30
PARTISAN REVIEW
cause I knew what Freudianism was and I saw that it could be a
pitfall and a narrowing down of things in my own writing. Analy–
sis did help me to accept certain relationships, certain ambigui–
ties, and to live with them and to know a little of what goes on,
but I didn't get any kind of a theory from it. Actually, I wish I
had-in
many ways. It would make things very much easier; but,
then again, there's my terrible resistance to this implication.
Christ:
"Symbiotic" seems to be the best word for describing relation–
ships in your fiction. Is this your sense of life as well as of litera–
ture-as in the vampiristic fiction of Henry James, of D.H.
Lawrence?
Donoso:
I don't know what my sense of life is.
If
I knew it, I wouldn't
be writing novels but teaching, or writing essays. "Symbiotic" is a
good word, though. Certainly if vampirism is what readers per–
ceive in the relationships between people in my novels, it must be
at least a component of them. I hope not the only one. Not be–
cause I disdain vampirism, but because I disdain the mindlessness
of boiling down the complexities of a metaphor to the false lucidity
of one word.
Christ:
In much the same way, you seem to distrust symbols, Freud–
ian or otherwise.
Donoso:
For me, everything is a symbol. But I refuse to deal with
symbols that have an exact correlative in reality. I do not accept, I
am not interested in, symbols that can be substituted for the
meaning. I only use symbols when I don't know the meaning. I
think that all literature is the extreme of lucidity that an author
can give. I can't be more lucid than that.
Christ:
You intend to incorporate into that lucidity things that are
not ordinarily considered lucid, rational?
Donoso:
Sure, sure.
Christ:
Your experience with morphine at the time of your illness–
again recalling Borges, with his septicemia - was a kind of water–
shed for you?
Donoso:
It
surely was.
It
also enabled me to write
The Bird
and prob–
ably not to write anything like it again. My writing from
The Bird
on has been very different.
Christ:
What were your difficulties in finishing that book?
Donoso:
The difficulties were enormous. One, of course, was that I
didn't know what I wanted to write. I set out to write something,
but it wasn't clear. I accumulated a vast amount of material that
somehow hung together.
