JOSE DONOSO
29
people of another class. .
at all!
Would not know how they live,
would never know anything at all about them. Except for what
one gets through the servants. So, really, the great bridge-the
great eye of knowledge for the present, for the ills of the present,
let's say - is the servants. But they are also the great eye of knowl–
edge and of vision for the past, for the real, for the genuine past
in myth. Why? Because these servants are repositories of a whole
lot of mythologies, of stories, of idiosyncracies, of superstitions,
which certainly our parents rejected because they were enlight–
ened people. So the dark part of life, in a way, was also provided
by the servants. Everything in my novels is autobiographical.
But, it is autobiographical in the sense that it is a very common,
very middle-class thing; or, rather, was in those days, and I lived
through it. The servants were the ones who fooled the separation
- the simplification - oflife into middle and lower class, the ones
who cut through that segregation, and shared characteristics of
the "inner space" of my novels (house, brothel, convent, etc.) as
well as of the "outer space" of my novels, and also acted as a go–
between for the myths of both spaces.
Christ:
It interests me that you say "dark." You are a witty, punning,
lively man but your books could be looked at as the dark side of
that world presented in
One Hundred Years
if
Solitude.
Donoso:
Look, somebody was trying to get me to take certain pills the
other day - this new vitamin thing which I'm not into. And they
were trying to make me take vitamins so that I could remember
my dreams. One great loss in my life has been that I have always
felt that I have dreamed a great deal but I'm never able to remem–
ber my dreams. She said to me: "Why don't you take these pills so
you'll remember your dreams?" I suddenly thought of the answer:
But then I won't write books! So, what is it? Probably just that my
dreams are pretty difficult to accept for my own self. Consequent–
ly, I suppress them. Probably that suppressed thing comes out in
my writing. Also, my vision of life
is
pretty gloomy. I'm not really
ajoking person; Ijust tend to put that act on. I'm not in general a
very happy man, I guess. I tend to be joking in public because I
try to win people over. I try to woo people.
Christ:
What effect did psychoanalysis have on your writing?
Donoso:
My experience was not in fact a happy one. I wanted to un–
derstand people as I wished to understand things in myself. But,
as it was an unhappy experience, I wanted to eliminate all kinds
of orthodoxy. I did not want to write novels that are Freudian be-
