JOSEDONOSO
33
episode of Maya is again a real episode, something that did hap–
pen. The character is a picture of my mother and Maya is the
man whom she got involved with . His real name was Maya. Of
course, the fact that I kept it, havinR
chan~ed
everything else,
means something. I don't know why I wrote the novel. Now I only
know why I wrote that name. Certainly it was a reference to the
Indian culture; certainly it was to the goddess of the dead. I knew
a little bit of this about the veil, but I didn't know too much; I
didn't know much about Indian literature, but I certainly did
know that. Probably all of this , without using it consciously, led me
to keep the name .
It
was a good name .
It
is an uncommon name.
Christ:
Yes, and the sound is very beautiful. How attentive are you
to that quality - the sound of the prose?
Donoso:
When my first book of short stories came out, an old critic in
Chile, an old Spaniard from Chile's revolution , wrote one of the
first articles on my stuff. He said that for the most part the beauty
of a language is not a question of the sensory ; it is a question of
the intelligence.
It
has nothing to do with sensuality . I think I
would stick by that. I think that I'm trying things which are so, in
a way, complex - or, if they are not complex, it's just a matter of
their being complex for me-and I can't deal with that question .
To get involved with the sensuality of the language would mean
really getting involved with something I'm not particularly inter–
ested in . I admire it greatly in other people. I even like it a great
deal . In fact , I envy it a great deal . But, somehow, there's a part
of me that is glad to know I don't have it. I conceive of myself. . .
well , it does go with a dryness, with a gloominess . How can you
be gloomy and sensual at the same time? They're sort of a contra–
diction in terms, aren't they? There's a pretty bleak vision oflife in
my stories . You see, this is the point : if! want to portray the sen–
suality of life, and I think I have a very keen sense of vision - I see
a lot, I see detail, I have a fantastic memory for details . I can tell
you how a certain person was dressed thirty years ago, I re–
member it all. I can say how the light fell at a certain point. Since
I want to portray detail : of sensuality, of a visual world, of smell ,
of taste, of the tactile world , I get the feeling that I would get lost
in a world of sensual words . The actual sensuality of the word
would be more important than that which it portrays. And as I'm
trying to get a lucidity, a precision of things more than anything
else , the detail must be precise. Therefore I don't want to use the
sensory nature oflanguage . But I think that my novels are terribly
