SOURCE: "Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Donoso's El jardin de al lado," in PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 1, January, 1991, pp. 60-70.

[In the following essay, Mouat discusses the "artistic crisis" presented in The Garden Next Door, which focuses on "a contradiction between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics." Mouat concludes that the novel successfully explores "the ground that separates politics from the autonomous work of art."]

José Donoso's El jardín de al lado [The Garden Next Door] dramatizes an artistic crisis that has ethical and political implications. The novel focuses on the contradiction between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in the context of political upheaval and on the attendant challenge to literary intellectuals to choose between representing their individual self-contained subjectivities and representing a collective subject repressed by dictatorship. This ethical choice, furthermore, must be made in a milieu alien to the modernist ethos, that of the literary marketplace promoted by the...