Noble Monsters

I’ve only got twenty minutes before this coffeehouse closes, so let me be super quick: Yup, this sure is a masterpiece.  I had remembered the extensive set piece in La Rinconada after Boy’s birth, in which the estate turned into a place without a sense of the normal and abnormal, so that Boy’s deformities would not engender any sense of inferiority:  I had forgotten

how explicit the language is of making the grotesque a kind of sublime, beyond beauty and ugliness.; and I’d forgotten about Humberto’s unusual status as the representative of don Jerónimo in La Rinconada, and how he feels partly a prisoner of the “grotesque elite,” even though in many ways he is their jailer, not the jailed.

[Post 2pm addendum:  p.188: “Don Jerónimo saw to all these details, because nothing around Boy must be ugly, mean or ignoble.  Ugliness is one thing.  But monstrosity is something else again, something of a significance that was equal but antithetical to the significance of beauty and, as such, it merited similar prerogatives.  Monstrosity was the only thing Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía would set before his son from birth on.”

[This is a repurposing of some classical aesthetic theory.  A few years ago I directed an independent study on the aesthetics of ugliness, and the language of ‘going beyond ugly vs. beautiful’ is usually associated not with the monstrous  but with the sublime.  But it’s also true that the tradition of the sublime often includes hurting the observer:  whether it’s Edmund Burke’s sublime, where trying to take in the size of the mountain range you observe is supposed to hurt your eyeballs, or Kant’s sublime, where the power of nature or the infinity of the stars reminds the human being that he is facing a reality that is non-human, the sublime is not measured by the social or the human and in some way endangers the viewer.  So why not apply this vocabulary to the monstrous too?  Still, the passage above is not just organized around getting beyond the beautiful and the ugly; it’s organized around eliminating the category of the abnormal:  the monstrous (and the classical grotesque) is about violating human norms.  No norm, then nothing is monstrous. –or, as in the novel, Boy becomes the norm, his status will not be threatened by his shape.

[And this particular passage plays with the ambiguity in the word “noble”:  an economic elite (Azcoitía is throwing a lot of money around to make this place for his son); a social hierarchy (there is an élite of monsters, and a second tier, a third tier, etc., and the ones below hope to be promoted to higher levels if someone in the higher levels leaves –Emperatriz acutely perceives this aspect of the Rinconada); and most importantly, an aesthetic or qualitative sense in which some monsters are just better at being a monster than others are.  In practice, the people who decide what makes for a noble monster are Humberto and Don Jerónimo, so this is not an internal criterion.  The relish with which Donoso/Humberto describes the monsters –the bat’s ears, the humps, the useless limbs, etc., put me in mind of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932); even though Boy is never supposed to be looked at by the norms, the same spectacularity that is at work in the sexual scenes of voyeurism is also at work in the hiring and the describing of the grotesque servants of La Rinconada.] [And the constant demonizing of women!  Not just Peta Ponce, whom I’d forgotten entirely; but in La Rinconada, the machinations of Emperatriz ( = “Empress”), and Miss Dolly breast-feeding a four-year-old Boy which gives him green diarrhea –Donoso just does not let up on his gynophobia.

[But you sure can tell that Donoso has been reading his Borges carefully, too:  who else but Borges could have inspired this temporal, almost metaphysical version of an existence without norms? “…Boy was to grow up believing that things came into being as his eyes discovered them and died when he stopped looking at them, that they were nothing but the outer shell perceived by his eyes, that other forms of birth and death didn’t exist…. No whys, whens, outsides, insides, before, afters; no arriving or leaving, no systems or generalizations.  A bird crossing the sky at a certain hour was not a bird crossing the sky at a certain hour, it wasn’t headed for other places because other places didn’t exist; Boy must live in an enchanted present…without a key or a meaning that could subject him to a rule and, in subjecting him to it, cast him into the infinite void it was necessary for him to avoid” (197-8). Hello, Funes the Memorious as Solipsist.]

[Finally, and sorry I’m going on so long on this tangent, the father who engineers a mini-world in which his son is to be the measure of everything, however grotesque that son is, echoes the irritating methodology of Georg Lukàcs’s Theory of the Novel, where Lukàcs famously argued that in epic poetry man was totally in harmony with the universe in which he lived, and that the novel is the epic of the fallen universe, of man struggling to achieve again that failed totality:  Don Quixote refusing to believe that that universe had fallen, Candide and Oblomov and the novel of disillusionment, Tolstoy and a realism that opens windows to a Christianity that scorns this world.  One of the novelistic forms that Lukàcs also creates/examines is a sort of “rigged Bildungsroman,” Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Pilgrimage, where Wilhelm thinks he is growing independently but in the end discovers that his changes and growth have been carefully orchestrated by a secret society that wants to initiate him into their circle.  You couldn’t have a more fully rigged “novel of development” (in which the father doesn’t seem to think that the son will actually develop –certainly will never exit his universe into the larger real world) than this part of The Obscene Bird of Night.]

What I had forgotten entirely was the run-up to Boy’s birth. (I’d also forgotten the twisting of the time of narration, so that all these chapters are supposed to have taken place some twenty-plus years before Iris Mateluna’s pregnancy, narrated occasionally in Humberto’s own book –material that is helpfully in italics in the translation but not in the Kindle edition of the Spanish original–  but mostly narrated while Humberto/Mudito is holding Madre Benita’s hand, after he has confronted Boy in the police station and Boy does not press charges.)  I liked very much how Don Jerónimo’s early life after his return from Europe is narrated in a stuffy 19th-c. omniscient narrator voice, and only starts to unloosen as Jerónimo’s own life begins to harden (in politics) and loosen (in his inability to please his perfect wife Inés); and I had certainly forgotten the recreation of, or variation upon the theme of, the story of the maiden, the witch, the imbunche, the chonchón, and the yellow bitch.  Really, that whole section was more impressive to me insofar as it came out of nowhere:  when Inés challenges Don Jerónimo’s attempt to separate her from Peta Ponce and she scratches his face and a wet tablecloth falls on him (p.150) –I was actually shocked a bit. Likewise, the escape from the Social Club, the way that Humberto takes a bullet for Don Jerónimo (this explains that line “the wounded are sacred” (p.117) that I was puzzled about earlier in the text, when Mudito wounds himself while running from the carabineros after stealing a copy of his own book from the Azcoitías), and the creepy way that Humberto seems to have had sex with Inés the night she gets pregnant, only to conclude that it was witchcraft and that he was actually having sex with Peta Ponce at the same time that Jerónimo was having sex with Inés, so that Jerónimo was borrowing Humberto’s potency –as I said, all of that had the power of surprise, as if I had not read it at all the first time.  Reading in Spanish instead of English this time contributes to that too.

I’d also forgotten the range and variety of ways that Don Jerónimo and Humberto complete each other or can substitute for each other, such that Humberto is always on the verge of losing his sense of self or identity.  Stealing Humberto’s gunshot wound was a particularly satiric example of this; but the way the two of them collaborate on the sexual act, either when Humberto serves as the voyeur or he seems to impregnate Inés the night of the gunshot wound, when in the end it seems as if he really had sex with Peta Ponce.  But his dissolution of self extends beyond this in the last chapter we read, 16, where he has been sent to a hospital or fantasizes that he has done so, and is so sick that he can’t give his name to the doctors and nurses, and his innards are all exploding and taking on independent life, just as the people he has been telling la Madre Benita about also have life independent from him.  It really is something.

I haven’t checked, but I imagine that the English is as good as the Spanish for using long paragraphs with run-ons to convey Humberto’s panic, paranoia, and desperation at various points in the texts (let’s see, say, the last bit we read, pp. 214-17, when Humberto panics about being ill in La Rinconada and convinces himself that all the blood transfusions that he is receiving from the residents will turn him into a monster too –yes, very effective).  That’s a sublime grotesque on another level, I suppose you could say.  Nobly monstrous prose.