JOSE DONOSO
31
Christ:
The book grew, like so many images within it, by putting one
thing inside another?
Donoso:
Yes. Absolutely, yes.
Christ:
In
Coronation
you used a conventional third-person narrator;
in
This Sunday
you alternate between first and third, and in
The
Bird
you seem to be writing a point of view on a point of view.
Donoso:
Sure , it's a novel about novel writing. The whole novel ends
with a bunch of papers, which were the novel, being burned. It's a
funny thing, you know, and is probably my greatest experience as
a writer: did you know that that ending didn't appear in the book
right up until I was correcting the galleys? T!J.e book ended in a
thousand ways, but I didn't tie it together until I had the galleys.
Christ:
Did the ending, where the events of the novel are revealed to
be so many pages of a manuscript, owe anything to the compar–
able ending of Fuentes's
Change
of
Skin?
Donoso:
I hadn't read
Change of Skin
in 1969, when I wrote that end .
Even if I had, I think the root of it lies elsewhere, and it is in
Proust.
Le temps retrouve
is the novel
retrouve.
Life and novel are not
distinctly separated. One annuls - and recreates - the other.
Proust is certainly the source of this, as of so many other things in
me - probably of so many other things in Fuentes.
Christ:
If
The Bird
is a technical
tour-deforce
in dealing with points of
view, it is also a fairly explicit statement about the nature of
human personality - one that could take us back to Freud or, more
to the point, back to Borges and his famous essay "The Nothing–
ness of Personality."
Donoso:
Sure, because psychological unity is only, I think, something
that we owe to our imagination of it, something we imagine so we
can use ourselves . "Personality" is a concept, an invention of the
intellect, a simplification . I fear simplification more than any–
thing: thus it plays a part in my life and in my books. A gradual
drifting away-starting with
Coronation
and ending with
The Bird
- from the simplifications of "personality ." In the book that I'm
writing now
Casa de Campo
(Country House), I'm working the other
way.
Using
the idea of "personality," the very simplifica–
tion - shades of Dickens again - to go beyond it. If in
The Bird
I
achieved fluid, intertwined , mutating personalities to render a
complexity of feeling, in the new novel I'm using monolithic enti–
ties, solid "personalities," to render a complexity with them.
Christ:
The notion of the meaninglessness of"personality" leads Borges
to metaphysics, but it leads you back to the world - to things , to
people.
