EXILE AND DESIRE: SEXUAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE “SPANISH” NOVELS OF JOSÉ DONOSO

Abstract

José Donoso wrote most of his best-known novels abroad, especially in Spain. What is more, many of his novels focus on the idea of foreignness or the experience of a Chilean abroad. Why this repeated focus on the foreign? In part, it is the nostalgia of exile, although this does not explain why he recreates the experience of the voluntary exile in such a problematic way. It is also the return of the Eurocentric gaze, but this does not explain the obsessive valorization of European (and American) culture that accompanies the criticism of aspects of those cultures. More specifically, the “foreign” in Donoso is almost always associated with issues of gender and sexuality, suggesting that, deep down, the exploration of the foreign is the unconscious expression of male sexual anxiety. Of special interest is the focus on Barcelona and Catalonia, associated by Donoso in his Historia personal del “boom” (The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History) with the “creation” of the Latin American New Novel. It will be seen how Donoso's work illuminates the author's anxieties regarding Latin American narrative (especially after the Boom), and a kind of exile from oneself in terms of a repressed sexual identity.