SOURCE: Murphy, Marie. “Language Put-On: José Donoso's A House in the Country.” Latin American Literary Review 17, no. 33 (January-June 1989): 50-59.

In the following essay, Murphy discusses the metafictional purposes of Donoso's use of the mise en abyme structure in A House in the Country.

While the Latin American new narrative interrogates many aspects of self-consciousness, within this tradition, José Donoso's A House in the Country provides one of the most exhaustive examinations of the art of the novel, overtly juxtaposing realistic and post-modern techniques. In this study, I examine the most evident display in A House in the Country of what is perhaps the central problematic in metafiction: the discrepancy between art and reality. I consider two instances of the mise en abyme structure, pointing to the role of artifice (and the artifice of language) in foregrounding a paradoxical search for history and reality in the novel. A narrative...