Donoso’s legacy is a dark room. In that dark room the beasts fight. To say that he’s the best Chilean novelist of the century is to insult him. I don’t think Donoso had such paltry aspirations. To say that he’s among the century’s best writers in Spanish is an exaggeration, no matter how you look at it. Chile isn’t a country of novelists. There are four, maybe five, great Chilean poets, and no novelist can stand the most superficial comparison to them. There are a few prose writers, not many, but no novelists. In a landscape dominated by Augusto D’Halmar and Manuel Rojas, José Donoso’s work clearly shines. In the grand theater of Lezama, Bioy, Rulfo, Cortázar, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Sábato, Benet, Puig, Arenas, Donoso’s work automatically pales and takes second place.
His followers, those who today carry Donoso’s torch, the Donositos, try to write like Graham Greene, like Hemingway, like Conrad, like Vonnegut, like Douglas Coupland, with varying degrees of success, with varying degrees of abjection, and through the lens of these bad translations they undertake to read their master, to publicly interpret the great Chilean novelist. From the neo-Stalinists to the Opus Dei, from the thugs of the right to the thugs of the left, from the feminists to the sad little macho men of Santiago, everyone in Chile, secretly or not, claims to be his disciple. A serious mistake. It would be better if they read him. It would be better if they stopped writing and started reading instead. Much better to read.
On Literature, the National Literature Prize, and the Rare Consolations of the Writing Life
First of all, so there can be no mistake about it: Enrique Lihn and Jorge Teillier never received the National Literature Prize. Lihn and Teillier are dead now.
To the matter at hand, then. Asked to choose between the frying pan and the fire, I choose Isabel Allende. The glamour of her life as a South American in California, her imitations of García Márquez, her unquestionable courage, the way her writing ranges from the kitsch to the pathetic and reveals her as a kind of Latin American and politically correct version of the author of The Valley of the Dolls: all of this, though it may seem hard to believe, makes her work highly superior to the work of born paper-pushers like Skármeta and Teitelboim.
In other words: Allende’s work is bad, but it’s alive; it’s anemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it’s alive. It won’t live long, like many sick people, but for now it’s alive. And there’s always the possibility of a miracle. Who knows? The ghost of Juana Inés de la Cruz could appear to Allende one day and present her with a reading list. Or the ghost of Teresa of Avila. Or all else failing, the ghost of Emilia Pardo Bazán. There’s no such hope for the work of Skármeta and Teitelboim. Even God can’t save them. Still, to write — I swear I read it in a Chilean newspaper — that we need to hurry up and give Allende the National Prize before she wins the Nobel is no longer just a ridiculous farce, but proof that the author of such a claim is a world-class idiot.
Are there really innocents who think like this? And are the people who think like this actually innocents or simply incarnations of a folly that has swept not just Chile but all of Latin America? Not long ago, Nélida Piñon — celebrated Brazilian novelist and serial killer of readers — said that Paulo Coelho, a kind of soap opera Rio witchdoctor version of Barbusse and Anatole France, should be admitted into the Brazilian Academy because he had made the Brazilian language known all over the globe. As if the “Brazilian language” were a sanctified essence, capable of withstanding any translation, or as if the long-suffering readers on the Tokyo metro spoke Portuguese. Anyway, what is this “Brazilian language”? You might as well talk about the Canadian language, or the Australian language, or the Bolivian language. True, there are Bolivian writers who seem to write in “American,” but that’s because they don’t know how to write very well in Spanish or Castilian, even though — for better or for worse — they ultimately do write in Spanish.
Where were we? That’s right, Coelho and the Academy and the vacant seat that he was finally given, thanks among other things to his popularization of the “Brazilian language” around the world. Frankly, reading this one might get the idea that Coelho has a (Brazilian) vocabulary on a par with Joyce’s “Irish language.” Wrong. Coelho’s prose, in terms of lexical richness, in terms of richness of vocabulary, is poor. What are his merits? The same as Isabel Allende’s. He sells books. In other words: he’s a successful author. And here we come to the heart of the matter. Prizes, seats (in the Academy), tables, beds, even golden chamber pots belong, of course, to those who are successful or to those who play the part of loyal and obedient clerks.
Let’s just say that power, any power, whether left-wing or right-wing, would, if left to its own devices, reward only the clerks. In this scenario, Skármeta is the favorite by far. If we were in neo-Stalinist Moscow, or Havana, the prize would go to Teitelboim. It frightens me (and makes me sick) just to imagine it. But success also has its champions: all those mental dwarfs in search of shelter, who are legion. Or all the writers who hope for a favor from Isabelita A. Anyway, forced to choose among these three, I’d take Allende too. But if it were up to me I’d give the prize to Armando Uribe, or Claudio Bertoni, or Diego Maquieira. As far as I’m concerned, any one of them has produced a body of work more than worthy of such an honor. I’ll be told that all three are poets and that this year it’s the novelists’ turn. Who ever heard of such a stupid rule, unwritten or otherwise? For a long time, Nicaragua turned out great poets, from old Salomón de la Selva to Beltrán Morales. Novelists and writers of prose, on the other hand, were in short supply, most of them also completely forgettable. According to this backward logic, a brilliant group of poets should have shared the prize with an inferior group of prose writers and novelists. This is the first thing about the National Literature Prize that should be changed. And it’ll probably be the only thing that changes. Young writers with no fortune and only their names to make are still left out in the cold and will continue to be left out in the cold, where the annointed and self-satisfied hunt them down. For the sake of these young writers, and for their sake alone, it may not be entirely pointless to say a bit more. The self-satisfied tend to be quick to anger, but they are also cowards. Their arguments are the arguments of mediocrity and fear and can be dismantled with laughter. Chilean literature, so prestigious in Chile, can boast of only five names worth citing: remember this as a critical and self-critical exercise. Remember, too, that in literature you always lose, but the difference, the enormous difference, lies in losing while standing tall, with eyes open, not kneeling in a corner praying to Jude the Apostle with chattering teeth.