Excerpts from an interview conducted in Uruguay by Alicia Torres and published by Gap, Uruguayan newspaper.
Jose Donoso, Chile 1924-1996.
(Alicia Torres) faintly disappointed, ironic and melancholic, José Donoso recognizes part of a dying breed: writers. While endlessly reread Tolstoy persists in the habit of creating stories, not because they intend to redeem the culture but simply because they bet their own salvation.
(Jose Donoso) My literary vocation has been fairly constant. Born of a great love for books, especially the novel. Explore the novel, always read it, be very there with her. I think at first it was a bet of ambition. Rather, at first, first, I was curious. Was asking myself how far reaching, what he could do. Then appears ambition, then turn over and are such things as the desire to free an important work. The virus of literature, if true, is as disease, you do not choose, but always trump your will. You know, I was never very conceptual at this. I think that literature is something indefinable, a body very ambiguous, and fearful of rationality. Somewhat strongly irrational, it has to do with imagination, sensitivity, with affection, with memory, but little to the right.
However, you stated in the presentation where elephants go to die, he did not believe that literature will last much longer. It literally said: "I have fear that culture fades, memory, literature ...". What are the threats?
Well, there is a crisis of humanism throughout the world. We are in the post-industrial era, science and technology. There is no assurance that it will disappear the literature, nor to stay, and that fit my guesses. The world is becoming less personal. What could be a "voice part, the result of personal experience, is becoming extinct, despite or precisely because the story is read by the individual, is subsumed in the subjective. So everything is relative. We live in the open, all schemes have fallen into disuse, although many believe they are all certainties now attempt to conquer other certainties, to demolish opinions. Of course there is something positive in this crisis. We are once again immersed in a sea of \u200b\u200bunanswered questions and that makes possible the way of imagination. So are valid assumptions.
then I would guess that for the disappearance of literature, writers should disappear first, and even before, the "virus" to which you referred.
I think so, that the writers are a race, a race that ends, or perhaps that no longer exists as such.
apocalyptic is your perception?
vision is a bit dark, I've always been a pessimist. But it still takes time, and meanwhile is more uncertainty. In periods of crisis like this, the tradition is the huge spider web that supports the operator on the existential void. We all rely on written works and to write our texts, especially when other uncertainties are staggering. Where this is staggering. Remembering TS Eliot: "The tradition is passed down through the breaks with her."
care much to stay?
Well, I've never believed in literary posterity, but I'd like to continue reading for some time after my death. I also know that not going to be. The public is very fickle, is forgetting everything. Fashion, taste, everything changes. Are other characters, the protagonists of the culture. We are also a time when much of the economic (the edition of the masses, for instance) defines culture.
What remains of that company that was the boom?
The boom is in a period in which the Latin American novel was like a kid in the mirror, touching to know. It was a single project, "Bolivarian", which could only be in another America, almost in another universe. This unit was made the boom, the constellation that explains many different ways, or not explained, it became something else and it's over. In a moment it seemed that we were all about the same, but eventually that was not true. That effort was not anything, or if four or five novels rescued master. But that was all.
What are these novels?
Hopscotch, Cortazar, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes, The Green House, Vargas Llosa One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez ... Onetti a novel. You know? I learned so much from the portals of my contemporaries, the other of the boom. I learned by example from the novel that portrays vast spaces: the city as a vast, Fuentes mode. I learned the meaning of magic, of wonder, with García Márquez. Cortazar's learned that there could be a great brotherhood of man. He was like me, far from land, as aliens and exiles them. Longed for a duet. I always felt to July in parallel. And so I learned from all of the group, although at that time had no sense of belonging to a group perceived as the audience. There were people that were frequently. Our wives were friends, our children played together, veraneábamos and spent much time together.
are still watching?
Yes, with almost everyone. But we're talking less than literature, and learn less from each other. In García Márquez has always been difficult to talk about literature, not like it. With Fuentes we love doing it.
How is the new Latin American novel?
Totally different, of course. There is no project, no know anyone (or almost), is fragmentary, it is completely dismantled. One of the characteristics of the people of the boom, was the transfer of borders. That coupled d people saw, felt, made them interested, read, knew what was written in other countries.
A global perspective on his work, we would briefly tell how it started and what is it?
could start talking about a realistic stage, revealing a little of what was the novel of that time in Chile, which reflected the Chilean society. Then came the era of boom, which was a period experimental, in which "a novel" was challenged, twisted, testing, and great novels were written and encyclopedic, but always mounted on a formal experiment. Finally a period of conformity, as a return to classical sources, but taking itself all that was learned along the way and all the ways in which one has passed.
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