THE TENSION OF PARADOX: "THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT" AS SPIRITUAL EXERCISES (JOSE DONOSO, CHILE)

PAMELA MAY FINNEGAN, Purdue University

Abstract

Donoso privileges the word "spiritual" in his choice of epigraph and in his narrator's presence within the House of Spiritual Exercises. The implicit lack of spirituality in his characters signals, ironically, both the meaninglessness of their existence and of their languages. The text focuses the reader's attention on how the characters verbalize themselves. The narrator's implementation of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises enables him and the reader to experience a socially-sanctified code of behavior, the spiritual exercises, that paradoxically reveals the barrenness of the code and its generative society and of that society's spiritual condition. This study proceeds on the assumption that Mudito, the implicit author, feigns muteness so that the reader may hear for himself the text's empty words. Mudiot's relationship to the text involves three master metaphors: Chapter I explicates the epigraph and the novel's linguistic development based on the tension of paradox. The chapter "Mudito, the Exercitant," confronts Mudito's silence and the text's two primary levels of discourse inherent to the novel's two loci as structural principles: The House of Spiritual Exercises and the Rinconada, an interdependent dialectical relationship. In the following chapter, "Mudito, the prophet," the narrator embodies Biblical allusions as he seeks escape from the reiterative and ultimately meaningless language practices codified in the two textual structures. He seeks escape by attempting to incarnate an alternative language, that of the omnipotently creative Biblical Word, thus becoming a prophet of apocalypse. The fourth chapter, "Mudito's Manuscript," details the novel's use of linguistic and literary conventions as Mudito juxtaposes the textual voices so as to result in their mutual self-parody, preparing the way for the text's final pages which remit back to its beginning, the novel's world becoming an icon characterized by entropy, parody, and materiality. The study concludes that all linquistic ordering fictionalizes and that blindness to this fact leads to dogma or solipsism, each counterproductive to communication and human endeavor. The lack of spirituality within the novel's world is symptomatic of language gone stale. To revive the linguistic system, we must revive the creative power of language.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Latin American literature

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