28
PARTISAN REVIEW
Donoso:
Sure. I think that one of the great experiences of my life was
to be possessed by a family, and a class, and a way of life - up to a
certain point. The breaking away from the family, then the
experience of being dispossessed, and then the experience of
creating, in fact, a world - a new version - where I could possess
myself. But you know, I've always been fascinated by gardens–
Italian gardens, not English gardens. Italian gardens are novels in
themselves and they are, of course, the fruit of the baroque. Some
in fact are more like nightmares than gardens. Besides being
novels, they are history too; they are full of phantoms, they are
slightly monstrous. I am very interested in the formalization of
nature through landscaping and my ideal
espacio cerrado
would be a
garden .
Christ:
You have a preference for the baroque, for complexity rather
than simplicity. Is this a Latin American or a personal character–
istic? What are its qualities?
Donoso:
I refuse to define the baroque . And I refuse to define myself
as baroque, since it seems to transcend the meaning of mere com–
plexity. Let it be enough to say that I am bored - for myself, I
sometimes admire it in others - with the "well-made" thing as an
unchallenged canon. I prefer the artifical to the "natural," which
seems to be the God-like, unquestioned measure of perfection, es–
pecially in so much American writing and which, though it
did
yield its crop and has taught a lot, tends to introduce a kind of fear
in the young writers-to-be, and this is not the eighteenth century.
Control has its points. But how controlled is the aesthetic "control"
which is prompted by fear?
Christ:
If
the closed world of the family is the source for much of your
fiction , how do you account for the other social element that is al–
ways present too?
Donoso:
Perhaps it's an interesting thing to state here that the first
book I ever published was dedicated "To Teresa Vergara who
does not know how to read." She is the servant who brought me
up and who went to my house before I was born, and who is still
with my parents . And still doesn't read. She doesn't know my
books, and she
wasjurious
when they told her how I had dedicated
my first collection of stories to her because "Now everybody's
going to know that I don't know how to read ." The point is this : a
boy of my upbringing would never have had any kind of access to
