SOURCE: Donoso, José, Nivea Montenegro, and Enrico Mario Santi. “A Conversation with José Donoso.” New Novel Review/Nouveau roman 1, no. 2 (April 1994): 7-15.

[In the following interview, Donoso speaks about his life, the history of the “Boom” period, and aspects of postmodernism.]

[Nivia Montenegro]: José Donoso's distinguished writing career began in the 1950's when he published his first short stories in his native Chile, and since then he has piled success upon success, both in Latin America and in the rest of the world with his many novels, most of which have been translated into several languages. No serious reader or scholar of modern Latin American literature can afford not to know such Donoso classics as Coronation, Hell Has No Limits, The Obscene Bird of Night, Charleston and other Stories, State of Siege, The Garden Next Door, Taratuta, among others. A frequent visitor to the United States, Mr. Donoso is a graduate of Princeton University, has been a Writer-in-Residence at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently is a fellow at the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he is at work on another novel about which we hope he will talk to us today. What we have planned for this afternoon is simply a conversation with José Donoso on the general subject of the new Latin American novel, a subject he is most qualified to speak on. Not only is Mr. Donoso one of the outstanding protagonists of this important development in modern Latin American literature, but also is the author of The Boom in Spanish American literature, A Personal History. Joining us in our discussion will be CMC and Scripps College Visiting Professor Enrico Mario Santí.

[José Donoso]: Thank you very much. I feel very privileged to be here with you. Let me tell you that I have suggested this format, above all, because I am such a bad public speaker. I write a lot, but I talk less, in general, except in private. I do like to answer questions, and I can deal with that much better, than I can with a prolonged presentation. I would be very glad to answer your questions toward the end of this period. Meanwhile, we'll see how we can develop this with my two distinguished friends.

We just finished reading in class your novel The Garden Next Door. There are several questions that you explore there which I'd like to ask you about. One of them, I think, is that the novel concerns, in part, an ongoing struggle, between a husband and a wife, who also happen to be either writing or trying to write a book. As we gather towards the end of the novel, one character, Gloria, is, or seems to be, successful in publishing, while the other, Julio, the husband, gets his manuscript rejected. Would you care to elaborate about, perhaps, the relationship of the two characters, whom you mention in A Personal History of the Boom: the figure of the writer versus the figure of the author?

What can I say? The first thing I must say, of course, is that of all my novels it's the most autobiographical. I remember once when Russian television came to my house in Santiago and my wife came down to say hello, everybody said, “Ah, Gloria!” I don't really know how happy she was. But still, it is the story of a couple very much in a position such as the one my wife and I had together both in Spain, in several cities in Spain, and mainly in Sitges and in Madrid. The author and the novelist in this case are like two sides, two extremes, of a playing card. They complement and they value each other, they are one and the other, the same person. My wife was, before I met her, a painter who had had several reasonably successful shows in Buenos Aires and in other Latin American cities as well as in Egypt, in Cairo, where she lived as a young girl. When I met her, I told her, first of all, that I thought her painting stank, it was very bad, and that everybody was really making a fool of her by telling her she had a talent for painting, whereas I thought she had none. I also said that I thought that perhaps she could write, as she had been involved in writing articles for several magazines, and she clearly enjoyed literature, her intelligent enjoyment of literature in general. Then we got married. I told her that if she wanted to marry me she had to do two things: one was to learn how to drive a car because I never would, and the other one was to read Proust because if she hadn't read Proust we wouldn't have anything to talk about. She accomplished both things very well.

I met my wife in Buenos Aires, actually, as I was on the first leg of my trip on a voyage to all the countries of Latin America with my pockets full of letters of recommendation to the writers of all the whole continent signed by, especially, Pablo Neruda. Pablo and his wife went to my house the last night I was in Santiago to help me pack with my friends, I myself am very incapable in that sense, and they filled my pockets with letters. Eventually we lived in Mallorca, and in Barcelona where we met Carmen Balcells, who in the novel is the formidable Noria Monclús, and my wife started to want to write her own version of things. She has always been a woman of the world, a very worldly person, she has always gone to parties and met people in all sorts of places. Best of all, she's a great raconteur who tells a story much better than what I could ever hope to. Generally in conversation, in a group, when I want to tell an anecdote, I turn to her and say: “Please tell that story,” because I know that she knows how incapable I feel of facing a social audience.

And so, she arrived at the conclusion that she wanted, somehow, to sum up her life. She struck on this idea of dividing her life into a series of parties: three parties in Cairo, one party in Madrid, another party in Iowa City and another party in Paris, and so forth, lots of parties, giving an account of what the atmosphere at these different places was all about. I think she has great narrative talent and I've always told her that. She has always wanted to write a novel, to write a narrative piece, and there were times when I think that our vision of the world overlapped: I didn't know whether I was telling my story or I was telling hers. There was a confusion of identity at that point and I think it is this confusion, this interchangeability of identities, which I have lived through so many times with her, that makes The Garden Next Door work.

But funny enough, it wasn't the book that I had started out to write with that idea. What I did start to write about was our experience of being expatriates, of living in Madrid, of living in Sitges, of being poor, of undergoing several depressions, of being unsuccessful. This is something which is sort of inside the novel, it's the “innards” of the novel. And I think that, biographically at least, it is this interchangeability, this communal experience, this one experience shared, that happens to be the backbone of the novel, in reality. I started out by writing about this experience, but I didn't know how to end the novel. And I gave the novel to my editors without the ending, until I went through reading the galleys, which I returned, then they were sent back to me in the form of page proofs. It was only in the page proofs that I deleted all the end that I had in the other novel, and in about two or three days I wrote, in quite a frenzy, the end as you know it. So that is my experience of writing and of my interchangeability of being an author with the identity of my wife.

[Enrico Mario Santí]: I have another question concerning The Garden Next Door. It refers to that aspect of the novel that pokes fun at your other novelist friends and your novelist peers. People like Cortázar, García Márquez, and even a certain “Marcelo Chiriboga,” whose identity I hope you will reveal to us today. The question has to do with whether you think that the new Latin American novel, which of course, these novelists represent, along with you, has come to the point now where we can actually make fun of it? Do you happen to think that we should?

Oh, I think that it's important that we do make fun of them, more than anything else. I think that if one is not able to make fun of oneself, one is of little account. Some people have asked me whether I know if The Garden Next Door is in any way autobiographical, and how can it be autobiographical since the author in The Garden Next Door is an unsucessful writer while I have been a moderately successful one. My answer is always the same: that I think I nurse the incompetent and the failure in myself. I do not want to be too far from being a failure because I fear that if one loses sight of the possibility of failure in oneself, one tends to be a swollen-head lacking in irony. I think that this being able to face oneself as a failure is a help. I think that I poke fun at my writer friends, people who are writing in the same generation, because I fear that this experience of being a writer in that period was such a heady experience, such a glamorous experience it was. In a way, too, it was an experience of commonality. And I think it was dangerous, that this would go to our heads.

Well, does this mean that you are “Marcelo Chiriboga”?

No, but I'm going to be. Let me explain this to you. Right now I am in residence at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and I'm writing two books. One book is on the travels of Sir Richard Burton when Sir Richard went to Chile in the 1870's or so I think it was. He left us no account of that two-month trip, so I make up the elements of that voyage which is uncharted and undocumented. That is one project. Another project is a novel about an Iowa girl, plump and delightful and happy-go-lucky, who falls in love with a professor, who teaches the Boom in the Midwest. This professor happens to be a Chiribogista—a specialist in the literature of Chiriboga, which is something I make up in the novel. I also make up a body of criticism surrounding Chiriboga, so that he's an invention, he's a literary character which I will continue with in this novel that I'm writing.

You mentioned something about the experience of commonality in your living abroad and meeting other Latin American writers of your generation. In rereading your Personal History of the Boom, I remember how you explain a little bit what it meant for you to leave Chile at that time and to go to Mexico and to meet other writers who were doing exciting things at that moment. I thought that it must have been a good experience. It made me think of when I talked, for example, to contemporary Cuban writers, usually they have positive things to say about writers from other countries. But it's very hard to get them to comment positively on writers from within their own country. So perhaps going abroad, then, releases you from the provinciality and the pressures of competition, whatever that is. I wonder, too, what it meant, not only in personal terms but for your writing, to be away from Chile for a number of years.

One of the curious things is that I've always been extremely interested in painting. As an undergraduate at Princeton I took a course on the Northern Renaissance and the later painting in the north of Europe with a professor Dewald. At that time the Kunsthistorische Museum of Vienna sent a huge exhibition of its recently recovered treasures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. It included any number of precious materials, including a collection of painting, which I thought was very important. A few weeks after I arrived in the United States, I suddenly walked out into the hall of my dorm, and there, in the middle of the hall there was an easel, Vermeer's famous painting “The Artist in His Studio,” which I had collected reproductions of as a young man. But suddenly it was right on my doorstep, the absolute thing, the genuine thing. There's a feeling: leaving Chile, which is a very remote country, meant being in touch, or coming in touch with the originals of many things which I had not known until then, except by reproduction, in literature, and other areas. And so, when we finally came to Europe, or came to the United States and Europe, or went to Mexico and then the United States and then Europe, I met all these great figures I had only read about. I sat at a table with Alejo Carpentier, for instance, whose work I admired a great deal. Suddenly, the whole of this movement of literature became alive, as a possibility. There was a remoteness of anything except local reknown as a young man. Suddenly, it opened up, it was possible to write things that counted in the great world beyond. I think, probably, one of the experiences of being Chilean is the fact of its remoteness. The way that it is separated from everything else by the cordillera and the Pacific Ocean. It's a very very narrow strip, as you know, and thus narrowness is also part of our experience. An isolation, a being in one way unique, in another way very limited. And it's good to have the limits well defined, but it is also very constraining. And the fact of being Chilean, going abroad meant also the possibility of jumping over these great hurdles, something that I couldn't do but with the imagination.

I remember when I married—I married very late in life, when I was 36, my wife was a year younger—and we settled down in our first home together. I remembered that somebody gave me as a wedding present, a typewriter, and I set it down in the corridor, the verandah of our house. We had a dog, and María del Pilar sat for several drawings I made, and then one day, I said, “I'm going to start writing a novel.” And I said, I want to write a novel which is not like the novels of the other Latin American writers. I wanted to write a very Chilean novel, I wanted to write a novel which was very much our own, which defines us very much. I wanted to write a very simple, straightforward, parable of a novel. And that year I started writing The Obscene Bird of Night, which I finished eight years afterwards. It was neither thin nor simple, but rather complex and different. But in any case, it did mean this jumping of frontiers, done first of all through my desire of emulation of certain writers—Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, the first Vargas Llosa. These were, somehow, the models I wanted to reach, these were achievements that I envied and wanted very much, and this helped me in a way, to become a writer with a wider scope than merely the Chilean one.

Pepe, my class, too, has just finished reading The Garden Next Door, and I wonder if we could broach the subject of your technique in that particular novel and also in the other novel, or short novel, that has just recently been translated into English, Taratuta. Some critics and some reviewers have said that in both of these works, and in fact, what could be called the latest trend of your narrative, there is a turn toward what, for lack of a better term, we could call a “postmodern” turn. That is, if I may be so bold as to attempt to define it, there is a deliberate confusing of the telling and the told, bringing the reader into the writer's workshop. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what made you go in this direction, or if this is something deliberate in you. Is there some sort of a common spirit or common turn in a number of other novelists, let's say, and do you feel yourself as part of this trend in general?

Well, I think that it is true that in some ways the novel could be termed postmodern, or could be called what I assume is postmodern, which I'm not too clear about, as nobody very much is. But on another level, you must acknowledge that my novels, especially the last ones, on one level are postmodern and are involved with the confusion of the telling and the told, but on another level, they preserve a sort of sociological and, somehow, political meaning. This is, I think, why I never could hope to be termed “magical realist” at all. I could perhaps be a “critical realist,” or what have you. I mean, you choose the words. They all define and I try to escape these definitions. But surely there's a valuation of the social experience, I have tended lately to hack it up into pieces, and to give it in fragments, which is, again, a very postmodern thing. I did it, of course, before I ever knew anything about the postmodern. Not to say that I feel like a precursor or anything like that. But it's there, it was a necessity. Somehow, the body of a novel, let's say, of the novel of experimentation, such as my generation of writers wrote it, the novel of, let's say, Vargas Llosa, Conversation in the Cathedral, the novels by Onetti, or those by Fuentes, they allude, I think, to an already-made vocabulary of images. They were explorations into the European and American novel of experimentation. I mean, it was all of Faulkner again, in many ways in a different guise, a different Faulkner, but nevertheless many things had been taken from Faulkner, as they had been taken from Virginia Woolf or from, as Gabriel García Márquez recognizes in his own case, as a direct influence on him, of Orlando, of James, Joyce, and so forth. I mean, they had a vocabulary, a way of looking at things. But I think things broke up later on. In Carlos Fuentes, say, it was Terra nostra, for instance, where things don't cohere, and there is this strange feeling of bringing into his texts other texts. As there is, I think, in these two novels of mine the life of other texts also in it. This is something that I was fairly cautious of doing in these novels. The other day I saw a movie called “Rosenkrantz and Gilderstern Are Dead.” I don't know if you saw that movie: it's great. Somehow it reminded me of what I had been doing in Taratuta, in this seeing only fragments, of marking the impossibility of being a witness to the whole truth. The whole truth is not given to us, we see fragments of it, loose fragments of it. This is, I think, what Taratuta is. And we think we see one thing and we're seeing something else. We don't know who is seeing what, and where, and when. This is the play that goes on in Taratuta, and this, I think, is very definitely postmodern.

It's interesting that you are relating the whole question of a postmodern narrative, at one level, to a postmodern politics, on the other. Is what you're saying that in juxtaposing these two levels, just as we cannot have a complete story in the narrative, we cannot have a complete story in politics?

Oh, by all means. I mean, I mean, we have the story as fragments given to us by the media, as the discourse of politicians, as the poetry of Pablo Neruda. All different levels and different fragments of politics. But the overall theoretical and all-embracing truth is to be doubted, and our possibility of achieving that is to be very much in doubt at this point. I mean, something, this is, I think, in a way, an influence not only of politics itself but an influence of the media. I think the media is so important to our lives that it has transformed it. I mean, it has transformed our taste, our possibility of drawing things, of understanding, and everything else.

In, in reading your Personal History of the Boom, which came out I think '70, '71?

Yes.

—where you give a very personal and very detailed and informative view of what the Boom meant to somebody who was in it, as it was happening. I wonder how now, 20, 22 years later, it looks to you if you look back on it? For example, what has it meant, what do you think is perhaps, if any, its most important impact, contribution? Is it in literary terms or in commercial terms?

I think it's made a difference in one way. I think that for the generation of writers which, for lack of a better term, we call the Boom, and whose frontiers are very ill-defined, something happened. There was an army of classical writers to whom younger people could look up. I mean, it's extraordinary in Latin America at this point, very few people read anything beyond the Boom, except in very specialized classes. Seeing it in perspective, I think it's a partial perspective because I think another perspective will come which will put that perspective into perspective, speaking in postmodern terms. And I think that is important. But there is one, there's one stage, which is somehow being accomplished and to which the younger people in Latin America apply to. And I think the younger writers in our countries, not essentially the following generation, but the generation after, the one that follows, are either rebelling against or learning from—both being ways of learning—from this group of writers who have now become classics … or classics quote-unquote, of course.

Well, I was going to ask you to shift perspectives, and look at it from the perspective of the younger generation, because you talk in the book—but, I guess you already, in a way, did that—you talk about your “literary grandfathers” and about what that sort of ominous presence meant for you as a writer, and for the generation of weak literary fathers that followed. You as a young writer trying to, precisely, escape from those limits and constraints. I wonder, from the point of view of the younger writers, both in Chile and in other countries, what it has meant for them, this being a very positive experience, in the sense that Latin America has been put on the literary map, international map. I wonder also if you now are the ominous grandfather that they want to break away from.

I think probably in a way, yes. They want to break away from what we have done, if I may be so bold as to use “we” in a very broad sense. I think the younger generation, the young men and women writing now, though I must say that this generation in Latin America has not given very interesting women writers. For instance, comparing the literature of Buenos Aires, twenty, thirty years ago, the feminine literature of Buenos Aires compared to the feminine literature today was much greater and much stronger than now; incredibly so. But, how did I get involved in this?

I don't know, but you get out by yourself!

You sound very worried about this.

Well, it's all a question of the ending of, of The Garden Next Door.