José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night. Monsters, Power, Violence

Abstract

Abstract José Donoso described, in his novel The Obscene Bird of Night (1970), the particular way in which an old and noble family, Azcoitía, gradually decays and eventually dies out. Of course, allusions to the progressive degradation of the contemporary Chilean society, to interpersonal relations in a world living exclusively under the sign of social conventions are the constant concerns of the Chilean author and all these are illustrated through the story of Jerónimo and the Azcoitía family, tentatively written by Humberto Peñaloza. The text of this amazing and great Latin American novel is dominated by two strongly interconnected essential issues: the monster and power. The monster might represent, according to the opinions formulated by Michel Foucault (in his famous study entitled History of Madness), a threat to all the general accepted social conventions, offering to the reader another type of literary discourse, which undermines the pre-existing aesthetic order and reveals some new and original potentialities of contemporary literature itself.