Arts, artists, artifacts in José Donoso's "Spanish Trilogy"

Abstract

From the beginning, José Donoso's fictions bring into play a series of mechanisms that tend to the abstraction of referents, the construction of spaces in trompe l'oeil and a world with all sort of objects come from an aesthetic transformation of the arts and their degraded products (artefacts). The insertion, by mention or allusion, of artistic or contrived representations in literary texts is not, of course, new. What singularizes José Donoso's fictions, and in particular the "Spanish Trilogy" (Tres novelitas burguesas [1973], La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria [1980], El jardín de al lado [1981]), is the textual saturation of objects that participate in the illusion of reality or trompe l'oeil and, above all, the elaboration of narrative structures whose nuclear sustenance are paintings, sculptures, monuments, musical pieces or machines.