THE BESIEGED ISLAND: SPECTRALITY AND WITCHCRAFT IN "LA DESESPERANZA" BY JOSÉ DONOSO

Abstract

The following work reevaluates José Donoso's La desesperanza (1986) in light of certain critical readings that have seen in it apparently irreconcilable processes, such as those of fiction and history, realism and phantasmagoria. Drawing on the figures of the specter and the sorcerer, and considering various theoretical approaches to each, such as those of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze, this work proposes a reading of the novel that examines the narrative operations that unite both figures. I propose that in this union, which is articulated as a question about spectrality, these poles or unreconciled processes are revealed instead as inseparable realities, both from what the novel—and the author—pose as their contemporaneity and from their poetics.