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

Donoso opts for artifice over verisimilitude to expose the constructedness of what is readily accepted as natural, real, unproblematic. [...]A House in the Country is a deconstructive narrative, an aggressive, angry book written to destroy the false unities, false totalities, false harmonies of post-1973 Chilean culture and all versions of bourgeois realism that are complicit with the totalitarian regime.7 Latin American cultural critics agree with Donoso in positing Southern Cone dictatorships as a historical threshold ushering in a major reorientation of artistic practice, including a new literature of disillusionment that breaks with high literary 'boom' experimentalism such as magical realism. [...]a description of the design of the park in the opening chapters portrays an artificial implant on the surrounding plain, carefully bounded and isolated from exterior nature: "The park, embedded in that plain without a single tree to mar its expanse, was like an emerald, its depths crystal with fantastic gardens of harder material than the stuff of the countryside" (House 34). According to the analogy between "house" and (Chilean) state suggested in the second half of the novel narrating the fictional revolution and counterrevolution (the passage also harks back to the political allegory, the "ship of state"), the consequences of Pinochet's dictatorship are catastrophic. [...]through the image of house-upon-underground labyrinth, Donoso allegorizes the loss of an entire historical period, native pre-Hispanic culture.