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Let me give you an example from Heading South, Looking North. That is a book about Latin America fundamentally from the perspective of a testimonio latinoamericano because it is trying to figure out a path and a pain that has been hidden. And yet, its manner of expression owes more to the confessional style of North Americans, given that I reveal intimate details about myself, which you would rarely find in Latin American memoirs. The book is a hybrid, and something similar is happening to all my works.

WLT AUTHOR FACTS

AUTHOR Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942)

COUNTRY Chile

PRINCIPLES GENRES Fiction, Verse, Theater, Essays

ARIEL DORFMAN is a Chilean novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, journalist, and human-rights activist. Born in Argentina in 1942 to Jewish immigrants, Dorfman was forced to move to the United States with his family in 1945 due to anti-Semitism and political intolerance. They then became the victims of McCarthyism in 1954, when Dorfman's father was targeted as a communist threat. They next fled to Chile, where Dorfman eventually gained citizenship. When Auguste Pinochet led a coup in 1973 against Salvador Allende, Dorfman was forced into exile again. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a professor at Duke University, and now considers himself an expatriate.

The author of eight novels, seven plays, a travel narrative, a memoir, and several collections of essays, short stories, and poetry, Dorfman launched his international success with Death and the Maiden (1992), a play about the complex and painful issues that confront nations as they transition from dictatorship to democracy. His most recent works are a novel co-written with his son, Joaquin, The Burning City (2003); the play Purgatorio (which premiered in London in 2004); Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusta Pinochet (2002), an account of the Pinochet case; and a travel narrative about the north of Chile, Desert Memories: Journeys through the Chilean North (2003). I interviewed him via telephone as part of the research for my forthcoming book on his work, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope, to be published by Duke University Press in 2005.

Sophia McClennen In interviews conducted during the Pinochet regime, you often referred to Latin American writers who had influenced your work. You also studied Renaissance literature and published your first book of essays on the theater of Harold Pinter. What do you consider to be your major literary influences? And do you see any shift in the writers you are in dialogue with in your recent literary projects versus those who most influenced you during your years in exile?

Ariel Dorfman I continue to think that one of my fundamental influences is Shakespeare. My thesis was on Shakespeare, so the Renaissance, the baroque, and the picaresque are very important to me. But to give you an example of the extent of my influences, I think Konfidenz (1995) is in dialogue with Henry James but also with Sartre and Borges.

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Or take the picaresque influences in The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999). But, you know, I'm not sure how I'm being influenced until I write a novel. It had been a long time since I read Tristam Shandy or taught El buscon or Guzman de Alfamche or Cervantes himself, and yet if you look at The Nanny and Iceberg, it constructs itself as the story of a picaro, Gabriel, who thinks he knows more than anybody else in that world. Hc thinks he's more intelligent. He thinks his individual rationality is above and beyond that of the historical collective he's in, and he thinks he can outsmart everybody, like the gringo he has become. He will be absolutely devastated in discovering that this view of the world is delusional, and he finally will awaken to the true dimensions of the world. This is the structure of the picaresque novel. The picaresque novel does that in the Spanish baroque by discovering God. What I come up with in this novel is an epilogue in heaven or purgatory or wherever it is, where Che Guevara and the Nanny are discussing how to save Gabriel. Of course, the way in which they save him is very mundane: it is through the cazuela, a pot of soup, which is being cooked. This is very typical of how the trivial and the transcendental combine in my work: heaven ends up being the way we eat. If it hadn't been for Cervantes, I never would have found a way of telling the story because he teaches me things about literature, narration, being on the road, playfulness, that I could learn nowhere else.

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Lately, I think that my major interlocutors might be those who write in what is called postcolonial Englishlanguage literature. I think that's where I belong, in some sense, though probably nobody else feels that way about me. I'm also reading quite a bit of very interesting Latin American fiction. I read Antonio Skârmeta, of course. I basically read my friends at this point. I read Hector Aguilar Camin, who hasn't been translated into English, which is a real shame. And I read Tomâs Eloy Martinez. I could go on. I read Elena Poniatowska. I read Guillermo Arriaga and Cristina Peri Rossi. And I feel as though we are moving in the same direction, even though they are writing in Spanish and I am writing in English and Spanish. They are asking the same kinds of questions that I'm asking about narration. I also feel very comfortable with Peter Carey, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink. I read these writers very carefully along with many of the newest Indian novelists like Amitav Ghosh. I've been reading Sebald. I'm in contact with Michael Ondaatje. I look at how they resolve some of the problems I also face. I've recently read Ian McEwan's Atonement, which I found to be a splendid text, wondrous text.

I believe, fundamentally, that one is always most influenced by what one reads between sixteen and thirty years of age. For example, I don't think I could have written The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1987) if I hadn't read Faulkner. Of course, Faulkner never would have written a story about babies who didn't want to be born, right? But if I had to choose the one person who has been my major influence, it's probably Julio Cortâzar, because of the way in which he understands the colloquial, the way in which he understands fantasy, and the way in which he dares to experiment. And yet he creates stories in which emotion and intellect are wedded. I think he's probably been the major influence on my literary life, but, in fact, I may not be able to tell. For instance, if I hadn't read as much Shakespeare as I have, I probably wouldn't write as I do. If Harold Pinter hadn't existed, I never would have written Death and the Maiden. I never would have written any of my plays. It's strange that I've hardly mentioned any women, but women writers have influenced me as well. I love Middlemarch, to give you an idea.

And then one is greatly influenced by other people. For instance, there is a woman writer who is like a sister to me. Her name is Deena Metzger.

SM Right, she's quoted in The Nanny and the Iceberg.

AD Right, exactly. In many ways one's work is always in dialogue with other people. Every time a writer does something wonderful, I think, "Great!" Not because I want to imitate it, but because it encourages me to push the envelope a bit further. The itinerary of my fiction has always been the following: it begins from a simple plan, a kernel of an idea. Widoivs, which might seem simple, is not only about some women who try to claim bodies-those of their loved onesappearing in the river, but it is also about how an individual turns into a collective, how the whole crisis of the military stems from having to destroy the construction of this collective, and it's also the story of peasants and modernization, it's all that. And yet, at the same time, it has this experiment in telling the story, which is: How do you tell the story from the point of view-because three chapters adopt that perspective-of a whole family of women? And yet I came up with a floating device in which the narration keeps on being grounded in one girl. It flits in and out of her consciousness. And, I guess here we can acknowledge the influence of Virginia Woolf. If I hadn't read Virginia Woolf I never would have come across that solution, although she never found herself in the situation where she had to tell the story of a collective demanding that bodies be returned to them. She was just trying to get her own body to be recognized. And if I had not taken that stylistic leap, I never could have written the last chapter of Widows, where the women rock the dead man's body while being confronted by the army.

SM Both The Nanny and the Iceberg and Blake's Therapy (2001) are framed by key epigraphs and citations. The Nanny and the Iceberg opens with quotes by Deena Metzger, Walter Benjamin, Christopher Columbus, and Che Guevara, followed by Dante, Montaigne, Columbus, and Ariosto. Blake's Therapy begins with George Soros and Calderon de la Barca and ends with Calderon de la Barca and J. P. Morgan. This frame surrounds three quotes from The Divine Comedy that signal the three stages of the novel. Would you explain the function of these quotes and your thoughts on their selection?

AD I can start by talking about Blake's Therapy. In a sense the quotes were clues to the reader about the double reading of the text, and here the quotes function more tightly than they do in, say, The Nanny and the Iceberg. You start with a quote by George Soros and Calderon de la Barca. One is about modern finance and globalization and the fact that people who think they control the world don't control it as much as they think they do, and the other is about dreams, wondering how we know what is real in the world, especially at the level of language. One is contemporary North American and the other is from the Spanish baroque. So, at one level, this is a text about modern forms of finance and the impact this has on us, but the novel is also a text that goes deep into the baroque theme of life as a dream. So I am hinting that the root of the rise of facsimile and mediatization are deep in the modern experience and that they in fact go all the way back to Don Quijote, because Don Quijote doesn't know what the windmills really are, and everyone around him works together to get him to delude himself for their entertainment.

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Blake's Therapy was originally written for Brazil. The first version, published as Terapia, was a shorter version than what you'll find in Blake's Therapy, because it was part of a series on the seven cardinal sins and I was interested in greed. So for the first version I decided to write seven chapters preceded by seven quotes from Dante, each from one of the circles of the Purgatorio. That was the original idea. Something I want to emphasize is that I'm obsessed with structure. You know, people might think that because I'm fascinated by power and problems of redemption and politics and all those issues, I don't care much about how the writing itself is organized. But for me, the organization is extremely important. The essential questions are: How do you tell a story? How do you divide the story? How do you organize it as a material experience on the page? Where do you cut off the story? Where do you stop? What don't you tell? What organic unities are within it? In the case of Blake's Therapy, I decided I would organize Blake's journey through three circles and that I would accomplish it in seven chapters. I spent an enormous amount of time on this idea of structure. I looked very carefully at how to divide the story. Then I looked for quotes that would indicate that all the sins were present, that it wasn't just greed. So I was signaling inside the text how the main character was in hell, in purgatory. In this way the quotes help me draw out the structure.

The case of The Nanny and the Iceberg uses the quotes differently from Blake's Therapy. There, I felt that certain quotes that I had been gathering for a while could be used to accompany the story so that they functizoned less as a structured frame.

SM Much of your work deals with the intersections between politics and art. During Salvador Allende's presidency, you were actively involved in projects that merged artistic expression with political goals. Not only do you create literature that deals with politics and human-rights issues, but you also write about culture and politics. In Exorcising Terror, you describe the events surrounding the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, and in a recent play, Speak Truth to Power, you intertwine testimonials from survivors of human-rights violations with the voice of a "man" who represents the source of oppression. What is the role of art in political struggle? And have your views on the role of art changed since your work with Allende?

AD There is an activist strain in my work. It doesn't mean that it's the only strain in my work. In other words, I see my own challenge to the world to change as part of art's multiple functions. There is a tendency to think of these as being mutually exclusive, because writers tend to project onto art their own beliefs, so if they don't do activist art, they conclude there cannot possibly be good activist art. I see my art as having as many functions as art can possibly reach, including, at certain moments, that it be an art which will engage the world. This may happen very directly, as in a testimonial. So we might call it "testimonial art," which is a way of intervening in the everyday life of people with stories and forms of beauty that can move them to understand the political or social predicament of the world a little better. In that sense, just as somebody could very well write a Joycean novel at night and during the day compose some interesting patents for shoes, let's say, I feel that I have no problem composing a Last Song of Manuel Sendero or a Nanny and the Iceberg, which are full of doubts about everything, at the same time that I work on a book that is a testimonial text like Exorcising Terror. In Exorcising Terror, I ask questions about the Pinochet trial, about the soul of my country, and about the state of justice in the world. At times it is a journalistic memoir in which I allow the voices of real victims to surface.

I see nothing contradictory in these many endeavors. In addition to working on Exorcising Terror, I then can do the Speak Truth to Power play, which allows me to put my art at the service of a cause. And yet, because it functions like art and is not just a sequence of voices pieced together, that play ends up asking why there is indifference in the world. I speak about the fears of the human-rights offenders. I had to create a structure for this artistic experiment; it's not just grabbing chunks of testimony of witnesses and stringing them together. The play has a structure and the structure relates to this "man," this antagonist that I conjure up, that I draw attention to. The fact is that this play moves from the human-rights offenders confronting death to confronting something they fear far more, which is the apathy, the indifference, which is the real enemy to the movement for empowerment that the play proclaims. People tend to think that there's no artistry in doing a testimonial, but there is, in fact, a great deal of poetry and careful craftsmanship. Only someone who has worked with the lyrical as I have, who's worked with the dramatic as I have, who's worked with the epic as I have, could have created this sort of dramatic solution. I think that's why it's worth mentioning that the relationship between politics and art is very complex, particularly because I believe that there are two contradictory needs. One, it seems, is that the artist needs to be in constant tension with the state and with power, that he or she always needs to be in conflict. At the same time, if you're going to be part of a social movement, there are certain agreements that you have with either the insurgent power or more contemporary forms of power. I think the tension between these two needs is a creative one and is very necessary, and you cannot deny either of them.

SM As you describe in your memoir, Heading South, Looking North, your literary formation was always in dialogue with Latin America. In recent years your work has become increasingly transnational in terms of audience and in terms of the issues you deal with. What is the role of Latin America in your identity as a writer today, and how do you situate yourself within contemporary Latin American literature?

AD I keep on thinking that I'm drifting away, and it turns out that I'm not. I think that at this point it's sort of a vaiven (a flowing back-and-forth) like most of my life has been, except that there used be more time between shifts. For instance, one of my last two projects involved a trip to the north of Chile as part of a National Geographic series on travel. How more specifically Latin American can I be? In fact, I question the whole problem of how the north of Chile, the desert of Chile, is a microcosm of the whole of Latin America. At the same time, I frame the book as the story of the universe, the story of men in the Americas. It's a story of origins and the story of time going by. So there you have an example of a project very specifically related to Chile. Who would've thought that I would go back yet one more time to Chile? But I keep finding unfinished business. I think that basically I'm interested in the whole world, but I feel that I come from Latin America, I feel that my perspective is very Latin American.

Let me give you an example from Heading South, Looking North. That is a book about Latin America fundamentally from the perspective of a testimonio latinoamericano because it is trying to figure out a path and a pain that has been hidden. And yet, its manner of expression owes more to the confessional style of North Americans, given that I reveal intimate details about myself, which you would rarely find in Latin American memoirs. The book is a hybrid, and something similar is happening to all my works. The other work that I have just completed is a play called The Other Side, and this play takes place within a landscape that has nothing to do directly with Latin America: the characters aren't Latin American, they've got names that probably will resonate as Central European, or something like that. And yet, of course, it is informed by everything I've lived in Latin America. There is a destina cosmico (a cosmic destiny)-I mean Latin America is the place where all the races have come, all the periods of history exist, it is both in the West and outside the West. It is, for me, the place of hope and also the place I know best. I understand it. So I feel as if I'm from there, but not exclusively. I think we suffer a great loss by not being from only one place, but I've turned that distance into the source of my creativity. I don't know what price I may have to pay in the future for having decided to be a perpetual expatriate. I would say that Latin America is my companera, that's how I would put it. I think that I'm married to Latin America. That doesn't mean that you become Latin America, but it's always there as a constant reference. This turns you into somebody supposedly strange, but not so strange, if you think about the number of Latinos in United States. I have a definition, by the way, that I am going to try to put into the language, the alterlatino-these are Latinos who are not Cuban, Puerto Rican, or Mexican. Well I'm an alterlatino. We have "alter modernity," "alter globalization." I like the idea of "alter," and of course "alter" has directly to do with the other, the double, et cetera, which is another of my obsessions.

Durham, North Carolina