DONOSO (Yañez), José

Nationality: Chilean. Born: Santiago, 5 October 1924. Education: The Grange School, Santiago; University of Chile Instituto Pedagógio, 1947; Princeton University, New Jersey (Doherty scholar), A.B. 1951. Family: Married María Serrano in 1961; one daughter. Career: Worked as a shepherd in Patagonia; taught English, Catholic University of Chile, 1954, and journalism at University of Chile; staff member, Revista Ercilla, Santiago, 1959-64; and at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, 1969; literary critic, Siempre magazine, 1964-66; participant in Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1965-67. Lives in Santiago.Awards: City of Santiago prize, 1955; Chile-Italy prize, for journalism, 1960; William Faulkner Foundation prize, 1962; Guggenheim fellowship, 1968, 1973; Critics' prize (Spain), 1979; Encomienda con Placa de la Orden de Alfonso X el Sabio, 1987; National Literature prize (Chile), 1990; Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellow, 1992. Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1986.

Publications

Short Stories

Veraneo y otros cuentos. 1955.

Coronación (novella). 1957; as Coronation, 1965.

El charleston. 1960; as Charleston and Other Stories, 1977.

El lugar sin límites (novella). 1966; as Hell Hath No Limits, in Triple Cross, 1972.

Este domingo (novella). 1966; as This Sunday, 1967.

Los mejores cuentos. 1966.

Cuentos. 1971.

Tres novelitas burguesas. 1973; as Sacred Families, 1977.

Cuatro para Delfina. 1982.

Cuentos. 1985.

Novels

El obsceno pájaro de la noche. 1970; as The Obscene Bird of Night, 1973.

Casa de campo. 1978; as A House in the Country, 1984.

La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria. 1980.

El jardín de al lado. 1981; as The Garden Next Door, 1992.

La desesperanza. 1986; as Curfew, 1988.

Taratuta; Naturaleza muerta con cachimba. 1990; as Taratuta; Still Life with Pipe, 1993.

Plays

Sueños de mala muerte (produced 1982). 1985.

Este domingo, with Carlos Cerda from his own novel (produced 1990). 1990.

Screenplay:

The Moon in the Mirror.

Poetry

Poemas de un novelista. 1981.

Other

Historia personal del "boom." 1972; as The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History, 1977.

Editor, with others, The Tri-Quarterly Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Literature. 1969.

Has translated works by John Dickson Carr, Isak Dinesen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Françoise Mallet-Joris.

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Critical Studies:

"The Novel as Happening: An Interview with Donoso" by Rodríguez Monegal, in Review 73, 1973; Donoso by George R. McMurray, 1979; " El obsceno pájaro de la noche: A Willed Process of Evasion" by Pamela Bacarisse, in Contemporary Latin American Fiction edited by Salvador Bacarisse, 1980; The Creative Process in the Works of Jose Donoso edited by Feliu Guillermo Castillo, 1982; "Structure and Meaning in La misteriosa desaparición de la Marquesita de Loria, " in BHS, 3, 1986, and "Donoso and the Post-Boom: Simplicity and Subversion," in Contemporary Literature 4, 1987, both by Philip Swanson; "Coun-tries of the Mind: Literary Space in Joseph Conrad and Donoso" by Alfred J. MacAdam, in his Textual Confrontations, 1987; Studies on the Works of Donoso: An Anthology of Critical Essays by Miriam Adelstein, 1990; "Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Donoso's El jardín de al lado " by Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, in PMLA 106, 1991; Understanding Donoso by Sharon Magnarelli, 1992.

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José Donoso is a Chilean novelist and short story writer. His first three novels qualify as novellas or novelettes. Coronation (Coronación), like many of this writer's works, is narrated with a studied incoherence suggesting mental or emotional disturbance and a plurality of perspectives, and it demands much of the reader. Decadence of the Chilean aristocracy, one of Donoso's enduring concerns, is the primary theme of three interrelated story lines: the grotesque birthday celebration of the completely mad, pathologically repressed nonagenarian Miss Elisa and her death following a private party at which her drunken servants crown her; the story of her 50ish bachelor grandson and his ill-fated, violent love for the young nursemaid Estela; and that of Estela's love for Mario, a delinquent who uses her to rob the house. The hermetic monotony and existential inauthenticity of upper-class life, isolated from the workaday world, are portrayed in almost naturalistic sequences, while social determinism appears in the depiction of society's dregs from the neighboring shantytown.

This Sunday (Este domingo) focuses on the deterioration of Chile's bourgeoisie and its values as seen by one of the narrators, an anonymous grandchild of the major characters, Alvaro, his wife Chepa, and Violeta (a servant of Alvaro's family, seduced in his youth, and a perennial refuge for his lifelong childishness). Physical, moral, and environmental decadence—the aging of people and property—contrast with idealized recollections of a splendid past. The adroit use of innovative techniques and more subtle thematic development, a contrapuntal effect achieved with stream-of-consciousness narration, make the work more complex than Coronation. Philosophical and literary theories of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust blend with latent Freudian and existential concepts, resulting in greater aesthetic and intellectual density.

In the novella Hell Hath No Limits (El lugar sin límites), the use of a deranged narrative perspective anticipates the still more nightmarish world of Donoso's longest and most critically acclaimed novel, The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pájaro de la noche). The breakdown of an established order, symbolically the traditional social order, appears through the disintegrating psyches of the narrators. A House in the Country (Casa de campo), seen as an allegory of Chilean politics, won Spain's 1979 Critics' Prize. Few meaningful thematic or technical distinctions exist between Donoso's novels and short fiction. Length notwithstanding, all superbly blend sociological observation and psychological analysis, and realism never eliminates fantasy, for madness, the supernatural, and the unknown lurk just beyond the uncertain limits of reason.

Veraneo y otros cuentos (Summer Vacation and Other Stories) and El charleston (The Charleston) are represented by tales included in Charleston and Other Stories. A favorite motif, the labyrinthine, decrepit mansion, a Jungian symbol of the psyche that haunts all of Donoso's fiction and that is allegedly based on the home of his father's elderly great-aunts where Donoso was born, appears in several of the early stories. Upper-class traditional Chilean families, the problem of the generation gap, and a rigidly stratified society in which a rich, decadent minority is cared for by an impoverished lower class pervade the stories as well as the writer's longer works. Donoso's recurrent ulcers, prolonged psychoanalysis, and a nightmarish illness in 1969 marked by hallucinations, schizophrenia, and paranoia and caused by intolerance of painkillers are all reflected in his fiction. Following Freudian theory, Donoso stresses the importance of early childhood experiences, the power of the unconscious, and the central role of sexuality in other areas of life. Much of the characters' conduct is irrational, neurotic, or motivated by repressed erotic urges, as in his long novels.

Sacred Families (Tres novelitas burguesas), reflecting Donoso's experience in Spain, paints the politicosocial and cultural environment of Catalonia, evincing Donoso's reactions to the intellectual and sociological ambience of the peninsula. "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," a critique of materialism, drugs, and easy eroticism among upper-class Catalans, includes an exiled Latin American novelist who fights with his publisher because his novel is not selling. (By necessity, exiles lose their natural audiences.) The sterility of the painter in "Green Atom Number Five" allegorically represents the exiled artist's frustration at separation from his homeland. "Gaspard de la Nuit" introduces other motifs common to Donoso's exile works, including homosexuality, sterility, absence, the double, estrangement, and role reversal, all paradigms of exilic experience. Many of these appear in The Garden Next Door (El jardín de al lado), a longer novel painting the exile of a Chilean couple in Madrid. In La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria (The Strange Disappearance of the Young Marquise of Loria), Donoso contributes an amusing bit of erotica to Spain's outpouring in this genre following the death of Franco and demise of the censorship.

Cuatro para Delfina (Four [Novelettes] for Delphine), one of Donoso's more varied collections, returns to the Santiago setting of his early stories, offering four seemingly realistic visions of the concrete sociohistorical ambient of the Chilean capital. While differing in tone and shadings from festive to lugubrious and grotesque, all of the works involve precise observations of daily existence at the same time that they constitute disturbing, even visionary, allegories of national life. From farce to tragedy to parable, the varied registers of Donoso's art coincide in their masterful narrative architecture and his mastery in portraying what for most eyes is invisible.

—Janet Pérez

See the essay on Hell Hath No Limits.