SOURCE: MacAdam, Alfred J. “Countries of the Mind: Literary Space in Joseph Conrad and José Donoso.” In Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature, pp. 61-87. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

[In the following chapter from his book on comparative literature, MacAdam compares and contrasts Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and Donoso's A House in the Country, finding in each work a break with literary tradition.]

[Jorge Luis] Borges begins his 1938 review of Absalom, Absalom! by comparing Faulkner to Joseph Conrad:

I know of two kinds of writer: one whose obsession is verbal procedure, and one whose obsession is the work and passions of men. The former tends to receive the derogatory label “Byzantine” and to be exalted as a “pure artist.” The other, more fortunate, has known such laudatory epithets as “profound,” “human,” “profoundly human,” and the flattering abuse of “primal.” … Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was the last, perhaps, who was as interested in the procedures of the novel as in the destiny and personality of his characters. The last, until Faulkner's sensational appearance on the scene.¹

Borges's association of Conrad with Faulkner reflects the powers of his imagination: In reviewing Faulkner, he looks beyond the southern, regional writer and discovers an artist concerned with both character and the problems of narrative structure. That is, he reminds us that Faulkner is as concerned with technique as he is with his obsessive themes. He then casts about for a parallel and finds Conrad: The mere act tells the critic a great deal about levels of reader response. On the one hand, Borges acknowledges that in the works of both there is the immediate appeal of theme and character, but he points out at the same time that there is another, perhaps more occult dimension to their writing, their modification of their immediate narrative tradition.

Borges has always had an antipathy toward the novel, preferring, when he condescends to speak favorably about extended fictions, what he calls, in his 1940 prologue to Adolfo Bioy Casares's novella The Invention of Morel, “the novel of adventures,”² fictions that have (according to him) a rigorously organized cause-and-effect plot. His sibylline remarks prod us into speculation: What are the “procedures of the novel” Borges contrasts in that prologue with the “destiny and personality” of the characters? Except for his insistence in his 1932 essay “Narrative Art and Magic”³ on the need for unity of plot, Borges goes no further with his “morphology of the novel”:

To my knowledge, no one has yet attempted a history of the forms of the novel, a morphology of the novel. Such a hypothetical and just history would emphasize the name of Wilkie Collins, who inaugurated the curious method of entrusting the narration of a work to the characters; of Robert Browning, whose vast narrative poem, The Ring and the Book (1868), details the same crime ten times, through ten months and ten souls; of Joseph Conrad, who at times showed two interlocutors guessing and reconstructing the story of a third. Also—with obvious justice—of William Faulkner.⁴

This is a curious list and a curious aesthetics of the novel, one vaguely based on the idea of the literary text's tendency, as the Russian Formalists would have it, to call attention to its mechanisms, in effect to make the display of its mechanisms a part of its very structure. Collins's The Moonstone, Browning's The Ring and the Book, and Conrad's The Secret Agent—if this is the novel by Conrad to which Borges alludes—are all eccentric works that constitute a parodic commentary on novelistic Realism.

What interests Borges is an author's subtle revolt against tradition and his almost imperceptible challenge to his readers to take note of his experiment. This is why Borges does not include Joyce or Virginia Woolf in the list: Their innovations are blatant attempts to modify both the narrative tradition and the reader's relationship to the text. Borges certainly admires these daring innovators, as his essays on Joyce and Woolf demonstrate, but his personal affinities lie with the kind of writer he includes in the list above, those whose experiments are veiled by an outward adherence to convention.

After 1932, the mature Borges is much more interested in the ironic parody of literary conventions rather than in an avant-garde assault on any literary establishment, as his own fictions prove. What makes Borges a fascinating if idiosyncratic critic is his ability to find aspects of the writers he likes that few critics ever see, for example, the idea that Joseph Conrad is as important a writer in his parodic manipulations of narrative structure as he is in the creation of intense psychological portraits. Borges's assertions about Conrad make us see Conrad in a different light and make us question our received notions about him. This is especially true of Nostromo (1904),⁵ usually read as a political novel. Eloise Knapp Hay defines Nostromo in this way:

Nostromo is primarily a novel of ideas, and its theme (seen especially in the contrast between the materialisms of the idealist Gould and the simple Nostromo) evolves as a revelation of the logic of ideas in history. With the demise of Martin Decoud, and the ascent of Dr. Monygham in the last part of the novel, however, we mark a rejection—characteristic of Conrad—of ideas, of intellectuality, and an invocation of moral sensibility … as the proper guide for political action.⁶

Hay dissects Nostromo in order to find the organization of its intellectual structure, but she loses patience with the novel as an aesthetic structure:

In short, I find that this disorderly presentation (in Part I) of material contributes greatly to the novel's “dramatic impenetrability” (as Morton Dauwen Zabel calls it) and its “hollow” reverberation (F. R. Leavis). It has not the chronological suggestiveness of Lord Jim, where the reader need not wonder distractedly for two hundred pages whether his human interest—the only worthy interest in a novel—is to be given anywhere a worthy object.

(p.176)

Hay does not explain what she means by “human interest,” but it no doubt has something to do with Borges's second type of writer, the one “whose obsession is the work and passions of men.” Hay's dissatisfaction with the first part of Nostromo typifies the attitude of most Conrad critics since F. R. Leavis. Hay's reaction and her comparison of Nostromo's “disorderly presentation of materials” with Lord Jim's “chronological suggestiveness” reflect an all-too-common trend in Anglo-American literary criticism: What is unclear or ambiguous is not good. Even if, as Leavis says, Nostromo is “one of the great novels of the language,”⁷ it is flawed.

There is something unsettling in this mixture of literary criticism and aesthetic evaluation: The critic wants to show the patterns of Conrad's political novels, but she also wants to tell us that Nostromo does not meet some unspecified standard. Conrad critics, from Leavis to Hay, have subordinated Conrad's “verbal procedures” to his themes. In doing so they have reawakened the ancient (and false) opposition of form to content; they have, in short, not read Conrad as a novelist but as an essayist. He is “good” when he presents his subjects in an orderly way and he is “bad” when he does not. A reading of Nostromo that would take Conrad's “verbal procedures” into account and think of them as consubstantial with his themes is possible.

We see this already in Leavis's essay on Conrad, where he states:

What doesn't seem to be a commonplace is the way in which the whole book forms a rich and subtle but highly organized pattern. Every detail, character and incident has its significant bearing on the themes and motives of this. The magnificence referred to above addresses the senses, or the sensuous imagination; the pattern is one of moral significance.

(p.232)

Leavis gestures toward the structure of Nostromo, but immediately returns to his primary concern, theme. Nostromo's plot does, however, clarify the relationship between theme and structure and shows just how subtle an innovator Conrad is.

Eloise Knapp Hay's remark about Lord Jim's “chronological suggestiveness”—which Nostromo certainly lacks—is an unwitting insight. It is precisely Conrad's eccentricity, his being an outsider, an interloper in the Western tradition and not a native-born English novelist that we see in the structure of Nostromo. He eschews chronology and the progressive view of history that informs the nineteenth-century European novel, and this links him to the parodic literature of twentieth-century Latin America. His attitudes are shared by authors like Alejo Carpentier, García Márquez, and José Donoso,⁸ all of whom tamper with our received ideas of history and, like Conrad, invent imaginary lands where they present their theories of history. All of these writers have contributed ironic chapters to the history of literary utopias, especially insofar as utopias are set, as they have been since More, in the Americas.

If we read Nostromo as a parodic utopia, we see that “Conrad's supreme triumph in the evocation of exotic life and colour” (Leavis, pp.231-32) is a feat of illusory realism, that the setting holds up a moral mirror to Europe and is not necessarily a recreation of the exotic. We are back on Caliban's island, but it is no longer a theater of marvels; now it is merely the scene of sordid capitalist exploitation.

In Nostromo, it is not Prospero's magic but the American millionaire Holroyd (or “holy rood,” the grotesque cross of evangelical capitalism) and his money that bring Conrad's imaginary Costaguana out of its pastoral torpor. The precapitalist territory has a history but it is cyclical rather than linear, a history of violence that begins with the Spanish conquistadores who discover silver and enslave Indians to mine it. The rule of the Spaniards is broken in the wars of independence, but the ideals of leaders like Simón Bolívar—whose lamentations about the “ungovernable” nature of Spanish America are quoted in Nostromo (pt. 2, chap. 5, p.161)—disintegrate during chaotic internecine struggles. Spanish American history after liberation is a series of civil wars in which opposing parties fight merely for power and from which the people receive no benefit. Order in that world is synonymous with control, and violence is the customary method either to maintain control or to overthrow it. The intention of the political idealists in that community is to end the history of cyclical repetition and to create a linear history like that of Europe, a history of evolving institutions.

This idealism in personified in Nostromo on the political and the economic levels by José Avellanos and Charles Gould. Both weave elaborate fictions in order to explain their motives: Avellanos, a victim—almost a martyr—of the tyranny of Guzman Bento, is an aristocratic “constitutionalist.” Which means, simply, that he is committed to peace at home and to business done in a businesslike way abroad. His thoughts on Costaguanan history are in his book Fifty Years of Misrule (or History of Misrule—it seems to have both titles), which deals with the government of Guzman Bento.⁹ The text tells what was wrong with Costaguana and proposes a plan of action that would at least guarantee domestic tranquility. Conrad never gives the details of don José's ideas on government because he wants them to remain vague. Don José is a pathetic fugure in the novel, a man who sacrifices himself to a shapeless ideal that corresponds in no way to the everyday reality of Costaguana. The reader learns nothing about his ideas except that the current regime gives him “a specific mandate to establish the prosperity of the people on the basis of firm peace at home, and to redeem the national credit by the satisfaction of all just claims abroad” (p.126). A “firm peace” implies a free hand for repression, just as the order “to redeem the national credit” suggests paying the exorbitant interest rates demanded by international financiers. His only reality, ultimately, is his book, a martyrology written by a martyr; his government is no government, just a benign form of business-as-usual.

Charles Gould, holder of the Gould Concession, the right to work the silver mine that lies at the heart of Nostromo, is a more complex figure than don José Avellanos. He inherits the Concession, a kind of albatross, from his father, who urges him to abandon it. But Gould, despite his father's warning or because of it, decides to restart the mining operations halted during Guzman Bento's regime. Why he does this is mysterious, although it may be part of an Oedipal, fathers-against-sons pattern that reappears throughout the text: Gould senior fails at running the mine, so Gould the son may outdo his father and recover his lost dignity. This possibility is barely mentioned in the novel, although in part 1, chapter 6, upon learning of his father's death, Gould remarks that it was the mine that killed him, but that it might not have, “if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!” (p.63).

The posthumous victory of the son is veiled in the kind of pious public spirit that don José Avellanos expresses. Gould senior was a martyr to Latin America's history, which he called “the appalling darkness of intrigue, bloodshed, and crime that hung over the Queen of Continents” (p.81). Conrad readers will instantly react to the word “darkness” in this context, the chaos that lies just under the surface of civilization as we know it, a darkness a militant West seeks to eradicate, although “the benign project of civilizing the dark places of the world becomes the conscious desire to annihilate everything which opposes man's absolute will.”¹⁰ Charles Gould, responding to his father's laments, presents this idealized vision of why he intends to reopen the mine:

What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security. Anyone can declaim about these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That's how your money—making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That's your ray of hope.

(p.81)

Gould clearly envisions himself as a stage in a process: He will bring Costaguana out of its cycles of rebellion and tyranny into the history of evolving institutions. The idea sounds fine, but it involves some questionable actions, especially the subordination of liberty to the security that “money-making” demands and the hint that the “better justice” to come may be indefinitely postponed.

Conrad wonders at what point the “material interests” become an end instead of a means, at what point Gould will become another Kurtz. This is the central issue of the novel, namely, that the subordination of all things to material interests is a form of economic barbarism and that the power that grows out of the accumulation of material wealth is an irresistible temptation. Thus the silver mine that lies at the heart of the text, the reason why international capitalism, personified by the American Holroyd, extends its tentacles to Costaguana, is merely a symbol. It represents material interests, which, when linked to an international market economy, turn even Western history into a struggle for power. The barbarism Gould and Avellanos want to extirpate returns in a different guise: Instead of the cycles of tyranny and revolt, the new history will be the enslavement of all to the ego of one—Holroyd.

Holroyd is the “hidden god” of Nostromo, the first cause for whom Charles Gould is the efficient cause. He represents for Conrad a force that transcends both the idea of history as it is in Costaguana's cyclical mode and in the evolutionary mode as it was envisioned by Hegel. He is Marx's notion of capitalism as the progressive concentration of power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Holroyd is the United States, carving out an empire in the twentieth century without having to resort to military force. Holroyd knows the history of European colonialism and views it as a lost cause. His assessment of Europe's folly and the ultimate triumph of the United States as a colonial force is one of the most-often quoted passages in Nostromo:

The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it's worth—and don't you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of ten-per-cent loans and other fool investments. European capital had been flung into it with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But there's no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God's Universe. We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith's Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world's business whether the world like it or not. The world can't help it—and neither can we, I guess.

(p.75)

Beyond Holroyd's bravado, there is a notion here that influences the shaping of Nostromo, an idea of history that becomes the shape of this book.

Because it uses an imaginary setting and because it subordinates the development of character to the presentation of ideas, Nostromo ought to be read as a satiric utopia. Costaguana, even though it is a composite of many Spanish American nineteenth-century republics, is a “no-place,” a mirror held up, not to an exotic “other world,” but to the prevailing situation of the West. International capitalism, the “material interests” alluded to so often in the text, recognizes no national boundaries. Holroyd is an American who understands the role the United States is destined to play in the coming phase of international “development,” but even he recognizes that he is part of a process that has its own ontogeny. Holroyd is a species of “world-historical-figure,” the embodiment of the principles he enunciates in the passage quoted above.

At the same time he postulates this deterministic view of history, Conrad argues that individuals can retain some degree of independence. In fact, the human drama of the novel (as opposed to the inhuman or superhuman drama of international capitalism) deals precisely with the notion of fidelity to self. Throughout his writings, Conrad classifies his characters according to their ability to live out the destinies they create—as the writer himself fashions destinies—for themselves: There are the MacWhirrs (Typhoon) who are what they do, individuals Conrad admires even if he relegates them to a lower rank, and the Lord Jims, whose relation to their professions is less fixed and who, because of their crises and changes, are more interesting psychologically.

In Nostromo, Captain Mitchell is of the MacWhirr type, as is the “Garibaldino,” Giorgio Viola, both men of principle who never doubt their principles. Their tenacity enables them to survive, just as their blindness to anything but duty creates an irony: Their angelic perfection makes them fools. The burden of the more psychologically complex characters is being aware of that irony, of experiencing a destructive type of desenqaño or loss of illusion. This experience, a major theme of the Spanish-speaking world in the seventeenth century, was originally religious in nature: The “man of the world” would awaken one day to his folly; the scales would fall from his eyes, and he would see the illusions of this world for what they are. He would then fix his sight on salvation and the next world. Conrad's desengaño is secular, an existential collapse whose most radical form destroys the skeptic Decoud.

Conrad's characters all need fictions in which to believe because the fiction and the believing—acts both in the sense of actions and in the sense of part-playing—make human life possible. As Alan Sandison says, this fidelity to oneself may be selfish, “but in preserving oneself one is preserving others.”¹¹ This would seem to make Conrad into a precursor of Camus and other Existentialists, and in his concern for the integrity of the self and its continued existence in the face of doubt he does resemble them. This maintenance of the self through an act of will is Romantic in origin, and is one of the most heavily used themes in twentieth-century Western literature, both in tragic and comic plots and in ironic and nonironic narratives.

In Nostromo, Conrad subordinates that important theme to a meditation on history, and this subordination explains some of the novel's irony as well as its structure—which so many critics have found faulty. Eloise Knapp Hay's complaints (quoted above) about the “disorderly presentation of material” in part 1 of the novel and the seeming lack of “human interest—the only worthy interest in a novel” represent the general critical verdict on Nostromo: It is a great but flawed novel. A demurring point of view might counter that Conrad in all likelihood knew what he was doing when he wrote Nostromo and that his methods in part 1 might be a signal to the reader about how he wanted his book to be read.

A much later text, Garcia Máquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), illuminates Conrad's strategy. The first sentence of García Márquez's satiric romance refers to no discerible present moment, and alludes to events already transpired but not yet narrated: “Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember the day his father took him to see ice.” García Márquez in this way gives the reader “memories” of the future: When an event takes place, it fulfills a prophecy made earlier in the book. The effect is the reduction of the chronological and sequential aspects of the text to a single point, as if the reader could experience the whole text simultaneously in spatial terms instead of bit by bit, in chronological order. The reader thus gets the same perspective on the whole the writer has as he produces the work.

In part 1 of Nostromo, “The Silver of the Mine,” Conrad deliberately confuses the chronology of his story so that the reader will not know what is happening “now” or has already taken place. In chapter 2, Conrad introduces Captain Mitchell, a man absolutely committed to his work, totally competent and devoid of imagination. As if to contrast the orderly nature of Captain Mitchell with the chaos of Costaguana politics, Conrad tells an anecdote using Mitchell as a point of view: “On a memorable occasion he [Mitchell] had been called upon to save the life of a dictator. … Poor Señor Ribiera (such was the dictator's name) had come pelting eighty miles over mountain tracks after the lost battle of Socorro …” (p.23). At this point in the novel, the reader can have no idea of the importance of this anecdote nor of its relative position with regard to the “now” in which the narrative is set. What seems a casual anecdote is the climax of the text, the revolution that threatens to bring down the government, take the silver mine away from Gould, and sweep the country back into chaos. As we read “away” from Mitchell's anecdote, we read “towards” it in terms of the work's chronology and in terms of the number of pages we have to read to reach it. The “line” of the narrative, of course, twists in the process into a circle.

Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude will recognize this narrative prestidigitation. They will recall how García Márquez constantly plays with the linear experience of reading by implanting memories of events to come in their minds. The result, both in Nostromo and One Hundred years of Solitude, is the turning of time into space. Jocelyn Baines defines the effects of Conrad's manipulation of narrative time in this way:

The effect of these time shifts is almost to abolish time in Nostromo. The elimination of progression from one event to another also has the effect of implying that nothing is ever achieved. By the end of the book we are virtually back where we started; it looks as if the future of Costaguana will be very similar to her past.¹²

Nostromo is a desperate text and its desperation reappears in authors like Alejo Carpentier (in his The Kingdom of this World) and in García Márquez (in his One Hundred Years of Solitude). These writers take Conrad's despair—each clash of wills brings violence and bloodshed—to the point of a deathwish. Both Carpentier and García Márquez conjure up hurricanes (García Márquez's clearly inspired by Carpentier's) to blow their created worlds into oblivion, to turn each of them into a tabula rasa where history can be inscribed anew. Conrad, Carpentier, and García Márquez all echo Stephen Dedalus's complaint (“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”), but none succeeds in transforming the nightmare into the utopian dream because all remain faithful to the real evidence of history before them.

It has fallen to José Donoso to take a first step towards accomplishing that task, a step he takes without turning his fiction into a utopia totally disconnected from reality. His A House in the Country shows how the cycles of revolution and repression, of the triumph of material interests may be broken: The drama of his text is tragic because his utopia is crushed, but it does inscribe the possibility of a new day, a new history, at least for Spanish America.

Like Nostromo and One Hundred Years of Solitude, A House in the Country is set in an imaginary land, during a vague period when horses have not yet been replaced by automobiles. And like the two earlier texts, A House in the Country deals with the colonial situation from the point of view of the criollos, those born in the country of European descent, with no Indian or negro ancestors. The criollo aspect of Nostromo is often overlooked by English and American readers: Charles Gould, while of English “blood,” thinks himself a native of Costaguana, with as much right to act in order to change its history as any of its mixed-blood dictators.

A House in the Country also deals with criollos, not, like Charles Gould, of English ancestry, but those Conrad describes in Nostromo in this way: “the great owners of estates on the plain, grave, courteous, simple men, caballeros of pure descent, with small hands and feet, conservative, hospitable, and kind” (p.41). The manners of the Venturas, the criollo family Donoso scrutinizes in his novel, do not coincide exactly with Conrad's description, but they nevertheless consider themselves an elite, superior in nature to those around them. Their mere existence is, for them, proof that God himself intended them for their position in the world.

There are myriad Venturas, and their wealth, like that of the Goulds, derives from a mine. But unlike Charles Gould, who imagines himself a transitional figure in Costaguanan history—“material interests” would provide stability, which in turn would cause the people to renounce disorder and misrule—the Venturas are resolute defenders of the status quo. They subscribe to a doctrine similar to the divine right of kings and countenance no questioning of their authority. Thus, while Charles Gould deludes himself into thinking he can use self-interest to better his country, the Venturas believe that material interests and the nation itself exist in order to provide them with an income and servants. In both novels, blind egoism leads to calamity.

Where Conrad and Donoso differ is their attitude towards the dynamics of history. Conrad sees a difference between the first two periods of Costaguanan history, Spanish rule and anarchic independence, as primitive variations of what was to come: The Spanish conquistadores work the silver mine with slave labor; during independence, with the mine under English control, it becomes a convenient symbol of foreign intervention and imperialism. In the third phase of Costaguanan history, the mine becomes Costaguana's link to international capitalism, a symbol of the subordination of all human life to material interests. Conrad denounces this situation because it breeds future violence, which will come when the socialists and communists of his final chapter triumph over the Goulds. He is not pleased with this prospect, and the despair in his text results from his not seeing any escape from material interests except violence.

Donoso agrees, but sees this violence as necessary because it would eliminate the very basis of the Venturas' wealth and the subordination of human life to things. The revolution he envisions would abolish private property. This utopian aspect of Donoso's novel is an echo of Don Quijote's discourse to the goatherds (Don Quijote, bk. 1, chap. 11), where Don Quijote praises the golden age in which the words “yours” and “mine” did not exist. Cervantes may have intended this speech as a mockery of utopian schemes, but it does evoke the radical critiques of private property made by Christian humanists, especially Thomas More. Donoso's utopian attack on private ownership requires the reader to recall similar attacks made during the eighteenth century by Rousseau, and in the nineteenth century by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, which were later systematized by Marx and Engels. The gold of the mine in A House in the Country conjures up golden ages, the idealized past, the utopian present, and the real future predicted by Marx and Engels, all golden ages in which, paradoxically, gold would have no value.

Donoso's text chronicles a critical moment in the Ventura family history, one in which their concept of history as repetition and perpetual present suffers a shock. This shock derives precisely from the criticism of private property that has been a constant though subterranean current in Western thought since antiquity, a criticism that seeks, especially in the analysis of Marx and Engels, to prove that private property is a fiction and not a reality. Marx and Engels say that society, ours or the Venturas', is as it is because we assume private property to be a “fact of life”:

Property owners and proletarians evince the same human self-alienation. But the landowners find in this self-alienation their confirmation and their good, their power: In it they have the appearance of human existence. The proletarians feel annihilated in their self-alienation; it they see their impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.¹³

The Venturas justify their ownership of property by having recourse to tradition. Their ancestors took control of the mine and the natives (Donoso never refers to them as Indians, thus preserving the abstract nature of those oppressed) who work it. The natives turn the gold they mine into gold leaf, which they give to the Venturas in exchange for goods worth very little relative to the market value of the gold leaf. The Venturas sell the gold leaf to foreigners, transforming it into money and the power it creates. Their defense of this primitive colonialism, aside from their idea that since things have “always” been this way they must be right, is based on a differentiation they make between themselves and the natives.

Tradition says the natives are cannibals—although the Venturas have supposedly purged the active exercise of this vice out of them. Cannibals, according to the “authorities” that lie at the basis of the Spaniards' justification for the conquest of the New World, are not human because human beings, by definition, do not eat their own kind. Since the natives are not human, it is both legal and laudable to enslave them. This postulate, mocked during the Renaissance by Montaigne in his essay on the cannibals, is nothing more than a fiction engendered by the idea of private property. Once private property is taken as a fact it creates its own defenses—the enslavement of supposed cannibals is one example—and these defenses become an ideology and a morality: Since history and tradition support these customs, they must, according to the Venturas, be sanctioned by God himself. Any alteration of them would not only be treason but heresy as well.

Private property thus produces an order, a social structure: The Venturas are the apex and the natives the base of the social triangle. The intermediate classes are composed of two groups, the family servants, who are superior to the natives but who lack individual identity for the Venturas, and the Ventura children, Venturas in potentia but not yet Venturas. The servants constitute a private army, whose mission, aside from attending to the needs of the Venturas themselves, is to keep the Ventura children under surveillance. As Lidia, the Ventura who administers the staff, puts it each year in her address to new servants:

These [children], she assured them in her harangue, were their enemies, intent on their destruction because they wanted to destroy everything stable by their questioning of rules. Let the servants be aware of the brutishness of beings who, because they were still children, had not yet acceded to the illuminated class of their elders, and were capable of anything with their abuse, their disobedience, their filth, their demands, their destruction, attacks, undermining of peace and order by means of criticism and doubt. They were fully capable of annihilating them, the servants, for being the guardians, exactly so, of this civilized order, which was so venerable it defied all criticism. The danger of the children was only inferior to that of the cannibals, of whom it was not impossible that they, the children, ignorant as they were and perhaps in no ill-intentioned way, might even unwittingly be the agents.

(pp. 40-41)

Similar to the children are the in-laws, necessary for the perpetuation of the family but not really part of it; it is an alliance of one in-law, some children, and some natives that threatens the Venturas' “civilized order.”

The servants are another kind of threat: As long as they remain servants or serve as a police force to spy upon and keep order among the children, they are mere projections of the Venturas' will. But armed and imbued with a sense of mission, what one of the Venturas calls “the mystical code that has guided our family since time immemorial” (p.269), they do indeed become a menace. When they identify themselves totally with the values of the Venturas, they find they have something they did not have before, an identity and a role in history. The instant they make that discovery the Venturas become expendable because the values they inculcate into their servants are greater than the Venturas themselves. And the moment the Venturas show the slightest weakness or indecision, the servants realize that only they are pure enough to be the keepers of that great tradition.

Donoso's drama, the abortive revolution against personal property, is more obviously allegorical than Conrad's meditation on material interests in Nostromo. Conrad deals with the inhuman history of things—the international economy—and how human beings are incorporated into it. Readers expecting to find a human drama (or melodrama) are frustrated because they find a disordered, oblique story whose protagonist dies in an absurd confusion of identity. Donoso alienates his reader in quite a different fashion: He puts his reader on guard from the outset by constantly intervening in the narrative in his own voice just to remind the reader that his book is indeed a fiction. This authorial interruption is related to the concept of personal property at an aesthetic level, but its main effect is to destroy sentimental lines between reader and character, or any notion that A House in the Country is a portrait of life.

The allegorical possibilities in A House in the Country are immense precisely because Donoso constantly reminds us that the text is a fiction. We can read it, for example, as an allegory on the history of Chile, Donoso's homeland, at the time of the coup against Salvador Allende in 1973. In the novel, the adult Venturas and their servants go off on an excursion and leave their children alone in the huge summer house. The trip is to last a day, but it is extended magically into an entire year. The Venturas' decision to absent themselves could correspond to the free elections that brought Allende to power, a moment in which neither the Venturas (the oligarchic upper classes) nor their servants (the armed forces) chose to intervene in national politics.

Suddenly a leader appears: In the novel this is the supposedly man brother-in-law Adriano Gomara, a physician known for his benevolence towards the natives (the lowest classes). Adriano Gomara emerges as a leader because he can mediate between the various factions that materialize among the Ventura children and the natives. His improvised government collapses because he cannot control the more radical elements within the ranks of the children and natives and because he cannot match the violent repression that takes place when the Venturas send their servants back to the country house to reassert their values and to repossess their property.

The Venturas' attempt to reverse history fails: One of the Ventura children, Malvina, forms an alliance with the foreigners who buy the gold leaf as a first step in taking possession of the mine. The Venturas are doomed, just as the utopian project of Adriano Gomara to forge a society without private property is doomed, but the history is redefined as a linear, irreversible process of change. No system is permanent, not even that of the Venturas. Donoso ultimately resolves nothing. Like Alejo Carpentier and García Márquez he ends his text with a natural disaster, one that wipes out the adult Venturas. The surviving children remain in the summer house while the servants, Malvina, and the foreigners escape to the city. The reader may wonder whether the surviving children will form the nucleus of a revolutionary avant-garde, but Donoso refuses to feed any speculation, rejecting the idea of projecting the novel beyond its limits. This is the chronicle of the fall of the Venturas, but their world, the world of private property, continues to exist without them.

Throughout the text, Donoso struggles against the idea of the representational in literature: His constant intervention in the book, his insistence on speaking as the author and not merely as a narrator, his commentary on the progression of the plot, are all devices he uses to keep the reader from confusing art and life. In the second chapter, Donoso explains to a reader he imagines growing impatient with his authorial interruptions that:

I do it with the modest goal of suggesting that the reader accept what I write as artifice. When I intervene from time to time in the story, I only do so in order to remind the reader of his distance from the material of this novel, a thing I want to keep as my own object, one I show, display, but never relinquish completely so the reader may confuse his own experience with it. If I succeed in getting the public to accept these authorial manipulations, they will recognize not only that distance but also the fact that the old narrative devices, so discredited these days, may produce results as substantial as those created by conventions dissimulated by “good taste” and its hidden arsenal of tricks.

(p. 53)

Here we see Donoso wrestling with a phantom that has haunted him since his earliest publications, the legacy of Realism. Donoso found his place in the literary tradition by means of parody, especialy the parody of the Chilean novel of costumbrista tendency, with its minute depiction of Chilean life. Here he integrates his parodic literary personality with the central theme of his novel, private property. In the passage above he states that he does not, want the reader to identify himself with the characters, but he does not thwart this identification by means of some Brechtian “alienation effect.” For Donoso, the traditional novel was aesthetically valid and, moreover, better as fiction than the contemporary novel, the French New Novel for example. That is, the obvious display of devices in a novel by Balzac or Trollope reminds today's readers they are reading a work of art and that they must not allow themselves to rework the text into their own image as they might be tempted to do with the kind of text that invites the reader to be a co-creator or literary accomplice. Donoso is also doing it because he wants to remind the reader that this book belongs to José Donoso.

He expresses the same possessive spirit at the end of the novel, when the narrator explains why it is so difficult for him to end the book:

It's curious nevertheless—and this is the point I wanted to make—that even though I've made my characters non-psychological, unrealistic, and artificial, I have not been able to avoid connecting myself to them emotionally and to their world, from which it would be as impossible to separate them as it would be to separate, for example, one of Ucello's hunters from his meadow he crosses. In other words, despite my determination not to mix reality and art, it's terribly painful for me to say this farewell, a conflict that takes the literary form of my not wanting to leave them behind without finishing their stories—forgetting that they have no more or less of a story than the one I want to give them—instead of settling for finishing this story which, in some way I don't fully understand, is, no doubt of it, my own.

(p.492)

After reading these two passages it is impossible not to think of Jorge Luis Borges. The same desire to rebel against the idea that literature is a mirror held up to life, the same desire to make the literary text a work of art that should be enjoyed for itself and not for its fidelity to the real world—even Donoso's use of the word “artifice” reminds us that Borges called the second group of stories in Ficciones “Artifices”—all of this delineates the problems involved in being a writer in the twentieth century. Conrad ran great risks in Nostromo by constructing a text he knew would confound readers accustomed to nineteenth-century story-telling, readers used to psychologically complex main characters and stereotyped secondary characters. By diverting attention away from character toward structure, Conrad broke with his immediate tradition and revitalized the novel of ideas, whose origins lie in satire.

Donoso's dilemma as a late twentieth-century writer is that he wants to do something similar to what Conrad did—meditate on the relationship between things and people in an imaginary land—but he cannot separate that meditation from a self-conscious contemplation of himself as a writer producing such a text. The example of Milton trying to write an epic poem and feeling obliged to take into account not only the classical and Renaissance epic traditions but also any knowledge even vaguely related to his subject (sunspots for example) comes to mind: The more self-conscious the text becomes, the more complex the materials the artist feels obliged to manipulate grow, and the more the resultant text becomes the writer's projected self-image, his metaphoric autobiography. Like the man Borges describes at the end of El Hacedor (The Maker), who proposes to draw a map of the world only to discover after years of labor that he has succeeded in drawing a self-portrait, Donoso (and Borges) finds that he is his text.

The image of Mary Shelley's monster in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus¹⁴ also comes to mind here: Frankenstein is a type for the artist who creates his work of art from the disjecta membra of tradition. The final product is not only monstrous, an involuntary caricature—what the Romantic artist always fears he will engender—but a monstrous double of the artist himself. Where the Romantic would attempt to save face by blaming his medium—language—for its incapacity to express his intuitions, the modern artist cannot shift responsibility for the monstrous nature of his text away from himself. The Romantic at least possesses an ego he wishes he could express and communicate to others; the modern writer ambiguously finds his self-justification in the act of writing. His published text is monstrous because it makes many demands on him—aesthetic, political, social—and is simultaneously a mirror in which he sees his own confused self-image.

To publish that self-image is precisely to disconnect it from the self, to send it into the world where, like Frankenstein's monster, it will take on other identities even as it usurps its creator's name. Loss of name is a loss of identity, and personal identity is one kind of personal property Donoso has great difficulty criticizing. This is in fact a theme that reappears throughout Donoso's writing, with great poignancy in The Obscene Bird of Night, where the failed author Humberto Peñaloza vainly tries to recover all the copies of his only book because its mere existence in someone else's library constitutes a loss of identity. Publication as loss of identity is the twentieth century's peculiar and ironic contribution to the topos of writing as a means to achieve fame and immortality. For writers like Borges and Donoso, writing is a kind of affliction that ultimately renders the author anonymous.

Thus, the issue of private property has the same value in A House in the Country that the idea of material interests has in Nostromo. The difference lies in the degree of self-consciousness, the degree to which the author of each text wants to put himself as author on display before the reader. Nostromo stands at the beginning of the modern tradition because of its deliberate alienation of the reader who comes to the novel hoping to identify with its central character. A House in the Country continues that tradition of putting the mechanisms of the text on display the better to explore the possibilities of the subject. The example of Thackeray in Vanity Fair, with its famous concluding passage about the characters who seem so real being mere puppets the author-narrator now puts back into their box, provides some idea of how venerable this tradition of allegorical novel-writing is.

This is not simply to say that the novel incorporates an earlier satiric or allegorical tradition into itself—even if this is obviously true—but to demonstrate that the tradition of true-to-life characters, the creation of novels in which the reader is invited to identify himself with the characters, while dominant over a long period of the novel's history, is not the only novelistic tradition. At the same time, Donoso's remarks above (pp.82-83) point out that more than verisimilitude is involved in the creation of character: The author takes a proprietary interest in his characters because they are his creation, because in some way they reflect him. This is a different sort of sentimental relationship from that of the reader who identifies himself with a character, but the possessive aspects are the same.

This situation, in which the author asserts his rights over the text, dramatizes the problem of literary meaning. Not only will the author lose his identity through writing but he will also lose exclusive rights over the text, as it becomes a part of the literary tradition, something with its own meaning-producing devices. No matter how much the author-in-the-text may protest, the literary text after publication is no longer his: It becomes part of the tradition and part of every reader's experience. In every way, it resembles the summer house Donoso uses as the center of his novel: The Venturas erected the house as a monument to themselves, to their power. It is surrounded by a fence made of iron lances that separates it from the rest of the world and marks it as personal, private property. When the children, the natives, and Adriano Gomara take control of the house, they take away the fence, symbolically destroying the idea of the house as personal property.

The restoration effected by the servants produces a parody of the earlier situation: Once an object is inserted in time, it becomes part of time and changes. This principle may be applied to society itself as well as to the work of art once it leaves the artist's hands. The author-in-the-text is part of the text: His asides to the reader are part of the text and are therefore public property. The author, like Frankenstein, possesses his text only as long as he refrains from redacting it; from then on it belongs to no one or anyone.

Like Conrad, Donoso reveals a horrifying reality to us without resolving it in any way. There is no escape from material interests, just as there is no escape from the delusion of personal property or individual identity. Both Nostromo and A House in the Country parody the Realist tradition, which they both admire, but which requires a worldview unacceptable to both. These are not revolutionary novels in the political sense, but they are apocalyptic texts that prefer to announce the death of an old tradition rather than the birth of a new one.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Absalom, Absalom,” Borges: A Reader. A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), p. 93.

2. Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologue to The Invention of Morel,” (1940), in Borges: A Reader, pp. 122-24.

3. Jorge Luis Borges, “Narrative Art and Magic,” in Borges: A Reader, pp. 34-38.

4. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Wild Palms,” (1939), in Borges: A Reader, pp. 93-94.

5. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1967). All quotations are from this edition.

6. Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 214.

7. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 231.

8. Carpentier in El recurso del método, García Márquez in Cien años de soledad, and José Donoso in Casa de campo. All quotations from Casa de campo (A House in the Country), are taken from the first edition (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978). All translations are mine.

9. José Avellanos's book certainly has a bizarre life (or halflife) within Conrad's novel, as Frederick R. Karl points out: “He [Conrad] actively deceived, saying that for the history of Costaguana he depended on the “History of Fifty Years of Misrule” by the late Don José Avellanos. Conrad's point is truly Borgean: inventing a book within his own book, he then uses his Author's Note to cite it as one of his principal sources. If he had to divulge anything, he would reveal only what he had borrowed from himself! He had, in fact, most definite sources for names, events, and places.” This revelation appears in Karl's biography of Conrad, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 542. Karl's chapter on Nostromo explains Conrad's ambiguous politics as well as his complex loyalties: the Pole, the European, the professional sailor, the artist.

10. J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 6. Hillis Miller is discussing “Heart of Darkness” in the passage quoted, but his ideas apply as well to Nostromo.

11. Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 138.

12. Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 301.

13. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der Kritishen Kritik: gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten, in Werke, vol. 2 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), p. 37. (My trans.).

14. For a discussion of the relationship between Donoso's earlier work, The Obscene Bird of Night, and Frankenstein, see my Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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