Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

1. Patriotic Passion: Isabel Allende's Of Love and Shadows

Patriotic Passion O N E Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows The search for communion through writing has been a constant element in the narrative career of Isabel Allende, whose books hold an ambiguous place in the canon of Spanish American literature. This is due to the fact that, even as they evoke certain aspects of the Boom, they also tend toward a “lighter” and more easily consumed kind of writing. In this sense, Allende’s work is typical of the Post-Boom and of the new sentimental narrative. Like many of these works, those of the Chilean writer display a constant use of commonplaces, of conventional styles and themes, in order to produce a more effective and affective communication with readers.1 Commonplaces and conventionalisms are not the only ways to elicit a sense of communion, of course; another, much less inclusive way, is to endow novels with some of the traits of sacred texts such as the Bible or the Qur’an—texts that demand an attentive and devoted reading, a reading sustained by faith. The Boom novels frequently followed this model: for example, the history of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude is contained in Melquíades’s prophetic parchments, which, when read aloud, sounded like “chanted encyclicals” (68). In earlier works, such as Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1964) and José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966), one finds the figure of a savant or demiurge who is the possessor of an occult and transcendent knowledge, as is the case with Morelli and Oppiano Licario. The Boom’s “total novels” offered themselves to readers not just as entertainment , but as instruments to acquire knowledge of Latin America’s Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows 4 1 reality at all levels, from the social to the metaphysical. These novels attempted to create communities of readers by turning reading into a shared experience—one that was frequently arduous, similar to the rites of passage and the “mysteries” of premodern cultures and of religious cults. Often , as in Cortázar’s works, readers were invited to become “accomplices” (with the ethical ambiguity the term implies) of the author and the text, a “complicity” that was also a kind of discipleship. Like cults or elitist sects, these communities of readers were preoccupied with keeping the uninitiated at bay, unlike the more down-to-earth, broadly democratic community sought by the testimonial narratives and—with perhaps greater intensity—by the new sentimental novels. From her first novel, The House of the Spirits (1982), Allende tries to establish a relation with the reader as a fellow instead of as an accomplice or a disciple. As many critics have already pointed out, this novel’s originality lies largely in being a feminist rewriting of One Hundred Years of Solitude.2 However, I believe that Allende’s notoriously epigonal and mimetic attitude toward García Márquez may also be understood as a search for a broadly popular as well as prestigious literary model. Even the differences between The House of the Spirits and One Hundred Years of Solitude have to do with further opening up the text to its readers, since Allende’s novel does away with what some readers perceived as “obstacles ” to their understanding and their enjoyment of García Márquez’s text. For example, in telling the story by way of a matriarchal genealogy, The House of the Spirits neutralizes or tones down the patriarchal machismo that feminist readers found distasteful in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Something similar happens when Allende abandons the tics of “magical realism” toward the end of her novel in favor of a more “realistic” mode, and substitutes an openly melodramatic and sentimental tone for García Márquez’s deadpan narrative style. The final reconciliation between the reactionary grandfather Esteban Trueba and his leftist granddaughter Alba is emblematic of the movement toward communion in The House of the Spirits. In the novel’s last pages, Alba expresses her hope that all the violence she has suffered—caused partly by her grandfather—will be resolved in a harmonious future: I suspect that nothing that happens is fortuitous, that it all corresponds to a fate laid down before my birth, and that Esteban García is part of the design. He is a crude, twisted line, but no brushstroke is in vain. The day my grandfather tumbled his 4 2 Love...