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In How to Read Donald Duck and Empire’s New Clothes (essays
in media criticism), Dorfman dwells on the brutalisation
of the American mind in Disney cartoons, and Reader’s
Digest. In a predominantly realistic early novel, Widows,
he reveals the physical and emotional damage brought on by
successive tyrannical regimes in Chile. In the present book he
weaves a phantasmagoria of political resistance against the
military dictatorship of Pinochet.
A crazy quilt of a
book, Last Song is about exile, forms of authoritarianism
and the influence of popular arts like comic strips on social
and political values. It is also a love story and, above all, a
celebration of the power of language to sustain a world of
community and solidarity in the face of banishment. It revolves
around the fantastical premises of fetuses refusing to be born
until their totalitarian government eliminates social injustice
and persecution.
‘Exile is like
being in an insane asylum…in the battle of Waterloo’, says
Skinny in the opening pages. Dorfman has elaborately presented
the implications of this observation. Every one in this book is
exiled, either inside their mothers’ wombs, or on the borders
between Chile, Mexico and America. The fetuses debate whether
they want to be born and the narrator and his beloved Pamela
decide to stay inside against the others’ decision to come
out. Eventually they too are born.
The two
cartoonists, David and Felipe are on the border, as are Carl
Barks or Sparks and his aged wife Sarah in the comic strip that
uses popular culture imagery for the satirical purpose of
enacting another exile story. This accounts for open endings,
not because the characters believe in them, but because the
author sees no difference between exile and home. A recurrent
image is that of movement across places, time zones and
narrative forms, a reminder of the rootlessness of exile, as in
Pynchon’s and Arenas’s novels.
The Last Song refracts
Dorfman’s view of Chile into myriad mirrors scattered across
thousands of years. The narrator is fetus and grandfather,
teller and tale, and represents an ethical dilemma for all the
estranged beings in the novel: whether to punish the country’s
tyrants by withholding love. At the heart of the book is the
mystery of the last song. Who is Sendero? Victor Jara, the
popular Chilean singer, killed by Pinochet? Or a wandering
minstrel of folktale singing of loss and deprivation?
Each character is
refracted into his or her analogue in myth. Carl Sparks and
Sarah are refracted into biblical resonance. So are David, the
narrator and Pamela, eternal questers seeking meaning to their
condition.
Dorfman seems to
be writing as if from the vantage-point of geology rather than
history. —an extended perspective within which all events are
equally permanent and transitory. Using language as a scalpel
and bludgeon, Dorfman captures large geographies of experience
and achieves a gravitas not common in ordinary historical
novels.
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ARIEL
Dorfman is not your wacky new- wave magical realist. He does not
trespass the boundaries of conventional narrative just to startle or
confound. He is neither the usual prancing bull in a staid chinashop
of neither traditional fiction, nor a breezy contortionist out to
provide thrills for the reader’s jaded palate. In his hands magic
realism does not degenerate into an elitist parlour game as it does
in, say, Gilbert Sorrentino or, more recently, Rushdie’s Fury.
