Artists, Aesthetics, and Family Politics in Donoso's El obsceno pâjaro de la noche and James's The Golden Bowl

Abstract

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is noforce; that it is notgenteel comedy even; that itflowers andfructifies on the contrary out ofthe profoundest tragic depths ofthe essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance ofeveryone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubduedforest where the wolfhowls and the obscene bird of night chatters. Henry James, Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William I. The Chilean noveUst, Jose Donoso (1924-1997), was a member ofLatin America's Boom generation. These authors, including JuUo Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, came to the attention of the world Uterary community during the 1960s because ofthe sheer virtuosity oftheir narrative techniques. Many great works were produced in only a few years: Cortazar's Rayuela (1963), Fuentes' La muerta deArtemio Cruz (1962), Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad (1967), Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (1965), and Donoso's El obscenopajaro de la noche (1970). The Boom authors rejected the realistic and naturaUstic schools (costumbrismo, criollismo) that dominated Latin American literature in the first halfofthe twentieth century, and embraced, instead, the high modernists ofEurope and the United States. Donoso shared his feUow Boom authors' love of William Faulkner, Joyce, Virginia Woolfand Marcel Proust, but he also discovered their immediate precursor, Henry James, when he came to the United States in 1954 on a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Princeton. He foundthe above quote, which serves as the epigraph ofEl obscenopajaro, whue poring through Leon Edel with a comb (personal interview). The final, referential Une ofthe epigraph orients the novel within a largerintertextual field, tangentiaUyidentifying HenryJames, Jr. as one of Donoso's literary fathers; Donoso confirmed the influence of mi querido James in his interview with Emir Rodriguez Monegal upon publication ofthe novel. When Sharon MagnareUi interprets the epigraph, she initiaUy notes its formal quaUties, the weU-wrought balance between the unsubdued forest as represented by Mudito and Peta Ponce and the genteel comedy [. . J as evidenced in Jeronimo and Ines (Baroque 90). But then, speaking ofour wolfand bird, she tUts her interpretation: But, perhaps even more importantly, the epigraph underlines, as does the entire text, the noisiness ofthese two animals. The wolfhowls and the bird chatters, but no mention is made oftheir ability to communicate anything via the howling and chattering. All they produce are sounds, commun