SOURCE: Lértora, Juan Carlos. “José Donoso's Narrative: The Other Side of Language.” Salmagundi 82-83 (spring-summer 1989): 258-68.

In the following essay, Lértora addresses Donoso's questioning of the traditional functions of narrative fiction in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnival.

A characteristic trait of the narrative produced by Spanish American writers like Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Julio Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, M. Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso, is its attempt to explore human experience by way of the secret codes associated with the instincts, the unconscious and magic. The discourse that founds these narratives is situated in the labyrinthic space of the characters' consciousness. Characters are no longer conceived as representatives of social class or as psychological types, but as subjects of inner conflicts for which they cannot always find lucid or logical understanding or expression. Consciousness is assumed as chaos; it has its corollary...