Gold, Allegory, and the Commodity Form: Reflections on José Donoso's Casa de campo

Abstract

Gold, Allegory, and the Commodity Form:Reflections on José Donoso's Casa de campo Alessandro Fornazzari (bio) According to the poet Pablo Neruda, José Donoso was destined to write "the great Chilean social novel."1 Yet instead of being recognized as the Chilean Balzac, Donoso's literary project has perhaps become best known for its modernist disarticulation of the very possibility of a realist novel capable of accessing a vision of totality. This modernist approach is based on a partial analysis of Donoso's work, privileging his formally experimental novels such as El obsceno pájaro de la noche and Taratuta: Naturaleza muerta con cachimba over more realist-oriented work such as Coronación, Este domingo and El lugar sin límites. This essay does not attempt to claim Donoso for one faction or the other. Rather, it works towards a reformulation of the question regarding whether Donoso is really a Lukacsian realist whose novels "reflect" the unity of economics and ideology as an objective whole (the ever elusive concept of totality), or on the contrary whether he achieves a high modernist vision, tearing heterogeneous bits of reality away from their social contexts and juxtaposing them in order to produce subjectivist narratives. The argument that this essay advances is that it is the unrelenting tension—and ultimate crisis—of these two aesthetic and cognitive forms (realism and modernism) in Donoso's work that makes him so valuable for understanding the historical transformations brought upon by the Chilean neoliberal transition. The crisis of these two forms coincides with a historical turning [End Page 31] point in Chile, the 1970s transition from one regime of accumulation (an industrial and traditionally agrarian order) to another (neoliberal capitalism). Since his earliest writings Donoso has expressed an ambiguous and at times capricious relation with the different variants of the Latin American realist tradition. He has explicitly rejected the criollista novel's mimetic realism, its exclusive concern for the rural (understood as a nostalgia for an agrarian past in an era of immigration and economic expansion), and its search for an autochthonous literary expression. This position vis-á-vis a certain form of the Latin American realist novel would seem to situate Donoso firmly within the Latin American literary boom's cosmopolitan aesthetic project; it reinforces the boom's parricidal tabula rasa myth and the claim that the preceding realist narrative project had been devoured by a descriptive and documentary passion for nature. Yet two immediate problems result from this positioning of Donoso within the modernist boom project—this approach cannot account for the entirety of his literary production (including some of his best work such as El lugar sin límites), nor can it go beyond the cliché that conceives the rich and varied tradition of Latin American realism in terms that are too mimetic, too rural and too local. Donoso's novels represent a continuation—however contentious—of a critical realist tradition rather than its rupture. Because of the split in the critical reception of his work, his novels have been read as both a notable expression of realist narrative and as marking a seemingly radical break with it (El obsceno pájaro de la noche is generally considered the paradigmatic example). Realist readings of Donoso's realist novels emphasize his description of the fragile and decadent upper crust of Chilean society with a language that is richly local and transparent (as in the work of critics Hugo Achugar, Hernán Vidal, and Antonio Cornejo Polar, for example), whereas modernist perspectives emphasize Donoso's radical signifying strategies, subversive and experimental attitude toward social institutions and language, and refusal of totalizing narratives (Philip Swanson, Sharon Magnarelli, Ana Dopico and Adriana Valdés, among others). The question then is—how do we understand or resolve this realist/modernist tension that has polarized the reception of Donoso's work? Can it be simply explained as a progressive change in his writing and aesthetic project? Is there an early realist Donoso versus a late modernist Donoso? Alternatively, I argue that the dyad is a constant and productive tension throughout his work; one that will reach both its pinnacle and ultimate limit in the 1978 novel Casa de campo, which...