Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place. By Flora Gonzalez Mandri. Detroit, Ml: Wayne State UP, 1995. 199 pages.

This welcome addition to scholarship on Donoso examines almost the entire corpus of Donoso's novels to date, something infrequent in recent Donoso studies. It combines close readings, detailed references to pertinent Donoso criticism, a useful bibliography, and a fluid prose.

As Gonzalez Mandri says in her introduction, her purpose in this book is "to carve out a dramatic image of Donoso's idiom as it moves from one stage set-and culturally determined language-to the next . . . The paradigm I propose, that of dramatic scene and of dialogic discourse, acts as a structure that may serve many artistic purposes-to confront the ideologies of social classes, to synthesize feminine and masculine aspects of artistic voice, or to arrive at an aesthetically conceived language that illuminates a historic or political context" (20-21). She proposes the melodramatic imagination as the guiding metaphor of Donoso's literature, expressed through scenic techniques, gestural language and the literary device of disguise. Her critical apparatus centers on Peter Brooks' theories of the melodramatic imagination, where polarized values are acted out in grandiose gestures and via displacements of resolutions and languages. The author also discusses Henry James' writings in relation to Donoso, along with theories of Bakhtin, Foucault and several feminist critics' views on language. She subtly incorporates many critical tools, although perhaps she could have summarized more of Brooks' salient points into the body of her text.

Gonzalez Mandri establishes the house as the stage where masters and servants meet in Coroncion, Este domingo and subsequent novels, with an emphasis upon scene setting and the dramatization of characters, while...