SOURCE: Donoso, José, and Amalia Pereira. “Interview with José Donoso.” Latin American Literary Review 15, no. 30 (July-December 1987): 57-67.

[In the following interview, Donoso talks about such topics as his literary education, changes in his literary techniques, other Latin American writers, and his attitudes toward exile and toward the political situation in Chile.]

The following interview was conducted at [the home of José Donoso] in Santiago on August 4, 1986.

[Amalia Peroira]: Some of your earliest stories, such as “The Poisoned Pastries” and “The Blue Woman,” were written in English when you were a student at Princeton University. Being a very young man, how were you affected by this immersion in the North American intellectual and cultural world?

[José Donoso]: Well, for me it was really the English world that I became immersed in when I came to study at Princeton. I studied English literature, and I also did read some American literature; for one thing I was introduced to Henry James, for example. But I was most impressed with the sensation that “this was the real thing,” and that I was a part of it. I studied with great scholars, and I felt involved in the original thing; in contrast, in Chile my studies had always seemed like the shadow of all this. It was a very exciting time. …

Many important Chilean writers have spent long periods of their literary careers outside of Chile. (Neruda, Mistral, Huidobro, Donoso, for example). Do you think there are any common reasons or circumstances that impelled these writers to practice their profession abroad?

The most common reason, naturally, is the political reason. In the case of, for example, the English Romantics like Byron, Shelley, Keats, the reason, though not precisely political, had to do with the dissatisfaction with the social life and customs of the age, don't you think? In the case of Byron, especially, enamored as he was with the libertarian ideals of the epoch. Later on, in the Twenties, let's say, there was a sensation among writers of the need to go abroad; among the Latin Americans who went to Paris, for example, there were Huidobro and Rubén Darío. There was a need for a sense of perspective on their own countries. A need for a more cultured, more complicated world, a world more culturally complex.

Do you mean something similar to wanting to be immersed in “the real thing”?

I'm not sure if that's true in the case of Rubén Darío, for example, because he did not have that sensation that we had of living with copies. Modernism grabbed hold of him, the idea of modernism, after reading Verlaine and the other writers of that circle. He read them for the first time when he was here in Chile.

What constants do you see in Latin-American narrative, starting with the so-called literary “boom” up until today?

Well, quite a number of things. A grandiosity of concepts, in the first place, and a need to experiment. … These are novels about identification, about the exploration of identity: the problem is one of identity, a search for national identity and for personal identity is behind all of them.

In your book A Personal History of the “Boom”, you mention various Latin-American women writers as members of the literary boom of the 60's and 70's. Why haven't these writers reached the high level of recognition that some of the male writers have attained? (Beatriz Guido, Sara Gallardo, M. Aguirre)

Simply for socio-economic reasons, I would say. Most of these women have not been solvent enough to really practice writing as a profession; being married and having children must make it difficult.

Do you mean that the women writers don't receive the same editorial support?

No, they all have that. There is no one that I know of that does not have editorial support. But they themselves, the events of daily life swallow them. The women, I mean. In addition, they don't have the training, the habit of working as a writer. They are somewhat bourgeois, these women that I am talking about, they belong to the upper middle classes; and since most of the women of the upper classes do not have the habit of working, they never get beyond a certain point.

So writing is sort of a “pastime” for these women?

Right, an adornment, something ornamental. They themselves do not take themselves seriously.

What did you feel with the death of Borges?

Well, the disappearance of a friend, in the first place. I knew him rather well. And, well, what can one feel in the face of the death of a man who has more than completed his life? He had completed his life both in terms of age and in terms of his profession. Borges did not lack anything. He was a friend, and I felt the pain and sadness that comes with the disappearance of a friend, and the sadness at the disappearance of the most prophetic writer in Latin-American literature, to be sure.

You discovered Borges when you were quite young, didn't you?

Not so young. But Borges was totally unknown then. In my youth I read an Argentinian writer who was at that time much more famous than Borges, a contemporary of his, a writer called Eduardo Mallea. I adored Eduardo Mallea, really; I liked his books very much. I discovered Borges ten years later.

Today there are many people who say they know his work, but I don't know if they have really read his books, or they just know the name.

It is true, yes, Borges' name has an enormous magic.

You lived your childhood and adolescence in Chile. What influence do your memories of these first stages of your life have in your work?

They are very important. Let us say that it is like the great stewpot from which all the broths of my creation issue. The memories, the sorrows, the frustrations of that age, the joys—they are all materials which transformed, become the idiom of literature.

Did you keep a diary, or are these just remembrances?

No, just memories. My diary begins only in 1958.

You once commented in an interview: “My experience has been very limited by my emotions and my tastes.” What relation does this observation of yours have with one of the most characteristic traits of your work, the experimentation with masks and disguises, both real and symbolic?

Well, there you have a desire to broaden one's scope of action, one's scope of knowledge and vitality. One desires to live more lives, everyone desires to live more than one life. And so, these five-minute masks, which are, as you say, imaginary or real, are always symbols of the multiplication of lives, and consequently, of the multiplication of death.

The publication of Casa de Campo [A House in the Country] signified a new stage in the recognition of your work in the U.S. Now there are two principal points of reference for those that study your works: The Obscene Bird of the Night and A House in the Country. What developments have there been in your work between and including these two novels?

I see my work as something I am much more conscious of. At times The Obscene Bird of the Night was for me a way of becoming aware of the form of what I was doing. I do not mean that I was not conscious of the form that I was taking with my writing—this is already clear in A Place Without Boundaries mainly, and also in Este Domingo [This Sunday]. But most certainly, in The Obscene Bird of the Night, the form becomes part of the narrative itself. The form is the argument, let us say.

Something like in Ulysses?

Right. This coincides with the most intense moment in novelistic experimentation in Latin America. All of the writers of that time are experimenting with the form of the novel, and I include myself a bit in that.

Was that a conscious decision on your part?

Oh yes, by all means. Each one of us knew what we were doing. In the ten years that follow, between one novel and the next, there occurs a change of form, of aesthetic intentions in my writing, basically because what is so evident in The Obscene Bird of the Night no longer exists; that is, a sense of disquietude towards human existence with respect to the existence of the novel. In my earlier novels, these elements balance and unbalance themselves; they create and destroy, and then once again recreate themselves and each other. This process comes to its solution—I resolve it, let us say—in The Obscene Bird. Afterwards, my novels become much more even and level, “planar,” if you will, until A House in the Country, in which once again I reflect upon the form “Novel.”

The way in which you ponder this issue in A House in the Country differs from that in The Obscene Bird.

Yes, they do differ markedly; I would say that my approach to this problem in The Obscene Bird of the Night is a modernist approach, while the form this approach takes in A House in the Country is a post-modernist one.

You write a great deal about the Chilean upper middle class. And, as a Chilean professor once commented to me, you really drag them through the mud. (Laughter) Do you think that the people of the Chilean high society read your books, and if they do, what must they think of the ways in which you represent the bourgeois class?

I couldn't care less. (Laughter)

After living abroad for seventeen years, has your perception of Chile changed in the six years that you have been back?

Yes, it has changed a great deal. Before returning to Chile, I did not believe that we had the ability to degenerate as much as we have degenerated. We have fallen so low, and in a way so iniquitous, that I did not believe we were capable of it. No, I had never imagined such abject faculties as existing among the Chileans, such as I have seen now. Something like the betrayal of judicial power, for example, which is one thing the Chileans have done that I simply cannot grasp inside my head. I still have not been able to metabolize this.

Do you think that you or your writing have become “Chilenized” in some way after living here these past six years?

Yes, but I hope that my work has not become limited, that it has not been “Chilenized” in the sense of becoming limited. I hope that it has remained universal.

What was it like for you to collaborate with the theatre group ICTUS in the theatrical production that they did of your story, “Sueños de mala muerte” [“Dreams of a Bad Death”]?

It was one of the most marvelous experiences that I have had in this country. I think that writers in general lack the experience of working in a group, of having colleagues. Being a writer is a very solitary profession. Working with the theatre group was wonderful in the sense that I felt companionship, and in the sense that I always had a job to go to, with other people, and with continuous feedback. It was an excellent experience.

Have you given this experience as advice to other writers?

(Laughs) I do not think that solutions can be passed along; I think that solutions are totally personal, unique.

It is not usual for you to be referred to as a writer who utilizes folkloric concepts in your work. Nonetheless, a variety of popular and folkloric Chilean symbols can be found in your novels. What conception do you have, not necessarily as a writer, of the Chilean people and their folklore?

I know very little about Chilean folklore. I know it inasmuch as it was told to me by the servants in my house when I was a small boy. I do not know the Chilean commonfolk, almost. I am familiar with the upper middle class, with the intellectual class and with the servants' class. Therefore, my contact with the commonfolk has always been through the servants; the servants are the ones who related the folkloric stories to me. In general, the servants here are originally from the country, and they are brought to Santiago by their employers. These women were the ones who told me about these things. It has something to do with becoming emotionally close to them. The memories I have are very affectionate, very loving. These stories are surrounded by a world of affection for me.

Do you have memories of spending time in the country, of going to a summer house?

Yes, my family spent the summers in the country, near a place called Talca, where my family is from. We have had property there since the colonial period. Not that we still have it; it has been sold off through the years. But we did have land there, and that's where we would summer, in the houses of my uncles, of my grandparents.

Your novel A Place Without Boundaries, for example, contains many popular, or folkloric symbols, and also themes that have come to be regarded as typically Latin-American, such as the wealthy landowner, the exploitation of the peasant, the “machista” society. This demonstrates a profound understanding of the life of the popular classes.

Probably so, but it is an understanding absorbed through intuition, let us say … through intuition, through “flashes,” and not through actual experience. Through poetic transmittance, let us say, more than through information. I could not give you any statistics on Chilean country folk, for example.

What role does the writer, the intellectual, the artist play in today's Chilean society?

I suppose that the answer has to do with preserving some of the human qualities in a world that is purely a struggle for power. It has to do with preserving human qualities such as the faculty for understanding, and for measuring and balancing. The writer's role has to do with conserving pleasure, and knowledge for knowledge's sake.

How does the turbulence that Chile is now experiencing affect the process of writing?

It is impossible to write about anything else. We are all condemned to this. I cannot stand writing about it, but nonetheless I cannot write about anything else. I find myself so completely obsessed by this problem, that I have no other option. May it be damned! But what other option is there?

Can you tell me something about the novel you have just finished writing, La Desesperanza?

La Desesperanza is probably the most realistic of my novels, and the most Chilean. It is a novel that begins during the wake of Matilde Neruda, Pablo Neruda's wife, who died about a year ago. The second part of the novel is about a couple and an excursion they make throughout Santiago during the curfew hours, which ends up at Matilde's funeral. Everything occurs within eighteen hours, and, well, the novel has a sense of great urgency. The novel is significantly committed to the actual situation of the country. I both enjoyed and suffered very much writing it.

You taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop for two years in the late Sixties. Here in Santiago you have conducted a literary workshop for a number of years. How do these experiences compare?

Here in Chile my classes are very elemental; the students are not widely read, and they have little literary training. In contrast, in the U.S., writing students have made the separation between literature and real life, and they understand very well what they are doing. A literary professionalism exists there. Here that does not exist.

The number of publishing houses in Santiago has recently increased, and it seems that there is increased support for the new generation of Chilean writers. Writers such as Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita, for example, receive a fair amount of attention in the press. What is your impression of the new generation of Chilean writers and of the literary world in Chile today?

Well, I find it to be somewhat shabby, if you want the truth of the matter. And this is for one reason: basically because of economic problems. For example, the number of books of short stories that are published in Chile is immense. Thin little books of stories, about eighty pages long, of short little stories. This is certainly an economic problem; the problem is the dismantling of the actual society in Chile, in the sense that people do not have the time nor the money to be able to write something longer, broader. I do not mean that the short story is inferior as a literary form to the novel. But there is something more of a commitment to writing a novel, and that commitment cannot be assumed by writers because of economic reasons, because of a sense of social insecurity. Because of this I think that Chile will remain for a time a country of writers of short story books—fifty pages long, of poetry books thirty pages long, those that can be read in one sitting. It is very sad if one compares this to the very large number of novelists my age who were beginning to write a generation ago. There were really a great number of novelists, and they had an enormous impact on the country. In contrast, there is no one like that now.

Except for Isabel Allende, who must have a great influence on other Chilean writers.

No, not really, she has not become a very significant influence. The problem is that she was a momentary flash; she did not continue, although they say that she is writing something else now.

Who are the young writers that most interest you?

For me, the term “young” is such an ample one (laughs); for me, at sixty, almost everyone is young. There is an Argentine writer that I like, called Juan Carlos Martín; there is a Cuban writer I like called Reinaldo Arenas.

Are you familiar with the works of contemporary North American writers like Alice Walker and Raymond Carver?

Well, of Alice Walker I have read the same work that everyone else has read, The Color Purple. I read it a year and a half ago, and it impressed me very much. But it is not a style of writing that I like very much.

Another American writer that I like a great deal is John Edgar Wideman.

John! John! He was a student of mine!

John Edgar Wideman?

Yes, of course! In the Writer's Workshop. Is he very well-known now?

Well, he won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1985.

Oh, how wonderful! And for what novel?

A wonderful novel called Sent For You Yesterday.

Would you believe that my wife and I always wonder: what happened to John Wideman, has he stopped writing, has he fallen into obscurity? This news you've given me brings me great happiness. He was an intimate friend of ours, intimate, intimate. Adored personage! We have a series of photographs from the last time we were in the United States, of my daughter Pilar with his children. We were looking at them yesterday and wondering, What has happened to our friend John! We commented that, well, we had lost contact with him, like with so many others.

I almost did not mention him because I thought that you would not know his work.

Of course, but he was a personal friend. What wonderful news you have given me!

You have traveled a great deal as part of your profession. What are your sensations when you leave Chile?

To breathe, to breathe, to move, to rejuvenate myself. Chile is a country that ages one, that causes one to age. There exists a great deal of sadness in this moment; I hope that it is not always like this.

What do you miss when you are away from Chile?

Probably that which caused me to escape (laughs). It is a vicious circle, don't you think?

You mean that what you don't like about Chile is also a part of what you are?

Right, exactly. …

What do you miss when you are away from Latin America?

The language, of course, the language not only meaning Spanish, but also signifying a series of symbols that come into being through the participation within a culture. There are certain symbols that exist in Latin America that cannot be found outside of the Americas. There is a certain facility for expression, a certain joyousness, a certain ease that you find neither in the U.S. nor in Europe.

There is a significant number of writers, both from Latin America and from other parts of the world, that have been exiled or have self-exiled themselves from their countries for political reasons. What are your impressions of these writers and of the literature that proceeds from political exile?

Well, I think that it is quite necessary for this literature to exist. Political exile is one of the great themes of this generation. I think that it has performed quite brilliantly on various occasions. The elements of blame and nostalgia that are a part of the experience of exile have to make good material for a novel.

It is common for writers in exile to write about their countries even though they cannot return to them.

Sure, notice that all of the well-known novels of the “Boom” were written not in exile, but by writers working outside of their countries. One has only to realize that Mario Vargas Llosa wrote The City and the Dogs in Paris, that Cortázar wrote Hopscotch in Paris, that García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in Mexico; everyone wrote their novels abroad; it was a way of recovering one's birthplace, one's native land, from without.

Have you ever discussed why this was so with any of these writers you've mentioned?

No, no.

You will be going to the U.S. soon for a few months. What do you find attractive about living and writing in the U.S.?

I do not know if I am attracted to living and writing in the U.S.; I like the idea of being in the U.S. for a time. There is something invigorating about the U.S.; it is a country that is not totally obsessed by the political phenomenon; it is a country that enjoys freedom. A country that is obsessed by the political phenomenon is a country that does not enjoy freedom. And here in Chile we are obsessed by the political phenomenon.

So in the U.S. you feel that you can breathe more easily?

Right. I have a sense of freedom. Also, many more things are accessible in the U.S., things that are not accessible here in Chile.

What about the literary world in the U.S.; are you familiar with it?

I know something of the literary world in New York; I know Vonnegut, Sontag, Doctorow. I know John Irving, who was also a student of mine. Some of these people are good friends, but in general, I participate very little in the “literary” life. I don't know why, really; I have never been attracted to the “public” thing. The demands, the exigencies have always been distasteful to me. “To be a Personality!”: the Americans call it Personality! I can't stand it; I hate it!

You mean you consider it to be a façade?

Yes, it is so false!

“The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State”: this was the theme of the 1986 PEN Conference. What ideas does this theme provoke for you?

It is a very long and painful theme for one; imagine, writers do not have a place in the actual state of Chile. In Chile today we are peripheral to the system. And so, of course, all of this is horrible for me. We do not have the right to participate in public life. In the past it was quite to the contrary; one of the characteristics of the Latin-American writer was his tendency to become involved. It was expected of him to take part in public life; the South American writer has always been a tribune. Now this is no longer so, at least in this country in which I live. It seems that it is different in other countries; but here, this is what we have.

What are the greatest satisfactions of being a writer?

Well, it is always the most usual ones, the satisfactions are the most common ones, really: recognition, respect, admiration, money, and being able to earn a living doing what one has a vocation for.

That must bring you a great deal of satisfaction.

It is something very ordinary, if you will, a very modest satisfaction, but it is very fine, after all. The recognition is very good also. I think that one has a right to it. Things become different with age. The satisfactions change; one looks for other satisfactions, don't you think so, different from those one looked for as a young person?

How does one feel when this happens, when things change like this?

It is a part of the evolution of each person. I mean, people adapt to time, to exterior time and to interior time. I think that this is a part of it: it is a pretty phrase, at least! One goes through changes; there is no reason for one to be the same person always. I find myself to be a completely different person from what “I set out to be.”

What did you set out to be?

Oh, I set out to be violent, and a rebel, and scandalous. My evolution was, no, things did not turn out badly. … What's more, at my age, I can say that all of the objectives change.

Do you think that one gets to know oneself better with age?

Naturally, there is an important element, which is that one's opportunities get more and more limited; the world becomes more limited to a person of greater age. But it becomes limited in terms of breadth, not in terms of depth. That is to say, that which was ample, is transformed into something more profound. Therefore, one no longer has one thousand friends, you see, or calls thirty people, or is intimate with fifty people. One has two, three friends, but these friends are enough, and that is the change. I used to be quite gregarious, very, very gregarious. I knew all kinds of people. I am still very curious about people, but if you get down to it I am less gregarious. For example, this upcoming trip to the U.S. has me up to here; I don't have any desire to go. I will have to meet people, whom I don't know if I wish to meet. So you see, I am no longer so outgoing.

But that does not mean one loses interest in the people one already knows … ?

Not in the people one knows.

… or the people one loves. …

Or those that one loves, or even new people that one meets. One becomes more choosy, that's all. One wants to have time. … And have time more for oneself.

Do you think that you are more aware of time?

Very much so, very much so. How to use it; to use it and not to use it up. To inscribe oneself in time, and not allow it only to pass. To do things without urgency, to look for a harmony.

That's all. …

Is that all? Ah, well, it's very short.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. You are very welcome.