[In the following interview, Dorfman discusses the themes and narrative voice of The Last Song of Manuel Sendero and Mascara.]

It is the dubious distinction of the 20th century to have created a vast literature of exile. The most compelling voices of our time are homeless, and modern fiction has been enriched by the passion of expatriate writers from cultures as diverse as those of Czechoslovakia, Colombia, Russia and Peru. Chilean author Ariel Dorfman gave near-definitive expression to the anguish of exile in The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, published here in 1987. In his new novel, Mascara, just published by Viking, he moves beyond the confines of that experience, exploring the fragmentation, despair and moral anarchy that inform even more settled lives, while retaining his commitment to the struggle for freedom and justice in his homeland and abroad.

Born in Argentina in 1942, the grandson of Jews who fled Eastern European pogroms, Dorfman and his family lived in the U.S. for 10 years before settling in Chile in 1954. As a supporter of Salvador Allende, he was forced into exile after a CIA-backed coup established General Augusto Pinochet as dictator in 1973. He now lives in Durham, N.C., where he is a professor at Duke University, although he spends much time in Chile; he was permitted to return in 1983 and hopes to settle there permanently someday. But his continued denunciations of the Pinochet regime make this unlikely: in August 1987 he was detained with his two sons for eight hours at the Santiago airport, then deported without explanation. Two weeks later, the ban was mysteriously lifted and he was again allowed to return.

When PW speaks with him in his home, he is about to make another trip to Chile, taking with him a group of TV spots by such celebrities as Christopher Reeve, Jane Fonda and Richard Dreyfuss, urging people to vote in the October plebiscite—which Pinochet expects will legitimize his rule, and which Dorfman hopes will reveal how deeply Chileans oppose it.

“We were given 15 minutes a day for the first time in 15 years,” he explains. “Clearly, 15 minutes a day does not compensate for 15 years of lies and brainwashing, but it's something. My whole theory of literature and communication is that if you're telling the truth, a token is important. I've written and lived like that my whole life. You have to be sure enough of yourself to say it's better to have 15 minutes than nothing, that with those 15 minutes you can do a lot.” [Editor's Note: Dorfman's cautious optimism seems to have been justified. As PW went to press, the Pinochet regime conceded that it had lost the plebiscite.]

This stance is far removed from the dark mood of Mascara, an unsettling allegory narrated by three troubled personalities. Principal among them is the protagonist whose terrifying monologue opens the novel: an unnamed man, cursed with a face no one can remember, who takes his revenge on society by capturing people's most intimate, shameful moments in photographs. This character leads the reader into a world of deception and betrayal, puzzles and masks, where image is everything and manipulation is the preferred path to domination.

Observing the tenderness with which Dorfman treats his wife and son, it's hard to believe this profoundly gentle man could possibly be acquainted with such dark passions. “I'm as surprised and stunned as anybody at these voices coming out of me,” he says. “It was not my intention to write this book. I can almost say that it was my intention since before I was born to write The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, because I felt it was in me as a primeval memory of the race. But this book scares me. I was possessed by this voice, it overwhelmed me. It said, ‘You must write, and you must write in this way.’ I'm not the sort of guy who sits down and plans what's going to happen in a novel. What I tend to do is have a voice, I let the voice go and I see where it's going to take me. Once you have the tone of voice, you must be true to that. If you aren't, the character will just savage you.

“I think that in some sense this book comes out of my 15 years of confrontation with evil. In all of my books, I'm obsessed with evil, with how it works, with how it's a part of our everyday landscape. In the U.S., the more evil you are, the more special effects you get—lights, horrors, cracking noises, all these things. I think evil is exactly the opposite of that. I think it's generally quiet, because the act of evil happens in the conscience. Some of my own experiences—of exile, torture, loss of identity, of not really controlling your own existence—are in this novel. That doesn't scare me, because that would be a comfortable explanation. What scares me is that somehow I feel the voice is deeper than that, and that it might be mine.”

Dorfman fought his natural tendency to look for a way to mitigate the horror of that voice. “I had to go to the last consequences of what it was telling me about humanity. In all my other books, because I think there is hope in the world, I put hope into the books. But in this book I decided that I'm not going to put hope into it that the readers aren't willing to put in themselves.

“The other thing I decided was that I was writing a novel that was not about Chile—I wanted very desperately to do that. You know, my life has been hostage to General Pinochet for all these years: he sneezes, and I turn over in bed! I keep on proclaiming my independence from him, he keeps on pulling at the leash, and I go, ‘Yes.’ Because the only way not to be a hostage would be to become indifferent. However, I was worried that everything I wrote was obsessed with him and the situation in Chile. I wanted to do something a bit more timeless.”

Mascara is Dorfman's first book without topical references, yet all his work has elements of fantasy and allegory. He feels it's an essential literary strategy for writers from totalitarian societies. “All this horror has a weight of reality, of immediacy, of urgency, which can be very dangerous to literature because you tend to feel that the only way is to be very realistic—in Spanish the word is minucioso, very minute in the details. You try to make a photograph, an exact replica of what happened, which of course is totally impossible. For a Latin American, writing in the late 20th century, you can't write as if you were Zola. We should have a Victor Hugo or an Emile Zola for what we're living, but you can't write that way anymore: we're living 19th century barbarism with 20th century esthetic tools.

“So for me the problem has been, how can I liberate myself from that material and not be overwhelmed by it? Absolute realism I think is a trap. As you can see in Manuel Sendero, I'm very anguished by that problem: that book had a crisis after the fourth chapter, when all of a sudden I said, ‘I have to bring in the real exiles.’ But just in case anybody thought that they were more real than the babies [the unborn children whose revolt is the mythic center of the novel], I put in footnotes to make sure that people understood these are forms of representation of reality, which may or may not correspond to the totality of reality. In my poems [collected in Last Waltz in Santiago], I was able to write directly about the disappeared, but I don't know if anybody would be able to stand a 300-page novel written with that intensity. I think if you read those 20 poems you've had enough for the rest of your life—I'd certainly had enough writing them! There's that need for distance, for placing things in a way in which I can deal with them.”

The artistic distance he has fought to achieve is one that Dorfman can never have in his personal life; like most activist writers, he feels the conflict between the demands of his work and his political commitments. “There's something in the back of your head saying, ‘Ariel, how could you be writing about voyeurs [in Mascara] when people are being killed?’ It's a legitimately moral stand, but it's not right and it's not going to solve my literary problem. I'm never going to put it behind me; there's going to be tension all my life between writing and more immediate political action. As I get surer about my writing, as I get clearer about the fact that it is deeply political in the sense that it asks very perturbing questions about our lives and this century, there's a sense that I'm doing what I should do. Now, as a citizen there are certain things that I also have to do; I use my influence where I can.”

A convinced populist, Dorfman is painfully aware of the people he hasn't reached. “I'm always challenged that there's an audience out there that may not understand anything I'm talking about. A lot of Latin American literature is informed by the existence of enormous masses of people who are creating culture every day, but who are excluded from the literary elite. Many of us are struggling with the fact that our literature comes from an old Spanish tradition, but it's also created by all these voices which come from real people and from popular culture. This is one of the central issues of my generation, and it ends up being a question of: Where is reality? How can you narrate a reality which has so many different fragments?

“A lot of my work is about division. I've spent a great part of my existence fighting to be whole, fighting to have some integrity, an identity which is not separate or fragmented. But I find that everything in my life tends towards that, even the fact that I'm bilingual. The world for me is very fractured. What's happened in the last year or so is that I'm beginning to enjoy this doubleness. These are the cards I've been dealt. I'm going to fight to be whole, but if I can't be, then I'm going to explore all this division.”

Paradoxically, Dorfman sees Mascara as his most unified book. “I avoided the temptation to let things take me away from the main structure. You might say that the whole history of 20th century Latin American literature is the search for some form of unity—you see it in Borges and Cortázar—and I don't feel apart from that search. I'm always looking for the unifying factor, the one voice through which I can tell the story, but I've never been able to quite pull it off. One of my problems has been that I always have one genre commenting on another; Manuel Sendero is an experiment in genres, in languages. In this book, I wanted to maintain a basic structural unity, and I think I managed it.”

It wasn't easy. Additional chapters kept presenting themselves, and his old nemesis wouldn't leave him alone. “General Pinochet was trying to get into this book. At one point, I was totally crazy, and I shouted at the computer, ‘You son-of-a-bitch, you're not going to get into this one!’ Just as he excluded me from the country for so many years, I excluded him from the novel! But I discovered that in fact I've probably written more about Pinochet in this novel than in all the others.

“What horrified me as I wrote this novel was the question: Has Pinochet come to dominate my world so much, have experiences been so terrible that this voice has finally been injected into me? Or a worse question: Did it come from before? Is it deeper? Is it part of this century? Is this what we have been forced to do to each other to survive? Because in one sense I know that Pinochet is evil, period—let's get rid of him, get him out of our lives. In another sense I know he is a product of a century that I am part of. The deeper question is: What if he is more than just a person, but part of a system, a cyclical sickness which reappears over and over again? If that's true, then there's something in us which we have to work on much harder. I see literature as part of that therapy of becoming more human.”