The Obscene Bird of Night

The Obscene Bird of Night (Spanish: El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970) is the most acclaimed novel by the Chilean writer José Donoso. Donoso was a member of the Latin American literary boom and the literary movement known as magical realism.

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 sown 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 alienation from the outside world, i.e. an adoption of the ideal of the physical Imbunche in terms of space, with the purpose of taking away the power that others have over the individual and choosing a life of non-existence. This auto-segregation is achieved by fortifying one’s living space, i.e. sealing off all the entrances (like the Imbunche’s, metaphorically speaking). This seclusion from the outside world is a form of self-preservation from an oppressive and anti-individualistic society. Later on in the novel, a reversal from the state of Imbunche begins, with the recuperation of one’s own name – the word that represents the concept of an individual. Ironically, the re-discovery of the self here depends on being acknowledged by the outside world, to be named by others.

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