A Lizard’s Tale: Irony and Immanent Critique in José Donoso’s Lagartija sin cola

Abstract

Published in 2007, having been found among Donoso’s papers by his daughter, Pilar, during her research for a biography of her father, Lagartija sin cola was well received by critics, with some expressing surprise that Donoso abandoned the novel in the early 1970s. My argument in this paper follows Rowe’s seminal essay on El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1983) by suggesting that critical responses to the novel have so far overlooked the extent to which we are dealing with a nuanced and often ironic work in which the narrator cannot simply be read as a cipher for Donoso the writer. However, the parallels between Armando Muñoz-Roa, the reclusive painter who narrates the novel from his Barcelona hideaway, and Donoso the man, undergoing one crisis or another during his Spanish exile, reveal, along with contextual references, the immanent critique Donoso carries out on his own position as a writer and his work in the novel. Inter-textual and self-referential sequences must be read as more than simply a justification for Donoso’s own decisions. An unstinting analytical eye, refusing both the security of adherence to knowledge external to oneself and the kind of Archimedes point beloved of the commercial novel, is a distinctive feature of Donoso’s work, and what perhaps sets him apart from other writers of his generation.