[New Directions; 2024]
Tr. from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell
The Obscene Bird of Night was first published in 1970 by the Chilean writer José Donoso, who’s become—at least in the English-speaking world—somewhat of a forgotten son of the Latin American Boom, an efflorescence of literature between the 1960s and 70s that minted global superstars such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. In his life Donoso didn’t win the Nobel Prize like Márquez and Llosa, and today all his books besides Obscene Bird are out of print in the United States (though New Directions is also publishing a slim erotic novel of his next year). Until now, The Obscene Bird of Night, widely regarded as Donoso’s masterpiece, had only ever existed in English in bowdlerized form—twenty pages of material relating to an estate filled with monsters and freaks were excised without explanation. Now, New Directions has just reissued the novel with an updated, unabridged translation.
It’s hard not to be affected by the molten energy and warped intensity of The Obscene Bird of Night, composed of 464 pages in small print that tell the story of a crumbling estate in the countryside of southern Chile called La Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación. The labyrinthine Casa has seemingly infinite rooms. There are nuns, ancient female servants, wayward orphans, and the faded rural aristocrats who rule over them all doing spiritual and sexual battle with each other. The aristocrats, last of the cruel and storied Azcoitía line, are desperate to cling to their land, their bloodline, and their names, while the forces of all they consider monstrous—servants, clergy, old women—steadily grow in power and cruelty.
This battle—between the old regime and the new, the powerful and the subaltern, the beautiful and the monstrous—takes place across a number of incidents throughout the novel. It is one of Donoso’s central themes, drawn directly from the midcentury tumult in Chile, when the old landed elite was rocked by a potent mix of agrarian reform, urbanization, and socialist movement-building that culminated in the monumental election of Salvador Allende in 1970. While Donoso’s sympathies lie with the rural poor, his novelistic eye falls not on the glories of the underclass but on the grotesqueries of the rich, whose fears, obsessions, and prejudices are reified in the world of the novel so that they can be ironized and dismantled, revealed as the absurdities they are. It’s a world seen through the broken fish-eye of a decaying aristocracy whose only recourse to its decline is hate: The people deemed disposable and monstrous—the poor, the disabled, the old, the women—are, in the Casa, bona fide monsters, repulsive creatures on whose bodies is inscribed all the hate they’ve ever endured. The catch, Donoso shows, is that it’s the rich who in the final accounting are destroyed by the hideousness they have imposed on the world at their feet.
Our guide to this world is Humberto Peñaloza, secretary to Jerónimo, the lord of the estate. Humberto is also a failed writer, a social climber, neither an aristocrat nor a peon. Humberto lives in the Casa; when he describes what occurs there, he undermines himself constantly, repeating events and telling them differently each time, assuming powers of omniscience at will, describing conversations where he was not present. In Humberto’s telling, each scene is cast in a bizarre glow that, while often bewildering to read, illuminates the world beneath the world of the Casa: its dominant symbols, its repressed fears.
Take, for instance, what should be a straightforward event, as commonplace as they come in a society that’s still basically feudal: Jerónimo wants to bear a child with his beautiful lawful wife, Inés, but she won’t do it. Her wetnurse-turned-Svengali, Peta Ponce, one of the horrific withered women who roam the halls, tells her she cannot. So Humberto has sex with Inés on Jerónimo’s behalf, assuming his physical form, including his enormous penis. All good so far in the marital bed, until Humberto—rather, Humberto-as-Jéronimo—sees that he is having sex not with Inés but with Peta Ponce, or rather with Peta-as-Inés. It’s Inés-as-Inés, though—who gets pregnant from this encounter and gives birth to a monster par excellence, a son with a “loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump” and a mouth that’s “a gaping bestial hole in which palate and nose bared obscene bones and tissues.” Jerónimo builds the child an estate of his own, filled with “monsters” from all across Chile, so he will never know the degree of his otherness. Humberto is assigned to run this estate, where he—whose palate and nose bare no obscene bones and tissues—is regarded as monstrous.
It’s precisely this wildness of The Obscene Bird of Night that allows it to draw the fixations of a decadent aristocracy to their illogical extremes while reinforcing that the elements of this society—rich and poor, owner and worker, master and servant—are not as elemental as they seem. The topsy-turviness is the point: No ancient hierarchy, no typical division between people—not even that of “self” and “other”—can be taken for granted as an old world dies.
To illustrate this point, much of the novel proceeds as a catalogue of grotesqueries, with horrific scenes and indelible images passing by out of chronological order and with only the vaguest explication of cause and effect between them. Femininity is a particularly dark specter haunting the macho, agrarian, patrilineal Casa: If a woman is not a blond angelic aristocrat, she is something abhorrent and servile. (Gender and sexuality and their roles in maintaining, then subverting, elite rule in Chile are frequent themes in Donoso’s work; this novel and his 1966 El lugar sin límites have attracted plenty of affectionate attention from queer theorists.) The elderly women of the house are discarded and despised for their femininity and inability to reproduce. This disgust is made physical: Their vaginas are worm-ridden, their faces covered in a dense layer of polyps. The disabled and deformed are not only impoverished and marginalized; they are sadistic, nymphomaniac, having orgies dressed as nurses after conducting Mengele-style experiments on human subjects. The reader witnesses a parade of unimaginable deformities, inconceivable sex acts, dozens of people who “were born and lived in a world not correlative to them”—forming a careful, taxonomic study of monstrosity, which, as opposed to mere ugliness, is “a noble category” here, “something of a significance that was equal but antithetical to the significance of beauty and, as such, it merited similar prerogatives.” In the context of the book’s self-conscious exploration of the nature of making and being made a monster, what may scan as misogynistic seems rather an instance of Donoso dialing up to 100 the subtle and habitual perspective that sustains the psychic life—and economic power—of the elites under his withering gaze.
It’s not clear that the Azcoitías exert as much control as they imagine they do over the workers in their house. What the novel understands is that monsters hold enormous power over those who made them monstrous. This power is the knowledge of the true nature of their oppressors. “Servants,” Donoso writes in a philosophical stretch early on in the novel,
accumulate the privileges of misery. The demonstrations of pity, the ridicule, the handouts, the token help, the humiliations they put up with make them powerful. . . . Sometimes I get the feeling that, instead of sleeping as they should, the old women are very busy pulling things out of drawers from under their beds and out of little bundles—things they’ve been hoarding, such as their employers’ fingernails, snot, rags, vomit, and blood-stained sanitary napkins—and reconstructing with all that filth a sort of photographic negative not only of the employers they robbed it all from, but of the world.
The Obscene Bird of Night is that photographic negative. All the supposed beauty and righteousness of the hierarchical society Donoso depicts is consumed by the hideousness that those categories impose on the masses excluded from them. Donoso, himself from the urban elite, critiques his own class, giving a terrifying tour of their inner lives at a time when the Chilean government was trying to relieve revolutionary ferment by undertaking agrarian reform, distributing land to campesinos and focusing its unionization efforts on married rural men with families. Masculinity was in the air, the key to land ownership and liberation, and the horrors of the novel that emerged from that milieu are not trivial or bombastic; they immerse the reader in the netherworld that any nexus of land, manhood, and violence creates and then condemns the majority to live in.
Donoso poses the same question to the novel form that he poses to the aristocracy: What is the monstrosity that beauty and order are trying to suppress? We enter a novel where timelines are hopelessly confused, boundaries between characters are thin to the point of nonexistence, dark magic abounds. Rumor, gossip, myth, and legend—types of information traditionally relegated to women and the poor—all have the force of the real. Over the course of the novel, Humberto loses all identifying traits and decomposes into pure consciousness, the consciousness constituting the novel in our hands. Humberto is, at different times, a servant named Mudito (from mudo, or mute), an old woman, his master Jerónimo, a recurring “yellow bitch dog,” a prodigal child of one of the orphans. At times he editorializes and theorizes, as if he has become Donoso himself. Catastrophes pile up at his feet, and he loses his ability to speak, to act, to do anything but serve as a witness to the greatness (then decay, demise, humiliation) of his master. He loses his name; he begins to lose parts of his body, then most of his body. Finally, he becomes a baby then a stump of flesh and then a fragment of consciousness bundled up in blankets and left in a box. And even that consciousness is warped, deformed, not his alone—so many other voices take control of his for their own narrative purposes.
Here the photographic negative of the narrator—that sturdy “I” that buttresses fiction from whatever point of view, a stable point of departure for observation, elaboration, and interpretation—is revealed. He may be the perfect narrator, admitting every voice, witnessing all. But this witnessing comes at the cost of his own destruction, overwhelmed by the delirium of the novel. As it happens, Donoso claimed to have begun the book after an adverse reaction to morphine left him clinically insane for a few weeks. He seems to have tried with all his might, over a near-decade of labor, to challenge the division between literary creation and hallucination. Reading The Obscene Bird of Night, you start to doubt that the conventions of how setting and subjectivity are represented in fiction—a unity of place and time (allowing for backward and forward movement), characters who form coherent and mutually independent selves—were ever anything but delusions of order and rationality, guardrails before the abyss.
The Obscene Bird of Night comes out now, touched up by star translator Megan McDowell (who has also ferried Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, and Alejandro Zambra into English), as part of what seems to be a bid to integrate José Donoso, in his centenary year, into the US canon of Latin American Boom writers. It’s an interesting task. His less enthusiastic reception in the English-speaking world complicates the story of the Boom, whose writers were catholic in their approaches to the novel and at times protested their subsumation into a single Latin American blob (many especially resisted that dread term that stalked their work—“magical realism”) but still seemed to share a basic faith in the integrity of the novel form that Donoso seems to lack. The novels that brought Donoso’s peers so much success and acclaim in the United States now seem like relics of a more stable time for the mind, and the contemporary writers who self-consciously follow in their footsteps have rarely found a hold in the culture—still believing, as our narrator puts it, “in the existence of a reality to portray.” After all, the conceptual bases of grand sweeping novels—self and society—are so deeply unstable these days. I wonder how out of place this novel must have seemed to a world-historically comfortable American audience in the 1970s. It fits in much better with the United States of today.
Setting aside the mass of novels that hold the publishing industry on their shoulders—romance and fantasy—one of the centers of Anglophone literary culture today is a literature of intense subjectivity, where the drama of the work is the drama of the mind seeking to exist in a world indifferent or hostile to its existence. There’s the Cusk/Heti/Lerner/Cole coterie that must deal with its own dread term stalking its work, “autofiction”; there are authors like Jenny Ofill and Kate Zambreno, writing what literary critic Becca Rothfeld calls the “fragment novel . . where the self reigns supreme, for practically everything else has been excised from them.” There are Patricia Lockwood’s and Olivia Laing’s experiments with social media. There’s Ottessa Moshfegh writing a bestseller from the perspective of a woman who’s asleep for a year. They gave the Nobel Prize to Annie Ernaux (she writes in French, but still—we love her here). The literature of intense subjectivity, more than an exercise in narcissism or laziness, as the charge often goes, is an attempt to start from the beginning, to try (and often fail) to find a new way of representing and activating consciousness in words.
The Obscene Bird of Night anticipated, by some fifty years, the epistemological anarchy of the present. Our ways of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world around us have been seriously wounded by the technology that more and more dictates our inner life, not to mention social upheavals and structural collapses. While his peers were composing exquisite accounts of human beings moving through a human world, Donoso imagined an inescapable house where timelines are meaningless, where every fact is in doubt, where people speak in many voices, take on many names, and are themselves only insofar as they are also everyone else. He imagined, claimed, and displayed the power he, via Humberto/Mudito, attributed to the old women waiting in the Casa to die, those storytelling creatures who
have the power to fold time over and confuse it, they multiply and divide it, events are refracted in their gnarled hands as in the most brilliant prism, they cut the consecutive happening of things into fragments they arrange in parallel form, they bond those fragments and twist them into shapes that enable them to carry out their designs.
The novel that emerges from this process is obscene—ragged, unwieldy, difficult, and horrific. But that obscenity looks a lot like life.
Daniel Yadin is a writer, translator, bookseller, and bartender in New York.
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