University of Oregon

Old Women, Orphan Girls, and Allegories of the Cave

Author(s): Sharon Larisch
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Spring, 1988), pp. 150-171
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770586 .
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SHARON LARISCH

Old

Women,
Orphan Girls,
Allegories of

and

the

Cave

N BOOK SEVEN of the Republic,Socratesinviteshis intelocutors

to form images in order to understand the nature of education. "Picture (ide)," he says, "men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern
with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width" (Rep. 514).
The details of the image are well known. The men are fettered so that
they can only look in front of them; behind them is a fire, and between
the fire and the fettered prisoners is a low wall built along a road.
Carved and molded figures, "human images and shapes of animals as
well, wrought in stone and wood and every material," are raised by
their bearers above the wall, and the fire projects their shadows onto
the back wall of the cave. The prisoners see only the shadows of the
figures and hear only the echoed voices of the bearers, who crouch behind the wall so that their own shadows are not projected. Unable to
turn toward the scene of (re)production and projection, the prisoners
mistake the shadows and echoes before them for reality.
Some of the prisoners, however, are able to effect a passage, or at
least a crossing over, to the outside world. Consider (skopei-we are
still in the realm of visualizing), Socrates continues, a further scenario.
A prisoner is freed and forced by a guide-whose function here is like
that of the midwife-dialectician described by Socrates in the Theaetetus-to make the "rough and steep" ascent out of the cave into the full
sun. The light is too painful for one who has spent his life in shadows.
Therefore he requires the passage of education, the learning of a new
discourse. The freed prisoner first looks at shadows, then reflections in
water, the light of the stars and the moon, in order to be able finally to
look directly at the sun and "see its true nature, not by reflections in
150

PLATO AND DONOSO

water or phantasms of it in an alien setting" (Rep. 516b). At this point,

his education would be complete and the former prisoner "would infer
and conclude that this it is that provides the seasons and the courses of
the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some
sort the cause of all these things that [he] had seen" (516b-c).
This is one way of picturing or telling the story, and certainly this
account of passage towards a heritage of light is part of our heritage.
But although it has come to be called the allegory of the cave, it is not
the story of the cave but of emergence from it. It is written from a position outside the cave, or at the very least on its threshold, because in
order to describe the cave without sharing its blindness and muteness
Socrates cannot be fully within it. Therefore the activities that take
place within the cave must remain outside the scope of his philosophical
vision. Our heritage thus seems to have a pre-history which is suggested by Plato's picture but never fully illuminated. Nor is it encompassed by the terms of the comparison. Most of the elements of Socrates's allegory are identified: the student, the teacher, education, the
Good. What remains unidentified in the picture are the bearers and
their strange fabrications and activities which have no real counterparts,
no "other voice," in the outside world. Hence there is a blind spot and
an asymmetry at the very root of our heritage/history.
But despite the value placed on light and vision in this passage, Soccrates is concerned about the image he is producing. At the conclusion
of the previous book he rejected "picture thinking and conjecture"
(eikasia) as the basest form of mental activity, and earlier, having been
forced by the complexity of statesmanship to employ the "parable or
comparison" (eikonos) of the ship of state, he lamented that to find a
likeness he was forced to "bring together many things in such a combination as painters mix when they portray goat-stags and similar creatures" (Rep. 488a). Picturing and the strange combinations it can produce are thus linked with primitive thought, and the discursive combinations of parable and allegory are seen as monstrous hybrids.
The status of these visual and discursive monsters in the Platonic
world of light and of vision made possible by dialectics is ambiguous, as
the long reception history of various aspects of Platonism will attest.
But their static position within the Platonic system is not all that is at
issue here. Socrates's monsters are not merely a fixed portion of the
picture; they are producing other pictures: they have generative and
reproductive powers of their own. Indeed the visual/discursive goatstag of Plato's cave allegory has produced its own goat-stags, retellings
of the story mixed with other stories. I propose to explore two recent
retellings of the cave allegory, Jos6 Donoso's El obsceno pdjaro de la
noche and Luce Irigaray's rhapsodic "L'hustera de Platon." These texts
151

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

are not turned towards the sun but towards Plato's text-itself a goatstag-and, perhaps, towards the mysterious activities of bearers. As
such, they offer us an entirely different vision of heritage, history, monstrosity, excess, and the conditions of passage and projection.
Donoso's novel El obsceno pdjaro de la noche returns persistently to

what seem to be different versions of a single legend. Many of these

versions are contradictory,but the repeated assertion "esto es hist6rico"
offers the assurance that there is a core of information that can serve as
a landmark amidst the proliferation of identities and events. With one
exception, these elements ultimately lose their privilege as "historical";
the only constant that remains is a veil that screens or covers over some
aspect of history, although it cannot prevent the projection of histories
behind the veil. The blind spot or blockage at the root of history and the
excessive growth of histories that occurs despite (or perhaps because
of) the lack of depth in which to plunge the root reoccur as themes in
the epigraph of the novel, a passage in a letter from Henry James Sr. to
his sons William and Henry, which the text adopts as a heritage that
gives it a name. The letter offers parental advice, and thus participates
in a specific familial tradition as well as a literary one, but it depicts
heritage as rooted in infertility-in danger of extinction, and of being
uprooted-and as overgrown, a jungle of verdant excrescence. It reads:
Every man who has reached even his intellectualteens begins to suspect that life
is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifieson the
contraryout of the profoundestdepthsof the essential dearth in which its subject's
roots are plunged.The natural inheritanceof everyone who is capableof spiritual
life is an unsubduedforest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night
chatters.

Henry James Sr. does not address the question of how to receive an
"inheritance"that is an "unsubduedforest," and in the absence of such
parental advice we can only improvise a way of receiving the "unsubdued forest" of El obsceno pdjaro de la noche. The novel suggests two

possible ways of proceeding. On the one hand, we could piece together

an "historic" legend, a core history from many histories, and claim esto
es hist6rico. On the level of fiction, this would correspond to what we
might call the plot. Alternatively, we could elaborate legends ourselves,
grafting on other histories. Both activities seem necessary to chart some
passage through the howls and chatterings of the text.
The "historic" legend might read something like this: Jer6nimo Azcoitia is the scion of a wealthy and prominent family and married to
Inds de Azcoitia, who has distant genealogical connections with her
conjugal family. Humberto Pefialoza, a poor poetaster from an insignificant family, works for Jer6nimo as his secretary and as the adminis152

PLATO

AND DONOSO

trator and chronicler of La Rinconada, an independent, completely enclosed world where Jer6nimo's monstrous son, Boy, is confined in a
society made up entirely of monsters. During an illness, (Humberto
imagines that) Dr. Azuela, a monster-doctor, "extirpates" (extirpa)
his organs and bodily features in order to graft them onto monsters and
then to graft-somewhat carelessly-the monsters' singular features
onto Humberto. He flees La Rinconada and goes to live as Mudito, the
mute one, at the Casa de la Encarnaci6n de la Chimba,a convent owned
by the Azcoitia family and populated by old women (notably Madre
Benita, to whom most of Mudito's "discourse" is addressed) and orphan girls, notably Iris Mateluna. There he is transformed into an imbunche, Donoso's modification of a Chilean folk figure (from the Araucanian ivumche). According to tradition an imbunche is a witch who
steals six-month-old children and takes them to a cave to convert them
into monsters; in the novel the meaning of imbunche is extended to define a certain type of monstrosity in which witches transform children
into imbunches by sewing up all bodily orifices: "los ojos cosidos, el
sexo cosido, el culo cosido, la boca, las narices, los oidos, todo cosido"
(Donoso 41; 29).1 Humberto/Mudito end(s) sewn up in successive layers of burlap bags like an imbunche. Esto es histdrico.

The chronology and identities of this history are, perhaps, arbitrary;

certainly, there are exclusions. But it may be that we can elaborate it
without doing excessive violence to the "unsubduedforest" of the novel
since even this reductive history makes clear that monstrosity, exclusions, and the expanding combinations of grafting proliferate despite
the confines of La Rinconada and the threat/promise of total containment proferred by the legend of the imbunche. This is also the case in
the Casa de la Encarnaci6n de la Chimba, where excess is the basis of
the contained economy.
The Casa is an enclosed yet sprawling complex, not unlike the cave
where the traditional imbunches performedtheir operations on children,
and much of the narration in the novel is projected from behind its
walls. El obsceno pdjaro de la noche opens, however, in a space border-

ing the Casa and the outside world of streets and patrones. The conjunction and juncture of the two worlds is occasioned by the need to
resolve problems of possession and dispossession, testament and mortal
remains. Brigida, one of the old women in the Casa, has died, and her
former patrona had promised that she would be buried in the family
crypt. The problem is that there is no room for Brigida's mortal remains, her despojos. Although her patrona would like to displace or dispossess distant family members ("Si, si, Brigida, voy a emplear abo1 In all references to El obsceno p6jaro de la noche the first page numbers refer
to the Seix Barral edition, the second to the Martin and Mades translation.

153

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

gados para que despojen a estos parientes de sus derechos"), only a

provisional solution is possible: Brigida can occupy her patrona's own
niche, as Misiai Raquel explains it, "calentandome el nicho con sus
despojos" (15; 6, emphases mine), until she is dislodged by the latter's
death. I stress the interplay of the verb despojar and the noun despojo(s) because (dis)possessed remainders or castoffs are essential to
production in the Casa and to the production of El obsceno pdjaro de la
noche.

Both despojar and despojo are related to the Latin spolium, the skin
or hide of an animal and hence figuratively, in the plural, the arms or
booty (spoils) stripped from an enemy. The verb spoliare can mean to
strip or unclothe and to rob, deprive, pilage or impoverish: dispossess.
All these semantic components remain in the Spanish words, and there
are some additions, mostly having to do with the notion of a remainder:
despojos refers to the normally unused portions of slaughtered cattle
and birds, to leftovers, table scraps, salvageable parts of destroyed buildings, and, finally, to the mortal remains of a person. The possession of
such remainders is ambiguous. Plunder-being things of value-belongs to the victors; but unwanted leftovers "belong" to the dispossessed, the scavengers, who "own" what is not normally seen as worthy
of ownership. The ambiguity of ownership also applies to the problem of
mortal remains. It is this problem of possession that now must be resolved in the case of Brigida's other despojos, her worldly remains hidden under her bed.
When Mudito and Madre Benita clean Brigida's room looking for
salvageable goods, they find little of value. In the patio, however, the
judgment is different, and the old women pick over the remains, fighting each other for castoffs: a cork, buttons, an insole, a pen cap. And
this is not the first time that these items have been part of an unofficial
(unwritten and unspecified) legacy. When Mudito and Madre Benita
throw away a ball of silver foil he comments, "Seguro que volveremos a
encontrar esa bolita entre los despojos de otra muerta" (32; 21).
The old women are dispossessed. Most are former servants sent to
the convent by their patrones. But they do possess the despojos of their
former employers: "las ufias y los mocos, las hilachas y los v6mitos y
los pafios y algodones ensangrentados con las menstruaciones patronales" (64-65; 49-50). Dispossessed of valuable property, they possess
power (and thus value) through accumulation. Servants witness (and
preserve) what the patrones would like to forget or hide, and they piece
together a world composed of despojos, a "placa negativa," made of the
portions that must be eliminated from the ordered life of the patrones.
Mudito therefore identifies the functions of servant and witness, and
grants a negative power to both: "Ser testigo tambien es ser sirviente"
154

PLATO AND DONOSO

(84; 62) ; "Lostestigosson los queposeenla fuerza"(254; 205).

The Azcoitiafamily,definedby genealogyandthe possessionof valuablepropertythat is not discardedbut deededor willedas an integral,
coherentheritage,is the antipodeto the dispossessedandtheiraccumu-

lation of random despojos. The Azcoitias constitute a stock (an estirpe,

from the Latin stirps, a root), a family tree whose coherent growth and
production is controlled by a biological-proprietaryroot. However, the
family faces several threats to its integrity, above all the decreasing
number of male children. The casualties of the wars of independence
coincided with the birth of an unprecedented number of females, and
we are told early in the novel that Jer6nimo (the last remaining virile
male Azcoitia) and Ines, his wife, have not produced an heir. The Azcoitia seed is disseminated in relationships "por la sTibanade abajo,"
and the family name runs the risk of extinction.
Dr. Azuela's (imagined) plan to extirpate (extirpar, from the Latin
extirpare, to root out) Humberto's organs and features and graft them
onto monsters illustrates another threat to the genealogical tree and the
estirpe. According to a genealogical logic, uprooting destroys the entire
tree; combination and generation can continue, however, by means of
extirpation and grafting: rootless lateral additions replace the controlled branching of the family tree. Monsters are a special case of this
problem. In their extreme singularity and incoherence they are outside
a genealogical system. The monsters of La Rinconada "eran todos excepciones. Ninguno pertenecia a estirpes ni tipos" (243; 198). Rootless,
they seem to be patched or grafted together without any controlling
logic, and the only way that they can gain a conformity of sorts is
through additional grafting. Their being thus constitutes an organic
counterpart to the old women's collections of despojos.
When Humberto (imagines he) undergoes extirpation and grafting
he loses any claim to an estirpe that his poor family might have afforded
him; as he is extirpado he is also dispossessed, despojado. He becomes
a repository of singularities that defy any type of whole: the defective
organs and features of the monsters

van conformandoun nuevo yo que nuncaterminarade formarse,suma de todas las

monstruosidades,pero en el que yo quedare condenadoa seguir reconociendome,
en este infierno fluctuante de lo enfermo y de lo deforme y de lo risible y de lo
err6neo que sere yo, mientras mis 6rganos sanos injertados en los que fueron

monstruosiran sanindolos. (291; 229)

This constantly reformulated I, whose reformations are, moreover, due

to an incorporation of the foreign and the alien, contrasts, again, with

the genealogically preformulated I determined by the root or the seed.
Further, grafting, as a sort of placa negativa of generation, also lays
claim to regenerative powers. Humberto finds that when the monstrous
155

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

organs are grafted onto his body they become normal again. He functions as a "vivero de 6rganos y fabrica de miembros sanos," a "terreno
de cultivo para trozos de otras personas" (292-93; 229), and the grafting process is potentially endless. Immortality through replacement has
two faces: on the one hand, an eternal substitution of organs, a patchwork of grafting; on the other, the eternal substitution of generations.
The scene of the nexus of the genealogical and the grafted, the estirpe
and its despojos, is the convent, where, as we have seen, the initial problems of possession and dispossession were played out. The Azcoitias
own the Casa, but the property is used for the storage of the disowned
or dispossessed. The former cells house their despojos or "cachivaches,"
and the physical form of the Casa mimics the characteristics of its contents. The Casa grew so anarchically that it is impossible to identify the
original patio, and like a cyst it continued to grow internally even after
the city streets enclosed it ("la enquistaron, muda y ciega" 50; 36). Like
a malignancy, mute and blind, the Casa metastasizes; the more it is contained, the more it multiplies. Mudito walls up doors and windows so
the old women and orphan girls will not get lost, yet, as he explains to
Ines, who has taken up residence in the Casa, "Nadie nota el cambio.
Solo tui, que sabes que tapiando y clausurando se agranda, no se restringe, el aimbitode la Casa porque nadie, nunca, ni demoledores ni
rematadoresvan a poder entrar a los sitios clausurados" (373; 299).
This "property" which is both limited and unlimited, possessed and
dispossessed, "belongs" to women. Although the male heir to the Azcoitia property can do what he likes with the Casa, it is regularly ceded
to the church and left under the control of devout aunts or impoverished
cousins. Jer6nimo has never set foot in the Casa; Ines is characterized
as the dueiha.The Casa is also "women's property" in that it houses non(re)productive women: old women and pre-pubescent orphan girls.
Mudito is the only male presence, although his sex is ultimately undecidable, especially when he becomes the seventh old woman in a conspiracy of six crones.
As we have seen, the mode of production and possession associated
with the Casa (patchwork and ownership of the disowned) is, like the
Casa itself, both included and excluded in the Azcoitia scheme of (re)production and heritage. In order to fully explore the relationship between these two modes of (re)production-as well as the relationship
between Donoso's and Plato's accounts of the cave-we shall insert
another story in the space between the two allegories, Irigaray's
"L'hIusterade Platon," which responds to Socrates's invitation to imagery by reading the myth of the cave as a metaphor of the missing element in the Platonic scheme, the matrix or the womb (hustera). It
156

PLATO

AND DONOSO

would be impossible to reproduce her argument here, and, indeed, any

reader of her text is compelled to perform a rite of passages, piecing
together connections through contiguity in the absence of fixed landmarks. (In this sense Irigaray's and Donoso's texts have much in common.) But we can follow out some of the paths which concern the effacement or subsumption of crossings and passages by the paternal act of
mirroring, speculation, and reproduction.
The process employed by the God of the Tinmaeusto make the world
soul is, I believe, paradigmatic for this operation of specular containment. Picture the procedure. The creator God joins the proportions of
the soul by superimposing one over the other in the form of the letter
X. But then chiasma is replaced by a tautological encircling :2

The joining of A to B and C to D results in a figure of containment. The

dot marks the original point of juncture of the X, but the circles are no
longer connected. The outer circle (AB) moves to the right ("the motion of the same") ; the inner circle (CD) to the left ("the motion of
the other or diverse"). When we consider that the original ingredients
of the soul were "the being which is indivisible and unchangeable" (the
same) and "that kind of being which is distributed among bodies" (the
other), we see that this crossing and compressing of the same and the
other in various proportions turns out to be a double-crossing in which
the other is subsumed by the same (Timaeus 34c-36d). The juncture is
erased; there is no composite.
This self-contained soul matches the world's body. Again God chooses
the circle as the form most like himself, and thus the world's body is also
immortal. The full range of characteristics of this sphere will be important for our subsequent discussion of the imbunche:
Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, roundas from a lathe, having
its extremes in every directionequidistantfrom the center,the most perfectand the
most like itself of all figures, for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer
than the unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all around for
many reasons-in the first place, because the living being had no need of eyes
when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen, nor of ears when there
was nothing to be heard, and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed,
nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing
which went from him or came into him, for there was nothing besides him. Of
2 This figure is adapted from the Timaeus, p. 71.
157

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

design he was created such-his own waste providing his own food, and all that
he did or suffered taking place in and by himself . .. the creator did not think it
necessary to bestow upon him hands, nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole
apparatus of walking ... and he was made to move in the same manner and on the
same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. (33b-34a)

But if the world is a self-contained blindness of a polished, spherical

surface, what is the possible relationship of the cave, the underworld, to
the polished surface of the sun outside ? Irigaray points to a similar subsumption of difference and the point of union in the picture of Plato's
cave allegory. Passage and division are represented within the cave by
the road and the wall above which the images are raised. Outside the
cave are a second, much superior path (education), the arch or wall of
the sky, and the sun, of which the fire in the cave is only a pale reflection.
These analogous features join the cave and what is outside the cave in
a relation of correspondence or mirroring, but while each contains its
own passage and division there is no passage between them, and the
separation is absolute. The cave exists only as an image of the outside
surface and, if we agree that its features do not exceed those of the outside and are, indeed, inferior, then the cave is contained in/by the outside surface.
As we have seen, some prisoners do cross over into the outside world
with the help of a teacher-guide, but this education requires that the
freed prisoner turn his back completely on the cave, leave it behind him
without ever seeing what was behind him when he still inhabited the
cave, without seeing the modes of production, projection, and reproduction that took place behind his back. The turn must be complete, leaving
behind at once what was behind and what was before him.3 In the Platonic scheme, man already has vision; the problem is that he cannot
rightly direct it. Therefore, "the true analogy for this indwelling power
in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of
an eye that could not be converted to the light from darkness except by
turning the whole body" (518c). By turning to the light, the soul will
3 The criss-crossing meanings of hustera (husteron) and proteron reappear in
Irigaray's argument. He hustera is the womb, the cave, whose adjectival form,
husteros, conveys the disparaging meaning of "inferiority." The abverb husteron
has two faces. In its temporal meaning it refers to a position of inferiority, "coming after," "later (too late)"; its spatial meaning, however, is "behind," which, in
the allegory of the cave, is a position of power. The other word, which Irigaray
associates with the phallic, superior direction of straight ahead (the adjectival
form also means "superior") displays a similar crossing of meanings in the adverb.
Proteron in its temporal meaning grants the priority of an origin, meaning "earlier," "before"; spatially, it means "before," "in front," and thus in the realm of
vision. The paternal figure of the Sun needs both temporal and spatial priority,
although the latter seems to "belong" to the hustera. The reversal in hysteron
proteron is thus already contained in its components. Irigaray asks what is behind

the claim of the father to have (as a circular whole) nothing behindhim.
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AND DONOSO

become a mirror of the Good, an eye that reflects what is before it. The
perfection of this copy, however, depends on a first, reversed, or pale
image that is produced in and indeed is the cave.
Again we appeal to the Timaeus and the cave-like receptacle, the
hupodekhe, from the verb hupodekhomai, whose meanings include "to
become pregnant," and "to receive beneath the surface of the sea." The
pregnancy beneath the surface of the sea is another type of cavepregnancy, because, we remember,in the cosmos of Thales, whom Plato
praised for his wisdom (Protagoras 343a), the first principle and basic
nature of all things is water, and the earth floats on water.4 Like the
depths of the sea, the depths of the cave are beneath the surface. What,
then, are the conditions for surfacing, for leaving behind the darkness
of the depths ? Irigaray reasons that there must be a double movement
of surfacing: the emergence is without return because upon surfacing
the surface of the water is frozen over into a mirror, a reflecting surface
that covers the pocket or depth that was the cave. In his renaissance the
prisoner is not merely blinded by the sun; his first birth in the cave and
the passage between the cave and the sunny outside world become
permanent blind spots. He can no longer see the depth but only his
own reflection in the surface. The cave is a frozen-over, glassy-eyed
specularization.
The freed prisoner, the cave and the Sun correspond to the three
principles of the Timaeus: "the Becoming [the son], that'Wherein' it
becomes [the mother or nurse], and the source 'wherefrom'the Becoming is copied and produced [the father]." The son is the soul, the freed
prisoner, the mirror of the father; the mother, the cave-like receptacle;
the father, as always, the source, the sun. The Republic helps us understand how a perfect copy is produced. Just as the world soul as a reflection of God is formed in the Timaeus by a double-crossing, the perfect
reflection of the freed soul in the Republic depends on a double angle of
incidence, a double mirroring. The paternal image is reversed in/by the
frozen maternal reflection and then rectified in/by the filial mirror of
the soul which restores right and left to their proper positions.
Plato does not invite us to see below the surface, to examine the
projection of shadows and echoes, and the bearers of the effigies are
never identified. They seem to have a considerableamount of knowledge
and power, which would ally them with the outside world illuminated
4 See Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b: "Thales .. . says that it ['the element and
first principle of existing things'] is water (and therefore declared that the earth
is on water), perhaps taking this supposition from seeing the nurture of all things
to be moist, and the warm itself coming-to-be from this and living by this (that
the supfrom which they come-to-be being the principle of all things)-taking
position both from this and from the seeds of all things having a moist nature,
water being the natural principle of moist things." See Kirk and Raven 87.
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COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

by the sun, but at the same time they neither emerge from the cave nor
attempt to educate its occupants about the outside world. The cause of
this double allegiance is suggested by another portion of Irigaray's rereading. Focusing on the creation hierarchy in the Timaeus in which
wicked souls are reborn as women and, if they persist in their behavior,
in "some bestial form," Irigaray speculates that the forms that exceed
an economy of reflection can effect a passage to the cave and, indeed,
must be enclosed there. The fact that the cave houses the scraps and
excesses of paternal mirroring should give Plato pause; if the bearers
and their shadowy creations are not simply a convenience of Plato's
picture-thinking but are engaged in creating their own pictures, their
own versions of the "same" story, the possibilities are frightening.
Because of the horror and aversion occasioned by the cave of rejects,
successful pupils who have emerged from the cave will only reenter it
au nomtdu pare, in the name of the law, since the best governance, the
best law, must be accomplished by those who have completed their education on the outside, those whose souls are allied with the Good. However, the presentation in the Republic of such a return of the educated
to the cave, of a new passage, does not augur well for such a governing
project. If the former prisoner were to go below the surface he would
"get his eyes full of darkness" and, accustomed to the light, would be
unable to distinguish and evaluate the shadows passing before him. The
other prisoners would laugh at his incompetence, and, Socrates asks, "if
it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release
them and lead them up, would they not kill ?" (517a). They would be an
unruly public at best. But Irigaray would argue that it is the passage that
denies passage (the passage to philosophical discourse guided by the
midwife-dialectician or the passage to the direct reflection of the fatherson) that makes Socrates's project impossible. Passage for the educated
is at the service of identity; their return would be an attempt to merge
with a reflection (see Irigaray 439-40).
The result of this return that is not a return is that the different mode
of (re)production, the projections of the cave, are never examined or
"seen" ; they are always left behind, shut up, subsumed along with any
notion of passage or of the crossings of self with other. Type, filiation,
and genealogy gloss-and glass-over conjunction and contiguity. So
even if the prisoners did not kill the pupil he would not see the cave's
mode of (re)production: and, as Irigaray speculates, even if they did
kill him:
reste a savoir si ce qu'ils tiendraientainsi entre leurs mains n'&taitpas deja mort:
pauvre present d'une copule effigve. Et si dans ce corps ia corps autre chose leur
adviendrait que de se dichirer eux-memes. Faisant couler de leurs blessures un

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AND DONOSO

sang qui rappelle encore un rapport tres ancien a la mare. Reipitant un meurtre
qui deja' aurait eu lieu. (Irigaray 457)

Irigaray reminds us that crossing and mixture have already taken

place; that the origin of the son is a double birth: that the wall that is to
separate the outside world from the phantoms of the cave produces its
own phantoms.
In order to return to the allegories of containment and the myths of
the womb or matrix in El obsceno pdjaro de la noche, we need to reconstruct the image of the Casa. Like a mute and blind cyst, we remember,
the Casa and its labyrinthine passages are enclosed and left behind by
the streets or passages on the outside: "las callejuelas de la Chimba, al
avanzar, se transformaron en avenidas con nombres de reivindicadores
de derechos obreros, y al rodear y dejar atras a la Casa de Ejercicios
Espirituales de la Chimba, la enquistaron, muda y ciega, en un barrio
bastante central" (Donoso 50; 36). It houses unserviceable women and
items, wastes of genealogy and households. It is the property of women.
But the Casa is also the scene of a type of reproduction and repetition
performed by supposedly non-reproductive women that confounds and
compounds genealogical reproduction and substitution. The Casa, as a
mute and blind cyst, encloses and produces an imbunche, a model of its
own containment. The imbunche can thus be seen as a representation of
the cave, of containment, which, unlike Plato's allegory of the cave, is
produced within the cave itself. But if its history is projected from
within its walls, is the Casa blind and mute? What are the characteristics and conditions of its (self) reproduction? Are the walls of the convent semi-permeable?
Certainly passages are effected. Humberto, Jer6nimo's chronicler
and servant, comes to live in the Casa as Mudito, mimicking its presumed muteness; Ines, Jer6nimo's wife and the focus of hopes of legitimate reproduction, takes up residence in the cavernous convent by converting herself into an old woman. But what is remarkableis that such
return passages or rejections are not confined to servants or marginal/
marginalized figures in the genealogical line and history; the paternal
plan of containment also includes Boy, Jer6nimo's long-awaited branch
or scion (vdstago). Up to the time of his birth the Azcoitia's family tree
had yielded only select fruit; Boy, however, is a monster, a "versi6n de
caos," seemingly produced through random grafting rather than the
selection of the family line. Does Boy, then, belong to the Azcoitia
estirpe or to the despojos housed in the Casa? His place in the family is
both affirmed and denied. The prologue to Humberto's chronicle of
Jer6nimo's experiment-which he imagines that he rewrites from memory for Boy-tells us that Jer6nimo's public considers the monstrous
offspring a leyenda negra and when Jer6nimo is buried they lament the
161

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

end of the Azcoitia lineage. But the inclusion/exclusion of Boy involves

a proliferation of accounts of his paternity and conception as well as a
veiling of his existence. Both of these movements implicate Humberto,

as a servant (and thus, like the old women, a potential despojo) and as
the chronicler-administrator of La Rinconada. Both movements endanger the integrity of the estirpe.
The relationship between Humberto and Jer6nimo, the despojo and
the estirpe, often seems to undergo a parasitical reversal that produces,
at the very least, a relationship of symbiosis. Jer6nimo's potency depends on Humberto's envious gaze as he witnesses his patr6n's sexual
feats; one of the operations that Humberto (imagines he) undergoes at
Dr. Azuela's clinic is the extirpation of his genitals because Jer6nimo,
left impotent since the night of Boy's presumed conception, wants to
exchange his useless genitals for Humberto's organs. If paternity depends on possession of a certain set of genitals, Boy's paternity is difficult to assess, especially since Humberto both denies and affirms that
the operation was completed. Further, the possibility of castration (extirpation) and grafting makes genitals a kind of despojo or cast-off,
property that can be disowned and repossessed within the cave.
Boy, a pieced-together offspring produced by an organ that can be
cast off, is not a mirror of paternal potency and thus is confined as a
despolo in La Rinconada, an enclosed, walled space that is the counterpart of the Casa with one exception: it is administered by Humberto
au nom du pare, to the specifications of Jer6nimo. But here the law does
not involve the imperative of mirroring. It creates a world where there
is no type of filiation-no estirpe-but only pure singularity. However,
all the monstrous residents are refugees who retain a knowledge, gained
on the outside, of the necessity of specularization, the necessity to conform to an estirpe. Boy acquires this knowledge when he escapes for five

days from La Rinconada, and he sums up his lesson in terms of genealogical property rights: "se qu' es tener padre"; "se qu' es poseer"
(462; 387).
The residents of La Rinconada thus correspond not so much to the
prisoners of Plato's cave allegory as to the unidentified bearers of the
effigies behind the wall. The monsters, like the bearers, owe a double

allegiance. In terms of their knowledge and potential power they belong

to the outside world; but their form-seemingly pieced together like the
bearer's effigies from a variety of materials-makes them unsuitable for
inclusion in that world. The exclusion of a group with knowledge presents two potential dangers: first, a rebellion from within the cave that
makes use of the assumptions of a specularly organized world; second,
a proliferation of conflicting accounts of paternity or new allegories of

the cave. Boy's plot against his father, Humberto's chronicle, and the
162

PLATO

AND DONOSO

multiple legends of Ines and other old women represent these dangers
in El obsceno pdajarode la noche.
At the same time that Boy discovers his estirpe and heritage, he asks
to be ex.tirpado,to have Dr. Azuela remove the portions of his brain that
harbor the memory of his father and his five days outside, and to be
disinherited, despojado, offering all his inheritance to Dr. Azuela in
exchange for the operation. He persists in his request even though the
operation will make him once again a fettered prisoner in the cave of
La Rinconada, for, as Dr. Azuela warns him, the knowledge of the outside world has taken root like a tumor and is metastasizing, and such a
large extraction will rob him of lucidity: "Al hacerlo tendria tambi'n
que extirpar un trozo grande de su cerebro, y entonces, claro, le quedaria
apenas una sombra de conciencia, viviria en una penumbra, en un limbo
apenas distinto a la muerte sin caer en ella" (499; 401).
But Boy's return to his agenealogical penumbra is preceded by a plan
of revenge against his father that depends on lucidity and the governing
principle of genealogy. In order to lure Jer6nimo into the enclosed
space of La Rinconada, Boy starts the rumor that he has fathered a
child, reasoning that Jer6nimo will hope that Boy was only a necessary
aberration in the formation of a perfect paternal reflection. Jer6nimo's
entrance as a father into his self-created cave of rejects is fatal. It is
not-as Plato suggested might happen-that the residents of La Rinconada kill him; rather, his dependence on specularization makes him
unfit for life in the cave. Two incidents coincide: Emperatriz, Azuela's
consort and the fattest lady in the world, gives a masked ball; the monsters oblige Jer6nimo to look at his reflection in a fountain whose surface, disturbed by a rock, fractures his classic proportions. One version
of what then happens is given in the form of a monologue by Jer6nimo,
who, confusing mask and reflection, tries to tear what he is sure is a
mask from his face in order to retrieve the perfect reflection of his model
appearance:
puedocorrer hasta el estanquede la Diana sin que nadie se de cuentapara recobrar
la otra imagen que no encuentroen el agua, flota s61o ese revoltijo de facciones,
esa descomposici6nde planos,ese exageraci6nde rasgos, esas supresiones,suturas,
cicatrices,esos hombrosque no encajancon el cuerpo,el cuello borrado,los brazos
de longitud fluctuante,es mi imagen borrosa que espera que se disipe la luz de la
tarde para armarse de otra manera,pero la luz no borra nada porquees noche de
luna
no puedohuir si le prometia Emperatrizasistir a su baile de disfraces
llena y
y paraeso me puse este rostro que sangra porqueno me la puedosacar, la m~scara
fracturadano cubre nada, encontrar a alguien que me ayude y me guie, correr
acosado por los gatos de cabeza fenomenalesque puedenapoderarsede mi en la
oscuridadque ahora es completadafuera de sus pupilas encendidas... tropiezo,
caigo, la cara se me deshace en un golpe contra el piso de ladrillos, arrodillado
en el suelo me aprieto lo que me quedade facciones para unirlas, para forjar algo
parecidoa un rostro, como si fuera arcilla, es blanda,quizt logre reconstruirmis
163

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

facciones antiguas, pero ya no me acuerdo c6mo eran, al tratar de moldearme un

rostro me quedan trozos adheridos a las manos. (505; 405-06)

The death of the father narratedby the father from within the cave gives
us a different view of the reflecting power of surface and the consequences of intercourse or passage. When Jer6nimo enters into the
depths of La Rinconada, the surface is not left unaffected by his penetration. Its rippled surface fractures his discourse as well as his features,
and the visions and projections of his narration seem more surreal than
those of the monsters, who explain, quite sensibly, that Jer6nimo, having drunk too much at the masked ball, was the victim of an accidental
drowning. (Indeed, the monsters have a realistic explanation for Boy:
Jer6nimo must have picked up some strange bacterium in France that
affected his offspring.)
In one version, then, the father, lured by the promise of a filial reflection, drowns in his own fractured reflection, unable to surface or to reestablish a stable, reflecting surface. He has drawn a veil over the
knowledge of his son. The son learns of veiling when he learns of paternity, and he draws a veil over his acquired knowledge of genealogy. Boy
tells Emperatriz, "Aqui no ha pasado nada,"and he insists that the monsters conceal his escape and education: "vamos a correr una cortina:
aqui no ha pasado nada" (483; 387). The filial and paternal veilings
recall other veilings in the Azcoitia history. But in order to understand
their significance we have to examine the alternate genealogy pursued
by In6s, who, like Humberto and Boy, will eventually (re)enter the
cave.
In the same way that Jer6nimo is both potent and impotent, In6s, the
presumed mother of Boy, is also apparently incapable of having children. To counter this infertility she petitions for the canonization of the
female ancestor that she has in common with her husband. This would
guarantee the Azcoitias another sort of immortality through ancestry
or ascent rather than progeny and descent. Even when the Pope refuses
to consider the canonization, Ines persists, returning to the Casa, which
was originally built to house this potential saint, to search for evidence
of her existence, specifically her despojos. Mudito, however, rejects her
efforts at retrospective generation through the female line as a "curso
monstruoso." The saint's "history" supports his judgment, at least
when seen from a genealogical vantage point.
One presentation of the protean figure whom In6s is attempting to
have canonized occurs in the novel directly after the distribution of
Brigida's despojos. It is told to the orphans by one of the old women in
the form of a fairy tale, and concerns a cacique (a patriarch strongman) who lives in the north by the river Maule, where the Azcoitias
originated, and has, again like the first Azcoitia family, nine sons and
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PLATO AND DONOSO

one daughter, the youngest child. The daughter is taught the "inmemoriales artes femininas" by an old woman, her nanny, who has cared
for her since the mother died giving birth. When bad times come to the
region-crop failure, poisoned animals, still-born and deformed children-rumors begin to circulate concerning the daughter, the "isla
feminina" in a male household:
se decia, se decia que decian o que alguien habia oido decir quien sabe d6nde, que
en las noches de luna volaba por el aire una cabeza terrible, arrastrandouna larguisima cabellera color trigo, y la cara de ese cabeza era la linda cara de la hija
del patr6n ... cantabael pavoroso tue, tue de los chonchones,brujeria, maleficio,
por eso las desgracias incontables,la miseria que ahogabaa los campesinos.Sobre
las vegas secas donde las bestias agonizabanhinchadaspor la sed, la cabeza de la
hija del patr6n iba agitando enormes orejas nervudas como las alas de los murcielagos, siguiendo a una perra amarilla, verrugosa y flaca como su nana, que
guiaba al chonch6nhasta un sitio que los rayos del astro c6mplice sefialabanmas
alli de los cerros. (36; 25)

One night the peasants are able to kill the yellow dog and thus immobilize the daughter's nanny, but when the cacique breaks down his daughter's door he extends out his copious poncho and hides what is happening from all eyes except his own. The body of the nanny is thrown into
the waters of the Maule; the daughter is confined in a convent in the
capital (the Casa) and is never seen again; it is rumored that the nanny
was trying to kidnap the daughter in order to turn her into an imbunche.
Mudito cannot say for certain that this version of the story was told
that night to the orphans because he has heard so many contradictory
versions that all have merged into one. There is, however, one constant
which may, more than any historical location or identity, be the core of
the story: the veiling, the curtain of the paternal poncho which diverts
attention from the daughter to the nanny.
Ines, in fact, learned another version of the story from her own nanny,
Peta Ponce, which tells not of a niha-bruja but of a niiia-beata who died
a saintly death in the Casa. The niiia-beata, who was also named Ines,
saves the convent from an earthquake by holding up a cross made of
dried branches given to her by her nanny, and is miraculously, if temporarily, transformed into a tree. This, according to Ines, constitutes the
evidence for her beatification as well as her position as adornment and
supplement to the Azcoitia family tree. Her metamorphosis and the
ambiguity of her history, however, do not cohere with the organizing
principle of such an estirpe, and her existence should, according to a
genealogical logic, be veiled rather than highlighted.
So we must ask, along with Mudito, "j Que ocultaron los brazos del
cacique al extender sobre el vano de puerta la discreci6n de su poncho ?"
(358; 286). There are various answers, all of which involve a crossing,
a non-sanctioned mixture. Perhaps, Mudito muses, it was the view of
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COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

the daughter in a hybrid state between her witch-like nocturnal appearance and her diurnal form. Perhaps, however, the old nanny played the
role of an alcahueta, a go-between or Celestina, who procured young
men for the daughter. Then, perhaps, the paternal poncho hid the birth
of an illegitimate child. Unlike the bastard children of a cacique who
retain a paternal stamp and are unofficially recognized as sons, the
illegitimate offspring of a female member of an estirpe has no identity,
"porque aqui no hay hijo, aqui no ha pasado nada" (360; 288). The
paternal poncho controls what is seen to maintain the integrity of the
visible and effaces female generation. (Mudito suggests, however, that
Peta Ponce belongs to the Azcoitia family through this detour.)
In at least one instance Jer6nimo's paternal poncho hides his own
lack of integrity. When Jer6nimo and Humberto, then his secretary,
are pursued by a mob of miners, someone shoots at a shadow on the
roof. History records that Jer6nimo was shot; but Humberto claims
that he himself was injured when he stepped from behind Jer6nimo's
poncho to defy the crowd. Jer6nimo appropriatesthe blood from Humberto's wound, his despojos, as a sign of his heroism, although it is actually Humberto who has been seen as a futre, a patr6n, by the crowd
of the dispossessed. That night, according to Humberto, one of them
sleeps with Ines and one with Peta Ponce, and Boy is conceived. Again
Boy's paternity and genealogy are in question, although history only
records the presence of Jer6nimo, and Humberto, in his own chroniclehistory, affirmsthat Jer6nimo is Boy's father.
Since the screen of the paternal poncho guarantees identity in and
the identity of history, it must also screen alternate accounts of the same
event. Jer6nimo therefore raises his poncho in front of Humberto to
conjure away his double, his enabling witness; he extends its folds in
front of Ines in an attempt to veil the legend of the nifia-bruja, to form
a barrier between the two versions of the legend that Peta Ponce has
tried to fuse into a synthesis. Humberto affirms, "Yo he visto a don
Jer6nimo alzar el brazo y con el los pliegues de su poncho de vicuiia
como el del cacique, para indicar que aqui no ha pasado nada, que este
es territorio vedado, que la voluntad de su gesto es eliminar, desgajar
del volumen entero el trozo que esti dispuesto a mostrar" (357; 285).
Jer6nimo's actions succeed at first in erasing the legend of the ni~iabruja from In6s's mind, but there is a remainder that produces its own
projections. Fearing extinction, Ines seizes on the project of having
her ancestor canonized-and thus immortalized-which, in turn, only
focuses attention on the repressed portion of the story. Jer6nimo's gesture, like that of the cacique, produces a split in history. Just as it is
impossible to find the original patio of the Casa where the despojos of
the nii~a-beataare buried, it is impossible to fix the true version of the
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PLATO AND DONOSO

legend, to determine "cual fue el burdo hecho real que dio origen a este
monstruo de tantas caras Ilenas de p61ipos, de variantes infinitas y
laberinticos agregados posibles que nada uitilaportan y que sin embargo,
de una manera o de otra, pertenecen" (358; 286-87). The poncho that
is supposed to shut off the paternal realm from phantoms and shadows
projects its own phantoms.
In the end, Ines allies herself with the realm of excess, crossings, and
syntheses. When she goes to live in the Casa as a useless old woman,
Jer6nimo's despojo, she merges with Peta Ponce by acquiring the belongings-despojos and thus the identity of the old women. At the same
time, Boy's birth on the outside as a hybrid of the world of genealogy
and that of the Casa-a hybrid necessitating confinement since there
can be no hybrids in the world of genealogy-is overlaid by his (rebirth (s) inside the Casa. This repetition is another polyp on the face of
the genealogical legend, a monstrous proliferationthat contributes nothbut the union of uselessness
ing useful and yet-somehow-pertains,
and belonging that characterizedthe legends is hardly alien to the Casa
where belongings are despojos. Boy's birth on the outside transformed
La Rinconada into a prison, and prompted a need for a history of containment, Humberto's chronicle of Boy. His birth in the Casa does not
transform it-the Casa is its transformations and additions-but it does
produce different histories of paternity and containment.
All the histories of Boy's rebirth involve Iris Mateluna, an orphan
girl of the Casa, but different versions ascribe paternity to different
sources. One version eliminates the notion of paternity entirely. The
six old crones who know about (or create) Iris's pregnancy proclaim
the miracle of a virgin birth and make plans to confine the infant as a
saint-regenerator who will ensure their way into heaven and immortality. Mudito is accepted as the seventh old woman in the plot. A second
version compounds paternity. The father of Iris's child is Gigante, a
huge papier-mache head, but Gigante has been occupied by Romualdo,
the head's owner, as well as by Mudito, Jer6nimo, and others who rent
the head."A third version attributes paternity to the (female) source of
5 Gigante's head is destroyed by a street gang, and Mudito's reaction to the destruction of the mask/himself is similar to Jer6nimo's fatal reaction to the destruction of his mask: "Aniceto me da una patada en medio de la cara, su pie se incrusta
en mi carne desgarrada que apresa ese pie que me esta deshaciendo, ya no tengo
rostro otra vez, mis facciones han comenzado a disolverse, van a desaparecer,
apenas veo con mis ojos trizados, voy a quedar ciego, pero no ciego porque nada
de mi va a quedar, Aniceto comienza a andar con su pata metida adentro de mi
cara, me pisotea por dentro, cojea, los demas nos retorcemos de la risa, oye, puchas
que estruje, que divertido este huev6n de Aniceto y el tonto del Romualdo persiguiendolo en cuatro patas por el suelo para pescar la cabeza, como si fuera otra
cosa que un mont6n de jirones de cartonpiedra ahora" (113; 88).
For a discussion of masks and identity in the novel see Alicia Borinsky, Sharon

167

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

the recounting of history. Brigida heard about imbunches from her

nanny and in the world of the Casa where men do not exist "Brigida
concibi6 el hijo de la Iris, la Brigida es la madre del hijo monstruoso, la
Brigida sabia todo" (136; 106-07).
In trying to come to terms with a knowledge of paternity and possession within a contained-but limitless-world of grafting, despojos,
and proliferating accounts of origin, Mudito plans or enacts two types
of containment that would firmly establish his own identity if not his
paternity. The first of these attempts involves a holocaust, which corresponds to the Platonic image of the sun; the second is an imbunche, an
image of the Platonic world soul. His attempt to establish identity
through either total self-destruction or total self-containment fails because in each case there is always a surplus, some despojo that can be
passed to another; this failure, however, perhaps marks the genesis of
El obsceno pdjaro de la noche.

The first indication of Humberto's will to identity is his desire to

steal 100 copies of his first book from Jer6nimo's library. By regaining
possession of his book, Humberto hopes to retrieve his name, which is
repeated 9,300 times on the spine, the title page, and at the top of all the
left-hand pages. He plans to burn all the copies and thus contain his
book and himself completely by annihilating the book as passage, as a
scrap that can be passed and owned by someone else. At this point, however, the holocaust is only a vision; its realization involves Iris's son
who is, like the book, both Mudito's son, his production, and Mudito
himself.
That Iris's son is substitutable or an open category has already been
demonstrated by the fact that his position can be filled by Damiana (a
dwarf lesbian who plays the role of Iris's doll-baby pending the birth),
by Boy (whose existence overlaps with the other Boy, the presumed
scion of the Azcoitias), and finally by Mudito himself; the exchange
value is therefore only confirmed by a wager between Ines and Iris in a
game of dog-racing that offers Ines's teeth against Iris's baby. Ines's
dog, which is yellow like the nanny-dog of the legends, wins, stripping
Iris of her possessions just as Ines has stripped the old women of their
despojos to create a new pieced-together self of an old woman. Mudito's
status as son remains the same, since either version of maternity affords
him the potential at least of being self-engendered. (He claims his
"birth," however, only after In6s's triumph.) The dispossessed Iris beMagnarelli, and John Caviglia. Caviglia sees Humberto as an "interface" between
social identity, identity in plurality, the norm (being like others) and inner, psychological identity, identity in singularity (being like oneself). The novel is told
by Mudito-imbunche who "imagines his past, his prospects as a young man, in a
retrospective present whose disillusionment shatters the author's own image as if
reflected in broken water."
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PLATO

AND DONOSO

comes a despojo, and Ines's role as virgin mother of Boy-Mudito is also

temporary. Madre Benita and MisiA Raquel think she is mad and take
her away to an asylum. The exclusion of Ines and Iris opens the path
for Mudito's plans for containment of/within the Casa: "toda la Casa
imbunche, todas nosotras imbunches" (472; 379).
This Casa-imbunche,created by its exclusions, is the scene of the production of Mudito as an imbunche. The old women cover the baby with
layers of burlap sacks so that he is, like the world body in the Timnaeus,
a self-contained package: no legs, no eyes, no ears, living on its own
waste, no hands, no feet. The old women
cosen, amarranmis sacos sobre mi cabeza y otras se acercan y siento levantarse
alrededor mio otro envoltorio de oscuridad,otra capa de silencio que ateni'a las
voces que apenas distingo, sordo, ciego, mudo, paquetitosin sexo, todo cosido y
atado con tiras y cordeles, sacos y mas sacos, respiro apenas a travis de la trama
de las capas sucesivas del yute, aqui adentro se esta caliente, no hay necesidadde
moverse, no necesito nada, este paquetesoy yo entero, reducido,sin dependerde
nada ni de nadie, oyendolas dirigirme sus rogativas, posternadas,implorandome
porquesaben que ahora soy poderosovoy a hacer el milagro. (525; 423)

The miracle that Mudito-imbunche intends to perform is multiform.

For the old women, the miracle is that the Christ-like saint will take
them to heaven; the imbunche should also make possible the miracle of
containment via holocaust that Mudito-Humberto envisioned. But the
role played by the imbunche in salvation and proprietary authorship
puts into question the possibility of passages and reappropriationswithout a remainder.
First, there is the absence of Iris which bothers Padre Ac6zar when
he comes to take the old women and orphan girls away to a new institution. (The old women, of course, assume that the micro-buses are taking them to paradise.) Second, Misia Raquel sends a new truck-load of
despojos: 500 grotesquely shaped squash left over from harvest. Padre
Ac6zar's attempts at order are defeated by "esa poblaci6n de armaduras
plateadas, de irregularidades grotescas," "esta invasi6n de seres de otra
era geol6gica, pasada o futura, cuyo nuimerocrecia incontenible, como si
estuvieran reproduciendose obscenamente alli mismo en el corredor"
(534; 431). When an orphan girl drops a squash, scattering the seeds,
the old women envision a Jamesian "unsubduedforest," predicting that
"este otro afio esto va a quedar hecho una selva de guias y hojas que lo
ahogaran todo"; still, they take some seeds with them, intent on transporting anarchy to paradise.
Another remnant of salvation is the means of salvation: the imbunche that is left in the Casa. On the one hand, there is clarity, order,
transparence, oblivion inside the sacks: "soy este paquete . .. no necesito hacer nada, no siento, no oigo, no veo nada porque no existe nada
169

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LITERATURE

mas que este hueco que ocupo" (537-38; 434). On the other hand, the
imbunche senses an outside and attempts to chew a passageway out of
containment, only to see a wrinkled hand sew over all exits. An old
woman throws the imbunche into a sack along with other despojos and
burns the contents under a bridge: paper, sticks of wood, cardboard,
stockings, rags, newspapers, writing paper, trash (mugre). The woman
lies beside the fire like "otro paquete matsde harapos" (542; 438). The
imbunche, the contained figure with no orifices, the perfect image of the
father, turns out to be a pieced-together collection of scraps or despojos
that is hardly distinguishable from the old woman/package of rags that
sleeps by the fire. The holocaust, the image of the father-sun, should not
leave a remainder, but it leaves behind ashes, a black smudge, and a
scorched tin can: despojos. Further, the fire gives warmth to the despojadas, old women and a scrawny bitch, who gain power from it. This is
again a final version of the world behind the veil of the paternal poncho,
an excess that extends itself through a series of passages. The bitch is
associated with the yellow dog of the nanny, pursued by the Azcoitia
founder and by Jer6nimo who feared its witnessing eyes. The yellow
bitch is skinned by the founder's men, shot by Jer6nimo-although her
despojos, like those of the niia-beata, are never found, thrown into a fire
in plastic effigy by Ines only to be resurrected as the invincible bitch in
the game of dog-racing. The yellow dog is the nanny of the legends who
taught the daughter fine embroidery; Peta Ponce embroidered fine
handkerchiefs; Brigida was known for her delicate needlework; Ines
takes on the identity of Brigida-Peta Ponce when she enters the Casa;
the hand that sews Mudito up in the sack mends it carefully "como si se
tratara de bordar iniciales sobre la batista mais fina, no de coser arpillera" (540; 436). The holocaust cannot be complete because its wholeness depends on its exclusions; the paternal reflection cannot be complete because there is always something left behind, if only the silvering
of the mirror.
There are two chronicles of the cave, two myths of containment. The
first, we will assume, is authored by Humberto, although Emperatriz
claims that he slumped over his Olivetti in a drunken state and never
wrote a word. It is written au nomrdu pkre and concerns the containment of monstrous offspring. Humberto associates this history with his
own juvenile writings enclosed in Jer6nimo's library, although again
we must add qualifications because it is suggested that the book spines
are false and only hide Jer6nimo's safe. This chronicle/chronicler seeks
to enclose it/himself without passage or extension, to consume it/himself in a fire that leaves no remainder.
However, scraps of this first chronicle-pieces of ashes, waste from
the inmbuinche-reappearin the second chronicle, written from memory.
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AND DONOSO

This other chronicle is "authored"by Mudito, who, in turn, is a secondhand product, authored by the dicen of the old women, given voice by
the other voices around him. Like the legends it is a hybrid; it could be
called El obsceno pdjaro de la noche. It remains after the fire because it
has/is a memory, a scrap of consciousness on the borderline between
possession and dispossession, a memory "possessed" by the dispossessed: rejects, scraps, excess, witnesses. This memory, however, allows it to write, to (re)produce, what no memory-less image of eternal
paternity can: a history of containment within containment that, like
the exuberant squash vines or the "unsubdued forest," cannot be contained. This is the true allegory of the cave that looks behind to the
hybrid mode of production of the cave, using the screen of containment,
the folds of the paternal poncho, to produce its own phantoms.
Reed College
Works Cited
Borinsky, Alicia. "Repeticiones y mascaras: El obsceno pdjaro de la noche."
MLN 88 (1973) : 281-94.
Caviglia, John. "Tradition and Monstrosity in El obsceno pijaro de la noche."
PMLA 93 (1978): 33-45.
Donoso, Jose. El obsceno pcijaro de la noche. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970.
The Obscene Bird of the Night. Trans. Hardie St. Martin and Leonard
-----.
Mades. New York: Knopf, 1973.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. "Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter" and
"Plato's Unwritten Dialectic." In Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Irigaray, Luce. "L'hustera de Platon." In Speculum de l'autre femme. Paris:
Minuit, 1974.
Kirk, G. S. and J. E. Raven. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Magnarelli, Sharon. "Amidst the Illusory Depths: The First Person Pronoun
and El obsceno pdjaro de la noche." MLN 93 (1978) : 266-84.
Plato. Loeb Classical Library Edition. Trans. R. G. Bury et al. 12 vols. London:
Heinemann, 1914-1935.

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