Postdictatorship Allegory and Neobaroque Disillusionment in José Donoso's "Casa de Campo"

Abstract

This essay traces the recuperation of baroque styles and themes in Chilean novelist Jos? Do noso's Casa de campo (1978),1 an allegorical novel about Latin American history and culture in general and Chile's national trauma of the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's popular socialist government by Pinochet's dictatorship in particular. Donoso's novel is neobaroque, a category that refers to the resuscitation of baroque forms of representation by modem and post modem Latin American and European intellectuals, a group that includes figures such as Cuban writers Alejo Carpentier, Jos? Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy as well as Mexican intellectuals Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. Specifically, my discussion will focus on allegory, a central mode of baroque and modem representation that Walter Benjamin analyses in his work (begin? ning with The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1928] through his studies of Baudelaire and the material culture of nineteenth-century Paris in the unfinished Arcades Project [1927-40]), and allegory's characteristic mode of return to the past in a situation of crisis, catastrophe, and loss.2 Symptomatic of postdictatorship Latin American fiction, Donoso's recourse to allegory in his contemporary historical novel marks a crisis in representation in his work. A House in the Country hinges on an allegorical image of the contemporary Chilean nation and state as the eponymous country house, a hermetically sealed microcosm whose idyllic artifi? ciality and orchestrated rimelessness represent the escapism, neo-feudalism and baroque aesthetics of illusionism of the Chilean oligarchy. The Ventura's country house known by the imaginary name of Marulanda, a contradictory emblem of arcadian idyll on the inside and ruthless exploita? tion on the outside, allegorizes Chile's social contradictions and residual internal colonialism under the liberal democratic regime of the 60s, on the eve of Allende's election. In A House in the Country, as in the seventeenth-century German baroque plays analyzed by Benjamin, [h]istory merges into the setting (Origin 92): rather than being narrated sequentially, time is represented spatially and visually, in a series of static panoramas of the allegorical country