Chance” twins fathered—but swiftly disowned—by the Shakespearean actor Melchior
Hazard in advance of the first of his three marriages.
Dora recalls that the identical Chance twins are indeed lucky, first by virtue of being informally adopted by Melchior’s more colorful but less successful fraternal twin Peregrine, and second by virtue of developing a career as dancers in music halls. (Music halls were Britain’s primary form of vulgar popular entertainment from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II.) It subsequently transpires that Peregrine is the biological father of Melchior’s supposedly legitimate identical twin daughters by his first marriage, Saskia and Imogen. The paternity of the fraternal twins of Melchior’s third marriage, Gareth and Tristan, is never formally disputed, although Dora and her sister Nora cannot help but
wonder why it is that one bears a far stronger physical resemblance to Peregrine.
The intricate comparisons and contrasts drawn between the fortunes and pretensions
of the legitimate Hazards and the illegitimate Chances mirror and embody the fortunes
and pretensions of “legitimate” theater and the music-hall tradition, as both are swallowed up by new media—first by Hollywood films and then by television. The contemporary
events that surround Dora’s recollections involve the effects of television game-show host Tristan’s simultaneous sexual involvement with his much older half sister Saskia and the Chances’ protégé Tiffany. The paradoxes of Melchior’s theatrical career are summed up
by the juxtaposition of his eventual knighthood with his attachment to the cardboard
crown that was the chief legacy he received from his father, also a Shakespearean actor.
Although Wise Children is far more sentimental than the bleakly dark fantasies Carter penned while her own marriage was failing in the early 1970’s, it is to some extent a revisitation of their themes. (The revised version of Love, which she prepared while struggling to find the time to write Wise Children, also softens the self-mutilatory aspects of the original, but only slightly.) What Carter’s final novel adds to her jaundiced view of family life, however, is the legacy of her midperiod preoccupation with the processes by which the
substance of childhood dreams and unfathomable experiences can be transmuted into
high and low art. Beneath the surface of its comic exuberance, Wise Children achieves considerable intensity in its celebration of theatrical magic and its accounts of the redemption of wounded personalities by spirited performances.
Jane Anderson Jones
Updated by Brian Stableford
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Other major works
short fiction: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, 1974; The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories, 1979; Black Venus, 1985 (also known as Saints and Strangers, 1986); American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, 1993; Burning Your Boats, 1995.
screenplays: The Company of Wolves, 1984 (with Neil Jordan; adaptation of her
short story); The Magic Toyshop, 1987 (adaptation of her novel).
radio plays: Vampirella, 1976; Come unto These Yellow Sands, 1979; The Company of Wolves, 1980; Puss in Boots, 1982; Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays, 1985 (includes previous 4 plays).
nonfiction: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, 1978; Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings, 1982; Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, 1992; Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, 1997 (also known as Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings, 1998).
translations: The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977; Sleeping Beauty, and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, 1982.
children’s literature: The Donkey Prince, 1970; Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady, 1970; Moonshadow, 1982; Sea-Cat and Dragon King, 2000.
edited texts: Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, 1986; The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, 1990 (also known as The Old Wives’Fairy Tale Book).
miscellaneous: The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts, and an Opera, 1996.
Bibliography
Day, Aidan. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Presents an examination of Carter’s fiction that is generally accessible to the
nonspecialist. Notes the similarity of themes in Carter’s work and describes how she
was influenced by the books she read at various times in her life.
Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Critical biography analyzes the relationship between the events of Carter’s life and her works. Examines how Carter was engaged in topical issues, such as politics, feminism,
class, and national identity (particularly English identity).
_______. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Comprehensive study of Carter’s works. Argues that Carter intentionally
undermined traditional ideas about history, social codes regarding propriety and
“woman’s place,” and the distinction between “high” and “low” literature.
Landon, Brooks. “Eve at the End of the World: Sexuality and the Reversal of Expectations in Novels by Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, and Thomas Berger.” In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Examines the feminist mythology of Carter’s work, in particular in
the novel Heroes and Villains, and discusses Carter’s confrontation of sexual stereotypes.
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Critical Survey of Long Fiction
Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Presents critical discussion of all of Carter’s novels in a clear and accessible style. Includes details of Carter’s life and explains her ideas about nonfiction in order to provide insight into her fiction.
Munford, Rebecca, ed. Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Collection of essays focuses on Carter’s extensive use of
allusions and references drawn from a wide variety of sources. Among the topics dis-
cussed are the influences on Carter’s writings of the works of Charles Dickens, Jona-
than Swift, Edgar Allan Poe, and film director Jean-Luc Godard.
Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Study of Carter’s novels offers an overview of her work and close readings of the individual books. Argues
that although Carter employed elements of fantasy literature, her novels still addressed
“real-life” issues.
Rubinson, Gregory J. The Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson, and Carter: Breaking Cultural and Literary Boundaries in the Work of Four Postmodernists. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Compares and contrasts the work of the four authors, including an
analysis of gender and sexuality in the writings of Carter and Jeanette Winterson and
examination of The Passion of the New Eve and Heroes and Villains.
Sage, Lorna, ed. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Collection of thirteen essays on various aspects of Carter’s
work includes discussions of Carter’s “political correctness,” Carter and science fic-
tion, and the novels Love and Wise Children.
Smith, Joan. Introduction to Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, by Angela Carter.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. Well-written essay on Carter’s critical work links
her social commentary to major themes in her long fiction.
70
JOSÉ DONOSO
Born: Santiago, Chile; October 5, 1924
Died: Santiago, Chile; December 7, 1996
Also known as: José Donoso Yañez
Principal long fiction
Coronación, 1957 ( Coronation, 1965)
Este domingo, 1965 ( This Sunday, 1967)
El lugar sin límites, 1966 ( Hell Has No Limi
ts, 1972)
El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970 ( The Obscene Bird of Night, 1973)
Tres novelitas burguesas, 1973 (novellas; Sacred Families, 1977)
Casa de campo, 1978 ( A House in the Country, 1984)
La misteriosa desaparición de la Marquesita de Loria, 1980
El jardín de al lado, 1981
La desesperanza, 1986 ( Curfew, 1988)
Taratuta; Naturaleza muerta con cachimba, 1990 (novellas; “Taratuta” and
“Still Life with Pipe,” 1993)
Donde van a morir los elefantes, 1995
El Mocho, 1997
Other literary forms
José Donoso (doh-NOH-soh) was a superb storyteller, and his first literary efforts were
in the area of the short story (curiously, his first stories were written in English and published in the Princeton University literary review MSS). His collections of stories include Veraneo, y otros cuentos (1955; summer vacation, and other stories); Dos cuentos (1956; two stories); El Charlestón (1960; abridged as Cuentos, 1971; Charleston, and Other Stories, 1977); and Los mejores cuentos de José Donoso (1965; the best stories of José Donoso). Little if any significant thematic or technical distinction can be drawn between Donoso’s novels and shorter fiction, other than those imposed by the limits of the genres themselves. Regardless of length, all are superb blends of sociological observation and
psychological analysis, in which realism never quite manages to eliminate fantasy, where madness, the supernatural, and the unknown hover just beyond the bounds of consciousness and reason.
Donoso also wrote essays of literary criticism and attracted attention with Historia personal del “boom” (1972; The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History, 1977). His Poemas de un novelista (1981) is a collection of thirty poems with a twelve-page authorial introduction explaining the personal circumstances that occasioned the verse.
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Achievements
Each of José Donoso’s novels had its special success, and the writer’s prestige grew
with each stage of his career. Despite a slow beginning (he came to the novel at age thirty-three), Donoso published no novel that could be classed a failure by critics or the public, and several of his works have received awards, the most acclaimed being The Obscene
Bird of Night (a favorite of reviewers and literary critics) and A House in the Country, which received the Spanish Critics’ Prize, a coveted award despite its lack of endowment, since it reflects the esteem of the country’s professional critics as a whole. Donoso was the recipient of two grants from the Guggenheim Foundation for the furthering of works in
progress and served as writer-in-residence at various American universities, with stints at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1965-1967) and teaching positions at Princeton University and Dartmouth College. In demand as a distinguished lecturer, he also held a number of editorial posts. His powers of sociopsychological penetration and his marvelous irony and skillful use of allegory, together with his masterful handling of existential themes and the abnormal or psychotic narrative perspective, place Donoso in the forefront of international fiction.
Biography
José Donoso is one of Chile’s most widely known writers of prose fiction and one of
the most outstanding and prestigious figures of his generation of narrators in Latin America. He was born José Donoso Yañez into an upper-middle-class family of Spanish and
Italian descent in Santiago on October 5, 1924. His father (for whom Donoso was named)
was a physician; his mother, Alicia Yáñez, came from a prominent Chilean family. It was
she who, with the couple’s servant, Teresa Vergara, reared Donoso and his two brothers.
Until her death in 1976, Donoso’s mother continued to live in the spacious home where
the future novelist was born, and the atmosphere of decrepitude and decay in the labyrinthine mansion (property of Dr. Donoso’s three elderly great-aunts) haunts his fiction.
When Donoso was seven years old, his father hired an English governess, the founda-
tion of his excellent knowledge of the language, which he continued to study at the
Grange, an English school in Santiago, from 1932 to 1942. During this period, Donoso’s
maternal grandmother returned from Europe to make her home with the family, an event
that (together with her deteriorating mental and physical condition) left a mark on the future writer’s development. A teenage rebel who disliked school and his father’s imposi-
tion of the British sports ethic (personified in a boxing instructor), Donoso began feigning stomachaches, which led to a real appendectomy and subsequently an equally real ulcer.
Never serious about religion, Donoso proclaimed himself an atheist at the age of
twelve. Equally cavalier about classes, he cared only for reading, and in 1943, he dropped out of school. After two years, during which he had not managed to hold a job for more
than a few months, he set out for Magallanes at the southern tip of Chile, where he worked as a sheepherder on the pampas for about a year, subsequently hitchhiking through
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Patagonia to Buenos Aires, where he lived as a dockhand until he contracted measles,
which obliged him to return home. He finished high school in 1947, enrolling in the Uni-
versity of Chile with a major in English and completing his bachelor of arts degree at
Princeton in 1951. His study with Allen Tate and his discovery of Henry James, as well as his introduction to the great paintings of the world, would all influence his future writings.
Returning to Chile, Donoso worked as a teacher, journalist, and literary critic but
found himself estranged from his homeland and dissatisfied with his work. His ulcer re-
turned, and he began psychoanalysis. He collaborated in launching the newsmagazine
Ercilla, which he edited, and in 1954, his first short story written in Spanish (“China”) was included in an anthology of Chilean short fiction. The following year, his first book, the collection Veraneo, y otros cuentos, was published and had a favorable critical reception, winning the Santiago Municipal Short Story Prize. This success and that of his first novel notwithstanding, Donoso found Chilean society oppressive and moved on to Buenos Aires, where he met his future wife and stayed for two years. He published his second collection of short stories upon his return to Santiago, and he became a leading literary critic, which led to teaching in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa; he abandoned
this position in order to move to Spain and finish a novel begun years before, which would become The Obscene Bird of Night.
Donoso and his wife, Mará del Pilar Serrano, whom he had married in 1961, adopted
an infant daughter in Madrid and settled in Mallorca in 1967. Donoso’s first Guggenheim
award (1966) was followed by a lectureship at Colorado State University (1969). While in Colorado, his hemorrhaging ulcer required surgery; because of his inability to tolerate
painkilling drugs, he subsequently went through a period marked by hallucinations,
schizophrenia, and paranoia that resulted in suicide attempts. He returned to Mallorca,
moved his family to Barcelona, and began to rewrite his novel, incorporating his night-
marish illness. Subsequently, still recuperating, he bought a seventeenth century home in Calaceite, remodeled it, and in 1971 moved to this village of some two thousand inhabitants in the center of Spain. Both his critical history, The Boom in Spanish American Literature, and his novellas in Sacred Families were published in Spain.
Donoso’s second Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1973, enabled him to work on A House
in the Country. His first trip to Chile in some nine years had to be canceled bec
ause of the military coup there (an event that colors both A House in the Country and El jardín de al lado). His next move, to the Mediterranean fishing and resort village of Sitges (1976), has obvious resonances in El jardín de al lado, which, like all of the author’s fiction, has a strong autobiographical substratum. Donoso returned to Chile in 1980, winning the Chilean Premio National de Literatura in 1990. He died in Santiago in 1996.
Analysis
José Donoso’s first two novels are similar in a number of ways, which makes it conve-
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Critical Survey of Long Fiction
in the level of style and technique. Both involve upper-class, traditional Chilean families, a decaying mansion, and the problem of the generation gap; both treat psychological abnormalities in a rigidly stratified society where a rich, decadent minority is contrasted with an impoverished lower class; and in both, members of the aristocracy become emotionally
involved with members of the lower class. In This Sunday, however, there is a more adroit utilization of innovative techniques and more subtle thematic development, a contrapuntal effect and stream-of-consciousness narration rather than the omniscient narrator of Coronation, who summarizes events and describes places and people in photographic fashion, sharpening the narrative perspective and involving the reader’s collaborative effort, using secondary characters as third-person reflectors.
Time in Coronation is treated in a linear, chronological manner, but in This Sunday it is subjected to a more fluid handling, reflecting the philosophical and literary theories of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust while intensifying the latent Freudian and existential
concepts of the first effort, with the result that the aesthetic and intellectual density of This Sunday is considerably greater.
Coronation
Misiá Elisa Grey de Abalos in Coronation is a wealthy, demented nonagenarian who lives with her fiftyish bachelor grandson, Andrés, an asexual aesthete whose life is a prime example of abulia and existential inauthenticity, a man addicted to French history and collecting canes (possibly symbolic of his not standing on his own in life). Andrés’s world, like that of his grandmother, is hermetic, monotonous, isolated from the “real” workaday world; virtually his only human contact is his lifelong friend, Dr. Carlos Gros. The two aging servants, Rosario and Lourdes, have devoted their lives to the service of the Abalos family but become unable to cope with and care for the bedridden Misiá Elisa; Estela, a
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