A Lizard's Tale: Irony and immanent critique in Jose Donoso's "Lagartija sin cola"

Journal article

The years that have passed since the posthumous publication of José Donoso’s unfinished novel "Lagartija sin cola" (2007) allow us to assess the spectrum of critical responses to the work. Having been found among Donoso’s papers by his daughter, Pilar, during her research for a biography of her father, Lagartija was well received by critics and some expressed surprise that Donoso abandoned the novel. Commentators have focused on two of its aspects in particular. Firstly, sequences in the novel have contributed to the now widely-held perception of Donoso as a “closeted” homosexual writer (García Castro 2002, Náter 2006, Shaw 2009). Secondly, critics use the novel to demonstrate his shift from the confusion and contortions of his overtly “boom” or “new narrative” works, towards less spectacular, more approachable, but nonetheless equally subversive fictions within the “post-boom” (Swanson 2010).1

While both positions offer important insights into Donoso’s novel, they overlook the extent to which we are dealing with a nuanced and often ironic piece, in which the narrator cannot be simply read as a cipher for Donoso the man. However, the parallels between Armando Muñoz-Roa, the reclusive painter who narrates the novel from his Barcelona hideaway, and Donoso himself, undergoing one crisis or another during his Spanish exile, as well as contextual references, are revealing of the immanent critique Donoso carries out on his own position as a writer and his work in the novel. Intertextual and self-referential sequences must be read as more than simply a justification for Donoso’s own decisions. An unstinting analytical eye, refusing both the security of adherence to knowledge external to oneself and the kind of Archimedes point beloved of the commercial novel, is a distinctive feature of Donoso’s work, and what perhaps sets him apart from other writers of his generation.

Authors: Bollig, B

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Journal: Romance Studies
• Volume: 33
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 141-152
• Publication date: 2015-06-04
• DOI: 10.1179/0263990415Z.00000000094
• EISSN: 1745-8153
• ISSN: 0263-9904
• Keywords: autofiction; authorial identity in fiction; irony; commercial novel