FANTASY NOVELISTS.vp

by Rollyson, Carl E.

  sensual country wench, is brought in to care for her, introducing a new element into the previously closed system. Estela is something of a catalyst, awakening Andrés’s dormant

  sexuality and introducing the neighboring shantytown’s societal dregs into the mansion

  (and the novel) via her affair with Mario (whose older half brother, René, is a link with the criminal element).

  Coronation is traditional in its technique and employs an almost naturalistic cause-and-effect sequence, portraying most of the characters as products of their environment, although Donoso’s interest in psychological analysis transcends the usual naturalistic

  characterization. Social determinism underlies the formation both of Andrés, who studied law in his youth because it was the thing for young men of his class to do, and of Misiá Elisa, who is pathologically repressed, molded by the religious education and bourgeois

  puritanism of her family. A similar social determinism is responsible for Mario’s fear of entrapment (partly cultural, partly based on his brother’s unhappy marriage); Estela’s

  pregnancy thus inspires in Mario panic and instinctive flight.

  Following Freudian psychology, Donoso stresses the importance of early-childhood

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  experiences, the power of the unconscious, and the central role of sexuality in other areas of human life, with much of the characters’ conduct being irrational, neurotic, or motivated by repressed erotic urges. In her senile dementia, Misiá Elisa becomes overpower-

  ingly obsessed with sexuality, which she suppressed during most of her life, and gives way to obscene outbursts. Obsessions are a recurring motif in Coronation and in Donoso’s fiction as a whole, and often are associated with recurring symbols, false rituals, repetitive or symbolic dreams, existential themes, and rigid daily routines that acquire an unconscious, magical, or supernatural character for the participants. Any break in the routine, therefore, is a transcendent disruption of order—hence the ultimately catastrophic ramifications of bringing Estela, the new servant, into the rigid and ritualistic existence of the mansion.

  Misiá Elisa’s conversations with Estela include warnings of the dangers of seduction

  and reveal that she considers all men “pigs” while considering herself a saint (having

  never let her husband see her naked). Life for the old lady is a gutter, a sewer, a cesspool from which religion is the only escape; thus she is also obsessed with sin, although for her, sexuality and sin are essentially identical. His grandmother’s stern warnings and prohibi-tions and the inculcation of childhood fears and exaggerated taboos fill the boy Andrés

  with dread and apprehension, leading ultimately to his falsifying his first confession and, disappointed that instant fire and brimstone is not the result, to a loss of faith and rejection of religion, without any accompanying loss of inhibitions.

  Plagued by a recurring nightmare in which a long bridge over an abyss suddenly ends,

  precipitating him into the void, Andrés experiences extreme existential anguish as he comes to realize the inability of philosophy or science to replace the security promised by faith and to assuage the fear of death, of the infinite, and of nothingness. Existentially, he is also radically alone, his solitude and loneliness so extreme that his abulia and inability to act are the visible result of the isolation and meaninglessness of his life. More than two decades spent in idle alienation, avoiding any engagement with life, end abruptly for Andrés when the terror inspired by his grandmother’s approaching death is combined with the

  disturbing attraction of Estela’s presence, bringing the realization that he has never really lived (in contrast with his friend, Carlos Gros, who represents an acceptance of life and love, believes both in science and religion, and exemplifies an existential exercise of free will). Where Misiá Elisa sees life as a sewer, Andrés sees it as chaos, terror, absurdity, a mad trick played upon humankind by an unjust or insane god. Both grandmother and

  grandson thus exemplify alienation so extreme that it borders upon the psychotic, their

  fragile equilibrium maintained by a series of obsessive routines and rituals—as in the case of Andrés limiting his cane collection to ten.

  Donoso employs an indirect, third-person narration or monologue (comparable to the

  procedure of James) to plumb the psychological depths of his characters and thereby pro-

  vide a multiplicity of perspectives, augment dramatic intensity, and allow the reader to identify more directly with a given character’s viewpoint. The novel raises serious psychological, social, and philosophical issues, often through Andrés’s very avoidance of them (an 75

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  ironic technique that requires the reader to face the conclusions that Andrés has refused to contemplate), but Donoso also employs humor and numerous aesthetic ingredients. Incongruity is essential to many moments of humor, with the best examples involving Misiá Elisa, who, in her madness, swings like a pendulum from prudishness to obscenities to exaggerated religiosity. Similarly, the ironic contrast between Andrés’s adolescent ignorance (in flashbacks to his childhood and youth) and the mature knowledge of narrator and reader

  provides much black comedy; for example, the young Andrés imagined that there was some

  connection between hell and the school restroom because the latter was a filthy place, and it was there that he first overheard a conversation about sex.

  One of the recurring symbols or images of Donoso’s fiction is the decaying mansion,

  often a Victorian monstrosity replete with gables and turrets, balconies whose only function is decorative, passages leading nowhere, closed or walled-up rooms, and other ele-

  ments representative of a decadent or outmoded lifestyle. The mansion in Coronation, similarly constructed, also exemplifies Donoso’s fascination with Art Nouveau—with its

  opulence of detail, decorative floral borders, and curving lines—while the depictions of the grandmother, her “coronation” and death (amid rococo bows, streamers, and billow-ing folds of cloth), function to complement and emphasize the theme of conspicuous con-

  sumption. The decadent mansion is a transparent allegory of a decadent upper class, while on an individual, psychological level, it also frequently symbolizes existential or

  emotional emptiness, isolation or alienation, and lack of contact with reality.

  Another important symbol in Coronation is Andrés’s collection of canes, rigidly limited to ten to exteriorize or make visible the rigid, self-imposed limits on his sterile, monotonous, routine existence. When the existential crisis provoked by confrontation with

  two of life’s most powerful forces—love and death, both of which he has previously

  avoided—obliges Andrés to take radical measures, the one step he is able to visualize is raising the limit on his cane collection. He visits the home of an antique dealer whose

  wife—with her pink shawl and naked palms, evoking a powerful subconscious associa-

  tion with Estela—profoundly disturbs him; thus brought to an awareness of his desire for Estela, he resolves to win her, a decision that, if carried out, would constitute his first step toward existential engagement and authenticity. As he returns home, however, an accidental glimpse of the girl with her lover beneath a streetlight mortifies him and brings realization of his own absurdity and that of his situation; unable to return to his once-comfortable abulia and solitude, he gradually retreats into madness (a denouement that, in naturalistic terms, might be implicit in his heredity), succumbing to the pernicious influence of his grandmother, whose pervasive madness has gradually undermined his own rationality.

  Similarly, Mario’s fear of becoming a criminal, arising from his brother’s criminal na-

  ture, the family’s increasingly desperate financial straits, and the injustices of society, presages his fall
into crime: He is induced to participate in the theft of the Abalos family silver, thereby setting the stage for the grotesque denouement that combines the frustrated robbery attempt, Andrés’s madness, and Misiá Elisa’s death.

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  This Sunday

  The themes of alienation and existential anguish reappear in This Sunday, but

  Donoso’s interest in abnormal psychology and the exploration of the unconscious of each

  of his protagonists are much more visible than in the earlier novel. Don Alvaro Vives and his wife, Chepa, a wealthy, middle-aged couple, live in another of Donoso’s mansions,

  where they are visited by their five grandchildren (one of whom narrates portions of the novel). Other characters include Violeta, a retired former servant of the Vives household and onetime mistress of Alvaro; Maya, a lower-class psychopath who has been convicted

  of murder; Marujita, a peddler; Mirella, Violeta’s illegitimate daughter; and her husband, Fausto.

  In brief, the plot revolves around the activities of Chepa, a volunteer welfare worker,

  and her infatuation with Maya and use of the family’s influence to obtain his parole. Settled by Chepa in Violeta’s house, Maya is both attracted to his benefactor and fearful of her, and his pathology determines a path of escape through violence once again—this time through the murder of Violeta, which allows him to return to the comfortable alienation of prison, where no existential decisions are required. Rather than a straightforward narrative, This Sunday employs an ironic alternation between the naïve or limited vision of characters—first-person narrators who are participants in the action—and the occasional

  interventions of an omniscient narrator, thereby stressing the characters’ ingenuousness, self-deception, or unawareness.

  Much of the narrative is retrospective, via the use of Proustian flashbacks (for exam-

  ple, Alvaro’s recollections of the beginning of his affair with Violeta are stimulated by the smell of meat pastries, experienced years previously when he had gone to her house). Free association and indirect third-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative are combined in reconstructing Alvaro’s life as a weak young man whose social position enabled him

  to exploit Violeta without assuming responsibilities, avoiding the threats represented by both university girls and prostitutes while preventing the servant girl from living an authentic existence of her own. A victim of the social conventions by which “decent” girls of his own class were sacred, meant only for marriage, Alvaro is unable to truly love Chepa and other upper-class girls, although on the basis of established mores, he assumes that he will love her; actually, he manages to consummate the marriage only by closing his eyes

  and imagining that he is making love to Violeta.

  In their fifties, Alvaro and Chepa have ceased sleeping together, and both live behind

  masks, maintaining a facade that serves as a substitute for authentic relationships as well as an escape from unpleasant reality. Alvaro’s inability to love having become more pronounced with time, he appears narcissistic, withdrawn, and slightly ridiculous—aspects

  emphasized by his grandchildren’s nicknaming him the Doll, his interminable games of

  chess and solitaire, his deafness, his lack of concern for things other than his health, and his rituals. Chepa, a victim of a loveless marriage that has increased her basic insecurity, provides a self-portrait in a number of interior monologues, most of them precipitated by 77

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  contact with Maya. As a lonely, aging woman whose children have left home, she seeks to

  give some meaning to her existence by works of charity—by helping the poor and through

  her work at the prison—in an attempt to compensate for the knowledge that for Alvaro she is an object devoid of significance.

  A good deal of sadomasochism inheres in Chepa’s relationships with “her” poor; she

  imagines herself as “a littered bitch” with a compulsive need to feed the hungry mouths

  fastened to her. Her philanthropy is a substitute for the normal human relationships that are lacking in her life as well as a mask for less admirable motivations of her own, the desire to dominate or control, and to indulge her more (or less) than maternal interest in Maya. She helps him to set up a leather-goods shop, but her vigilance arouses his resent-ment and desire to escape; despite his derangement, Maya intuits in Chepa the devouring

  female, the Jungian evil mother.

  Seeking Maya at Violeta’s house, Chepa learns both that he has become Violeta’s lover

  and that Violeta had an affair with Alvaro before his marriage to Chepa, provoking the latter’s decision to throw off convention and look for Maya in the shantytown. Unfamiliar

  with the sprawling slums, she becomes lost in the twilight maze of alleys, but she fortuitously encounters Maya’s mistress, Marujita, whose revelations of Maya’s mixed emo-

  tions concerning Chepa inflame her and bring on a surrealistic, nightmarish experience as she is set upon by slum children who rob her of her furs and purse and leave her exhausted, on a trash heap. The inferno of the slums into which Chepa descends is a symbolic, expressionistic representation of her own subconscious with its hidden, conflicting sexual desires. Maya’s murder of Violeta has been seen by critics as an instance of transferring his repressed aggression for Chepa to one socially weaker; the murder frees him from his obligations to her as benefactor, and to society.

  The differences between Alvaro and Chepa are not so marked as the grandchildren

  imagine; their inability to communicate with Alvaro leads them to see him as cold, absurd, and slightly grotesque, while the grandmother is perceived in an unrealistically positive fashion as generous and loving (perhaps a result of her own altruistic self-image), a participant in the children’s games of fantasy. Actually, both Alvaro and Chepa suffer from

  inauthenticity, solitude, and unfulfilled emotions, but Chepa is close to achieving authenticity when she recognizes and accepts her desire for Maya and determines to seek him,

  while Alvaro has lived so long in egotistic aloofness, exploiting without giving, that no self-redemption appears possible.

  The novel’s title refers to the family’s habitual Sunday gatherings for dinner at the

  grandparents’ residence, highlighting an incident of one specific Sunday, when Chepa

  searches for Maya, returning from the slums so traumatized that her subsequent life is almost that of a catatonic. Maya’s murder of Violeta, who is vicariously Chepa, symboli-

  cally signals Chepa’s death, and although she lives for many years, she spends them in isolation, essentially as dead to her grandchildren as if she were deceased. The rituals in the lives of adults are paralleled by the children’s games, and additional parallels and con-78

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  trasts throughout the novel lend symmetry: Alvaro’s relationship with Violeta is socially similar to that of Chepa with Maya (a superior-inferior involvement); Alvaro and Violeta are passive, inert, making no effort to change their lives, while Chepa and Maya are active, attempting to improve their situations or to change them. This Sunday explores more complicated relationships, with more tragic repercussions, than those plumbed in Coronation, and it does so in a more objective fashion, given the lessening of authorial intervention.

  Both novels, however, re-create the surrealistic and nightmarish effects of subconscious, irrational, or instinctive forces, achieving especially memorable portraits in the matriarchs (Misiá Elisa and Chepa), who undoubtedly hark back to the mental deterioration of

  Donoso’s own maternal grandmother.

  Hell Has No Limits

  Hell Has No Limits, which was published one year after This Sunday, provides a departure from the novelist’s previous urban settings, being set in a somber, sordid bro
thel in a backwater rural winegrowing area. Although the existential issues of authenticity and

  alienation, solitude, and a lack of communication found in the earlier novels are again

  present to some degree, there is an increased emphasis on absurdity and the grotesque, and Donoso begins to employ mythic elements and ambiguity, symbolically alluding to biblical myths of the Creation and the Fall in depicting the results of a failed economic experiment by a local politician, Don Alejo, who is a sort of local god, even said to resemble the Lord.

  The village, Estación El Olivo, created by Don Alejo, a wealthy landowner and area

  boss, was touted as an earthly paradise at its inception, but some twenty years later, during the novel’s present, it has become a caricature of itself, where physical and moral stagna-tion make it something of a hell on earth. Don Alejo had originally owned the brothel, but as the result of a bet between himself and the madam, Big Japonesa, he signed the property over to her (the wager involved Japonesa’s managing to seduce Manuela, a gay cross-dresser who imagines that he is a flamenco dancer). Japonesa won, thanks to her astute-

  ness in manipulating Manuela’s erotic fantasy and a promise to make him her partner in

  the brothel, but during the incident she became pregnant and subsequently gave birth to an unattractive girl, Japonesita, who operated the brothel business following her mother’s

  death. Japonesita, at the age of twenty still a virgin despite her managing a house of prostitution, is a rival of her gay father in a subliminal competition for the affections of Pancho Vega, a truck driver, bully, and closeted gay man whose return precipitates the novel’s

  climax.