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Reviewed by:
  • Authorizing Fictions: José Donoso’s “Casa de campo”
  • Isabel R. Vergara
Marie Murphy, Authorizing Fictions. José Donoso’s “Casa de campo.” London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1992.

Marie Murphy’s Authorizing Fictions is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing body of critical studies about the Chilean author. As is stated in the “Introduction,” this critical work primarily studies Casa de campo with its prominent feature being the self-conscious novel which addresses many problematic issues of great importance in modern criticism and literature. Characterizing Donoso’s work, Murphy discusses key concepts of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida such as the “absence” or the infinitive play of signifiers around a basically empty center. Murphy rightly points out the pertinence of the issue of authority and power in Casa de campo and brings into her debate Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novel as a polyphonic play of voices, Edward Said’s study on the duplicity of the novelist, and Linda Hutcheon’s discussion on self-consciousness. All these critical devises are embedded in the premise that Donoso absorbs and rewrites in this novel many concerns and techniques of his previous fiction.

Murphy confirms that Donoso openly juxtaposes techniques of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narrative and the postmodern, attempting an [End Page 432] exhaustive examination of the art of the novel. In her eagerness to make this novel stand out, Murphy contextualizes Casa del campo in the Latin American tradition, placing it beyond “the nostalgic and epic seriousness of the boom exemplifying the postmodern pastiche of the selfconsciousness of the 70s and 80s, and the modernist departures from realism of the twentieth century,” a simplistic assertion that could be used to describe almost any of the so called ‘novels of the boom.’”

“In Authorizing Voice and Time,” the first chapter, Murphy traces the tradition of the self-conscious novel back to Cervantes and Fielding; like its predecessors, the discourse of Casa de campo insists on calling attention to its fictive status: “The text insistently proclaims that it intends to work against verisimilitude.” She pertinently compares Donoso’s and Henry James’s poetics since Donoso’s works were influenced by James’s narrative, and discusses intertextualities between Cervantes and Borges. Contrasting Henry James’s techniques with Donoso’s, Murphy discusses “reality” and “history” and Donoso’s departure from realism, but his refusal to duplicate Reality. Instead, she adds, Donoso questions verisimilitude through parody. Murphy provides a meticulous analysis of the dismantling of the narrator as an authoritative figure in the novel, carefully supporting her thesis through the use of quotations.

In the second chapter, “Narrative Strategies: Representing (Resisting) Characters and Readers,” Murphy continues her conscientious analysis of the discourse of Casa de campo, focusing on the relationship between the narrator and the reader, the implied author and the implied reader (as defined by Wolfgang Iser). She also comments on the function of reality and fiction and concludes that: “In Casa de campo, the play of voices and of language continually points to the insecurity and insufficiency of authoritative definitions of reality.” Murphy examines the relationship between narrator and characters and the traditional role of the “Author” while connecting the anecdote with the abuse of power of the Pinochet regime in Chile.

“Interior Duplication/Distortion,” the third chapter of the book, offers a discussion of the metafictionality of the novel: the discrepancy between art and reality, and Casa de Campo’s structure of the “mise en abyme.” Murphy ends her book with a clearly written concise section of conclusions.

Authorizing Fictions, an in-depth analysis of Casa de campo, is a valuable work, although at times seems too anxious to present and exhaust the most typical aspects of the twentieth-century narrative innovation. It contains an excess of terminology for the neophyte reader. Professor Murphy incorporates much of what previous scholars have had to say on this novel and adds her own significant insights to prove her thesis: that the structure of Casa de campo combines modalities of the eighteenth and nineteenth century with the twentieth century’s intermingling of reality and fiction, disrupting the reader’s expectations about character, narrative omniscience and time. Authorizing Fictions is a volume that anyone...

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