306
PARTISAN REVIEW
inhabit the Ventura country mansion, playing at playing a fantasy,
La Marquise Est Sortie
a
Cinq Heures,
which mirrors the adult game of
working hard at doing nothing, sumptuously, decadently. Where
are the sweets of yesteryear, they all seem to ask, surfeited. Left on
their own when their seven sets of parents self-consciously reenact
Watteau's
L'Embarquement pour Cuthere,
the children abandon their
imposed theatrics and discover sordid society behind the masked re–
bellion formerly dressed with taffetas, damasks, and operatics of the
escapist retreat where all the Venturas live from gold mined and ham–
mered to tissue thinness by natives, who mayor may not be canni–
bals. (Anyhow, many of the dumpling children are "good enough to
eat.") Gone for a day- or is it a year? - the elders return to the rebel–
ravaged estate, try to sell it off to bumpkin foreigners, and end up
huddled on the floor, smothered in pillows and blankets to avoid a
suffocating storm of thistledown, as the ever stately, ever discreet,
painted figures on the walls look down.
Behind, in front, and all over this
noblesse defafade-no
printed
pages behind the thousands of spines in the library; a blind arbiter of
decor for the house - the narrator, supplanting any principal charac–
ter -
any
psychological character at all- seriously enacts the artifice
of not telling the novel he is writing. Deliberately protesting too much
at every artful turn, Donoso reminds us that all is artifice, pure nar–
rative, opera,
painting-anything
but a chronicle of Latin America,
let alone his native Chile - while archly pursing his puppets' lines:
"Appearance is the only thing that never lies." Donoso is brilliantly
engage by disengagement. The more he fancifully fabricates this
bouffanted
Lord of the Flies,
the more brutal our realization of its cruel
Latin American reality, the greater our awareness of his magisterial
triumph in accommodating gothic criticism of pure corruption to the
sullied practice of freely contaminated esthetics.
One of many threads to this decorative labyrinth is the children's
game, in which each performs a part at once confining and liberat–
ing, since each may alter the course of the drama within the confines
of the "collective action." The name of the game comes from one of
Breton's surrealist manifestos, in which Valery purportedly asserts
that he has not yet written a novel beginning, stupidly and conven–
tionally, that is, "realistically," "La Marquise sortit
a
cinq heures." In
other words, while writing a novel of
la haute bourgeoise,
Donoso has
cleared a space for his most impassioned and passionless descriptions,
observations, and imaginings, rather like talking eloquently with his
mouth full. The result will weary some readers with its
longeurs
and
