Reality and Artifice: José Donoso and his father's letters

Abstract

José Donoso’s archive contains a copious correspondence exchanged by the writer with his father throughout his life. This paper explores the relationship between the two recorded in letters in contrast with the portrait that the narrator made of his father especially in his memoirs Conjeturas sobre la memoria de mi tribu. From this counterpoint it is possible to consider a rereading of Donoso’s work in the light of the way in which Donoso fictionalizes the image of his progenitor through the process of masking and imagination, the basis of the main axis of his poetics: the illusory existence of a substantial unity of the subject. A detailed examination of the correspondence between father and son that shows how Donoso’s writing vocation, in its symbolic and creative dimension, is disseminated in his biography and in his literary work, mutually nourishing each other.