Yumyum! Gothic Late Modernism

I am having so much fun re-reading The Obscene Bird of Night that I can’t believe it’s been 28 years since I read it the first time.  To be sure, the formal fireworks can sometimes seem like a ruse to distract us from second-guessing what’s at stake in the story, but at other times these same formal and verbal tricks seem to give us exactly the insights we need to understand what is at stake in this story of Mudito/ Humberto Peñaloza, the extended family and servants of the Azcoitía family, and the decrepit and haunted House where most of them live.

In the housekeeping of literary-historical labels, the novels of Latin America’s Boom were at first labeled “post-modernist,” but more recently we call them “late-modernist,” to suggest that they follow in spirit the same practices as Joyce, Woolf, Gide, Mann, and (himself later than the rest of them) Faulkner.  I’m good with that in this case:  I think it’s clear to see how Joyce and Faulkner in particular  help inspire the verbal and formal hijinx of this book:  especially, the tricks with the first-person voice (usually Mudito but it can be shared around when Mudito narrates something he’s invented as if he himself were one of the people there –the most ambitious and significant of these games is ch. 7, where he is not present but has so identified with the head of the Gigante that he narrates much of it as if he were the Gigante head) and the rearranging of episodes, so that we can begin with the death of the servant Brígida but many of the chapters that follow take place while Brígida is still alive and we have to put them back into chronological order.

One of the elements that feels particularly Latin American (though also characteristic of the high modernists) is a tension between a not-yet-achieved modernity and pre- or anti-modern folkloric or magical elements of the society, elements that are taken seriously by the narrator (the genius of One Hundred Years of Solitude was that these unmodern magical elements of the society were taken seriously by an omniscient narrator).  While the “official European anti-modern superstition” of Roman Catholicism, and the Azcoitías’ failure to get one of their ancestors canonized, is mostly played for laughs, nobody is laughing at the story of the imbunche, narrated almost as a fairy tale in ch. 2.  In fact, you can already see how much of the main plot is constructed around the elements of the imbunche story:  old ladies as witches; the colchón or flying head as a manifestation of power; the yellow she-dog as an effect and an omen of witchcraft; and the imbunche itself, a powerful symbol of youth and vigor that is thwarted and made impotent –although in his weakness at times Mudito finds that impotence seductive, insofar as he wants to hide from the world and make his social impotence completely literal.  (Against his literal impotence and the literal impotence of don Jerónimo, the last of the Azcoitias, you have Mudito’s (and Jerónimo’s)  potency with Iris/Gina while wearing the head of the Gigante.)

(It’s not clear to me who among the Boom novelists, if any of them, had read Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), a novel with many parallels with this Donoso novel in particular.)

It’s probably unnecessary to point out all the gynophobia and castration anxiety in this book, so I won’t bother.  The young sexually active woman is a halfwit, who mentally tortures the weak male protagonist into doing her bidding (although all the torture is fantasized on his part –he’s not actually turned into a dog with a leash and an inside-spiked collar (ch.5), or is he??–); the spinster who has gone to Rome to achieve a beatification; and the old ladies who are planning to help Iris deliver her baby in secret and then turn it into an imbunche: none of them are real women, just images that produce panic in Mudito. The only good women are mother figures, Jerónimo’s wife misiá Ruiz and the convent head la Madre Benítez, but they are kept passive and out of the loop even when no one overtly questions their authority.

The politics of this book are likewise retro, paranoid, impotent (and elevating impotence to a moral good):  the two options in the novel’s politics are to go along with the aristocracy and Church, or to be part of a revolution.  The aristocracy and Church are both obviously decadent; the revolution only appears as a photo of a bearded revolutionary on the paper hat that Iris makes, helping to threaten and intimidate Mudito (ch. 5).  There is infighting between Church and aristocracy, due to the inability of the Azcoitias to produce a male heir to inherit the House. Curiously, there is no praise of the appearance of the Church –it is mostly symbolized by the cemetery of the fragments of statues of saints (ch.4)– that might correspond to the praise of the appearance of the aristocracy, in the description of the carriage of Brígida’s funeral in ch. 1 or in the overpowering harmony of grays in the suit of don Jerónimo in ch. 7, a power that has been prepared for by Humberto’s schoolteacher father’s obsession with not being somebody.

Conversely, Donoso is also trying to figure out how to describe the power of being nobody, of being the weak and the abject.  Some of it is straight up Hegelian master-slave dialectic (at least I think it is; I haven’t read Hegel on this topic, although, as Josh knows, I know what I’m supposed to say about it): the servants and women do much of the dirty work involved with their master’s bodies, and so although they have no contribution to make to official politics they can affect things unofficially (ch. 4), and Mudito in particular has the power of his envious gaze, his status as witness, which Jerónimo found necessary in order to perform in bed.  The power of the abject is partly symbolized in all of the amazing amount of junk that Donoso describes for us in the House, and it is partly symbolized by the eyes of the Gigante.  But of course the main power of the abject in the novel so far is the power of feminine witchcraft (the old ladies) and feminine fertility (the young Iris), and Mudito can’t participate in either of those powers directly and runs the risk of being destroyed by either –by the old ladies when they realize that he isn’t mute (“mudito” = little mute boy) and has his own agenda, and by Iris when, how, if, whether she gives birth.

I titled this post “Gothic” late modernism because it’s clear that much of the genre conventions of the Gothic are at work in this book, especially the haunted castle (the section on the ghost of don Clemente (ch.3) is currently being played for laughs or black humor, but as I say the story of the imbunche is being played for keeps). One of the fun reasons to invoke a generic convention is to see which elements of that convention are not used, and it is interesting to see a Gothic castle without a brooding male hyper-potent presence at the center of it, just lots of old ladies and a seemingly impotent male servant. We’ll see how all this plays out, as well as seeing the impending main event (Iris giving birth to Mudito’s child, who will be passed off as the last male Azcoitía) in the chapters to come.