SOURCE: Kerr, Lucille. “Conventions of Authorial Design: José Donoso's Casa de campo.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature 42, no. 2 (summer 1988): 133-52.

[In the following essay, Kerr analyzes the metafictional elements of Casa de campo.]

In José Donoso's Casa de Campo the conventions of reading mimetic fiction confront the conventions of reading reflexive writing. The novel juxtaposes and turns between at least two apparently distinct modes of discourse, two seemingly disparate ways of reading and writing narrative fiction. The fictions proposed by Casa de campo take us from a reading of the novel as a reflexive commentary on the state of things in modern fiction to a reading of its fiction as both a nineteenth-century family story and a political allegory. Within its pages Donoso's novel also produces the image of an author who is master over the text in which he himself appears but who can also be viewed as mastered by the fictions from which his image emerges. This figure turns between disguising and disclosing, questioning and supporting, different, but complementary, conventions of reading and writing.

There is little, if any, doubt that Casa de campo makes it possible for us to turn from one reading of its fictional story to another. We may read it “directly” as the chronicle of events in the life of the Ventura y Ventura family at their summer estate. We may read it “indirectly” as the chronicle of events in Chile in the early 1970s or as a more general tale about Spanish American history. The first, a more or less “literal” reading, accepts the novel as a quasi-realistic, though also ironic, presentation of fictional events and characters located in or around the Casa de campo.¹ The second, an essentially figurative reading, understands the story as a political allegory of the history of Chile in particular and/or Spanish America in general.² However, Donoso's novel is also a novel about writing novels and about the conventions that bind together narratives that appear to be either realistic or reflexive, fictions whose emphasis is mimetic or allegorical.

Casa de campo is a curious mixture of pages that relate its primary fictional story and passages that present the self-conscious commentaries by the author-narrator presumed to be responsible for that other “primary” material. Donoso's novel undermines, however, the primariness of its fiction and the privilege of the discourse that presents it. The novel turns with equal force between a reading that focuses on the fictional story (a story that can also be interpreted allegorically) to one that explores the writing of such forms of fiction. It moves us from a reading based on assumptions of referentiality (the referents are at once fictive and real, they are the fictional characters or the historical figures seen “through” them) and one that privileges principles of textuality and reflexivity.³ Indeed, Casa de campo can be read as a novel that deals with the writing of one or the other kind of story.

Let us turn to both the novel's fictional story and its reflexive commentaries to see how Casa de campo proposes such readings. The fiction revolves around the Ventura y Ventura family, at whose casa de campo, located on property called Marulanda, most of the action is set. At the time of the main episodes (a summer during which the family stays at the country house), Marulanda is inhabited by three groups of characters: the Ventura family, composed of a total of forty-six adults and children;⁴ the family's “army” of servants, which, headed by a Mayordomo, maintains order at the house; and the area's native inhabitants, who mine the gold from which the Venturas' wealth and power are derived.

The event that serves as catalyst for the story's major developments is the adults' picnic excursion to an idyllic retreat in a distant part of Marulanda.⁵ Accompanied by all the servants, the parents embark on their outing, apparently abandoning their children at the casa de campo. Strangely enough, the excursion is lived by the adults as a trip of one day while it is experienced by the children as an absence of a whole year. This undelimitable time becomes a time of discord, disorder, and destruction at the summer house. In the temporary absence of the adults and servants, the children and the natives split into opposing camps to battle for control of the house and its grounds. Some follow Adriano Gomara (a Ventura by marriage only who had been declared insane and imprisoned by the elder Venturas), who is released once the adults depart, while others ally themselves with opposing factions as each group vies for power over the others.

Though the return of the parents, preceded by their servants, restores some kind of order, it does not return everything to the way things are at the beginning of the novel. Authorized by the Ventura adults, for whom they act, the servants restore an approximation of order by violently suppressing the children's and natives' resistance to their control. However, that order is also left in question at the novel's end. For when the parents themselves return, they are accompanied by a group of foreigners, to whom they plan to sell the property. However, it is this group of potential partners that is joined by the once-loyal Ventura servants and together they abandon both the former masters of the property and the decaying, but not yet totally destroyed, casa de campo.⁶

As convention would have it, the more or less representational discourse that presents the story focuses on the “third-persons” (i.e., the characters) who figure as fictional entities of the story and subjects of the narrative.⁷ The omniscient narrator with whom the power and plan of narration reside, and who apparently is responsible for the way things do (or do not) get told, is a narrating subject who remains more or less “out of sight.” I say “more or less” for several reasons. First, the narrator's discourse or “voice” turns from a posture of identification with to a position that is ironically distanced from (and at times seems to make parodic or caricaturesque gestures toward⁸) the characters and events in the fiction. That is, the narrative discourse fluctuates between emphasizing that there is indeed a narrator “behind” the fictional story that is being told and covering up or disguising the presence of a subject from whose position and perspective everything is known and narrated.⁹

Another fiction proposed by the novel is that this knowledgeable narrator is also its author, who reveals himself throughout the novel. This subject's visibility becomes a significant feature of the text as the narrator intermittently speaks not only to tell the story that is the principal object of narration but also to talk about his work as the author who has fashioned it. In fact, his visibility is fleshed out—in a sense literalized—when he incorporates himself into the text as a participant in a conversation held with a “real” person, upon whom, supposedly, one of his fictional characters of the same name (one Silvestre Ventura) has been based (395-403). The conversation between the unnamed author-character and the named person-character deals with the novel itself, as the “real” author, en route to his publisher with a copy of Casa de campo under his arm, meets the “real” Silvestre and comes to discuss it with him. His interlocutor responds to a reading of some of the novel's pages and the fiction it proposes with statements that elicit from the fictive author comments about the intentions and assumptions he has held while writing the novel.

Their conversation revolves mainly around the question of verisimilitude which also becomes the focus of the author-narrator's “postscript” that follows (404-5). Their meeting is a meeting of disparate positions on the relation between the literary and the extra-literary, between fiction and reality: that of Silvestre, who can't understand why this author has changed reality, thereby misrepresenting him and his family, and that of the author, who has written with the intention of deforming, making unrecognizable, that very reality (398-401). The one desires literature to be realistic in a photographic, literal way: to copy accurately, to reproduce faithfully the “real” referents named in its pages. The other aims to undermine such a form of realism, putting in its place another kind of reality by rewriting the appearance of its apparently realistic models. “Realism” as a set of conventions that present directly images of the real, the author-character asserts, is a theory and a practice of the past. One simply can't write a novel as if one were living in the nineteenth century or as if the twentieth century had never occurred.

Yet, this is in a way just what Donoso does. Or, rather, by writing precisely from the perspective of a twentieth-century author rooted in both the literary practices and the political history of his own time, Donoso has managed to produce a text that returns us with equal force to the powers, as well as problems, of nineteenth-century conventions. If the authorial commentaries turn us away from the fictional story to consider reflexively the conventions of narrative fiction, they also fix our attention on both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary practices that are simultaneously employed in Casa de campo. And, if the fictional story, interspersed with the author-narrator's ironic remarks and reflexive comments, turns us toward a reading of its characters and events as signifiers that belie an allegorical meaning,¹⁰ it also keeps our gaze fixed on the development of its narrative and the invented world to which we have to adhere if we are to understand what it “really” means, if we are to read through it to the political history it also figures.

In the encounter between the “real” author and “real” person and in the authorial commentary that follows it, we have a good example of how Casa de campo turns our gaze (as well as its own focus) to what we might call its literary concerns, its reflexive inquiry. Throughout its pages Casa de campo develops a self-conscious commentary on, a critical analysis and theoretical discussion of, the story being told, the techniques that are used to tell it, and the framework of literary history within which the whole enterprise might be situated. The discourse we might call reflexive thus takes as its object the referential discourse—the Ventura narrative itself—that unfolds alongside it.

For example, in the numerous comments to his reader (these are “direct addresses” if we privilege the idea of the text as a communication between author and reader; they are “asides” if we privilege the idea of the novel as telling a story from which the fictive author's commentaries digress), the author-narrator draws attention to his unconventional approach to the conventions of narrative fiction. He openly refers to the novel as a text he has authored (e.g., 13, 166, 237, 363, 391-92); draws attention to his role as a narrator (e.g., 42, 52, 73); highlights the relationship between his role as an author and that of his readers (e.g., 104, 229, 310, 477); draws attention to his characters as characters (e.g., 174, 303-4, 318, 371-72, 394, 457); interprets events, or explains the meaning of characters' actions, or makes connections between narrative episodes (e.g., 166, 229, 466, 477); asserts or puts into question the authority of his own authorial intentions (e.g., 302, 349, 391-92, 492); makes implicit or explicit comparisons between disparate narrative conventions (e.g., 53, 334, 492-93). It is only in his function as narrator that this privileged subject tells what happens in Marulanda. In his function as author, he comments on his own characters and discusses how he has decided to tell, or not to tell, the Ventura family story. Throughout, he acknowledges the virtual presence of his interlocutor—the reader to whom he repeatedly refers and for whom he develops his explanations of the positions that his novel is meant to take.

This authorial subject is, of course, the novel's fictive author and thus but another artificial figure proposed by the text.¹¹ The imaginary conversation between this author and Silvestre Ventura is also emblematic of how the text disguises, while also seeming to display, its artifice (i.e., its textuality). It is a scene that purports to distinguish clearly between what is artificial and what is real, what is inside and what is outside the novel's fiction. It is a scene that is presented as a hypothetical “real” event whose artifice the novel's readers are asked to suppress while it is put forward. (The author-narrator says: “Supongamos que la siguiente entrevista tuvo—o hubiera podido tener—lugar” [395].) This momentary, conscious suspension of disbelief, in which author and reader are to participate together, turns us away from the Ventura family fiction to a “reality” outside it. This realm would appear to be a fictionalized depiction of the “reality” in which the author-narrator actually resides. It is the “real” world from which he has gathered material on which to base the representation of the Ventura fiction. It is the “real” world in which the writing of this novel has taken place and in which he, for a moment, transforms himself into a fictional character in dialogue with one of the models for that fiction.

In calling attention to the artificial status of the fictional world “below,” from a position “above” (where the author “really” resides), the author-narrator appears to establish his distance and difference from that artifice. As we are well aware, however, this gesture is one that gives but another artificial turn to the text—a turn that produces its own realistic effect. For the position that never seems to be put into question is that of the subject who oversees the novel as a whole. The fictive author speaks of the text we read in an authoritative and apparently accurate manner. His reflexive observations draw our attention away from the represented fiction as realistic to the novel's narrative as artificial. However, in order to succeed with this distraction the author-narrator actually proposes another realistic frame within the novel: the frame within which the fictive author himself speaks, the “real” position from which the authorial subject is able to take his reader into his confidence and declare the artificiality of the fictional world that his own discourse appears to frame. That frame, as we know, is itself part of the artifice it would claim to locate at a distance from the subject who speaks within it. Oddly enough, the comments that lead us to read the novel reflexively are given authority by the realistic appearance of the subject whose discourse forms that reflexive register.¹² We see, then, that the authorial image and voice that would lead us away from and outside the Marulanda fiction are part of the most powerful fiction of all. For this authorial fiction is but another representational effect of a discourse that proposes to “represent” nothing at all.

This author, who is himself but a well-disguised and thus verisimilar subject of artifice, is to be taken, appropriately enough, as an authority on the artificial. Indeed, as he himself emphasizes, his “intention” is to prove—or, rather, to prevent his reader from forgetting—that his novel is only an elaborate appearance. He thus claims that his text is to be taken as nothing more, and nothing less, than an artificial object. To that end, he explains early on why he finds it necessary to interrupt the fiction's flow, to erupt into the narrative and shift registers—that is, to move from a discourse that focuses on other fictional entities to one that centers on the author-narrator himself and the text over which he presides. For instance, at the beginning of chapter 2 he openly declares: “A estas alturas de mi narración, mis lectores quizás estén pensando que no es de ‘buen gusto’ literario que el autor tironee a cada rato la manga del que lee para recordarle su presencia, sembrando el texto con comentarios que no pasan de ser informes sobre el transcurso del tiempo o el cambio de escenografía. Quiero explicar cuanto antes que lo hago con el modesto fin de proponer al público que acepte lo que escribo como un artificio” (53).

Along with the many other self-conscious comments in the novel, this declaration of a literary intention would appear to situate itself on a level above the narrative, being as it is “outside” and “beyond” the fictional world proposed here. From within the realm of this “higher,” more privileged discourse, the conventions of mimetic fiction are exposed, revealed for what they are: devices for creating an illusion of the real, techniques for making us suspend disbelief. It is from this perspective, then, that the novel demands that we read its story as nothing more than a fiction, as an artifice of whose conventional designs we are supposed to remain aware. The fictive author also admits, however, that this is precisely the kind of reading the novel attempts to undermine. He reveals that from within his own position as a privileged reader, from his superior position as a “real” and totally informed observer, he himself is unable to respond with or produce this kind of reading. Contrary to its author's stated intentions and techniques, then, the fiction in the face of which we are to remain distanced and of whose mechanisms we are to be critically aware manages to persuade even its own author of its “reality.” The subject presumed to be most conscious of its artificiality is precisely the one brought under the spell of its representational powers.

In the final chapter—just before we find out how everything ends in Casa de campo—the narrating author uncovers the limits of his own readerly, and yet authorial, abilities. He confesses that his plan to create “personajes como seres a-psicológicos, inverosímiles, artificiales” (492) has somehow been foiled by those same fictional entities. He discloses that the presentation of those characters in the novel seems to have overpowered the intentions of the author responsible for their creation: “no he podido evitar ligarme pasionalmente a ellos y con su mundo circundante, del que es tan imposible extraerlos. … En otras palabras: pese a mi determinación de no confundir lo real con el arte, me está constando terriblemente esta despedida, conflicto que toma la forma literaria de no querer desprenderme de ellos sin terminar sus historias—olvidando que no tienen más historia que la que yo quiera darles—en vez de conformarme con terminar esta historia que, de alguna manera que no acabaré nunca de entender, es, sin duda, la mía” (492). This statement is at once a declaration of proprietary privilege and an acknowledgement of this author's failure to establish such rights and powers—such final authority—within or over the novel (see also Mac Adam).

The confessed contradiction revolves around a question of interpretation, a problem of reading. It raises questions about how to read the novel in relation to the various traditions to which it is bound and in relation to the various models of reading it calls to mind. If we were to read the narrative as the fictive author asserts he himself has been led to read it, we would read it as a discourse that represents a world which, in one way or another, gets taken as “real.” However, as the narrative takes us inside the Ventura family story (the fictive reality produced by such a reading), the allegorical potential of that narrative also takes us outside that fiction to the historical reality it appears to figure. And, as we read the fictive author's comments on that fiction, we are turned to a view of its referents as mere fabrications, while at the same time the author-narrator who reveals their artifice to us supplants their “real” world with his own.

If we read the novel allegorically, we read its discourse as both transparent (as referring to entities and events that acquire something of a life of their own beyond the text that simultaneously recedes into the background while that privileged meaning reveals itself to us) and as opaque (as referring to entities and events that point as much to their own textual reality and the “meaning” signaled by that surface of words as to the reality of the story through which they also appear). Such a reading would see the novel's political allegory as figured by the main events of the Marulanda tale during that one fateful summer/year. More specifically, that story appears to allegorize events surrounding Salvador Allende's rise to power and his fall; it also seems to figure events of Spanish American history from the time of discovery or the era of independence to the present. But, even though the novel proposes a political allegory that operates in different, but connected, registers at once (it can be read as moving between macrocosmic and microcosmic analogies between Spanish America and Chile), it seems to aim principally at the Chilean context.¹³ The Venturas' abandonment of their house and children, the ensuing disorder and partial destruction of their property, the rise of a leader in the figure of Adriano Gomara, who accedes briefly to power only to be murdered during the period of violence imposed by the servant “army,” and the subsequent restoration of order, with the return of the Ventura adults as figures of precarious authority—all these and other narrative elements can be read as allegorizing Chile's political history from around 1970, when Allende was elected, to 1973, when the military coup brought his government to an end.

Political history is thus figured by a fictional reality that, paradoxically, must be perceived as a surface, as an artificial textualized reality in order to point toward the other “truer” story it also tells, the other reality (or realities) it also represents. To recognize that other meaning is also to read Casa de campo as mere artifice—as an artifice that, by drawing attention to itself as unreal, also draws attention away from questions of textuality toward the historical events the novel's central fiction can be read to figure. Oddly enough, the reaffirmation of the text's artificial status is precisely what enables us to read it also as figuring the “real.” To read Casa de campo as a political allegory is, by definition and convention, to read it as a textualized representation, a fundamentally “artificial” and reflexive structure, as well as a narrative that tells a potentially convincing story. Donoso's novel highlights this characteristic of political allegory and thereby reveals some connections between the different readings we may give to representational and reflexive writing. It also reminds us of the possible points of contact between allegory as an “old” (i.e., classical, medieval, or Renaissance) form of narrative and modern fiction.¹⁴

There is, in the end, a great deal of self-consciousness in the fictional narrative and not a small amount of representational force in the fictive author's self-conscious commentary. The one form of writing seems to uncover, even to figure, the workings of the other. For example, as stylized or parodic as its development may seem to be, and as ironic as its (author's) intentions may appear, the discourse that produces and presents the Venturas manages both to represent the fictional world to which the novel refers and to proclaim in so many ways that what is meant here is something other than what, on the surface, is seen or told (see note 10). And, what is meant by this fiction, the allegorical potential of the narrative would tell us, is something “real,” something historically “true.” However, the meanings toward which the narrative turns us pertain as much to the literary as to the historical, as much to the realm of the textual as to the political.

If we were to posit the tale of political history allegorized through the fiction (that is, the historical referents) as the only story being told here, we would be privileging a meaning, a reading, that Donoso's novel also undercuts. Such a reduction of meaning to a univocal, unambiguous, and fixed reading is countered by the novel's discursive opposition. The complex dialectical interaction of fictions moves us from one register to another, from one kind of meaning to another throughout the novel. The story of the Ventura family and all the events set in Marulanda is at least a two-pronged, double-directed tale (that is, both a quasi-realist and an allegorical story) that is developed in constant contact, even in direct competition, with another openly reflexive one (the “story” of the fictive author and the literary issues with which he attempts to deal). Each story, each reading has its own kind of authority; they are of course interconnected—indeed, inseparable.¹⁵

The fictive author's presence just behind, as well as above, the story being told, however, points not only to invisible meanings below the surface of events but also to visible concerns that are displayed upon it. The immediate issues of concern to this author—those about which he reveals his authorial positions—appear to be those which shape the literary theories and practices of readers and writers of texts such as Donoso's own Casa de campo, rather than (or not only) those which inform Chile's recent political history. Thus, there would certainly appear to be several directions in which to take our reading of Casa de campo. The choice of one reading or another would seem to be a choice in favor of one kind of discourse or another, one type of issue or another. The choice—indeed, the opposition itself—is perhaps misleading. It leads us astray of the issues that are held in common by these apparently opposing spheres and aims. For the discourse whose object is the at once representational and allegorical events in Marulanda also returns us to questions that connect up with those around which the novel's fictive author creates his self-conscious commentary. And the discourse whose object appears to be principally literary theory and practice actually leads us back to some of the key issues addressed within the development of the Ventura narrative.

In both these registers—in the literarily reflexive and the representational/allegorical realms—we are never far from some consideration of the conventions of authority. Throughout its pages Casa de campo examines relations of authority that govern these seemingly distant spheres of action, relations that inform literary as well as political theory and practice. For example, such relations and conventions are presented through the clashes among the Ventura adults, their children, the servants, and the natives (and, thus, among the classes or institutions they might be seen to figure). Through that fiction, the novel explores how authority is legitimized or challenged, how power is exercised or eliminated in the real world as well as in narrative fiction. One of the conclusions, as it were, to such conflicts is that no single system or individual, group or leader, emerges as entirely legitimate or finally authoritative.¹⁶

Though the relatively stable and established hierarchical order of the Ventura family and its property is destroyed by the end of the text, the novel does not elevate another order to take its place nor any figure of authority to lead the way. The presentation of conflict between groups or classes of characters (i.e., adults vs. children) also presents divisions within them. For example, rather than constituting a single voice and vision, the children divide themselves into groups supporting one or another interest, opposing one or another agenda. Though figures of authority emerge to lead or govern (Adriano Gomara, Juvenal, the Mayordomo), none of these figures remains unchallenged or undefeated, no one character receives lasting or unified support (not even from the text's author). Each group's powers are sanctioned and struck down, each leader's authority is supported and then challenged. The question of who has the right to and who shall rule, control, or author(ize) the reality and relationships of Marulanda circulates not only in the characters' deeds but also in their words. Indeed, these issues are explicitly thematized in some of the fictional characters' own ruminations about the nature of power or the exercise of authority, and in the narrator's description of the significance of specific events or actions.

In effect, within Marulanda itself many characters are actuely aware of the structures of authority, the relations of power within which they are situated and in accordance with or against which they may act. We see this, for example, in Balbina's (Adriano Gomara's wife) analysis of her husband's relation to the natives on whose behalf he works: “Estoy segura que los nativos, que te creen una especie de dios y eso te encanta, te enredan con sus mentiras y tú simulas creérselas para dominarlos. Esas cosas me pertenecen: si tú eres dios, yo soy la esposa del dios y tengo derechos” (78); “No me engañes, Adriano mío: aunque supieras que te están dando de comer carne humana, lo que no es improbable, comerías para no arriesgar tu poder” (83). While her interpretation of Adriano's motives may or may not be entirely valid, the analytical force of her reading of the relations of power that bind her husband and the natives, as well as the privileges that such a relation may grant her as the wife of such a powerful person, unveils some of the realities governing relations that may appear on the surface as free of any kind of interest or constraint. Her reading of the situation also reveals the potential for reading (legitimately, it seems) any relationship as a relation with interests of power.¹⁷

The children who are, by definition, subject to parental authority, are acutely aware of how such relations are formed and how they shift. They too understand the contingent nature of those relationships and thus how each of their positions may be upheld or undermined. For instance, while plotting an apparently harmless challenge to their parents' order in their project to uproot the iron gate surrounding the estate, the brothers Clemente, Mauro, and Valerio acknowledge an understanding of the hierarchy of authority that informs their relations with one another as well as with the Ventura adults. After Clemente, the youngest, challenges the authority of his older brother Mauro (“Quiero cuestionar la autoridad que te has arrogado para desposeerme de mi juguete”), we are told that “Mauro abrazó al pequeñuelo, asegurándole que después, cuando tuvieran tiempo, y él comprendiera su propia autoridad en caso que la tuviera, la recobraría” (101). This incident is later analyzed by Valerio (a year younger than Mauro), who situates it within the context of their transgressive project: “El propósito de lo nuestro era sólo hacer algo prohibido, ajeno a la voluntad de nuestros padres, algo verdaderamente nuestro, no tribal, secreto pero sin consecuencias. Ahora … no hay leyes y por lo tanto no hay autoridad, por lo cual queda invalidada tanto la esencia misma de nuestro quehacer como tu autoridad para quitarle la pelota a Clemente” (103). The wielding of authority is authorized by the laws that govern and give shape to the familial order within which they find themselves. Without such a structure neither legitimate actions nor transgressive acts are possible—the (familial, social, or political) law authorizes as much as constrains all subjects of authority. This is the force of Valerio's declaration—a declaration that, of course, takes on its own authoritative tone.

The servants in Marulanda are perceived as the force that upholds the authority of the Ventura adults as well as the established order that empowers them. They nonetheless also represent a potential threat to the privilege of the masters whom they serve. Indeed, though the servants act as the agents for the Ventura adults and thereby exercise authority for them, they are, it is suggested, a possible threat to their masters' position and power. This reading of the servants' real or imagined role in Marulanda is offered, in fact, as a possible explanation for the novel's catalytic event. Juvenal, the eldest of the Ventura children, theorizes that a question of control, of power, may be at the heart of the adults' one-day/one-year excursion: “este paseo fue organizado para aplacar a los sirvientes, ya que en sus filas podía estar germinando el descontento: quizás nuestros padres les tengan miedo por haberles dado demasiado poder, y el propósito de complacerlos a ellos, a los sirvientes, estaría entonces detrás de todo el fasto familiar” (153).

Such a view of the servants' powers and of their actions as potentially subversive is strengthened by a scene such as the one in which Juan Pérez (the only servant with a given name in the novel) overhears the Mayordomo's plan to bring the Ventura children under control by regulating—indeed, authoring entirely—the reality in which they live. The narrator reveals his critically subversive analysis of his own superior's misdirected goal, describing his thoughts while working to restore a mural in the room where the Mayordomo discusses the plan:

Con un toque lívido de su pincel aquí, un verdoso acá, él podía alterar a este lacayo enaltecido hasta dotarlo de la perspicacia suficiente para que comprendiera de una vez que la meta no era atrapar a los niños dentro de esa realidad que él estaba inventando, sino a los Ventura mismos cuando regresaran. Tarea por cierto más difícil. Pero como al fin y al cabo son las leyes las que crean la realidad, y no a la inversa, y quien tiene el poder crea las leyes, era sólo cuestión de conservarlo. ¡Que el Mayordomo no lo malgastara! ¡Que fuera con cuidado para que el poder, que siempre finalmente se agota, no se agotara antes de la llegada de la presa suprema!

(330-31)

However, we see that this same character is also characterized as unable to master the mechanisms of power he appears to analyze so acutely:

Juan Pérez no sabía vincularse con el poder más que por medio de maquinaciones clandestínas que lo tornaban vulnerable a cualguier emoción. Así, no calculó que las grandes alianzas suelen establecerse directa y fríamente, de fuerza a fuerza, prescindiendo de consideraciones ideológicas y personalistas de frágil constitución puesto que no encarnan más que la carencia de esa autoridad oficial, sorda, y ciega, que en definitiva es la única que cuenta.

(434-35)

This analysis of how power works, how authority gets wielded is an analysis provided by the author-narrator, who, in providing such comments, reveals his own understanding of and interest in this topic. Thus it is not surprising that such an issue becomes both an implicit and explicit focus of attention not only in the parts of the novel that tell its story but also in the sections that present its author-narrator's comments. Indeed, such issues of authority are self-consciously emphasized in the fictive author's discussion of the conventions governing narrative fiction and in his description of the privileges accompanying his own authorial activity. More specifically, the author-narrator takes up the issues of his own authority—his own powers and privileges (or lack thereof) as an author and as a narrator—as he makes theoretical and practical comments about writing novels in general and Casa de campo in particular. He posits the relation between author and reader as a polite partnership in which the author-narrator performs with the permission of his textual partner (e.g., 37, 318). We know, of course, that requests such as “si mis lectores me permiten” can be read as formulaic conventional devices, as the rhetorical convention of false humility used by many a conventional author. Such a request may be read as either revealing or obscuring the fictive author's position—or, perhaps, as disclosing the position in which he turns from mastery over to submission beneath his own reader and text.

Indeed, in the author/reader relationship implicitly posited by the fictive author, his is the position from which details are organized, information is withheld, and mysteries are clarified (see for example, 104, cited in note 10). The fictive author's frequent explicit reminders of his own authority and privilege punctuate the novel's pages. For example, when describing the vastness of the country house's underground cellars, built atop ancient salt mines, he states:

No es mi intención, aunque como narrador omnisciente tendría derecho a hacerlo, contar la historia de esos sótanos pretendiendo que es independiente de mi antojo, o que existe fuera de esta pǵina. Ni topógrafo ni espeleólogo, ni minero ni ingeniero, no voy a levantar un plano de esta mina de sal tan vasta y tan vieja como la de Wieliczka. Aspiro sólo a establecer el proscenio para mi recitación, rico, eso sí de bastidores, bambalinas, telones y tramoyas, y complejo de utilería y vestaurio, pero matizado por la reserva, de modo que mi monólogo—no nos engañemos: no pretendo que esta narración sea otra cosa—cobre proyecciones que ni mi propia intención desconoce.”

(349; see also 371, where he refers to “la prerogativa del escritor”)

This statement of narrative intention and textual control emphasizes the fictive author's confidence in his plan and the authority of his position as sole subject (and thus owner) of the narration. His passing declaration of a restricted knowledge (he is not an engineer, etc.) and, thus, a limited literary intention does not seem to undermine his position of authority. However, as we (and he) move closer to the novel's final pages, we see this image of authority eroded. We hear the voice of the author-narrator declare his own subservience and attachment to the very text over which most of his earlier statements proclaim his control. It seems that, in becoming an authoritative author and teller of a powerful and meaningful tale, this author-narrator seems to produce a text that also masters him.

As noted above, this dilemma is addressed near the end of the text (490-93), when the question of the novel's ending (not only what happens at the end, but also how to make that end or any end happen) is raised. The author-narrator finds himself under the spell, as it were, of his own fiction. In confessing his loss of control, he would of course put his own authority into question. This confession, as we recall, turns us, along with the fictive author himself, from a position of omniscient mastery to one with a limited perspective and power over things, and back again. For the fictive author's final confession unveils from a different angle how we shift back and forth between reading this author as an omnipotent authority and reading him as no more powerful than any of his characters or readers. As we are turned (with the authorial figure) from one to another image of his powers and position, we are turned with the text from a reading that sees it all as verbal artifice to one that accepts the representation of a believable, though also ironically staged, fictional world.

The following passage, which immediately precedes the confession cited earlier, illustrates the fictive author's shifting reasonings about and readings of his own text:

Aunque yo mismo siento una curiosidad omnívora por saber todo …—pero me doy cuenta que para saberlo tendría que escribir por lo menos otra novela; o, como en algunas novelas del siglo pasado, agregar un epílogo insatisfactoriamente esquemático para redondear cada destino—, me veo excluido en forma dolorosa de las infinitas posibilidades narratives que tendrá que ocultar mi silencio, y para paliar la contradictoria angustia producida por la necesidad de abandonar el campo en el momento justo sin la cual no hay aite, me digo a mí mismo que la vida real, en efecto, está constituida por anécdotas a medio terminar, por personajes inexplicables, ambiguos, desdibujados, por historias sin transición ni explicación, sin comienzo ni fin y casi siempre tan sin significado como una frase mal construida. Pero sé que justificarme de este modo es apelar a un criterio mimético de la obra de arte, que en el caso de la presente novela es totalmente ajeno a mi empeño porque esta historia hubiera sido otra si la hubiera escrito en esa tesitura. Quitado el freno a pesar mío—el freno de no confundir lo literario con lo real—, se descencadena entonces el desmedido apetito de no ser sólo mi texto, sino más, mucho más que mi texto: ser todos los textos posibles.

(491-92)

As the fictive author continues with his “Es curioso, sin embargo …” and goes on to reveal that he has been made to believe in his characters and artifice, his statement turns into a confession of “insecurity” as well: “siento una oleada de inseguridad: dudo de la validez de todo esto y de su belleza, lo que me hace intentar aferrarme a estos trozos de mi imaginación y prolongarles la vida para hacerlos eternos y frondosos. Pero no puede ser. Tienen que terminar aquí, porque debo recordar que si los artificios poseen vida, poseen también muerte para que no lleguen a devorar como monstruos al autor” (492-93; see also 396, where he refers to the “tyranny” of the fictional character over its creator).

It is no accident that these statements are made near the end of the novel. For, as the fictive author also emphasizes, the novel's impending ending is precisely what appears to cause this sense of “angustia.” As he contemplates receding into silence—that is, disappearing altogether—he is literally faced with a loss of position. These confessions can also be read as the fictive author's attempt to retain control, his defense against a fiction to which he has in a way already surrendered himself. (We might also read the imaginary conversation between the authorial figure and Silvestre Ventura, noted above, not only as a device through which more reflexive commentary is included in the novel. It is also the scene in which the fictive author defends himself against one of his characters, a character who is permitted a very challenging appearance by his own author.) With the end of the novel comes the “death of the author” in the form of silence—an impending silence that is acknowledged as well as deferred (491, 493). However, to keep talking, as it were, is to give power once again to the fictive entities that have come to have power over him, to the fiction that is not supposed to convince us but which, nonetheless, leads its own author to succumb to its conventional designs. Indeed, this is how Casa de campo ends—we return to the fictional world of Marulanda, as the authorial voice recedes behind the narrative discourse that brings the story to a close.

The novel's ending does not close off, however, the question of the author-narrator's authority, nor does it establish any fictional/allegorical figure or any literary model or political institution as unquestionably authoritative and, thus, worthy of unconditional support or condemnation by Casa de campo. Donoso's novel develops, rather, an inquiry into the political and social, literary and textual relations that make the exercise of authority possible in different arenas (see note 17). The character's apparent awareness of such matters, the author-narrator's self-consciousness of his own privilege or powerlessness, and the Ventura story's development of individual, group, or institutional conflicts of power—these features of Casa de campo connect different registers of fiction that have been designed, it may appear, with some such aim in mind.

Indeed, in turning us to read its text one way, then another, Casa de campo seems to reveal as well as veil the authorial figure responsible for its design, an author who might appear to (want to) take positions on a number of different topics. However, we must also remember that the author still remains under cover, under the protection of the various fictions (“realistic” or “allegorical” or “reflexive”) that serve as provocative disguises while seeming to uncover the subject responsible for the masquerade. The discourse we might call representational points at meanings also allegorical, thus appearing to disclose the “real” author along with the “real” meaning of the whole fiction. The discourse we might call reflexive points at the artifice of all that may appear real or even meaningful—the artifice that makes it possible for anything like the truth to be seen. Together these modes support one another, figuring the shifts between one or another kind of reading, one or another kind of narrative convention, that shapes Casa de campo and the issues under consideration within its pages.¹⁸

We thus see how Casa de campo questions, but nonetheless also affirms, the orders that inform the various fictions between which it dialectically shifts, the various “realities” to which it simultaneously, though alternately, refers. The dialectic of discourses and fictions, moreover, figures as much as represents the dialectic of authority to which the novel's “real” as well as fictive author is subject. For, if, from above the novel's reflexive and representational/allegorical fictions, there surfaces an image of an authorial subject who has plotted everything out from a superior position of authority, we should also remember that that image is itself but another conventional product of a text in which convention is dialectically certified and curtailed. Casa de campo thus takes an unconventional turn around issues both old and new as it explores in complementary registers the relations between the authority of convention and the conventions of authority.

Notes

1. I use “literal” in the sense of what is explicit, manifest, or visible, what refers, on the surface of things, mainly to what can at first glance be seen. To put it another way, our literal reading of the novel is a reading of its literal level—the story of the Ventura family to which the narrative openly refers. On the other hand, if we think of the term “literal” itself in the most literal way, such a reading would point up not the referential, but rather the linguistic and textual, properties of the novel's discourse. This kind of distinction is important for the differences I wish to mark between two apparently disparate models of reading or forms of narrative, and also the form of allegorical readings or writing. (This a form of writing with which Donoso appears to work.) In reading a text allegorically or as having been written with an allegorical design, we deal with two “levels” (one literal or surface, the other allegorical or interpretative), two “meanings,” within the same text. (These points draw on the comments of Bloomfield [esp. 312-15], Culler [esp. 267-68], and Quilligan [Language of Allegory 67]; see also Todorov [The Fantastic 61-62] on the literal versus the referential, representative, or descriptive and the literal versus the figurative.) I use the terms “realistic” or “realist” not, in the restricted sense, to designate nineteenth-century realist fiction, but in a more general sense to describe a writing that produces an appearance of reality in the form of a fictional world and whose language can thus be characterized generally as transparent. (See Jakobson for some fundamental distinctions on realism.) I am grateful to my colleague Barbara E. Kurtz for bringing to my attention some of the materials on allegory cited in this essay.

2. The most helpful treatments of the novel's political allegory are those of Bacarisse, Gutiérrez Mouat (“Discurso”), and Iñigo Madrigal. Though the history of Chile is privileged as the political allegory's referent by most critics, Iñigo Madrigal also acknowledges the broader historical contexts (i.e., Latin America as a whole from the time of discovery to the end of the 19th century, see esp. 9-11) and Bacarisse asserts that many of the novel's allegorical elements can be read as referring to other contexts as well—to “pre-revolutionary Cuba, or the ochenio of odriísmo in Peru” (323). Indeed, Bacarisse appears to privilege the broader context over the Chilean by stating that “the allegorical elements in this novel do not correspond exactly to conditions or events in Chile and … their associations are more general” (323). (See also note 6.) Gutiérrez Mouat points out some problems with Iñigo Madrigal's reading of the novel and, drawing on Quilligan's Language of Allegory, asserts that the novel “no es una alegoría sino meramente alegórica” (“Discurso” 205). These and other points he makes are generally very well taken. However, it is not inappropriate to describe Donoso's novel as a political allegory, since the adjective “political” identifies it not as a “narrative peopled by personified abstractions moving about a reechoing landscape of language” (Quilligan “Allegory, Allegoresis,” 163), not as a text that exemplifies the established genre called “allegory” (see Quilligan Language of Allegory). It refers instead to a text that figures a specific politico-historical situation and whose fictional narrative can thus be read allegorically. (The most helpful discussions of allegory include the work of Honig, Fletcher, and Quilligan. On some features of political allegory, see for example Fletcher 324-28 and Bloom 170-71, 175-77. For Donoso's own characterization of his novel as an allegory and/or as a “symbolic” and “political” work, see Donoso/Martínez 72 and Donoso/Christ 42).

3. I emphasize the allegorical reading suggested by the novel as much as its allegorical elements or its overall identity as a political allegory. On the distinction between allegory and allegorical reading see Quilligan Language of Allegory and “Allegory, Allegoresis.” The distinction between fictive and real referents is proposed by Linda Hutcheon 93-94; I was reminded of this terminological possibility by Suleiman 146. Cf. Gutiérrez Mouat (“Discurso” 222-25) on the opposition between allegorical and carnivalesque discourse in the novel. My comments on reflexivity draw on the work of Alter, Hutcheon, and Spires; another very helpful study, which came to my attention too late for inclusion in this article, is that of Siegle.

4. The novel provides a table of family relationships that identifies each member by name and age (9). On the “hyperbolic” character of the family genealogy, see Gutiérrez Mouat “Carnavalización” 60.

5. See Christ 306 and Iñigo Madrigal 12 for relevant points about the painterly origins of the outing.

6. Briefly, within the Chilean context, the possible allegorical correspondences (as pointed out by Iñigo Madrigal, Bacarisse, and Omaña) include the following: Marulanda = Chile, 1970-73; Ventura adults = the oligarchy; children = the middle class; servants = Armed Forces; Mayordomo = Pinochet; natives = lower classes or proletariat or Communists; foreigners = North Americans; Adriano Gomara = Salvador Allende; rise of Adriano Gomara as a leader of one faction of children and natives = Allende's election in 1970; return of servants and death of Adriano Gomara at the hands of the servants = military coup of 1973. As noted above, within the context of other countries' political history or that of Spanish America as a whole, other equivalents have also been suggested: Marulanda could be read as an exemplary Spanish American country during its neocolonial period or as pre-revolutionary Cuba or as the Peru in the 1950s; the different groups of characters could be read as generally figuring distinct social classes, the servants the military forces, and the natives the lower classes, just as they do in the Chilean model; and points of contact could be established between Adriano Gomara and Castro or Madero.

7. I mean to emphasize, of course, the difference between the characters as subjects of the narrative discourse (récit or énoncé, the narrative text itself, the narrative as produced by the narrator) in which they figure as entities named and described in the third person by the narrator and the narrator's position as subject of narration or the act of narrating (or énonciation) through which his identity as a first person is intermittently emphasized in Donoso's novel. On these and other related distinctions, see, for example, Bal Narratology, Chatman Story and Discourse, Genette Narrative Discourse, and Todorov Littérature et signification.

8. On the ironic, parodic, and carnavalesque features of the novel, see Gutiérrez Mouat and Solotorevsky.

9. See Baker for comments on the process of masking and unmasking that shapes the narrator's appearance. Gutiérrez Mouat and Solotorevsky also emphasize that metaphor in their discussions of Casa de campo as a carnavalesque text. Donoso himself is the first to identify the novel in terms of the logic and structures of carnival (Donoso/Martinez 64).

10. The author-narrator provides explicit signs that the novel, or parts of it, can be read as symbolic, if not altogether allegorical. He makes statements that openly propose the figurative value of events and characters directly to the reader or that suggest this kind of interpretation from within the fiction itself. For example: “la figura de Melania era de una vaga inmaterialidad. Su sonrisa fija, en cambio, su cabeza de trenzas negras enroscadas como las serpientes de una Medusa, adquirieron una intensidad alegórica que hizo temblar a Mauro” (98; emphasis added); “Mis lectores se estarán preguntando cuál era el secreto que produjo esta ruptura entre los hermanos [Mauro, Valerio, Alamiro and Clemente, who dig up the spears forming the estate's iron gate], y acusando al escritor de utilizar el desacreditado artilugio de retener información con el fin de azuzar la curiosidad del lector. La verdad es que me he propuesto arrastrarlo hasta este punto del relato para descubrir ahora, dando al hecho toda su magnitud, aquello que quiero colocar como símbolo al centro de mi historia” (104; emphasis added); “Es que Wenceslao, igual que mis demás niños, es un personaje emblemático” (372; emphasis added).

11. Mac Adam concludes his reading of the novel by acknowledging this point (263). The term “fictive author” is suggested by Spires 15-16.

12. This view of things would put into question Baker's identification of a “meta-text” within Casa de campo; see also Mac Adam.

13. As acknowledged in note 2, there is reason to question the exclusion of other referents in an allegorical reading of the novel; but it would be difficult to claim that the Chilean case is in fact not privileged by Donoso, and I therefore emphasize that context here. Among the readings of the novel that minimize or exclude entirely the matter of its political allegory are those of Martinez, Pérez Blanco, and Salgado.

14. Given the complexity of Donoso's novel as it shifts between discursive modes and also between registers of meaning within each of those modes, it should be read as more than an example of allegory as “the most self-reflexive and self-critical of narrative genres” (Quilligan, Language of Allegory 24). However, we might identify it as a contemporary example of how such reflexivity itself becomes an object of textual commentary in a novel that suggests a number of interpretations, among them a reading of its text as a political allegory. (See also Quilligan's suggestive points on “the resurgence of allegoresis in the various reader-oriented critical approaches to literature” and “the resurgence of allegorical narrative in contemporary fiction” [Language of Allegory 280]).

15. Allegory can be described as an “authoritarian” form of fiction, precisely because it preselects and privileges a certain meaning and thus limits the possibilities for interpretation (see Quilligan “Allegory, Allegoresis,” 182-85; cf. Suleiman). Donoso's novel works with the ideas of the authoritarian or authoritative within its various registers, one of which appears to be allegorical. However, his text would appear to authorize readings that complement and compete with one another all at the same time. Thus one of the issues raised by the novel has to do with the degree to which interpretation is fixed or not in Casa de campo.

16. The subversion of the possibility of establishing any stable or final authority can be understood in terms of the novel's carnavalesque structure. For a consideration of the question of power from that perspective, which in many ways supports the present reading, see Gutiérrez Mouat, “Discurso” 234-41 and “Carnavalización” 62.

17. A reading of the novel as lending unconditional support to the figure of Adriano Gomara/Salvador Allende would have to come to terms with the novel's critique of the relations that appear to be inherent in any exercise of authority or power and the self-interests that obtain in such situations, regardless of the aims of the participating subjects. Balbina's self-interested critique is also a critique of the possible self-interests of an apparently selfless figure who is, in fact, enmeshed in relations of power. The novel's (some would say Donoso's) critique of the opposition (the other Venturas, the servants, the Mayordomo) can thus be read as an exploration of how authority comes to be exercised as well as an apparent “taking of position” for or against any individual or group. Indeed, the author-narrator appears to undercut a reading that would stabilize his own opinions of such entities or even the institutions or events for which they might stand (for example, he stresses that he does not wish to “condenarlos a todos” [302], when describing actions of the servants/army). Thus, though the novel can be read as taking positions for or against specific characters or groups, it also undercuts readings that would fix its position in unconditional or univocal terms.

18. We might note that Donoso's novel can be read as putting into question and at the same time using effectively the conventions of realist fiction. Casa de campo appears to transform dated conventions into the most up-to-date strategies of modern fiction. For Donoso's comments about his interest in “recuperating” such a “dead language” as that of nineteenth-century prose fiction, see Donoso/Christ 42-43.

Works Cited

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