The Obscene Bird of Night
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The Obscene Bird of Night (
Themes
The novel explores the cyclical nature of life and death and the connection between childhood and old age through shared fears and fantasies and a mutual lack of bodily control. Donoso invokes the Imbunche myth to symbolize the process of reduction of the physical and intellectual self, turning the living being into a thing or object incapable of interacting with the outside world, and depriving it of its individuality and even of its name. This can either be self-inflicted or forced upon by others.
The myth comes from the oral tradition of Chiloé Island, an island of the southern coast of Chile. In its physical manifestation, it is a grotesquely disfigured being that has been sutured, tied, bound and wrapped from birth. In this way, its orifices are sewn shut, its tongue is removed or split, its extremities and sexual organ bound and immobilised. It is then kept as a guardian to a cave. It is the product of magic and witchcraft. It is the incarnation of the very realistic fears we feel as children, when monsters, magic and imaginings all seem real – they are the deeply rooted fears that, despite rationalisation, remain present (albeit dormant) in the recesses of the subconscious.
In the novel, the intellectual/spatial manifestation of the Imbunche is the self-imposed
In The Obscene Bird of Night, the narrator and protagonist, Humberto Peñaloza, goes through the different stages of the deconstruction of his personality. He not only becomes El Mudito (The Mute or The Mutey), he eventually transforms into the monstrous Imbunche. This mutation also affects the characters in other ways, as in the case of Doctor Azula and the endless pregnancy of Iris the Orphan, and the regeneration process of Humberto himself. Even the identity of the characters becomes ambiguous or distorted sometimes, as for instance when Humberto says that Iris was developing a substantial clientele in the neighbourhood and then proceeds to say that he would hide inside the Ford car to watch her make love... to himself, as if it were an out-of-body experience.
In this way, Humberto provides the possibility of duplicity of
Ultimately the novel postulates and explores an existential paradox: the struggle between being vs. non-being, internal vs. external, interaction vs. separation, and society vs. individuality.
Publication history
The novel was translated into English by Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades and published by