JOSE DONOSO
27
Christ:
Getting back to English literature, I want to ask if Don
Andres in
Coronation
is a character out ofJames's
The Ambassadors.
Isn't the old woman, Misia Grey, directly descended from Miss
Havisham in Dickens's
Great Expectations?
Donoso:
Yes, but funnily enough you have two elements which I
think one has to combine and look at. Definitely there was an in–
heritance from Miss Havisham. Just as certainly there was an in–
heritance from Juliana in
The Aspem Papers .
There's that same
character then . But this lady, who is so literary, is in fact a por–
trait of my grandmother. You see, Miss Havisham was a member
of my family! So much so that my family cut me off completely
after I published this book because they thought it was a very bad
show on my part : I had used my own grandmother. It's a portrait
of her, which they said everybody would recognize . . . and hav–
ing said such horrible things about her! So, in a way , my life re–
sponded to the literary . It was a question of how did literature
happen in me, say, when I found the counterpart of literature in
my own life. It was
absolutely
that. Suddenly, I found that my own
home, because of my reading and because of the things that I
liked, the home I lived in, my past had a correspondence with cer–
tain things that I need in literature and would, in a way, elicit.
Christ:
So all that "influence" means in your case is that literature
made available to you your own subject matter : your own life .
Donoso:
Absolutely .
Christ:
Borges once wrote to the effect that for many years he be–
lieved that he grew up in a garden but then found out that he had
grown up in his father's library. Is that description appropriate to
you too?
Donoso:
It's a good similarity, but in a way I'm slightly different.
When I first read that sentence by Borges , I immediately pounced
on it and said it was me. But, in fact, it isn't . My childhood and
youth were bookish, but not in their essence. My book was my
family world.
It
was essentially my parents, my brothers, the ser–
vants, cousins, trips to the country where my family had land
-these were the essence . And these patterns are what I repeated
so often in my work: the theme of the family as a type of bond ,
which almost-all of a sudden-almost strangled me .
Christ:
You've written that only when your mother's garden no
longer exists will you feel finally and really on your own .
