This post I write for the would-be writers of Indiana, for the Midwest, for any place away from and disdained by the literary mainstream.
I am too old to have done anything particularly significant with my writing. Whatever hopes and faith people had in me 40 plus years ago, have been dashed, left on the wayside. That I came back to writing is my attempt at atonement, nothing more. I do not expect to be published. I only continue with those efforts to prove my long-ago supporters were not wrong.
You may have better luck. Consider, José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature from The Millions:
The Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ‘70s is associated with some of contemporary Spanish-language literature’s most towering figures, among them Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. But of all the giants translated, American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.
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The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is Donoso’s chronicle of this multi-generational, multi-cultural revolution of language from one of its earliest advocates and oldest mentors. Throughout this slim, warm memoir, Donoso performs two great tasks: to convince you that the Boom never existed for writers, but that only writers could have produced it....
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Quoting Angel Rama, Donoso says it plainly: “The great figures project their master over very long periods, giving the sensation from a distance, that they have cut the grass at the roots so that nothing new can grow.” It’s hard to imagine any young artist learning developing at any point in our commercially-essentialized age, but Donoso’s generation faced its own venomous predecessors who rejected anything but the cleanliness and security of trite parlor fiction. But Donoso felt that in a world undergoing rapid changes—politically, socially, environmentally, and so on—this fiction had all the impact of a decrepit museum.
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The Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ‘70s is associated with some of contemporary Spanish-language literature’s most towering figures, among them Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. But of all the giants translated, American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.
The Latin American Boom, of course, was somewhat artificially constructed—a marketing term by U.S. publishers to name and corral the Spanish-language arts, for which the ‘60s and ‘70s were especially fecund years. How else could writers as stylistically and geographically diverse as García Márquez, Silvina Ocampo, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante fit under the same tent, if not for the efforts of editors and publicists at highly regarded American publishing houses? But soon the Boom became a two-sided effort: The reason you now know and appreciate so much Latin American literature isn’t just thanks to editors like Toni Morrison, Alice Quinn, and Victoria Wilson—or such inexhaustible translators as Suzanne Jill Levine, Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades, and Edith Grossman—and but also the champion of his generation that was José Donoso. In fact, Donoso isn’t just the greatest writer of the Boom—he wrote its biography!
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The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is Donoso’s chronicle of this multi-generational, multi-cultural revolution of language from one of its earliest advocates and oldest mentors. Throughout this slim, warm memoir, Donoso performs two great tasks: to convince you that the Boom never existed for writers, but that only writers could have produced it. Donoso lays out this paradox in the book’s final pages:
[T]he question of the constitution of the Boom, of who does and who does not belong…. is naïve and false, as false as the notion of stagnation in human and political relations, as false as the idea of perpetual unanimity of opinions… [T]he [Boom] seen from the outside, and the reasons for inclusion or exclusion… are more than anything mirages seen by those who are excluded and who want to belong.
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I could point to various novels in which the dominant classes of Latin America are shown in the full height of their ferocious power as the owners of bodies, lands, and impunity, but perhaps this novel [The Obscene Bird of Night] and also On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sábato, in which monstrosity and decadence are prominent, were the most influential to me.
This contradictory assertion and deep understanding of inclusion came from personal experience. Donoso developed as an artist during a time when, as he writes in his memoir, “the novelist in the Spanish American countries wrote for his parish: about the problems of his parish, addressing himself to the number and level of his readers… without much hope of anything else.” The literary culture that Donoso grew up in emphasized an academically-minded, morally rigid literature. Novels lacked ambiguity, pronouncing themselves as entirely above or below the mores of their time, squeamishly submissive to the attitudes and preferences of previous generations.
Quoting Angel Rama, Donoso says it plainly: “The great figures project their master over very long periods, giving the sensation from a distance, that they have cut the grass at the roots so that nothing new can grow.” It’s hard to imagine any young artist learning developing at any point in our commercially-essentialized age, but Donoso’s generation faced its own venomous predecessors who rejected anything but the cleanliness and security of trite parlor fiction. But Donoso felt that in a world undergoing rapid changes—politically, socially, environmentally, and so on—this fiction had all the impact of a decrepit museum.
And in Donoso’s opinion, what could be more essential to writing than living within the ever-changing world around you? Rather than pretend a perfect tradition, Donoso understood that his work grew from “a mestizaje, a crossbreeding, a disregarding of Hispanic-American tradition… [which drew] itself almost totally from other literary sources… our orphaned sensibility let itself be infected.” Just as each Latin American country was questioning its own identity, so too did the Boom authors write in order to reflect a world beyond their parish. Of those giants, Donoso explored class and gender; Carlos Fuentes history and culture; and Mario Vargas Llosa sex, politics, and the corruption of ideals. (This was the Vargas Llosa of a different lifetime, whom Donoso supported from the very week his first novel was published; Vargas Llosa described Donoso as “the most literary of all the writers I have ever known, not only because he had read a lot, and knew everything there is to know about the lives, deaths, and literary fair gossip, but because he had modeled his life as shape fictions.”)
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...Well, say you read and wrote in a time of boring consecution, inundated by hype for literary cultures that are neither your own nor any good at all. What would Donoso do? First off—ignore the hype! You’ll never grow as an author if you only read and discuss the market-generated communities that you’ll never belong to. Instead, focus on who you are, and accept the fact that spending your life writing is about as uncool as it gets. But remember that to be cool has nothing to do with writing, and that like all great art, writing can become the altar of a community just as unsightly and weird as you. Rather than emulate the “perfection” of previous generations—emulate a culture whose language could not imagine our own—let us write in a language our own, and only hope that such language appears fanged and inhuman to anyone who can’t understand. With effort, and patience, and genuine love for your kind, Donoso didn’t just write a perfect novel—he created a space for many more perfect novels to exist.
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