SOURCE: Murphy, Marie. “Language Put-On: José Donoso's A House in the Country.” Latin American Literary Review 17, no. 33 (January-June 1989): 50-59.

[In the following essay, Murphy discusses the metafictional purposes of Donoso's use of the mise en abyme structure in A House in the Country.]

While the Latin American new narrative interrogates many aspects of self-consciousness, within this tradition, José Donoso's A House in the Country provides one of the most exhaustive examinations of the art of the novel, overtly juxtaposing realistic and post-modern techniques. In this study, I examine the most evident display in A House in the Country of what is perhaps the central problematic in metafiction: the discrepancy between art and reality. I consider two instances of the mise en abyme structure, pointing to the role of artifice (and the artifice of language) in foregrounding a paradoxical search for history and reality in the novel. A narrative mapping of rhetorical strategies, in which the narrator addresses readers, is supplemented by a network of interior duplication with the device of the mise en abyme. Two of these, the excursion to a mythical lagoon and the children's play within the novel, mirror the larger frame of the novel, while simultaneously pointing to the characters' construction of reality and the structuring process of fiction. Lucien Dällenbach specifies three principal categories of this reflective device: the first has a relationship of similitude with the whole which contains it; the second is a reduplication in infinite regress; and the third includes the work it is contained in.

The play and excursion are both fictions of uncertain origins within the novel and their function is identical within the anecdote—mystifying an opposing group. That is, the excursion to the mythical lagoon is invented to distract the adults from recognizing and preempting the impending revolution while the play is designed to sidetrack the children from joining the revolt. In the first part of the novel, the powerful Ventura adults prepare for an excursion to a fabled lagoon, while many of the children engage in their favorite game, acting out the unscripted play La Marquise Est Sortie à Cinq Heures. Once the adults have departed, some children and the enslaved Indians revolt against the parents' authoritarian rule. The mythical lagoon and the play signal the Ventura's predilection for living in a fantasy world, refusing to face reality. Simultaneously, these two mises en abyme recall and exalt the power of invention, problematizing both terms: the nature of power and the creative explosiveness of language despite/behind official versions of truth.

The novel is at once all places and no place, a site where reality and fantasy intersect in a textual construction whereby the parts reflect each other and the whole, while the boundaries between constituent elements are subverted. The novel begins with an excursion to a lagoon which does not exist; the central events overlap with those of the embedded play; and the fresco depicted comes alive while the characters recede into its two-dimensionality. Beyond the play of authority between implied author, narrator, characters and readers, the text challenges the perception of reality, its representability and ultimately its existence.

The disposition of the discourse and eternally evolving myth foreground the novel's tentative nature: second versions rewrite earlier versions; filters obscure initial situations; Celeste “sees” within blindness, Arabela sees through foggy glasses, Wenceslao sees in the dark—perception in space is as confused as the ambiguous time. Reading is countered by being read to, telling by listening, and roles are unstable in a symmetrical reversibility. The lack of center in terms of originating facts generates a continual superimposition of narrative aspects—a productivity whose finality is seemingly belied.

The text advertises itself as a fictional analogue of both sociological theories as seen in Berger's and Luckmann's work, in which “reality is socially constructed” (primarily through language)¹ and a concept expressed in S. J. Schmidt's article, “The Fiction is that Reality Exists.” Schmidt relies upon constructivist epistemology which asserts that “the constructed world is a world of experiencing which consists of experience and does not assert ‘truth’ in terms of a correspondence to an ontological reality” (258). He concludes that reality is always a construct and its objective existence is a fiction, insofar as we cannot ascertain more than postulations of reality. Specifically with regard to the relationship between reality and fiction, he remarks:

By emphasizing the role of conventions in directing the system's constructional work, we can illustrate how the status of reality, truth, meaning, and identity depends on conventions that determine what kind of rules are individually or socially accepted for the consensual confirmation of reality, truth, meaning, and identity.

(263)

A House in the Country and its characters never stop affirming and confirming, even while paradoxically undermining and doubting, presence and reality. While the discourse's fictiveness and intratextual “origins” delineate a hazy world apart from reality, the uncanny resemblance to real events and social reality play against the solipsism of the text.

The excursion to the fabled lagoon introduces and is emblematic of the novel itself. The fitful beginning(s) of the narrative is echoed in the fruitless attempt to establish an original cause for the parents' trip. Likewise, the narrator continually journeys back in time to explain the hypothetical lagoon, made even more implausible by the rumors, guesses and ever-widening circle of participants in the making of this myth. Apparently Arabela, Wenceslao and Adriano invented the lagoon in collusion, hoping to tempt the adults away from the seat of power/gold. The lagoon begins as a fiction within the novel but the Venturas eventually accept its existence as self-evident, thus it becomes “real.” As the children inquire about it, the parents fabricate answers in order in order to mask their bewilderment. Arabela's trumped-up maps and documents, one level beyond the oral quality of rumors, further imprison the adults in the seemingly incontrovertible verification of the written word. Yet the word only “verifies” textual uncertainty.

The narrator's explanation of the myth's origin clearly refers to the poetics of fiction as well as to the similar process of constructing reality. Fiction is created with voices and fragments which gradually build a substitute for reality, potentially mistaken by a naive reader for reality itself. Donoso's narrator ensures that we do not confuse his words with actual persons and events via his metanarrative. Realistic tokens of scenery and events are simultaneously proffered and denied the reader. The serpentine cavalcade moving toward the lagoon is a metaphor of the novel's succession of words which precariously stand in place of the absent world—figures traced and erased in one process. Insofar as the excursion refers to a pleasurable escape from ordinary constrictions, the conventions of fiction are displayed. The novel too makes a journey, with no destination other than itself, infinitely expandable with temporal and spatial digressions. The concept of narrative as physical displacement is suggested by the hierarchical arrangement of carriages in the cavalcade, recurring linear images (the cavalcade, train, sinuous carriage line and Marulanda's fence) and the replication of the excursion in a variety of minor trips—all metaphorically linked to the present of the narrative journey.

The excursion's counterpart, the play, is likewise an affirmation of the novel's irreality. A stylized version of the encompassing novel, it foregrounds the jockeying for power, as well as the continual production of myths and masquerades. It also reminds readers of the absence of love in a world where affection is a farce, hyperbolically reduced to a trivial love intrigue in La Marquise. The monolithic Marulanda society becomes even more unreal in the distorted mirror of the play. The already emblematic characters are here complete caricatures; artificial, self-dramatizing behaviour is explicit acting; the fantastical landscape and mansion literally become a stage and rumors a script. For example, The Perfidious Marquise accompanies her words “with an end-of-the-second-act cackle” (240); the narrator aspires “to construct a stage” for his recital and “Outside a bright sun, burnished as if by order of the Venturas, highlighted the flat azure sky” (228).

Although La Marquise Est Sortie à Cinq Heures is designed to uphold the adults' authority, it is undermined by deviations from the play's ostensible plot. The verbal duplicity by which every revolutionary event is redefined as a mere game with no transcendence succeeds for a time in upholding the status quo. The drama can only be defeated by the refusal to play by the rules. After the revolution and once Casilda steals the Ventura gold, the game no longer serves the parents' purposes, thus their most savage measures are invoked: the servants crush the insurrection with a violence heretofore unseen. …

The play's climax inaugurates a heightening of theatricality (connoting artifice and flight from reality) as well as its contradiction. While the instances of confused levels, linguistic games and play-acting increase in the second half of the novel, their thematic and structural opposite occurs. The anecdote itself inserts the reality of history and change, provoking the parents' brutality to become increasingly obvious. The narrator contradicts the adults' denial of time, insisting that to say that life will continue as before the attack is patently absurd. Furthermore, he counterpoints his own touted “exaggerated artificiality” with more traditionally “realistic” and detailed scenes of the hunger, torture and death experienced in the country house: “I must ask my reader to imagine … a scene steeped in desolation and death: screaming, running, and shooting in the charred and muddy park, and corpses of nameless natives floating on the laghetto” (218). The theatrical flavor is frequently laced with a more straightforward description and syntax than in earlier scenes.

Several passages are in this realistic vein: the deaths of Adriano and Arabela, Wenceslao's monologue and other scenes which painfully remind us of political repression in the world we know. Furthermore, some characters are portrayed in more depth and allowed a greater freedom of voice than at the beginning. While the use of artifice never abates, the prettified characterizations occasionally verge on the monstrification of The Obscene Bird of Night. The undercurrent of the grotesque, related to the relative “realism” of the earlier novel, is intratextually related to the discussion about the novel between the “author” and character/reader Silvestre. In a purportedly realistic scene, Silvestre is transformed from a relatively elegant caricature to his realistic analogue (fat, smelling of alcohol, etc.) and back again to his original characterization. Once more placed under narrative scrutiny toward the end of the novel, Silvestre and the other adults are re-transformed into their grotesque, more “realistic” versions: “How monstrous all the grown-ups had become during their absence! … And was Silvestre just one more lackey, wheezing, bound by the coils of his obesity?” (309). The switching of registers foregrounds the very literariness of literature while reflecting upon Donoso's own body of fiction. Nevertheless, it also connotes, albeit ironically, a realistic and critical view of the parents who can no longer appear merely prettified and artificial.

One of the novel's central concerns is the linkage between artifice and language; indeed, the language is as much put-on as the characters' costumes. The Ventura adults expect that language should provide a window onto the world. Furthermore, language should be univocal, such that totalized meaning is determined by those in power. The narrator demonstrates this world view by metaphors: the insistence upon the apparent Order of the Marulanda society, the lances in the fence forever fixed, the Majordomo's authority as conferred and symbolized by his gigantic uniform, and characters trapped in eternal immobility.

This monolithic attitude toward reality and language is assailed from within the very world of the adults. Language continually dysfunctions in a variety of ways. Names, for instance, are generalized, such that Juan Pérez is the same name given to a different employee every year. Thus the specificity of a name is belied by its more general function of designating a position. Even more dysfunctional, words are used to convey opposite meanings from the norm within the textual world: love is hate, one year is one day, etc. Language inadequately hides a lack of knowledge, as with the library's empty books, or myths about unexplainable origins.

Within the play, La Marquise, language takes on special significance because its artificiality parallels the grown-ups' intent to shut out reality yet the nature of language undermines their concurrent intent to represent the world to their liking. The “unlimited semiosis”² of language is foregrounded by a particularly chaotic display of signifiers in transformation. For instance, Juvenal describes the play as a fable, legend, fairy tale; the narrator calls it a masquerade; and Melania, a farce. The cousins are called children, spectators, crowd, actors, extras, while Mauro refers to Melania's perspiration as “that very drop, not some other … sweat, tear, lymph, dew … anything, everything” (156). The children are indiscriminately referred to by their names from the novel or the play, and furthermore they exchange roles and names throughout the rest of the novel with greater frequency. Once Adriano enters the spectacle, Melania calls him “God the Father Almighty” and the designation is taken up as an ironic epithet by the narrator in later moments.

The impossibility of a univocal interpretation of events is understood by Wenceslao, as he observes Juvenal straining “for sights and sounds no doubt identical but opposite in meaning to those he himself had noticed” (165). Ultimately, the linguistic correlation between signifier and signified is as tenuous and unreal as the skewed masks, crude make-up and hallucinatory scenery, where the illusion of correspondence is destroyed by inadequate theatrical tricks. Nothing quite matches nor masks properly, a metaphor for the slippage of signs whose meaning can neither be totally limited nor transparent.

Insofar as the handling of language and voice within the play hyperbolically mirrors that of the novel as a whole, the drama is a mise en abyme which Dällenbach would categorize as a reflection of both the text's narrative and linguistic code. By exaggeration, the opacity of all language, as well as the deliberate miscommunication of the adults, children and narrator is underlined. The novel's stilted language becomes the “Marquisese,” a garbled, invented speech of the children, ironically, not at all childlike: “The rosebud withers in the inky night, while the teeming jungle takes up its adamant cat-o'-nines to destroy the imperial orography of my blood” (309). The stereotypical banalities of the adults are parodied by the “Marquisese's” exalted tone. Learned, archaic words and complicated syntax mock the adults' (and the narrator's) rhythmic and anaphoric pontifications. The “Marquises,” an embedded language within the novel, is furthermore framed by the metalanguage enveloping the characters' and the narrators' utterances. Words become “divinas palabras” which cast a spell over children and readers. The narrator and children are ambiguously caught and revelling in the play's frenetic discourse.

A final breakdown of linguistic description is demonstrated when foreign guests (and potential buyers of the estate) disbelieve the Ventura description of reality. Celeste Ventura extolls Marulanda: “Don't you find the ochers of twilight … deliquescent as a golden shower cascading over Diana … ?” (299). One of the guests, thinking Celeste is an actress, wonders: “How I'm suppose to believe … that the whole thing isn't some pure invention … The subjectivity that colors your judgement of everything pertaining to the family is at total odds with reality seen from outside” (317).

The narrator, proclaiming the fact that language only alludes indirectly to reality, deliberately foregrounds the characters and story as linguistic constructs in his metanarrative. He indicates to readers that they should avoid the pitfalls of seeing through words directly to the world. Allen Thiher, writing about Nabokov, makes some observations which can be applied to A House in the Country:

A hatred of mirrors, to paraphrase Borges, is a beginning of an understanding of postmodern fiction, for as producers of doubles mirrors augment the illusion of being and foster metaphysical illusions. One might suspect that Hermann shares some of Nabokov's aversions, for, as representations, mirror-images work best to trap the unsuspecting, like mirrors set for dull-witted birds.

(99)

Language, inevitably limiting and structuring reality by virtue of grammatical rules and the constraints of the mind's and society's veils, is further problematized through the narrator's equivocation. Obtrusive metaphors and similes, as well as highly visible stylized construction, make words not mirrors but obstacles and challenges in constructing a parallel but different reality.

The parents' attempt to suppress reality and words not emanating from their authority is unmasked by the narrator's parody of the mystification functioning at all levels of the society. Some of the more lucid characters undermine or qualify events through the play with or questioning of words. The children's rebellion is as much for lances which are weapons as for lances as words. Mauro opts for a free-floating approach to language: each lance or word should be “regrouped in a thousand different ways and with a thousand fine distinctions, no longer slaves to the allegorial function that now held them prisoners in the form of a railing” (78-79). Arabela, in stark contrast to the servants' euphemistic speech, (for instance, “disappear” meaning “vanish in a puff of smoke”), clearly defines: “I mean, specifically, that you and your men have arrested him and taken him away” (242). Wenceslao and Agapito invent a language in order to communicate among themselves, circumventing the official discourse: the Mayordomo's men “were too dense to understand any language but their own, not even pig latin” (261). Both Wenceslao's secret language and the “Marquisese” recall the invented language (gíglico) of Cortázar's Hopscotch, which also plays against prosaic, “serious” and traditional discourse.³

The Marulanda oligarchy in some sense also invents a language but their power in conferring names is ultimately denied. We discover that, unbeknownst to the adults, the name Juan Pérez which generically referred to a series of gardeners, is the real name of one person who returned to Marulanda yearly. Ironically his role is quite different from that which they had envisaged, since he is a secret usurper among the faceless servants. The dysfunctional quality of language is not only obviated at microtextual levels, it is conveyed at the level of larger narrative units as well. Not only do words and things mismatch, the novel's static beginnings and floating references to time and space refuse the Balzacian fixing of story in history. The central catalysts of the story, the lagoon and play, never believable, lose their potency altogether. The play's allure is transcended by Arabela's death, and the lagoon is scoffed at by the foreigners who take over the property. Power and the power of monolithic discourse, inseparable in this novel, are diffused.⁴

The adults' mask of truth and the narrator's parody of their methods convey the multivalent meaning of the phrase “only appearances count” in the discourse. The exaggerated richness of painterly details betrays the novel's intent to reduce the symbolic depth of characters and plot to schematic designs as seen metaphorically in the real-seeming fresco—the novel's most vertiginous mise en abyme. Reality is transcribed onto the surface of a page, or for the characters, the flatness of the fresco into which they can be duped into entering. Readers too, like dull-witted birds, can be induced into walking into the allegorical fresco and seeing a categorical description of Chile, or other univocal reflections of reality.

While the novel refuses to, and cannot, make its narrative a mirror of history, it refracts in distorted fashion aspects of Latin American and Chilean society and history. The author and narrator indicate that A House in the Country is all novels in some fashion, “an adventure novel,” “a political novel,” “pure language.”⁵ It moves in and out of allegory and history but is always inscribed within the frame of fictionality in which a separate universe is created.

Not a historical novel, it shows ways of reading a created world in which some characters search not only for language/lances, but also for history. Wenceslao attempts to understand the contradictions in Adriano's revolution, recognizing the problems in his “ideal” society. He insists upon analyzing the movement from within itself, refusing both absolute pessimism and non-action. Not only is the adult denial of history exposed, the failure of the divided children to carry out a program, to make history, is chronicled. History is not resolved since the end implies the continuation of the dilemmas present from the beginning, but the progress of the novel shows the emergence of a faint light of consciousness. Characters' integrity as individual subjects is questioned, origins are absent and the last third of the novel departs from its historical analogue. There is no final knot which ties up interpretation and illuminates the reader as to who will inevitably rule Marulanda. Since history cannot be represented as something outside language, the narrator shows the process of constructing worlds with figures drawn and suspended within language:

The dust cloud raised by the cavalcade was never to settle: the stubborn fog that shrouded not objects but depths left no impression on the eye, suggesting instead that everything in sight-house, railing, in short, the entire universe-might reasonably be taken as figures embroidered in white thread on a fabric of similar whiteness, from which it would be impossible to extract them.

(340)

The displays of worlds in the process of reconstruction is neither a reduction of literature to mere play, refusing to speak, nor is it analogous to the opposite extreme practiced by the Ventura authorities where reality is denied, not merely put into question. Rather than narrating with what Henry James called the “tone of the historian,” offering reality “without rearrangement,” the narrator's feigned authoritarianism and the play between allegory and illusion dissolves the author's, narrator's, characters', reader's and reality's power into the plurality of language. Donoso invokes a “morality of form” in the sense Barthes spoke of, in that literature is the site of subversion, not dogma; problems, not answers.⁶ No comforting verisimilitude, identification nor resolutions are allowed the reader. The mise en abyme device and frame-breaks in A House in the Country point simultaneously to the self-enclosed world of fiction and its opposite—the impossibility of clear borders between reader/author and reality/fiction.⁷ The narrator as guide dismantles his own rhetoric and reality, yet paradoxically calls for a realistic view. While Donoso's text does not permit the sign to be “grimly weighted by its signified,” nor the novel to be “grimly weighed” by History, as with Barthes' discussion of the sign, “there is meaning but this meaning does not permit itself to be ‘caught’: it remains fluid, shuddering with a faint ebullition” (Barthes, 1978, 97-98).

A House in the Country's discontinuities and vertiginous interior duplication foreground similarities, and above all, differences between myth, fiction and history. Whereas myth presupposes a fixed, natural order of things which supports the status quo, fiction is an agreement—the site of questioning, change and of mutual participation in creating discourses that do not pretend to be absolute. While fiction is written in history, fiction permits us to write an alternative to history. Whereas in the world of myth, ethical meaning is attributed to mere conventions, fiction admits that it is only a world of appearances, where conventions accepted as conventions are used to create new forms and meanings. The mise en abyme structure creates a texture, an aesthetic pleasure, in which the real is investigated and figured on the margins of language and literature.

Notes

1. Gutiérrez Mouat has referred to Berger and Luckmann's work in relation to Donoso's fiction in the notes to his Introduction.

2. Eco describes Charles Pierce's theories on unlimited semiosis: “The process of unlimited semiosis shows us how signification, by means of continual shiftings which refer a sign back to another sign or string of signs, circumscribes cultural units in an asymptotic fashion, without even allowing one to touch them directly, though making them accessible through other units … Semiosis explains itself by itself: this continual circularity is the normal condition of signification and even allows communicational processes to use signs in order to mention things and states of the world” (198).

3. The use of subversive and nonsensical languages in Donoso, in its interplay with theatricality and power, also recalls Severo Sarduy's Cobra, a novel which continually produces and finally almost eclipses meaning. Playfully akin to Donoso's “Marquisese” and Cortazar's “gíglico,” Sarduy's Cobra signs mambos in Esperanto at one point.

4. Vincent Leitch discusses Foucault's ideas on the subject of the relationship of power to language: “he demonstrates that archival discourse expands, divides, and deploys knowledge and power in the interest of social control. The rules of discourse, particularly the exclusionary ones, direct powerful, though often unnoticed, socio-political practices” (154). The will-to-knowledge, as an implacable and anonymous force always susceptible to transformation, “summons ‘truth’ as a mask for its operation” (154-155).

5. Iñigo Madrigal quotes from an interview of Donoso where the latter describes his novel as an adventure novel and a political novel (6). Donoso's narrator describes the novel as “pure language.”

6. Susan Sontag writes in her Introduction to A Barthes Reader: “Although Barthes agrees with Sartre that the writer's vocation has an ethical imperative, he insists on its complexity and ambiguity. Sartre appeals to the morality of ends. Barthes invokes ‘the morality of form’—what makes literature a problem rather than a solution; what makes literature” (xix).

7. I agree with David Carroll's rejection of the idea of literature as being completely self-enclosed. He writes about the dogmatic formalism of some post-structural and structural critics, such as Jean Ricardou, who reduce the text to a “pure, linguistic system” whereby pre-texts are ignored: “The gradual elimination of all problems of the signified (of representation, history, sense, etc.) alone can guarantee that fiction is really what this theory and practice project it as being, but the consequences of such a ‘sacrifice’are evident” (177-180).

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983

———Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatis in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966.

Carroll, David. The Subject in Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Cortazar, Julio. Hopscotch. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon, 1966.

Dällenbach, Lucien. “Intertexte et autotexte,” Poétique 27 (1976): 282-96.

Donoso, José. A House in the Country. Trans. David Pritchard with Suzanne Jill Levine New York: Knopf, 1984.

———The Obscene Bird of Night. Trans. Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades Boston: Nonpareil, 1979.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo. José Donoso: Impostura e impostación: La modelización lúdica y carnavalesca de una producción literaria. Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica 1983.

Iñigo Madrigal, Luis. “Alegoría, historia, novela, (a propósito de Casa de campo.” Hispamérica IX (1980): 5-31.

James, Henry. The House of Fiction. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-David, 1957.

Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press 1983.

Sarduy, Severo. Cobra. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975.

Schmidt, S. J. “The Fiction is that Reality Exists: A Constructivist Model of Reality, Fiction, and Literature.” Poetics Today 5.2 (1984): 253-274.

Thiher, Allen. Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.