José Donoso’s Tortured Writing: A Reading of ‘The Previous’ in The Obscenebird of Night

Abstract

This essay explores the theme of “the previous” and its literary representation in José Donoso’s novelThe Obscene Bird of Night in light of ideas expressed by Franz Kafka in his Diaries and MauriceBlanchot in The Writing of Disaster, as well as the Chilean writer’s own statements concerning hisconstant struggle with the experience of writing, an experience presented and reorganized in the“chaos” that constitutes the writing of the novel itself. The semiotic and pre-symbolic aspects of JoséDonoso’s novel are explained with a view to addressing the nature of this experience and the difficultiesof “the impossible history of the previous” (cf. Jitrik, 2000).