SOURCE: "Masking History in Donoso's Taratuta," Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, Vol. XVII, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 47-62.

[In the following excerpt, González explores the nature of what she finds to be the fictional and historical discourses that are juxtaposed in Donoso 's novella Taratuta.]

In his recent novella Taratuta (1990), José Donoso, as narrator, begins by making us aware of the need to question received versions of history:

Como tantas cosas relacionadas con el legado Schmidt, este párrafo está lleno de datos que parecen contradecir los que aportaban otros tratadistas . . . Walter favorece la hipótesis de la mala salud del joven industrial, probablemente tísico como varios miembros de su familia. Otro cronista habla de suicidio. Aseguran, también, que la herencia de Nicolás Schmidt se dividió en tres partes. ¿Cuál es la verdad? (11)

As made explicit by this quotation, history purports to arrive at a truth, yet falls into ambiguity and contradiction. Born out of the lack of resolution and consistency in history, Donoso's text examines the nature of both historical and fictional discourses.

Taratuta attempts to retrace the trajectory of the disappearance from Soviet historical records of a marginal character in Lenin's entourage with the pseudonym of Taratuta.¹ In order to effect this "disappearing act," the novella erases the traditional concepts of genealogy, textual authority, beginnings, and endings; it substitutes for them a randomly determined, collectively forged fictional account of history. All these textual strategies highlight the uses and abuses of historical and fictional conventions in order to challenge the cultural and political contexts of those discourses.

In narrative terms, Donoso's novella mirrors the historical character's disappearance by making historical discourse disappear at the same time that alternative fictional languages appear. For example, the descendant of Viktor Taratuta, Horacio Carlos, disappears from the narrator's life at the end of section two. Narrative voice shifts from the historical to the personal at the beginning of section three and suddenly Horacio Carlos reappears as if by magic. The reappearance of the "lost" character coincides with a shift from historical to literary discourse. Thus, within the fabric of the text there are two parallel discourses that are juxtaposed so as to parody each other. On the one hand is fiction; on the other is historical discourse which surfaces as quoted texts from three verifiable sources. The first, and most extensive of the three, is Gerard Walter's biography of Lenin as published in translation by Grijalbo. The quoted passage does not deal with Lenin, but with Nicolás Schmidt, a Russian millionaire, who died in prison and left a good part of his estate to the Bolshevik Revolution. The second is a fragment from the Memoirs of Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, which describes the social life of the Russian immigrants in Paris. The third comprises three fragments of letters by Lenin that speak of Taratuta, the Russian playboy who managed the Schmidt inheritance for the party; Charlie Chaplin, whose irony the Russian leader finds interesting; and the enigmatic smile of the Gioconda, whose meaning seems to escape Lenin. All three sources serve as comic relief in Lenin's letters, which deal mainly with the political foundation of "la plus grande des révolutions que le monde ait connues" (Walter, "Note Préliminaire").

The presence of historical sources within a fictional narrative problematizes the fictionality of that text. Further, since the narrator of the novella is José Donoso himself, are we reading an account of his intellectual curiosity? The narrator clearly distinguishes between this novella and an article he had supposedly published in Spanish and Latin American newspapers entitled "Lenin: Nota a pie de página" (12), a bibliographical search of which proved futile and underlines the basic deceit that characterizes the literary enterprise. "Taratuta," in short, makes a collage of discursive practices and so points to the fluidity of the fictional process. Conversely, by quoting passages that introduce Lenin's interest in extravagant figures like Taratuta and in forms of art that play with sarcasm and irony, Donoso exposes the ironic side of historical discourse and obscures the neat margins between history and fiction.

In addition to the actual quotations that appear in the novella, there are two reworkings of Walter's biography in sections VI-VIII (39-61) and in section XI (77-81). Compilation and summary of the existing data has been consciously transformed into a story because of the contradictory nature of the available record:

Después de años de ir recogiendo en ecos de textos las astillas dispersas y las versiones trizadas de la historia del legado Schmidt, resulta tan nebulosa, nunca referida de una manera completa por una sola autoridad sino por distintos exégetas y de maneras tan contradictorias y llenas de lagunas, que no puedo imaginarme cómo logré sintetizar las variantes ni a qué versión de los hechos recurrió mi memoria para improvisar, esa noche en El Viso, algo que puede haber sido más o menos semejante a esta narración. (39, my emphasis)

The narrative that we read is thus a creative improvisation on a faulty, contradictory record. Taratuta includes a written transcription of a dialogue between the narrator "José Donoso" and the Argentinian descendant of the Bolshevik Taratuta. Moreover, whenever the narrator assumes the "historical tone," which is markedly more serious than the rest of the novella, he always starts with the premise that he will be relating the Schmidt case, when in fact, the main concern of these particular sections is with the characters of Taratuta, the Bolshevik, and Taratuta, the red-haired Argentinian. There is a movement from Lenin to Schmidt, to Taratuta the Bolshevik, to Taratuta the Argentinian Jew.

The narrator assumes a critical tone whenever he exposes the shortcomings of the historical record. He too, however, sins through the same absentmindedness when he quickly digresses from Schmidt to Taratuta. Furthermore, Donoso is in essence repeating Walter's gesture, who, in his introduction to the biography, confesses to having failed to fill all the gaps left open by twenty years of faulty investigation on the Bolshevik leader:

Tâche immense, et qui dépasse de beaucoup les moyens dont dispose l'auteur du présent ouvrage. c'est pourquoi le lecteur ne sera pas surpris d'y constater maintes lacunes. On n'éprouve aucune gêne à l'avouer ici en toute franchise: ce livre est insuffisant sous bien des rapports. Mais, aussi, on n'a nul scrupule à déclarer qu'il est, en tout état de cause, moins mauvais que ceux qui, avant lui, avaient traité ce sujet. Et puis, et surtout, on tient à dire hautement que, de la premiére ligne à la dernière, il n'a eu qu'un seul, un constant, un obsédant souci: celui d'écouter la voix de la vérité historique. (Note Préliminaire)

But while Walter's concern is to arrive at the historical truth, Donoso's novelistic interest compels him to digress: "Confieso que no fueron las grandes marejadas de la historia ni el desfile de personajes señeros los que atraparon mi fantasía, sino hechos triviales, personajes secundarios, a veces no más que una alusión al pasar, una sombra, una nota a pie de página relacionada sólo tenuemente con los acontecimientos fundamentales" (9-10). If the purpose of history is to arrive at the truth, and that of fiction to digress, they nevertheless share the obsessive drive to fill in the gaps left by those texts that came before. Moreover, both types of discourse function because of their contradictory nature.

The quotation regarding the contradictory nature of the historical record brings us directly to the literary discourse that underlies the novella and its dialogues with history. This literary discourse is historical in nature as well, for it serves to reevaluate the ironic discourses of the Argentinian masters Borges, Cortázar and Bioy Casares. Although the novella actually refers to "Autopista del Sur" by Cortázar and Fotógrafo en La Plata by Bioy Casares, it is with Borges, who is never mentioned in the text, that the novella truly dialogues. From the outset, Taratuta sets up a very Borgesian set of relations between historical and fictional texts, the main difference being that in Borges' stories, historical references are in themselves fictional. In Borges' intertextual games, the ironic tone privileges fictional over historical discourse ("Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote"), whereas Donoso at least starts with "True" historical sources embedded in his text. This leads to the question: Is Donoso simply revisiting Borgesian postmodernist games, or is he juxtaposing them against the historical to redefine Latin American literature vis-à-vis contemporary social and political contexts?

Everything about the character of Taratuta smacks of Borges. First of all, the narrator secures knowledge of Lenin's biography through an acquaintance in Moscow. Having read Walter's biography, he corresponds with his friend, referring to specific paragraphs in the text that deal with Taratuta. As expected, the copy that the Russian friend holds does not include the paragraph in question ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"): "Quedé estupefacto con su respuesta: no sólo jamás había oído hablar del legado Schmidt, y para qué decir de Taratuta, sino que no encontró el párrafo de mi cita en su edición del Walter" (11). While Borges' games with a disappearing imaginary planet lead to a discussion of the nature of language, Donoso's gesture at the disappearance of a historical character serves to point to the presence of censorship in the Soviet Union: "Quedé descontento con mi versión del asunto del legado Schmidt, como si me hubiera aventurado a un ámbito extrañísimo cuya totalidad desconocía y que, por quedar bajo la tutela de guardianes con derecho a arrancar páginas y eliminar párrafos, nunca llegaría a conocer" (12). The reference to censors in such a circular way as "guardianes con derecho a arrancar páginas y eliminar párrafos" underlines the rhetorical devices to which writers must resort in order to evade them. Furthermore, the mention of censorship in the Soviet Union serves as a reminder that matters are not that much better in the Southern Cone. When the narrator travels to Buenos Aires for a book fair, he comments on the situation in Chile: "El distanciamiento por corto tiempo, pone en perspectiva tanto mis problemas personales, como las urgencias políticas y sociales de mi país, y constituye un respiro de la agobiante 'coyuntura' que tiende a ocupar todo nuestro horizonte" (71-72). The word "coyuntura," already set apart by quotation marks, refers to a censored situation that is very much on the minds of all his readers.

Like many of Borges' characters (e.g. the Asian spy in "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan"), Taratuta stands out because of his marginal aspect: "No lo dije en mi artículo para la Agencia Efe porque entonces no lo sabía, que Taratuta, además de su profesión de terrorista y de su nombre espectacular, poseía una melena y una barba colorada que lo debían hacer blanco fácil para las balas de la policía, que siempre logró evitar" (12). At the beginning of the novella, both Donoso and the Argentinian Taratuta are in the dark as to the character of the Russian ancestor. Moreover, both Taratuta (by wearing a wig to hide his red hair) and the narrator (by not including the information about the red hair in the article), practice the art of self-censorship in order to appear in the public eye.

That which is being hidden is the redness of the ancestor Taratuta, i.e. the fact that he was a Bolshevik. Also obscured, by the unclear genealogy of his name, is the fact that he was Jewish. In fact, there is a question as to the Jewish ancestry of the young Taratuta (Horacio Carlos), who is himself unsure of what he is: "Es discutible el origen judío de la familia: la ausencia de circuncisión en el caso del Taratuta porteño lo prueba, porque, ¿qué padre pudo ser tan atolondrado como para privar a su hijo de un simple rito de iniciación y así hacerlo miembro de su tribu?" (26). The young Taratuta, who was raised by his father alone and was therefore bereft of his Jewish matrilineage, was not circumcised, precisely to protect him. Taratuta's father is known to have disappeared in Buenos Aires during the period of the Dirty Wars. The young Taratuta, however, does not know on which side of the Wars his father fought (18). This complete lack of knowledge leaves Horacio Carlos with an insatiable desire to search for his lost origins. While living in Spain, he reads Donoso's article about the Soviet Taratuta and his voyage to self-identification begins.

Even though Horacio Carlos Taratuta grew up with the insecurity of an invented name, he chose to define himself as Jewish. Yet the fact that he was not circumcised robbed him of his full identity. When he was of school age, his classmates stripped him naked and performed a symbolic circumcision that left him covered with red ink. The red hair and the red ink entitled him to the "privilege" of discrimination: "Tiraron sus pantalones al canal, empolvaron su cara con tiza blanca del pizarrón, y derramaron un frasco de tinta roja sobre su sexo. Lo despacharon chorreando sangre apócrifa de una circuncisión apócrifa, al patio de los grandes, que cayeron en manada sobre él" (17). For Horacio Carlos, self-definition is tied to the writing process: chalk and ink initiate the young man into membership in the desired community. Moreover, it is due to Donoso's published mention of the name "Taratuta" that the Argentinian first becomes aware of his famous ancestor. Placed within a literary frame, the story of the Argentinian Jew follows a melodramatic agenda where a fledgling discovers his aristocratic ancestry and his fight for identity and recognition comes to an end. In melodrama there is an explicit movement from disguise to revelation.² Viktor Taratuta had chosen to assume an alias to define himself as a terrorist and protect his Jewish ancestry. Scholars disagree upon his original name: "¿De dónde sacó Walter la autoridad para afirmar que era Lodzinski el apellido de este personaje, y no Taratuta, ni Moskowsky, como aseguran otros, ni Kammerer, que fue el apellido que adoptó al retirarse finalmente a San Remo?" (11). The assumption of the name Taratuta, a name that cannot be associated with any particular nationality, even in a melting pot such as is Argentina, becomes for Horacio Carlos' father a mask that should have insured survival but did not. The orphan, eager to be related to a clan of some kind, identifies himself with those who, like him, historically bear the sign of the outcast. Like all well-kept family secrets, that sign is carried in the unconscious of all members, but is very visible as red hair to all those outside his circle. If the Jewishness is handed down matrilinearly, and Horacio Carlos did not know his mother, the alias, or the capacity to invent one's origins, is transmitted patrilinearly. Even before he knew of the existence of other Taratutas in the world, Horacio Carlos had already invented a name for himself: Tahoca ( Taratuta, Horario Carlos). For those who lack origins, self-definition is a function of naming oneself, a writing function.

When the true writer, Donoso, and Horacio Carlos, who is functionally illiterate, meet, the act of self-definition becomes a joint venture:

El papel de mago, de pronto, me apeteció: la arrogancia de un escritor puede hacerlo desafiar dragones y obrar prodigios, y la desorientación de este muchacho condenado a vivir una historia sin comienzo me conmovía . . . Desde las páginas expurgadas de la biografía de Lenin de Gerard Walter, una figura había venido postulándose como héroe, yo no sabía héroe de qué, pero esa figura avanzaba hacia nosotros desde antes que yo supiera de las ansiedades de Horacio Carlos. Ahora, sin embargo, con un destello de barbas y melena coloradas, la función de Viktor Taratuta se me aclaró: esta función, lo supe al fin, era la de acoger a Horacio Carlos y decirle: ¡ven! (38, my emphasis)

An arrogant narrator in search of a hero and a nameless outcast in search of an identity meet in the common ground of narrating origins.³ The implication that narrative life is very much like the real life of the Taratuta ancestry, a life without origins, brings us back to another very Borgesian concern which erases the boundaries between life and literature ("Borges y yo").⁴ From the very beginning of the novella, Donoso is concerned with the fact that Taratuta is more like a character than a person, and that, therefore, it will be difficult to write about him: "¿Cómo moverse entre esta gente y manejar estos seres con su aire de haber nacido calzados y barbados y con sus papeles ya asignados, de la mente de otro escritor?" (13). Is Donoso expressing a kind of anxiety about the fact that many of Borges' characters in Ficciones are battling with their Jewish origins during the height of the Nazi persecution?⁵ More than anxiety about the fact that Borges has said it all and much better, there is a desire to make the Borgesian connection on Donoso's part, so that his reader does not forget that the issue here is that of prejudice against and extermination of dissidents, this time those of Argentina during the Dirty Wars.

Just as Horacio Carlos could not forgive his father for having failed to circumcise him, Donoso, in this novella, berates his literary father for not having spoken out against the Military Junta in the seventies. Even though Borges, in his short stories and essays certainly did attack Nazi fascism in Europe and Argentina during the thirties and forties, he remained silent when faced with a similar situation in his late years.⁶ By establishing a literary dialogue with the deceased writer, Donoso corrects Borges' omission and offers a most Borgesian piece to uphold a writer's responsibility toward historical contexts.

Like the history that it is contesting, Donoso's Taratutafunctions under the sign of contradiction.⁷ The novella inscribes within it Borges' intertextual discourse in order to dismantle it and offer an alternative use to metafiction. Although, like Borges, Donoso is ultimately talking about the uses and misuses of literary language, the Chilean novelist consciously plays games of magical substitutions in order to inscribe them in a contemporary historical and social context. Up until the time of the arrival of Horacio Carlos in the text, the reader readily recognizes the parodic dialogue being established with Borges. Upon a first reading, Donoso's novella seems to be taking a step backwards and rehashing old metafictional concerns regarding the loss of power of the narrator and the primacy of fiction over history. After a careful analysis of the role that historical and fictional discourses play in Taratuta, however, it becomes evident that they are made to stand side by side in order to underline the limitations of both. Moreover, with the unexpected arrival of Taratuta's descendant on the scene, the novella rejects a purely bidimensional discourse (fiction vs. history) and welcomes a multiplicity of marginal languages into the fabric of the text:

La segunda circumstancia que después de un tiempo me llevó a involucrarme en la historia del legado Schmidt fue recibir una carta firmada por cierto Horacio Carlos Taratuta Roserman, con remitente en ESTUDIO PARAPSICOLOGICO TAHOCA, calle de la Escalinata 26, sobreático, Madrid (España). La carta casi se me cayó de las manos al leer el apellido del firmante. (15)

With this poorly handwritten letter, enter two marginal discourses, the epistolary and the parapsychological. It must be noted that, because the young Taratuta is barely literate, his letter does not fall into the nineteenth-century tradition of epistolary literature. Rather, it is reminiscent of other contemporary Latin American writers' use of popular genres (e.g. Manuel Puig in Boquitas pintadas) to defend vernacular language and undermine an elitist definition of the artistic. As a consequence of the unexpected letter in Donoso's text, the narrator loses his historian's aplomb. From this moment on, his narrative authority will cease to be singular in nature and will become contaminated with other unexpected voices.

With Horacio Carlos, the thrust of the narrative becomes a drive for self-definition, often propelled by melodramatic impulses: "The indulgence of strong emotionalism; . . . inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety" (Brooks 11-12). Up to his contact with Donoso's article in ABC, the young Taratuta had turned to the stars in search of his origins. Sections IV-X of the novella constitute Donoso's narration to Horacio Carlos regarding his investigations on Viktor Taratuta, which would inscribe the protagonist within a pseudo-aristocratic lineage. The narrator advises his reader, however, that the story was interrupted by the arrival of Zonga, Haracio Carlos' lover and practitioner of occult arts:

Quiero aclarar que esa noche en El Viso mi narración quedó trunca, no sólo porque es en su esencia fragmentaria, sin más comienzo que el sitio por donde parece posible abordarla, y sin otro final que una serie de conjeturas, sino porque Horacio Carlos desapareció a consecuencia del incidente con la Zonga. Así, Jamás he tenido la ocasión para contar el cuento completo. (40)

Besides being an exposition on the nature of fiction à la Borges, the novella that we read results from the fact that Donoso has not been able to complete an oral narration. Whenever a Taratuta intervenes in history or in a story, a melodramatic tone imposes itself: "Mi olfato de novelista percibió al leer el párrafo de Walter, que esta historia . . . era la maqueta de un folletín portentoso que yo apenas alcanzaba a entrever" (11). Although the expectations of the melodramatic plot are not realized for Horacio Carlos—he never achieves an aristocratic standing—the narrator succeeds in subverting the interest of the reader so that the subject Lenin becomes secondary to the destiny of a marginal character. At the heart of the melodramatic agenda lies an interest in the quotidian rather than the heroic (Brooks 15).

"Taratura" oscillates between the historically determined discourse of the narrator and the parapsychological interruptions of the character. Soon after Donoso's oral narration begins, Horacio Carlos cuts in so that he may become a participant in the making of his own past:

—¿Lo nombran en muchos libros?

—Sí . . . tuvo un papel un poco . . .

—¿En qué mes nació?

—No tengo idea.

—Seguro que en julio.

—¿Por qué?

—Debe haber sido Leo.

—¿Por qué?

—Por su don de mando. Los Leo son autoritarios y escalan posiciones de influencia. Por eso Viktor Taratuta llegó a ser un protagonista de la historia, como decía mi profesora . . . (42-43)

Viktor Taratuta was indeed a protagonist of history. According to Donoso, however, he was no more than a Don Juan; but, according to Horacio Carlos, he was "el financista de los bolcheviques" (45). Horacio Carlos' "purely accidental" participation has the effect of stealing the show from Lenin and Viktor Taratuta, so that they are marginalized in Donoso's narration. Horacio Carlos becomes not only its protagonist, but its creative participant as well: "Callé para no contestarle que me parecía embrollado además de poco probable su razonamiento para atribuirse el apellido, la tribu, y el origen. Tampoco quise discutirle las cualidades con que su fantasía adornaba a sus supuestos antepasados" (46). Donoso's silence allows for a much more entertaining, because less historical, narration. If we recall that the first circumstance for the engendering of the novella was an obsession with "la sonrisa de gato oriental de Lenin," we can surmise that Horacio Carlos not only stole the stage from his spectacular predecessor, but also from Lenin himself.

Horacio Carlos' intrusion is the result of a fortuitous meeting between character and narrator. It is true that Donoso writes an article and his character responds with a letter of inquiry. But when Donoso, in spite of his doubts, answers the letter to arrange a meeting in Madrid, where Horacio Carlos now lives, the letter is returned marked "Address unknown." When Donoso goes to Madrid in order to meet his literary agent, he accidentally ends up in the coffee shop where Horacio Carlos works. This "Accidental" encounter, however, is not quite so accidental. It is tied to the narrator's professional and personal life. He returns to the neighborhood that is coincidentally Horacio Carlos' in order to savor a pastry that had been a favorite of both his and his wife during their exile in Spain:

Cuando viví en aquel vecindario hace cerca de un cuarto de siglo, sobre todo en invierno antes de ponerme a trabajar, yo hacía rápidas excursiones matinales a comprar esas pastas tiernas para nuestro desayuno porque a mi mujer 1e encantaban. Cuando vuelvo a Madrid me las arreglo para pasar por esa calle con el propósito de probar una ensaimada perfecta. (21)

Because the taste for pastries is conveniently tied to his personal and professional life, it cues the reader to the connection with Proust, a writer to whom Donoso has confessed a great indebtedness.⁸ If Proust uses the famous madeleine to trigger the rescue of a lost memory, Donoso uses the search for his "ensaimada" to usher in a collaborative type of narration.

The second meeting with Horacio Carlos is, likewise, tied to literary pursuits. Two years after the Madrid encounter, Donoso goes to Buenos Aires for a book fair, takes a walk through Palermo talking with an old friend, Josefina Delgado, and they eventually end up in a coffee shop called Yelisavetgrad, named after the originating town of the Taratutas and owned by Horacio Carlos and Zonga. The novella closes with a dialogue between Donoso and "Pepita" (the feminine of Pepe, Donoso's nickname) with the latter constantly challenging Donoso's narrative authority regarding the Taratuta story. This succession of café scenes that underline the collaborative nature of Taratuta,also establishes a link between the fictional and the historical. Krupskaya's quoted passage concerns Taratuta's love for the political gatherings at Parisian coffee houses: "Nuestra gente se pasaba el tiempo sentada en los cafés hasta muy tarde por la noche. Taratuta era un gran aficionado a la vida de café y poco a poco los demás rusos que iban llegando fueron adquiriendo sus mismos hábitos" (49). The gathering of political circles in cafés is, of course, not that different from that of literary circles. The narrator's insistence on that fact erases the boundaries between historical and fictional discourses.

Donoso's narrative had begun by attempting to rescue history from its insufficiency at arriving at the truth, and ends with a dialogue that discovers the forgotten characters of that history; characters that appear incognito due to the historical persistence of censorship and oppression in Latin American countries. Because of this political reality, Horacio Carlos' discovery of his origins has resulted in the scarring of his face and in the wearing of a wig in order to conceal his true nature. Having returned to Argentina to reassume his marginal nationality, the immigrant Jew resides in a country that is marginal to the European center, where his ancestors helped forge a revolution. Horacio Carlos and his friend Zonga end up as owners of a coffee shop in a lost neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The wigs they wear make it difficult to be recognized. When Donoso and Pepita, who sit to have a drink at the end of their walk, suggest that their waiter might be Horacio Carlos Taratuta, he recoils, and joins the company of Zonga, the person who had been his center up to the writer's arrival into his life: "La Zonga era la única persona que conocía con la que realmente tuvo una relación y por esto constituía para él un centro" (88).

Horacio Carlos' center is in itself a caricature of a television character. In fact, when the narrator first meets Zonga, he sees her through a window, and the transformations of dress she undergoes (from Morticia to a small town school teacher) are seen as if on a silent television screen:

A poco más de un metro de distancia, al otro lado de los cristales velados por el visillo de encaje, la vi tropezar con todo . . . Una imagen olvidada de la "Trivia" de mi adolescencia se interpuso para hacerme entender cual (sic) era la matriz, tal vez inconsciente, que la subyugaba: La Zonga se creía Morticia, de Charles Addams, imagen de lo cómicamente sepulcral . . . Horacio Carlos 1e estaba gritando algo que el vidrio me impidió oír . . . (65-67)

After losing track of both characters, Donoso confesses that the transforming Zonga was another version of a recurring character in his works: "reconozco en este personaje residuos de otros personajes míos" (71).

More importantly, this character, a symbol of the humorously sepulchral, appears on a silent screen, and functions very much like Charlie Chaplin, whose humorous black and white figure served to bring to millions a whimsical, yet mordant criticism of the fascist figures of Hitler and Mussolini in "The Great Dictator." Horacio Carlos' disoriented character makes him the butt of jokes (e.g. the scene in the Madrid coffee shop where someone trips him when he's holding a tray full of dishes) and mirrors the countless abused outsiders that Charlie Chaplin played during his long career. Donoso quotes one of Lenin's letters regarding Chaplin: "Expresa una actitud escéptica o satírica hacia lo convencional, e intenta dar vuelta al revés todo lo que comunmente (sic) es aceptado, desfigurándolo con el fin de demonstrar la ausencia de lógica en nuestros hábitos diarios. ¡Complicado pero interesante!" (53). Lenin's description of Chaplin's aesthetics is indeed a description of Donoso's own novelistic enterprise. The distancing effect that he practices with the interposing silent screen, the use of historical quotation to describe his own creative process, the transformation of character as symbolized by the assumption of a particular dress, and a prevailing interest in the grotesque, are but a few of the novelistic effects that Donoso has practiced throughout his career. These techniques have the explicit purpose of showing an absence of logic in human behavior and, in this novella's case, specifically of political oppression in Argentina. In Taratuta, this appeal to the humorously grotesque so commonly found in mass media serves to honor a creative genius such as Chaplin, who risked his career to convey a political message to the masses. As a novelist, Donoso is keenly aware of the limitations of his scope and, in effect, is afraid that his intervention may have done little to change his character's destiny. His friend Pepita tells him: "Estás partiendo del supuesto de que tus palabras, esa trade en El Viso, lo conmovieron tan a fondo, que 1e cambiaron el destino" (89). Donoso is clearly conscious that his extemporaneous contact with Horacio Carlos may have done little to rescue the character from his nameless existence, but his novella does rescue an historical period that was forgotten by Borges. With Taratuta, the Chilean novelist performs an ironic inversion of a Borgesian form in order to expose the historical context left silent in the woeks of the Argentinian writer from the seventies on.

The function of the collaborative effort between Donoso and his friend Pepita is to deflate the image of the omniscient narrator. Throughout the novella, the interventions of Horacio Carlos and those of Donoso's commonsensical female interlocutor confront the authorial figure and point to the provisionality of his enterprise: "Claro que lo que te conté no es verdad. ¿No te das cuenta que lo que acabo de contar no es más que un borrador . . . Tengo que limpiarlo, hacerlo coherente, verosímil, elegir, eliminar, desarrollar, y por fin escribir dos, tres, cuatro, siete versiones hasta que quede un elemento esencial de este relato" (90). The essence of Borges' fiction, as described and parodied by Donoso, is its metalinguistic, self-referential nature. Taratuta constantly returns to the narrator's preoccupation with his own task. This preoccupation is constantly subverted by the interventions of Horacio Carlos, Zonga, and finally Pepita, who with their direct, more popular interpretation of the historical events at hand, bring the narrator's exaggerated self-importance down to earth. Donoso has, in effect, done a masterful job in replicating Borges' ironic tone, but has managed to subvert it by contaminating the text with the language of the so-called extra-literary: parapsychology, television and film media.

In order to drive home the fact that his novella attempts to go beyond Borges, Donoso makes a habit of postponing the end. Taratuta tries to end on page 68 but, after several tries, does not succeed until page 91. In effect, it almost becomes a game when Pepita repeatedly assumes that his friend's narration is now complete, yet Donoso keeps offering other possible conclusions. This game pokes fun at Borges' implicit postponement of the ending in stories such as "La muerte y la brújula," "El milagro secreto," and "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan." In all of these, the protagonist's death is postponed so that his dramatic story can be told. In all of them, the death of the character neatly coincides with the death of the narrative. In Donoso's Taratuta, that is not the case. Not only does Horacio Carlos not die, his life story lacks any dramatic interest and rests, rather, on the quotidian horror of silent repression. The essential element that is to surface in Donoso's novella comes at the end. Pepita and the narrator are about to leave after concluding that the couple they suspect to be Horacio Carlos and Zonga cannot possibly be them. At that moment, they notice the name of the coffee shop. It is Yelisavetgrad, the place of origin for all the Taratutas:

Corrimos a tomar un taxi que pasó por la otra esquina. Le di la dirección de Pepita para pasar a dejarla. Cuando partimos en dirección contraria a la dirección hacia donde se fue la Citroneta, Pepita me preguntó:

—¿Tú crees que importan . . . ?

-¿Qué?

—Los nombres. Yelisavetgrad, por ejemplo.

—Sí. Mucho. En muchos sentidos. (91)

What is in a name? It was originally the outlandish name of Taratura that propelled Donoso to pursue the story: "Debo confesar que para mí, llamar esta historia LODZINSKI o MOSKOVSKY, no TARATUTA, le quitaría gran parte de su encanto. Incluso dudo si hubiera emprendido la tarea de escribirla" (39). In this novella, the narrator bears the name of José Donoso, a gesture which both repeats and subverts Borges' own definition as a writer in "Borges y yo." The name Yelisavetgrad, which at first he could not find on a map because under the Stalinist regime it has been changed, supplies for the protagonist the grounding which he sought all his life. For both Horacio Carlos and Donoso, this novella deals with issues of genealogy in and out of literature. In Donoso's narrative, the name Yelisavetgrad, which was conveniently erased for political reasons, points a finger back at censorship, that hegemonic activity of eradicating names and paragraphs from the face of the earth and from history.

The reinstatement of those names, however forgotten, has become the essential element in Donoso's fiction since his writing of Casa de campo. With El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), the Chilean writer joined other Latin American Boom writers in divorcing language from immediate social, political and historical contexts. In the sixties and early seventies these novels became playgrounds for multiple linguistic manifestations, each always denying the other's claims of definitive authority. But faced with the task of responding to Chile's political tragedy in the seventies and eighties, Donoso wrote three novels that seriously reconsider the role that language plays in his artistic production. With Casa de campo (1978), his work takes a tentative step toward a narrative voice clearly conscious of historical transformations (the fall of Allende and the rise of Pinochet). From this allegorical work, Donoso goes on to examine the role of the politically committed artist in El jardín de al lado (1981) and La desesperanza (1986). In these three novels, by depicting political and personal transformations, Donoso's narrative has shifted from personal to collective concerns. Each novel is now always mindful of the fact that in times of severe oppression and censorship, art becomes the vessel for historical memory. With Taratuta, Donoso has opted to outline consciously a poetics of contemporary Latin American literature in an effort to go beyond gratuitous metalinguistic games. Furthermore, its surprisingly serious ending reminds the reader that words do indeed have significant meanings and that literature, and specifically Latin American literature since the seventies, is firmly grounded in a political and historical context that cannot be ignored (a prime example is Gabriel García Márquez's La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, [1986]). Donoso, like his contemporaries, forges a literature that communicates human concerns in the face of censorship.

To counteract the seriousness of the historical context, Taratuta refers to Charlie Chaplin's humor, to Zonga's "sepulchral smile," and to "La Gioconda." The fact that Donoso quotes Lenin as not understanding Gioconda's meaning, presumably that of her smile (53), serves to juxtapose the seriousness of history with that of the multiple enigmatic smiles of literature's face. The perplexing nature of that smile points to a literary tradition of irony in Latin America that hovers above the unresolved contradiction between the discourses of fiction and history. Much contemporary Latin American fiction continues to express that contradiction between truth and deceit, but also expands its scope to encompass the voice of the marginalized. Marginal figures such as Horacio Carlos and Zonga may lack the "literacy" to pursue all the hermeneutic leads in Taratuta, but are capable of tapping into the language of mass culture in order to forge their destinies. Donoso's audience for a novella such as Taratuta is clearly the literary sophisticate; his message addresses the state of present Latin American literary history. He points to a canon that has transformed itself to go beyond the Borgesian poetics of literary self-consciousness, to encompass the languages of melodrama, oral tradition and mass communication. He goes beyond metafiction by contextualizing it in history: in social, political and literary terms.

Notes

¹ The young, Russian industrialist Schmidt dies in jail and leaves his fortune to the Bolshevik Revolution. He is survived by two sisters whose husbands must also donate their share of the inheritance. One of the two sisters is involved with the anarchist Taratuta at the time of her brother's death and he becomes the financial manager for the Bolsheviks.

² In his book defining the melodramatic imagination, Peter Brooks describes the plot trajectory of melodrama thus: "Yet, typically, the first exchanges of the play, or even the title . . . suggests mysteries or ambiguities hovering over the world, enigmas unresolved. And there swiftly supervenes a threat to virtue, a situation—and most often a person—to cast its very survival into question, obscure its identity, and elicit the process of its fight for recognition" (29). In Donoso's novella this fight for recognition gets played out at the level of characterization, and as we shall see later in this essay, at the discursive level as well.

³ At this time I should remind the reader that in Borges' "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" there is a similar encounter between a British researcher of Asian literature who spent his life in the study of one novel, and the descendent of that Asian writer, who before his untimely death comes to understand the significance of being an Asian spying for Nazi Germany.

⁴ With the exception of "Borges y yo," which appears in Antología personal, and "Deutsches Requiem" in El Aleph, the remainder of the stories mentioned in this essay are found in Ficciones.

⁵ See "El Milagro Secreto" and "Deutsches Requiem" for the two most obvious parallels. For the definition of literary anxiety of influence see Harold Bloom's book of the same title.

⁶ For anti-fascist essays by Borges see Borges: A Reader, particularly "A Comment on August 23, 1944" (153-54), "Portrait of the Germanophile" (127-29), and "I, A Jew," (64-65). This last short essay could have been a point of departure for Donoso's novella since in the essay Borges declares his dismay at not being able to find his own Jewish ancestry. Both Borges and Horacio Carlos Taratuta wish to be Jewish and go about defining that identification through a genealogical search. In his article "Borges and Politics," Emir Rodríguez Monegal gives a detailed description of Borges' political involvement through writing in and out of Argentina and starting with World War I. The critic's defense of Borges counteracts the Argentinian writer's unfortunate political support of Franco and Pinochet at a time when he had essentially disengaged from the world of politics due mainly to his increasing blindness and advanced age. Rodríguez Monegal concludes that there is ample evidence of Borges' more progressive ideology in his writings, and points out that critics should not rely on opinion to judge a man's oeuvre: "That is, it would all be acceptable if Borges' critics, so visibly militant on the left of the political spectrum, would actually study the ideology of his texts instead of just adding solemn glosses to his casual opinions. They would find not only that Borges has written more about politics than is usually believed, but that his whole oeuvre has a political ideology" (69). Although Taratuta is clearly a homage to the Borges that Emir Rodríguez Monegal describes in this article, especially that Borges who rose against the Nazis in the thirties and forties, the novella celebrates a literary practice which manages to transcend an immediate present (Pinochet's Chile and the Military Junta's Argentina), though without neglecting it. Donoso's solution in fact follows Borges' prescription in stories such as "Deutsches Requiem," but actually transcends it by presenting political issues through multiple forms of expression, including history, dialogue, and the language of the mass media, so as to expose fully the complexity of both literary expression during the eighties and nineties and the political contexts it exposes.

⁷ In her book on the poetics of postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon posits contradiction as being at the crux of contemporary art: "While all forms of contemporary art and thought offer examples of this kind of postmodernist contradiction, this book (like most others on the subject) will be privileging the novel genre, and one form in particular, a form that I want to call 'historiographic metafiction.' By this I mean those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages" (5).

⁸ Donoso, Historia personal del Boom: "Mis abundantes lecturas de novelas de todas partes, mi estudio con cierta porfundidad de autores como Henry James . . . Marcel Proust, Faulkner, me aportaron entusiasmo y cierta medida de sabiduría técnica, de teoría; pero siempre ejercieron una influencia a nivel de conocimiento, no irrumpieron en mi mundo, hermanándose conmigo para que al competir con ellas tratara de emularlas" (43). See also "El tiempo perdido," a novella published in Cuatro para Delfina, which is a bittersweet rendering of the Proustian theme (149-209).

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1957.

——. Antología personal. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sur, 1966.

——. Borges: A Reader: A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Eds. Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981.

——. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1956.

Donoso, José. Cuatro para Delfina. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1982.

——. Historia personal del Boom. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983.

——. Taratuta/Naturaleza muerta con cachimba. Madrid: Mondadori, 1990.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.

Rodriguez Monegal, Emir. "Borges and Politics." Diacritics 8.4 (1978): 55-69.

Walter, Gerald. Lénine. Paris: René Juillard, 1950.