A flight without organs? (Ego, orality and writing in El obsceno pájaro de la noche)

Abstract

El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The obscene night bird), in line to other great novels of Latin American Boom, understands that the omniscient author, like the ego, is a small tirant, though not a body tirant, but a tirant of narration itself. This novel tries to get free from that god through a series of devices. Among these devices we posit the co-existence of two basic narrators: one of them, resposible for the novel’s pre-text, is closer to oral discourse, and the other one, responsible for the text proper, is closer to omniscience, and in regard to discourse, works within the framework of literacy. The theory that allows an analysis like this is the one that studies bodies that lack an ego, schizophrenia, and hence we try to join some schizoanalysis propositions and some of narratology and text analysis in order to study the narrative stratum of El obsceno pájaro de la noche. It is important to point out that for our study we have used Donoso’s manuscripts, kept at the libraries of The Univesity of Iowa and Princeton University.