Coronation by José Donoso

First published:Coronación, 1957 (English translation, 1965)

Type of plot: Social realism/expressionism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Santiago de Chile and Valparaiso, Chile

Principal Characters:

• Andrés Abalos, the protagonist, a neurotic middled-aged, self-supporting bachelor who collects walking sticks as a hobby
• Misiá Elisa Grey de Abalos, a ninety-year-old demented widow who controls the lives of all around her
• Estela, a young servant at the Abalos household who cares primarily for Misiá Elisa; she is the object of both Andrés’s and Mario’s love
• Mario, Estela’s boyfriend, a delivery boy who strives to rise out of his social class
• Lourdes, a longtime servant of the Abalos family
• Rosario, a longtime cook of the Abalos family

The Novel

Most of the action of the novel takes place in the Abalos mansion, occupied by Misiá Elisa Grey de Abalos and her three women servants, and in the working-class neighborhoods where Mario, who loves the young servant Estela, struggles to maintain his human dignity. The Abalos house represents the enclosed space of repressed characters; the outside constitutes that space where they would find liberation. Coronation consists of three parts; the first, “The Gift,” introduces the characters who gather in the upper-class house to celebrate a birthday party. The guest of honor is Misiá Elisa, a demented lady in her nineties. Despite her old age and her confinement in bed, Misiá Elisa dominates all those who frequent the house, including Andrés, the orphaned grandson whom she and her husband reared. Still a bachelor in his fifties, Andrés lives comfortably on his inheritance and occupies his idle life by collecting fancy walking sticks and carrying on philosophical conversations with his lifelong friend Carlos Gross. Misiá Elisa also controls three women servants who live in the mansion: Estela, a young girl whose sole duty is to care for the aging lady; Rosario, who has cooked for the Abalos family for nearly half a century; and Lourdes, also an aging housekeeper.

The second section, “Absences,” follows the fates of Andrés and Mario, Estela’s boyfriend, as they both undergo a major crisis in their lives. Andrés is aroused from his complacency by the presence of Estela, the young, sensual servant just arrived from the country. Mario, the young delivery boy who aspired to lead an honest happy life with Estela, finds himself increasingly entangled in the world of his brother’s illicit yet unprofitable dealings. While Andrés becomes obsessed with his newly found sensuality and a preoccupation with death, Mario seeks to escape the fate of poverty and crime that now encircles him. Both men feel persecuted and trapped, Andrés by his grandmother, and Mario by Estela; the women seem to have joined forces under the banner of morality and religion to find shelter from abandonment and solitude. This section develops the characters and signals the eventual disintegration of the men. At the end of Coronation, the men find a questionable deliverance from their fate as Andrés loses his mind and Mario steals Estela and disappears in the streets of the dark city. If the house represented the stage where the men felt confined, the assumption of a new space triggers a radical change in personal definition.

Having opened with the preparations for Misiá Elisa’s birthday, the novel concludes with “The Coronation,” a celebration of her saint’s day. The guests never arrive; the house becomes a stage for the final phase of the already evident decay. In the final scene, the two old servants, now drunk and unmindful of the power that their mistress exerts upon them, crown Misiá Elisa in a grotesque pageantry that erases the boundaries between reality and fiction, decay seamlessly blending life into death. Donoso describes the downward moral path of the upper class by its decadence and the lower class by its degradation. Masters and servants coexist in the dilapidated old house, and both Andrés and Mario seek salvation through Estela, only to have their expectations crushed. By drawing a parallel between the two men, the novel goes beyond the issue of class conflict to evoke the universal quest for happiness. In José Donoso’s world, the moment when dreams fail marks the passage into another, less clearly defined form of existence. In Coronation, flight leads the characters into madness and the unknown.

The Characters

The characters in Coronation may be classified as those who experience inner anguish and undergo a significant change, and those who represent a prototype and serve to enhance the definition of the principal characters. The protagonist, Andrés Abalos, embodies the emasculated figure so prevalent in Donoso’s work, who, aware of his inability to exert power over his life, translates that lack into a search for existential meaning and the creation of a fictional world to alleviate his suffering. Andrés is driven by two obsessions, sexuality and death. He fears both because they constitute an unattainable escape. The rebirth of his dormant sensuality together with the overriding morbidity of his grandmother’s house drive him to seek refuge in his fantasy world of Omsk. Here he finds a faith in the harmony of life that he knows to be an impossibility for him. Unable to express his feelings or have them understood, Andrés escapes into a fulfilling madness.

The secondary characters of Mario and Misiá Elisa find justification in the novel as foils for the protagonist, Andrés. Like Andrés, Mario is oppressed by the social determinism that threatens to thwart his dreams. Mario, the Don Juan of his circle of friends, falls in love with Estela, only to find that the idyllic encounter leads to entrapment when she becomes pregnant and he loses his job. Mario acts on the desire that Andrés represses, yet he, too, finds reality unsatisfactory.

Misiá Elisa represents the past that is to become Andrés’s fate. Like Estela, she lives at the fringe of a world populated by men. In her demented old age, she enjoys the power over the domain that she lacked as a young woman. She existed as the wife to be pampered and photographed by her husband, but she never shared, nor wanted to share, his intimate life. Her obsessions are a perverted sexuality and a self-consciousness in her own morbidity. Andrés inherits her fate in a more self-conscious way, and for him she serves as a transmogrifying mirror.

The two old servants observe the residents of the decaying house; they record and predict the repetitions in the family history, themselves remaining unchanged, always attending to every need in the family, undisturbed by the struggles within Misiá Elisa and Andrés. In the final coronation scene, they are like the Furies, avenging the social crimes of an upper class that dehumanizes its servants. As they make a grotesque caricature of their mistress’s power by crowning her, they alone, of all the characters, are relatively untouched by the relentless forces of social determinism.

Critical Context

Coronation, Donoso’s first novel, was awarded the 1963 Faulkner Foundation Prize as best postwar Chilean novel. Two years later, it was published in English. This first work repeats some of the themes developed earlier in short stories, but most important, it foreshadows some of the author’s most marked obsessions. The metaphor of the boarded-up house to signify a world closing in on the character, which becomes a dominant force in El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970; The Obscene Bird of Night, 1973), already appears in Coronation as Andrés locks himself in the old mansion when he finds that Estela loves Mario. There is in this first novel great emphasis on the contrast between the outside and the inside of the house, representing internal, repressed forces and external possibilities for liberation, respectively. This play on internal/external spaces reappears in 1980 with La misteriosa desparición de la marquesita de Loria (1980). Similarly, the use of dramatically staged scenes such as that of the coronation at the end of the novel becomes the basic structuring model for Casa de campo (1978; A House in the Country, 1984).

The novel has been praised for its portrayal of the stratification of Chilean society and for its vivid incursion into a surrealistic world of dreams and the repressed unconscious. At a first reading, Coronation falls within the context of other novels written in Chile during the 1950’s and following the trend of social realism. Donoso departs from this trend, however, by creating a self-referential work in which the characters invent their own worlds. In Coronation, Donoso writes about himself when he writes about Andrés. This complex vision finds its fullest expression in Donoso’s masterpiece, The Obscene Bird of Night.

Bibliography

Finnegan, Pamela May. The Tension of Paradox: José Donoso’s “The Obscene Bird of Night” as Spiritual Exercises. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. Finnegan examines the novel as an expression of man’s estrangement from the world. The novel’s two alter-egos, Humberto/Mudito, perceive and receive stimuli, yet they regard the world differently, even though they are interdependent. In a series of chapters, Finnegan follows Donoso’s intricate treatment of this idea, showing how the world composes and discomposes itself. A difficult but rewarding study for advanced students. Includes a bibliography.

McMurray, George R. Authorizing Fictions: José Donoso’s “Casa De Campo.” London: Tamesis Books, 1992. Chapters on Donoso’s handling of voice and time, his narrative strategies (re-presenting characters), and his use of interior duplication and distortion. Includes a bibliography.

McMurray, George R. José Donoso. Boston: Twayne, 1979. An excellent introductory study, with chapters on Donoso’s biography, his short stories, The Obscene Bird of Night, and Sacred Families. Includes chronology, detailed notes, and annotated bibliography.

Magnarelli, Sharon. Understanding José Donoso. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. See especially chapter 1: “How to Read José Donoso.” Subsequent chapters cover his short stories and major novels. Includes a bibliography.

Mandri, Flora. José Donoso’s House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Chapters on all of Donoso’s major fiction, exploring his treatment of history and of place. Includes detailed notes and extensive bibliography.