SOURCE: Meléndez, Priscilla. “Writing and Reading the Palimpsest: Donoso's El jardín de al lado.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 41, no. 3 (fall 1987): 200-13.

In the following essay, Meléndez discusses the multiple texts and subtexts of El jardín de al lado.

To introduce the concept of palimpsest in a technological and computerized era might be perceived as an unnecessary irony or as the sign of reliance on an already exhausted metaphor. But the proliferation of intertexts, both perceptible and veiled, in José Donoso's El jardín de al lado (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...