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Writing and Reading the

Palimpsest: Donoso's El Jardín
de al lado
a
Priscilla Meléndez
a
Michigan State University
Published online: 02 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Priscilla Meléndez (1987) Writing and Reading the Palimpsest:
Donoso's El Jardín de al lado, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures,
41:3, 200-213, DOI: 10.1080/00397709.1987.10733625

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1987.10733625

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 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ

WRITING AND READING THE PALIMPSEST:

DONOSO'S EL JARDiN DE AL LADO

To INTRODUCE the concept of palimpsest in a technological and com-

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puterized era might be perceived as an unnecessary irony or as the sign of

reliance on an already exhausted metaphor. But the proliferation of in-
tertexts, both perceptible and veiled, in Jose Donoso's Ef jardfn de af
fado (1981) reveals an archaic system, the palimpsest, linked to a process
of writing or "publishing." This system functions as a literary metaphor
in which the substitution of the object and its referent for one or more
other objects and referents does not imply the disappearance of the first
set. Although in the medieval practice of "scraping again" the text sub-
stituted is not necessarily linked to what it covers, the dialectical implica-
tions suggested by the palimpsestic metaphor in Donoso's novel connect
and unmask the multiple covert/overt texts that demand to be read. The
recognition of texts over a text is, in essence, an incomplete enterprise,
since the established fictive boundaries between them disappear with the
identification of each fragment as a single entity. This contradictory
phenomenon-boundaries vanish just as they are discovered-leads us to
juxtapose the multiple texts and their readings and simultaneously
reveals the subordinate nature of both the explicit and implicit
discourses. Therefore, within this framework, literary intertextuality
becomes a useful notion only if conceived not exclusively as an echo of
other texts or as mere sharing of a stock of literary codes and conven-
tions, but as a nonhierarchical interplay of discourses. The illusory
discovery of footprints, of ruins, submerges the observer (reader) in a
world that has apparently disappeared and upon which new worlds-or
texts-have been built or written.'
The recognition of a consequent multiplication of texts and subtexts
imposed by the palimpsestic metaphor obliges us to heed warnings in
Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading against the debate that opposes in-
trinsic to extrinsic criticism, which in formalistic terms states that "form
is now a solipsistic category of self-reflection, and the referential mean-
ing is said to be extrinsic."? From the standpoint of the inherent plurality
implied in the title of the present essay, my concern is the "obligation"
of reading and decoding both the superimposed text and the one(s) being
removed. That is, I shall be dealing, not with the inside/outside meta-
200
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 201

phor that de Man seriously questions-although he often has recourse to

it-but with the notion of covert and overt writing, which has more to do
with a rhetorical development than with a structural one. The relation-
ship between the act of interpretation and the use of the metaphor of the
palimpsest suggests a process of elucidation, of revealing something else.
But my goal is not to "translate" into intelligible or familiar language
what has been explicitly presented or indirectly concealed, even less to put
the overt discourse in the place of the one that remained obscured. It is
to expose a proliferation of texts that thematically and formally clash with
one another and, in this encounter, to examine their genesis/destruction
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as linguistic and fictive entities. Nevertheless, the possibility of reading

these multiple "manuscripts" that are constantly emerging and simul-
taneously being substituted presents the reader with a rhetorical dilem-
ma. The metaphorical and/or literal nature of the text's language creates
another level of intra- and extra-textual structures that are part of the
overt/covert writings. The garden, for example, not only characterizes
the proliferation and elusiveness of its meanings but also questions the
distinction between what is understood as literal and what is figural. In
other words, which one is the "real" garden, who represents the authori-
tative voice of the text, which novel are we, in any case, reading?

In EI jardin de allado the protagonist and narrator, Julio Mendez, is a

slightly recognized Chilean writer whose most recent novel has been re-
jected for publication by the well-known editor from Barcelona, Nuria
Monclus, although she encourages Julio to revise and rewrite his text.
Five of the first six chapters of Donoso's novel consist of Julio's narra-
tion of the ordeal of revising his manuscript during a summer in Madrid.
Parallel to his need for writing, the other strong force in Julio's life is his
wife, Gloria. Fusion and confusion of past and present events transforms
Julio's narration of his professional and personal life into an autobiog-
raphy. But when, in the sixth chapter, we discover that it is Gloria who
has written and implicitly narrated the entire preceding text, EI jardin de
al lado's clear commentary on its self-begetting and fictional nature
becomes problematic. What was first taken for Julio's autobiography-
Julio's text and narrative voice-turns out to be Gloria's recreation of
their survival as writers. This moment of recognition, which coincides
with the end of Donoso's novel-and also with that of Gloria's work-
invites the reader to look for an alternate and more reliable writing that
has been concealed. The act of rereading, either literal or metaphoric,
implies substitution of the former interpretative text (where the garden
was observed by Julio) for a text where the narrative discourse has been
drastically altered and where the point of view (that of the observer of
 202 FALL 1987 SYMPOSIUM

the garden) has been replaced. "Erasing" the first reading to set forth a
new interpretation is reminiscent of Julio's painful exercise of rereading
and rewriting his rejected text.
Overt thematization of the acts of writing, reading, publishing, and in-
terpreting in EI jardin de allado leads us to pose a question similar to the
one de Man proposed while trying to "explain" the passage in Proust's
A 10 Recherche du temps perdu where Marcel engages in the act of
reading a novel: "The question is precisely whether a literary text is
about that which it describes, represents or states" (p. 57). In his attempt
to answer his query, de Man examines the possible coincidence between
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the meaning read and the meaning stated in the Recherche. If, as de Man
says, "reading is the metaphor of writing" (p. 68), then El jardin de 01
lado is a dear example of an act of reading both explained and redefined
by its counterpart, the act of writing. The process of interpretation
becomes, therefore, a paradigm of both reading and writing. De Man's
Proust is comparable to Donoso: El jardin is a work in which the story-
telling and the story-told are intermingled, the meaning read and the
meaning stated blend together. Gloria's fictionalization of Julio's
political and existential dilemmas documented in his rejected novel
reveals the difficulty of writing about a writing saturated with historical
and political overtones. It is Julio-narrator who reproduces part of
Nuria Monclus' verdict of his novel: "Falta una dimensi6n mas amplia,
y, sobre todo, la habilidad para proyectar, mas que para describir 0
analizar, tanto situaciones como personajes de manera que se trasformen
en metafora, metafora valida en si y no por 10 que sefiala afuera de la
literatura, no como cr6nica de sucesos que todo el mundo conoce y con-
dena, y que por otra parte la gente esta comenzando a olvidar .... "3 De
Man's concerns for autobiography as a genre-"what is at stake is not
only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his ex-
perience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history,,4-
highlight not only the autobiographical connections between Donoso's
own life and El jardtn but, more substantially, Julio's inadequacy to
recreate his political experience within his literary creation. On the other
hand, to what extent does Gloria's own text succeed or fail to make of
her literary discourse a metaphor-something that, as she immediately
discovers, Julio is incapable of doing? Can we, as readers of Donoso's
novel, recognize our own forgetfulness of historical events that are for-
eign to our experience, or that, even if experienced, are eventually buried
in our memory? Can we describe the ethical/aesthetical dialectic that
obsessed Julio and Gloria as an aporia which, in spite of its contradic-
tions, they both try to reconcile in their writings-Julio through overt in-
corporation and description and Gloria through a false act of rejection?
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 203

Julio's "intention" in writing his novel-document (as he alludes to it)

is precisely to transform the six days spent in a Chilean jail into what he
calls a source of telling, in other words, a discourse. But this enterprise is
threatened not only by the course of time (which turns the narration pale
and causes it to fade away), but more evidently by the superimposition of
other texts, by the invasion of other "experiencias menos trascendentes y
mas confusas, mezquinas experiencias personales que no me aportaban
otra cosa que humilliacion . . ." (p. 31). The weakening of Julio's
"heroic experience," the weakening of his initial hate produced by the
imprisonment, begins to transform itself into a marginal text where the
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remains and footprints are being replaced by other writings: "todo este
cumulo de vejaciones se habia sobreimpreso a aquella experiencia cuya
jerarquia yo tan desesperadamente trataba de mantener mediante las
paginas de notas que escribia como quien riega una planta moribunda,
pero que, ay, al fin se iba secando pese a tanto esfuerzo" (p. 32).5 It is
not until Julio completes the revision of his novel that he is able to
criticize his manuscript, recognizing in it the lack of two central aspects
of the creative process: "AI avanzar por mi copioso escrito se me fue ha-
ciendo indudable que la pasion que pretendia animarlo no era ni con-
vincente como literatura ni valida como experiencia" (p. 114).
As de Man suggests, Marcel's act of reading reconciles imagination
and action. Marcel realizes that the sedentary act of reading is powerful
enough to recreate the outside world and even to draw a more holistic
perception of it. Although in EI jardin de allado Julio's ethical conflict
between imagination and action is restructured in a different manner, it
also dramatizes the confrontation of the inner and the outer worlds (jail-
garden) as experienced by the protagonist. Julio's anxiousness to trans-
form his political experience-which is not transcendental-into a tran-
scendental writing is precisely what establishes the parameters and the
inevitable failure of his text. But one of the ironic forces of EI jardin is
that Julio not only fails to recreate asthetically his Chilean imprison-
ment, but also fails to participate, while in self-imposed exile, in an active
political life. Gloria constantly accuses him of his ideological "impo-
tency," of his weak liberalism, and describes his "moderate humanism"
as pedantic cowardice. Therefore, the emptiness of both his literary work
and his own life is filled neither by imagination nor by action. Contrary
to Marcel's relationship with the act of reading, neither of these activities
is capable of satisfactorily replacing the other. When Julio mentally
blames Gloria for living her life in his shadow-that is, through him-he
is ironically describing his own pseudoliterary discourse which lies under
the shadow of historical facts and, indeed, is eclipsed by Gloria's suc-
cessful story. In a similar way, the garden translates into metaphor and
 204 FALL 1987 SYMPOSIUM

simultaneously deconstructs its own allegorical meaning, particularly in

its dual incarnation of the literal and the metaphorical and of the action
and the imagination.

After a long period of procrastination, provoked by his weaknesses,

his abuses of drugs and alcohol, his mother's death, his contemplation of
the garden, Julio completes the revision of his novel. But his second ver-
sion is the result of an imprisonment different from the one that inspired
the original text. The endless series of dramatic events in Gloria's life-
from Julio's refusal to sell the family house after the death of his mother
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to Bijou's theft of one of Salvatierra's paintings-pushes her to a state of

depression, having as one of the consequences her absolute silence, par-
ticularly towards Julio. In their own special ways, both Julio and Gloria
become convalescents from different "diseases," prisoners of different
jails where, as Julio says: "Incomunicada [Gloria], s610 tolera su
situaci6n de encarcelarniento dentro de su enfermedad. Pienso en rnis
seis dias de calabozo en Santiago, en 10 distinto y en 10 igual a esta
enfermedad que fueron, y 10 igual que son, tambien, a esto en que se esta
transformando rni novela" (pp. 208-09). Not by mere coincidence, El
jardin is divided into six chapters. This fact suggests the possible infinite
exchange between the literal and figurative vision of the garden and the
six days spent by Julio in jail-a substitution that can even take place in
the title. Julio asks himself: "l.Hubiera podido terminarla sin el silencio
de su enfermedad, sin la paz que me ha proporcionado su dolor y su en-
carcelarniento?" (p. 212). Once his novel is revised and Julio recognizes
his wife's symptoms of recovery, he gives his new text to Gloria, whose
muteness is now directed only toward him. Gloria's reading is staged, as
de Man would have it, in his Allegories of Reading in "an inner, shel-
tered place ... that has to protect itself against the invasion of an outside
world, but that nevertheless has to borrow from this world some of its
properties" (p. 59). The jail, in Gloria's text, has become a garden. But
the garden turned out to be as oppressive for Gloria as she had intended
to make it for Julio. In other words, the metaphorical connotation of the
garden has expanded to include both the creation and the creator.
Gloria's reading of the new manuscript-that took place after Julio's
revision of his own text-questions the first act of rereading that he ex-
periences, since it suggests that the end result will not only be an act of
criticism on her part but also of re-writing. We are forced to ask then: to
what extent is Gloria's novel-that is, her writing-the consequence of
her reading of Julio's novel? Is her own creation a "revision" of her hus-
band's defective text? Nuria's negative response to Julio's novel comes
precisely from Julio's inability to "see" his own creation. Since he is in-
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 205

capable of "looking over" his text, his rewriting is as faulty as the first
version: "No se 10 que he escrito, ni 10 que a mi me ha ocurrido al
escribir. No logro verme, ni 'verla' " (p. 211).
But the reader does "see" and recognize the confused causality of the
acts of (re)reading and (re)writing in the identities, also confused, of
Julio and Gloria. Their marital struggles, where harmony and discord
coexist as a single entity and where dissatisfaction with the physical and
sexual decadence of the partner's body can only be destroyed by the
other's presence, dramatize their battle to reconcile their antagonistic
discourses in a single body-or text-as a means of becoming one. Julio
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repeatedly questions himself about his tendency and Gloria's to invade

the other's very being, to deny it by their intrusions: "i,Por que solo nos
satisface la devoracion mutua, el escarbar incansable de uno dentro del
otro hasta que no queda ni un rincon turbio ni oscuro ni privado, ni una
sola fantasia conservada como algo personal, sin exponerla?" (p. 234).
The duality-reading and writing and their repetition-exercised both by
Julio and Gloria, represent part of that struggle of identity where there is
a confusing relationship between creator and reader. Within this profu-
sion of readings, writings, and interpretations, Gloria raises these acts to
the level of themes in her novel and experiences them in her chaotic life:

Escribi mis quejas en mi diario, tan desgarrador que ahora no me

atrevo a releerlo; pero al releerlo entonces para escarbar mi rencor,
y al volver y volver a escribir esas paginas, y darles vueltas y mas
vueltas, fui como depurandolo todo, en ese tiempo tan largo que
las estaciones me han obsequiado junto al Mediterraneo, depuran-
do la imagen de mi misma, la de Julio, la de nuestro matrimonio,
hasta darme cuenta de que para que este examen tuviera fuerza de
realidad era necesario que yo construyera algo fuera de mi misma,
pero que me contuviera, para "verme": un espejo en el cual
tambien se pudieran "ver" otros, un objeto que yo y otros
pudieramos contemplar afuera de nosotros mismos, aunque todo
10 mio sea, ahora, en tono menor. (pp. 252-53)

This is precisely why the famous editor of Latin American fiction,

Nuria Monclus, is willing to publish Gloria's novel. In opposition to the
accomplishments of her text, Gloria realizes that the only footprint left
by Julio's manuscript was a vague chronicle of injustice. But is Gloria's
success, in any case, the result of her refusal to give Nuria access to her
diary and in a way risk a rewriting of her text by an "outsider," as they
both did to Julio? Or is this not what actually happens when, during a
meeting between editor and writer, Nuria expresses dissatisfaction with
 206 FALL 1987 SYMPOSIUM

the end of Gloria's novel, and after listening to her narration of Julio's
vicissitudes in Tangiers, suggests that this become the end of the novel:

-jPlease do not disturb! iQue ir6nico final feliz para una novela
tan amarga!-dijo [Nuria].
-i.C6mo ...?
-Bueno, i.no es este el capitulo que falta, el que no has escrito ...?
pregunt6 Nuria Monclus, (p. 264)

Needless to say, this also happens to be the end of EI jardin de allado.

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Ironically, Nuria-Irejreader has provided her own writing; she has im-
posed her own ending to Gloria's novel. But, is this a metaphor for what
the reader of fiction experiences while engaged in the act of (re)reading-
that is, the imperative to interpret and rewrite what (s)he is reading?
When Nuria suggests that Gloria's real challenge is to write a second
novel, is she implying that the public's reading of her first text will imme-
diately produce an infinite number of rewriters demanding their active
participation in the process of creation?
This "struggle for authority," or even the recognition of it-to use
Lucille Kerr's termst-s-is not limited to the two narrator-writers, Gloria
and Julio, who represent the overt powers. But the causal line of devel-
opment between the act -of (re)reading and the need to (re)write unveils
the fragility of those powerful overt structures of creation which,
ironically, become subject to the strength of other readings and writings,
such as Nuria's or even our own. The "new" texts discovered do not
represent the substitution of the original one, but an interplay of
discourses that weakens the entire system of authority, including the
authorial figure.
According to Kerr, when we finish reading EI jardin de al lado and
discover Gloria's voice as creator and manipulator of the narration, "we
virtually see one image of authority usurp the position of the other: an
apparently secondary subject of authority replaces another whose pri-
mary position seems to have been authorized and then denied by that
very subject who literally follows, but also virtually precedes, him as the
'original' author(ity)" (p. 44). The truth of this statement is subject to an
endless process of substitution that is not limited to Julio and to Gloria's
manipulations or even to the direct or subtle allusions to Donoso's reality
as a Chilean writer, but to the very nature and power of reading and
writing. In this case, Donoso is equally subject to the process of substitu-
tion, and his text is also threatened by our reading and inevitable
rewriting.' The ironic overtones of the readers' discovery of Gloria's new
position provoke the dismantling of the first reading, where the autobio-
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 207

graphical first-person narration becomes a biographical account pre-

sented by one of the characters of the "former" text. Gloria's takeover
demands an act of rereading-which for de Man (Allegories, p. 57) is "a
play between a prospective and a retrospective movement" (p. 57)-
an act of revising not the truth or falseness of the overt and covert texts,
but their rhetorical structures. As already implied, Gloria's literary ac-
count is also subject to a process of dismantling and reconstruction.
To decode the layers of rhetorical structures that a plurality of narra-
tions-through the proliferation of readings and writings-imposes on
the text, has been one of my tasks. Let us turn now to the recurrent trope
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of the garden. The first allusion to the duke's garden, which is next to
Salvatierra's apartment, is immediately diverted to a different garden
populated by other flora and by other figures:
Mientras Gloria termina de abrir la cortina me levanto de la cama y
miro: si, un jardin Florecillas inidentificables brotan a la som-
bra de las ramas Ramas de un jardin de otro hemisferio, jardin
muy distinto a este pequefio parque aristocratico, porque aquella
era sombra de paltos y araucarias y naranjos y magnolios, y sin em-
bargo esta sombra es igual a aquella, que rodea de silencio esta casa
en que en este mismo momento mi madre agoniza. (p. 65)
Julio's memories of his Chilean house and its inhabitants (his dying
mother, his dead father, his German-speaking niece, himself as a youth)
come forth through the presence of an immediate and physical space
already mentioned in the title. In addition, the fusion, confusion, and
multiplication of gardens and feelings remind the reader of a parallel
proliferation of texts and narrative voices in E/ jardin. But this frantic
reproduction of spaces and referents ironically creates a sense of oppres-
sion, isolation, claustrophobia, which is reflected in Julio's perception of
the outside world through various windows or, as he later says, "desde
mi ventana chileno-madrilefia de exilado" (p. 144). As a space of
enclosure, the garden is where Julio's historical past, his political ex-
perience, and his imaginative world clash to recreate the linguistic and
narrative paradox of the text."
When Monika Pinell de Bray, that is, cola condesita," leaves with her
family for the traditional summer vacation out of Madrid (their depar-
ture also coincides with the death of Julio's mother), Julio experiences a
profound emptiness as he faces the deserted garden. His new enigma is
how and with what he should fill the empty space. Surprisingly, what
comes to Julio's mind is Marcelo Chiriboga's poetics of writing: "AI fin
y al cabo uno no escribe con el prop6sito de decir algo, sino para saber
que quiere decir y para que y para quienes" (p. 159). The uninhabited
 208 FALL 1987 SYMPOSIUM

garden, in Julio's words, is available now for a luminous inquisition; he

is now "free" to write his own text-his own garden.
The garden represents the linguistic and narrative paradox of the text.
Throughout the novel, this particular space is destroyed as a single unit
while its various expressions become the paradigm of the emerging texts
already conceived in the palimpsestic metaphor. In other words, the
literal and metaphorical presence of the garden also works as a mirror
image of the figural and literal meanings of the multiple overt and covert
texts. Within this rhetorical distinction, what has to be taken into ac-
count is that El jardin, with all its linguistic and literary images-above
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all, the garden-is inherently metaphorical and its literal dimension im-
presses us also as a metaphor. The notions of reading and writing-an
overt theme in Donoso's novel-compel Gloria and Julio (characters,
writers, narrators) and us as readers, to engage in a process in which both
of these activities are challenged by their own repetition. Rereading and
rewriting endlessly multiply those subtexts that we have been in search of
through the medieval practice of "scraping again." The text's decon-
struction of its own writing is achieved in the infinite replacement and
flow of previous writings that show no hierarchical bounds but which
have been rhetorically concealed.
De Man's allusion to the traditional meaning of the metaphor sheds
light on El jardin's ultimate expression of the palimpsestic structure:
"Conceptualization, conceived as an exchange or substitution of proper-
ties on the basis of resemblance, corresponds exactly to the classical
definition of metaphor as it appears in the theories of rhetoric from
Aristotle to Roman Jakobson" (Allegories, p. 146). The exchange or
substitution that takes place in the act of conceptualizing, of metaphoriz-
ing, leads the reader to ascertain Julio's strong desire to become someone
else (Bijou, Pato, Gloria, Chiriboga, or the "guapo-feo"), to possess
other people's bodies, discourses, identity, as he simultaneously erases
his own decadent codes and footprints, which had traced his failure as a
writer, a father, a 'husband, and as a political activist. Julio suddenly
discovers the meaning of his attraction for Bijou: "De repente com-
prendi ... que no era tan sexual mi atraccion por Bijou sino otra cosa,
un deseo de apropiarme de su cuerpo, de ser el, de adjudicarme sus
c6digos y apetitos, mi hambre por meterme dentro de la piel de Bijou era
mi deseo de que mi dolor fuera otro, otros que yo no conocia 0 habia
olvidado; en todo caso, no mi codigo tiranico ni los dolores que me
tenian deshecho ... " (p. 84).
Julio's desire for transmutation is not only dramatized by his obsessive
desire to become a Cortazar and write a Rayuela for Gloria, or to possess
Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa's literary discourse. It is in Julio's last
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 209

chapter as narrator that the reader is confronted with his almost insane
willingness to get lost in a jungle of unintelligible codes, which, in the
eyes of a Westerner, are represented by the enigmas of the Arab world.
Julio's desire for anonymity is not provoked by his fame as a writer but,
ironically, by his endless failures. As he constantly suggests, his disap-
pearance alone will guarantee freedom from his unsuccessful life. But is
the need for transformation a way of searching for another mask, for
another disguising source, or is it an act of unmasking that is indirectly
linked to the activity and nature of literature?
His eagerness to unfold himself and experience a mental and physical
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metamorphosis reaches its highest point when, on a Tangiers street, he

glimpses a scene in which a beggar is lying beside a rubbish dump and is
accompanied by a naked one-year-old child who is feeding (his father?)
with garbage: "Envidia: quiero ser ese hombre, meterme dentro de su
piel enfermiza y de su hambre para asi no tener esperanza de nada ni
temer nada, eliminar sobre todo este temor al mandato de la historia de
mi ser y mi cultura, que es el de confesar esta noche misma-o dentro de
un plazo de quince dias-la complejidad de mi derrota ... " (p. 239).
Julio goes a step further and even contemplates the possibility of killing
the beggar. He recreates the scene: while he exchanges his breath and
soul with the dead man, they also exchange their identities, allowing
Julio to walk away from himself. The garden-in all its forms-and
Tangiers are the two spaces in which signs are deprived of their tradi-
tional meaning and values: the former by the juxtaposition of past ex-
periences with an unreadable present (the duke's garden with all its char-
acters), and the latter by cultural differences. Who is Nuria Monclus or
Marcelo Chiriboga, Julio asks himself, in a space ruled by a completely
different set of codes? Parallel to the unexpected narrative transition
from the fifth to the sixth chapter in EI jardfn de allado, which demands
a rereading and reinterpretation of signs and "messages," the mysterious
gardens and the indecipherable happenings at Tangiers challenge the
reader to retune his/her reading codes or habits.
Similarly, the narrative, psychological, and existential unmasking that
characterizes Julio's discourse can be compared with his claim for physi-
cal transformation. Julio's writing tries arduously to detach itself from
bourgeois codes and Western standards as a way, among other things, of
challenging the "boom" writers. But as readers watch Julio disappear
from the scene, witness Gloria's takeover, and later discover her hus-
band's return to the hotel at Tangiers, they realize that Julio's search for
otherness has also been a failure. What he seems incapable of appreci-
ating is that one of the effective ways to become someone else (a meta-
phor of himself) is achieved through writing. Even Gloria's success does
 210 FALL 1987 SYMPOSIUM

not come without pain and a certain fear of experiencing that same trans-
formation that she will later embrace with determination: "Tuve la
certeza, en esos minutos que siguieron a su desaparici6n del hotel, que no
volveria a ver a Julio nunca mas. . . . loEn que se transformaria Julio?
loEn ese mendigo que ni siquiera se si vio, tirado a la puerta de una mez-
quita, mientras yo me transformaba en una senora latinoamericana, sola
y madura, dedicada a traducir 0 a los telares en Sitges?" (p. 260)
The profound irony of EI jardin de allado is that Gloria, the writer of
Julio's desire for transformation, is ultimately the one who experiences
metamorphosis. As the creator of Julio's narrative voice, she (to some
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extent out of envy) impersonates his discourse, codes and sufferings, but
only to free herself from anonymity. She happens to be the observer, the
reader of the next-door garden which, as she suggests at the end, inspired
the writing of her novel. As I have been stressing, the proliferation of
intra- and extra-textual readers, narrators, and writers in EI jardfn and
their constant exchange of roles not only creates a flow of texts within
texts demanding to be read but also gives language a sense of otherness,
where a frequent transformation toward aesthetic discourse takes place:
the garden is framed through the image of the window; Gloria becomes
the perfect "Odalisca de Ingres"; Bijou the angelo musicante; and
Monica Pinell "la Brancusi."

Because EI jardin de allado's main concern is the dialectic between

reading and writing and the endless repetition of these two acts, the
characters' explicit discussion of the ethical/aesthetical question in rela-
tion to both art and their own lives cannot be ignored. For example, it is
Julio, himself, who poses the ethical/aesthetic conflict at the beginning
of the novel: "i,Por que-me preguntaba cada vez que hablaba con el
[Pancho Salvatierra), cada vez que vela su casa 0 su pintura-, por que
Pancho tenia la terrible virtud de replantearme el problema, que yo ya
daba por resuelto, de la relaci6n entre arte y etica?" (p. 18). In Pancho's
world-by contrast with Julio's philosophical views of art and life-
things lack history, purpose, and even future (p. 15). And it is in this
absence that the antagonism between Pancho's art and Adriazola's
becomes even more evident. The tension between Adriazola's weekly
murals, permeated with propaganda against political and social injustice,
and Pancho's lack of compromise represents one of Julio's moral con-
flicts. Julio's attachment to his political experience in Chile hinders his
writing. But, ironically, when Gloria confronts him with his lack of
political commitment, he indirectly associates himself with Pancho's
perception of art and life: "No naci para heroe, ni siquiera para tener
raz6n, 10 que puede sefialarme como un ser limitado y comod6n, pero
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 211

que Ie voy a hacer: es 10 que soy. Despues de todo 10 que ha pasado, es

muy duro darse cuenta que me interesa mas la musica de piano del
romanticismo y las novelas de Laurence Sterne que tener razon en cual-
quier campo que sea" (p. 116). Julio's allusion to Sterne should not go
unnoticed, since that eighteenth-century author's art represents one of
the most important efforts to break with traditional literary codes.
Tristram Shandy is an overt exaltation of literariness and of self-
conscious fiction that has often been interpreted as a departure from a
contextual commitment.
Not by mere coincidence, one of Salvatierra's most discussed paintings
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in the novel is precisely the one that reproduces a deceptive reality: be-
tween the two symmetrical and barred windows of his apartment there is
a painting-of the same dimensions as the windows-that reproduces the
white curtains of the entire house. Pancho Salvatierra, through his paint-
ings, and, surprisingly, Gloria, through the text that "we" are reading,
are perceived by Julio and Nuria, respectively, as successful reconcilers
of the "dual" scheme of art and ethics. Gloria acknowledges: "Te
quiero explicar que yo, como persona, no es que no siga exaltada,
politicamente, y sobre todo en relaci6n a Chile. Haria cualquier cosa
para que la situaci6n cambiara en mi pais. Pero se que eso es ajeno a la
literatura, quiero decir, ajeno por 10 menos a mi literatura" (p. 262). Far
beyond this confession, what she actually does is closer to what Julio and
Nuria perceive than it is to her own statement. Gloria's achievement is
the incorporation of a political discourse through apparent rejection.
That is, her own text about Julio's failure as writer incorporates-through
storytelling-those same elements that contributed to his novel's unsuc-
cessful outcome. Although Gloria theoretically pretends to stay away
from nonliterary discourse, the reader is constantly exposed to the ideo-
logical developments of the protagonist creating, not a contradictory
level of expression, but a dynamic relationship between ethics and art.
Within a thematic context the ethical issue is frequently translated into
a deep sense of guilt, particularly expressed by Julio. Although he
forcefully condemns Bijou's immoral behavior, Julio commits similar
crimes. Directed by Bijou, Julio uses a "fixed" phone to call his mother
in Chile; he steals Salvatierra's painting the way Bijou stole one some-
time before, but with the additional burden that Julio falsifies the object
painted, selling it as Gloria's portrait. Directly or indirectly, the idea of
fraud is always present: fraud in the political development of Latin
America, in Julio and Gloria's marital relations, in the subtle allusions to
plagiarism, and even fraud on the part of the narrator-creator, inevitably
posing the question of the intrinsic falseness of literature.
But our interest goes beyond strict concern for a moralistic view of
 212 FALL 1987 SYMPOSIUM

ethics, to the multiple texts and subtexts unveiled and substituted, and
their demand to be read and deconstructed. The "reconciliation" of
ethics and aesthetics that the reader experiences both in Donoso's novel
and in Gloria's is not the result of a mere fusion but the claim of each
text to be (re)written and (re)read. The act of writing and reading
represents the literal and figurative space where the creative process is
conceived. But it is simultaneously the space that also generates its own
destruction. The reader's perception of Julio's guilty conscience is not so
much the recognition of the protagonist's incapacity to write a text that
accurately fuses the ethical/aesthetical dialectic, but the realization that
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Gloria's multiple levels of narration, of writing, and of reading incarnate

the ethical demands of a fictional enterprise; that is, to reread and
rewrite Donoso's and Gloria's £1 jardin de allado.
Paul de Man's discussion of the image of the fountain in Proust's A 10
Recherche du temps perdu suggests that the fountain-similar to the
garden in £1 jardin de allado-is not subject to the synthesis of the literal
and the figural senses (Allegories, p. 71):
The shimmering of the fountain then becomes a much .more dis-
turbing movement, a vibration between truth and error that keeps
the two readings from converging. The disjunction between the aes-
thetically responsive and the rhetorically aware reading, both
equally compelling, undoes the pseudo-synthesis of inside and out-
side, time and space, container and content, part and whole, mo-
tion and stasis, self and understanding; writer and reader, meta-
phor and metonymy, that the text has constructed. It functions like
an oxymoron, but since it signals a logical rather than a representa-
tional incompatibility, it is in fact an aporia. It designates the ir-
revocable occurrence of at least two mutually exclusive readings
and asserts the impossibility of a true understanding, on the level of
the figuration as well as of the themes. (72)
Beyond de Man's notion of unreadability, both the garden and the
novel(s) studied characterize the proliferation of texts and intratexts in
which to write, to read and to narrate about writing, reading, and nar-
rating become the story-telling and the story-told. To write and to read
the palimpsest is to rewrite and to reread £1 jardin de allado.

Michigan State University

1. We can see how Henry James explores a poetics of rereading through the image of
replotting the footprints that were "originally" traced. See The Art of the Novel: Critical
Prefaces by Henry James (1934), foreword R. W. B. Lewis, intro. Richard P. Blackmur
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984).
 PRISCILLA MELENDEZ 213

2. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: FiguralLanguage in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,

and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 4.
3. Jose Donoso, El jardin de al lado (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981), p. 29. All subse-
quent parenthetical page references are to this edition.
4. Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-facement," MLN 94 (1979), p. 919.
5. Another scene where there is an evident exchange and superimposition of texts takes
place at the house of a Peruvian movie producer. Julio and Katy are watching slides of the
jungle, which are part of an unsuccessful project for a film based on Vargas Llosa's La casa
verde. Katy diverts Julio's attention from the slides to her own story (confession) of the
political assassination of her lover: "A medida que avanzaba el relato de Katy sobreim-
puesto al relato del peruano, estas afectaciones se van perdiendo y Katy queda como
desnuda, comovida, haciendo un alegato apasionado, certero, en contra del estado policial
en que se ha convertido su pais" (p. 183). What we see in the end, through the slides of La
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cosa verde, are the footprints left by Katy's painful experience, rather than a fictional
recreation of another pseudopolitical endeavor.
6. Lucille Kerr, "Authority in Play: Jose Donoso's El jardin de al lado," Criticism 25
(1983), pp. 41-65.
7. In his "EI jardin de al lado: La escritura y el fracaso del exito," Revista
lberoamericana 49 (1983), pp. 249-67, Oscar Montero presents, among other things, an ex-
amination of the correlations between Donoso's Historia personal del "boom" (1972) and
EI jardin: "Se trata, en cierto modo, de ... una nueva versi6n de los hechos en la cual el
fracaso del escritor Julio Mendez, cuyos valores literarios recuerdan los del Donoso de
Historia, corresponde implicitamente al exito de Donoso segun otro modelo del quehacer
literario" (pp. 451-52).
8. The reader is constantly reminded of the contrast between the beauty of the garden(s),
Chile's political turbulence and Julio's internal storm as an exile. The images of the garden,
the jail and the novel are framed within one space that struggles to contain both the intra-
and extra-textual manuscripts that are being written and read.