in fact went to bed with Peta, Inés’s old nurse. “I may not have given my love to Inés in that darkness but to someone else, to Peta […] ragged, old, crippled, filthy Peta […] it was her my enormous member penetrated.” This will be the version, tentative and dubious at first, that nonetheless takes root and determines Humberto’s conduct. Recognition—being someone, being a person—is postponed. In the meantime, guilt and indefinition.
Down the line, Inés grows old in the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales, that convent house of high adobe walls, replete with rooms and corridors and attics and patios and more patios. One, for example, is dedicated only to ever-accumulating broken statues of saints. Dwelling there are three nuns, five little orphan girls, and an array of old women. The lovely Inés will gradually transform into her old nanny, Peta.
Donoso notes in Iowa: “Learn a little about EL IMBUNCHE” (1/8/66). He asks his father. Joaquín Edwards Bello, years before, spoke of the imbunche. According to anthropologist Sonia Montecino, “imbunche” is a word of Mapuche origin. “Practitioners of black magic take a child, break his leg, and stick it to his back, then twist his head until it is turned backwards. […] They block up every orifice of his body, except the mouth.” The child grows up “without learning to speak” and protects the evildoers’ caves.11
When Iris gets pregnant in the convent house, the father’s identity is in doubt. Was it Mudito, Don Jerónimo, or someone else behind the giant’s mask? Mudito, who now lives and works in an ancient mansion, sometimes seems to wish it were his own son while bearing Don Jerónimo’s surname. The old ladies conclude it was a miracle. They fear “a father may come to claim his son.” He must be hidden. Thus will he grow up “beautiful and holy, without ever in its whole life leaving the room where we’ll have hidden it… And as he grows up the most important thing of all is for us not to teach him how to do anything for himself, not even talk or walk, then he’ll always need us to do every single thing. God grant he can’t see or hear… he’ll have to depend on us for everything.”
Mudito has told Mother Benita not to open the packages an old woman, now dead, left behind on her bed. “All of us are tied up in these packages you want to force a meaning from…” Which is to say, we are all packages that contain nothing more than emptiness and fear of loss—packages in which, nonetheless, we seek meaning.
Humberto comes to wish to be himself, in reality, a mere package, an imbunche. “The [old women] kneel around me and sew up the sack… deaf, blind, dumb, a small sexless package, all sewed up and tied with strips of cloth and strings, sacks and more sacks.” Humberto starts to chew through the jute. He no longer wants to be there. Why? “Because there’s someone waiting outside to tell me my name.” Once again, he wishes to be recognized by his fellow man, by someone he is not.
In the end, an old woman—Inés transformed into old Peta Ponce? Death herself?—takes him to the Mapocho River. Under a bridge, among the stones, she makes a little campfire. “The old woman stands up, she grabs the sack and, opening it, shakes it out over the fire, emptying it into the flames.” There is no groan, no pained contraction. Humberto is now nothing more than a bundle of jute, cord, and wrinkled papers. For Humberto, Mudito, there will be no redemption. Nor will there be for Jerónimo, nor for his monstrous son, nor for Inés. All that remains is the interminable rosary of interchangeable old ladies, “women as confusing as images of smoke, changeable and constantly changing…”
In El obsceno pájaro de la noche, Donoso created an implacable, sordid, devastating world—one that was absolutely unimaginable before he did so. Perhaps he hoped to lend a language to the mute language of the unconscious. And in a very Chilean manner of speaking.
The question that runs through the novel is that of identity linked to recognition. But there’s more. Mudito says so: recognition is given, in the end, through love. But perhaps in love there is something unattainable. To recognize me as I am is a necessary endeavor and, at the same time, impossible.
This is what Donoso has to tell us.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Notes:
1 Emir Rodríguez Monegal, in “José Donoso: la novela como happening.” Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. 37, No. 76-77, July-December 1971.
2 Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ibid., 1971.
3 Cecilia García-Huidobro, Diarios Tempranos: Donoso in Progress:1956-1965. Santiago: Ediciones UDP, 2016.
4 Cecilia García-Huidobro, ibid., 2016.
5 Cecilia García-Huidobro, ibid., 2016, footnote, p. 171.
6 Cecilia García-Huidobro, ibid., footnote, p. 171.
7 José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night: Unabridged, Centennial Edition. New York: New Directions, 2024.
8 Carlos Franz, “Se me olvidó que te olvidé.” Santiago: Estudios Públicos, No. 135, 2014.
9 Cecilia García-Huidobro (selection), José Donoso, Artículos de incierta necesidad, Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998, p. 210.
10 Megan McDowell, ibid., p. 475.
11 Sonia Montecino, Mitos de Chile. Santiago: Catalonia, 2015, p. 248-349.
Arturo Fontaine, “José Donoso, biografía del Pájaro,” in Letras Libres (Mexico),
October 2024, No. 310. Published with the authors’ permission.
