Literature as Survival: Allende's The House of the Spirits
The story began urgently, if unpretentiously, after a long-distance telephone call from Santiago de Chile
to Caracas. Isabel Allende's grandfather, in his ninety-ninth year, was about to die. More precisely, he'd
decided his time had come. Despite opposing ideologies, their family relationship had been close; and
now, although from the remote region he was about to enter she couldn't expect a reply, she sat down to
write him a long letter. Her purpose was to keep him living, in conformity with his own idea of
immortality. "My grandfather theorized that death didn't really exist. Oblivion is what exists, and if one
can remember those who die—remember them well—they'll always be with him and in some way will
live on, at least in spirit." ("Entrevista con Isabel Allende," with Michael Moody, Hispania 69, March,
1986.)
"Living on" was a persistent tradition in Isabel Allende's family on her mother's side, and her late
grandmother—the main model for Clara del Valle, "Clara la clarividente," in The House of the Spirits—
had been practicing since premature death what Grandfather had always preached in life, with her
periodic messages and visitations. The letter to Grandfather got longer, and longer. A year later (1982) it
had grown to five-hundred pages. It was a diary in retrospect, a family chronicle, an autobiography, a
political testimony, a group portrait and contemporary history, a series of experiments with magic. In
other words, a novel. Allende was a journalist in search of a complementary medium. Aesthetically, she
would now participate in the basic ritual of Latin American literature: a celebration of reality. Ethically,
she wanted to bear witness to social injustice, political violence, and repression—having been motivated
by the betrayal and murder by right-wing conspirators of an uncle on her father's side, President Salvador
Allende.
In what circumstances was the novel under consideration written? Allende stressed the importance of the
"moment of history the writer is born into," especially in Latin America, a world of great "struggles and
defeats, brutality and magic." Increasingly aware of the New World's five-hundred-year tradition of
violence, she matured intellectually with her uncle's socialist movement and became a novelist at her
reactionary grandfather's death. Thus, her book is the celebration of a momentous social struggle in which
those two figures were principals. Only fictitious names are used in the story, for places as well as for
people, but the implications are obvious: this was to be a composite testimony of many voices (like One
Hundred Years of Solitude, with which superficial comparisons have often been made), written with a
recent exile's sense of urgency, and a family member's intimacy. The political dispersion of the family she
tells about is microcosmic, for contemporary Chilean history is also one of dispersion, beginning the day
after Salvador Allende's election in 1970 with a complex opposition program that included technical and
financial assistance from our Central Intelligence Agency and State Department and accelerating after
September 11, 1973, when military forces led by General Pinochet carried out their coup d'état.
Soon after Allende's election, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared at a National Security Council
meeting, "I don't see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the
irresponsibility of its own people." In The House of the Spirits President Allende's niece has her principal
male character say of the impoverished tenant farmers at Tres Marías, his country estate, "They're like
children, they can't handle responsibility." A closer and more impetuous father-figure than the always
distant Kissinger, Esteban Trueba was also unwilling to stand by and watch. In his paternalized utopia no
one would go hungry, everyone would do his assigned work, and all would learn reading and writing and
simple arithmetic—that is, enough to follow simple instructions and read signs, to write brief messages,
and to count, y nada más, "for fear they would fill their minds with ideas unsuited to their station and
condition." When, near the beginning of the century, Esteban took over the administration of Tres
Marías—it had been in the family for generations— it was "a lawless heap of rocks, a no-man's-land." He
quickly put things in order and regimented his tenant farmers; within a year the "heap of rocks" was a
lucrative agricultural enterprise.
But behind this organizational rigor was an unbridled temperament, and deep sentimental frustrations. His
fiancée, Rosa del Valle of memorable beauty, dies in the first chapter, which is narrated—like several
other sections of the story—in first person singular by Esteban Trueba himself. Rosa's death is caused by
brandy laced with rat poison from a decanter sent as an anonymous "gift" to her father, a prominent
member of the Liberal Party. The extraordinary Rosa had bright green hair and the aura of "a distracted
angel." Ensconced in the white satin of her coffin, she impressed her grieving fiancé as having been
"subtly transformed into the mermaid she had always been in secret." Her autopsy and preparation for
viewing are secretly witnessed by her little sister Clara in a semi-traumatic state, immediately after which
Clara enters a nine-year period of unbroken silence. Her first words will be to announce, in one of the
many psychic predictions over her lifetime, that she'll soon be married.
In chapter 2 we are told that not only did Clara, la clarividente, foresee her marriage but also the identity
of her husband-to-be: Rosa's fiancé, whom she hadn't seen since her sister's funeral and who was fifteen
years her senior. Two months later, to be sure, Esteban visits the del Valle residence and immediately
formalizes their engagement.
The family was to grow in its strange diversity through three generations, but Clara and Esteban would
always constitute its vital, antithetical nucleus. The latter embodies privileged power; the former,
humanitarian resistance. History, for Trueba, was paternity and—whenever the situation called for it—
aggression. One of his first rituals in organizing Tres Marías as a community was to start populating it,
ranging through the wheatfields on horseback in pursuit of the peasant girls, raping and impregnating
more than a few. History was procreation, and the father's subsequent attempts to deal with the results of
procreation. The most troublesome outcome of his sexual escapades in the environs of Tres Marías was
Esteban García, his natural grandson born of an offspring of Pancha García, his first wheatfield victim.
After a childhood of deprivation and growing resentment, the grandson has nothing but the grandfather's
first name for an inheritance. Since childhood he had wanted to become a policeman. And he became one.
During the ugly reprisals taken by the military government in the aftermath of the President's death (in a
series of obvious allusions to the Pinochet regime's repressions starting in September, 1973), García
reappears, having risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the political police. It is he who presides over
the interrogation, confinement, and prolonged torture of his privileged cousin Alba, a university student
who has been active in the socialist underground and Esteban Trueba's only recognized grandchild. Alba
undergoes her torture partly in trauma, partly in an unconscious state. In the process she's raped an
undisclosed number of times, and in the Epilogue we're told that one of the culprits is Colonel García.
Third in a lineage of srong-willed women, Alba is the human instrument through which Esteban Trueba is
made to pay psychologically for a lifetime of large-and small-scale transgressions. That is, instead of
retaliating in a direct, hysical way against the aged patriarch, Trueba's bastard grandson chooses to punish
him through his legitimate" counterpart: revenge against the privileged by the underprivileged, against the
upper-class child o affluence by the peasant-child of want.
The principal antecedent to this reprisal comes in chapter 6. Trueba is then informed by Jean de Satigny,
his dughter Blanca's effete and dandified suitor, that Blanca is having nighttime trysts. The secret lover, it
turns but, is her childhood playmate at Tres Marías, Pedro Tercero García, who has grown up with
revolutionary ideas and composes revolutionary songs for the guitar (including one based on a fable told
to him years before by the first Pedro García: once there was a chicken coop invaded nightly by a fox who
stole eggs and ate baby chicks; eventually the hens organized, and one night they surrounded the fox and
pecked him half to death). About three weeks later Esteban García—then a boy of twelve—presents
himself and offers to lead his grandfather to Pedro Tercero's hiding place in the woods. Agreeing to pay a
reward, Trueba sets out with a pistol. Surprised in bed, the intended victim is still able to leap out, to
dodge the only shot Trueba gets to fire and, a second later, to disarm his assailant by hurling a piece of
firewood at him. Whereupon Trueba seizes an ax and swings—and Pedro Tercero, in a reflex-attempt at
self-defense, loses three fingers from his right hand. Shock and loss of blood notwithstanding, he rushes
from the cabin and escapes in the dark. Adding literal insult to literal injury, Trueba then refuses to pay
the boy his promised reward, slaps him, and snarls, "There's no reward for [double-crossers]!"
No reward then. But ultimately Esteban García was to obtain one of sorts. Years later, at the very moment
Senator Trueba of the Conservative Party was celebrating with champagne the Socialist president's
overthrow, "his son Jaime's testicles were being burned with an imported cigarette." After refusing to
accept his captors' offer of freedom in return for saying on television that the late president in a drunken
state had committed suicide, Jaime is beaten a second time, left with hands and feed bound with barbed
wire for two days and nights, then shot together with several other prisoners in a vacant lot. In the
interests of good government and domestic tranquillity, the lot and the cadavers are dynamited
immediately after the execution. Two weeks later the Senator is told the circumstances of his son's death,
but he refuses to believe the eyewitness account. Only when Jaime appears months later as a ghost,
"covered with dried blood and rags, dragging streamers of barbed wire across the waxed parquet floors,"
does he realize that he had heard the truth. It is in this penultimate chapter (13, "The Terror") that he
concludes he had been wrong and that, after all, "the best way to overthrow Marxism" had not been
found.
Systematic oblivion (it never happened; there's no proof), censorship, disinformation (the President, it has
been reported, committed suicide in a drunken state), and the infinite ways of "disappearing" people (such
as dynamiting political prisoners' corpses) are some of the methods by which authoritarian regimes
maintain themselves in power. The Brazilian critic Antonio Callado remarked in 1974 that contemporary
Latin America was "full of new ruins" (e.g., democracy in Uruguay and Chile, the Revolution in Mexico),
that Latin Americans have displayed a peculiar resistance to "becoming historical," because they're
"always trying to start again" amidst a detritus of infringed constitutions and derelict or disabled
governments. ("Censorship and Other Problems of Latin American Writers," Working Paper No. 14,
Center of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1974, 18-19.) The attempted starting-again,
we could add, is more often ultraconservative or reactionary than revolutionary, and more motivated by
frustration than by hope.
But against this antihistorical resistance, of which the cantankerous Esteban Trueba is a representative
figure, another, more imaginative, more perceptive resistance arrays itself. In The House of the Spirits
Clara, Blanca, and Alba are its persistent mainstays over three generations. Light is freedom and hope,
and the luminous names of the three women are clearly symbolic. The dramatic nucleus of the book is the
struggle between Trueba and the forces he generates, on the one hand, and the female members of his
family, on the other. He is the blind force of history, its collective unconscious, its somatotonic (i.e.,
aggressive, vigorous, physical) manifestation. They embody historical awareness and intuitive
understanding. Trueba is a semicomic version of the "world historical personalities" conceived of by
Hegel; never happy, "they attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole
nature was nothing but their master passion." (Hegel, The Philosophy of Hegel, 1956.) But unlike the
three illustrious examples offered by Hegel—Alexander the Great died young, Julius Caesar was
murdered, Napoleon Bonaparte ended up in humbling exile—Esteban Trueba lives through the problems
and outrages he helps create. Possessed by a terrible temperament, violent and arbitrary in his treatment of
peasant girls, his share-cropping tenants, his wife and daughter, and his political enemies, and subject to
furniture-smashing tantrums, he is not permitted to recognize—or forced to acknowledge—the
consequences of his acts until he's close to death. His author, it seems, decided to put off his death until he
could be made to witness the full historical effect of his own retrogressive ideas and actions, and of his
collaboration and conspiracy with like-minded people. Until that time of punitive recognition he is
subjected to recurrent experiences of loneliness and frustration. His estrangement from his family
(although he ends his isolation at Tres Marías and joins them in "the big house on the corner") leads him,
halfway through the novel, to venture into politics as a Conservative Party candidate for the Senate,
"since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared."
Symbolically in that same chapter (7), having won election as Senator, he becomes convinced that his
body and brain are shrinking and travels to the United States for diagnosis. Symbolically in that chapter
("The Brothers") his two sons manifest themselves as ideologically incompatible with him and with each
other: Jaime is socially and socialistically committed; Nicolás, the childlike seducer, equates the highest
good with pleasure and later will found an Institute for Union with Nothingness and be arrested for
singing Asiatic psalms naked before the gates of Congress. And, symbolically, in that chapter Alba is
born (feet first, we're later told), harbinger of a new era.
Clara "la clarividente" died when Esteban was seventy, with twenty-nine years still to go, and when Alba
was seven. Did the seven and its multiple of ten portend survival and good fortune for the old man and his
granddaughter? Clara, Blanca, and Alba, I've already observed, embody historical awareness and intuitive
understanding. Their role throughout the novel is the preservation of moral and social conscience and
civic responsibility. Clara departs this life at a relatively young age, but she'll often return as a spirit to the
halls and bedrooms of "the big house on the corner," and in chapter 14 ("The Hour of Truth"), to Alba's
tomb-like prison cell. The latter apparition occurs at the crucial moment when Alba, having undergone
the worst of the tortures directed by Esteban García, has decided to stop eating, drinking, and even
breathing, in hopes of a quicker death. Clara succeeds in convincing her granddaughter that "the point
was not to die, but to survive." Further, she strengthens Alba's will to live by urging her to write—"in her
mind, without paper or pencil"—not only to forestall madness by keeping her mind occupied, but to
preserve a testimony that sooner or later and one way or another must be revealed to the outside world.
Her reason is that, given the ways in which the inside world works (through torture, deceit, abuse,
betrayal, and cowardly concealment), no one has a right to ignorance or forgetfulness, and the true heart
of literature is neither pleasure nor knowledge, but survival. The paragraph in which Allende describes
how Alba tries to reconstruct what has happened to her could easily be adapted to an essay or textbook on
the function of memory within the creative process:
Alba tried to obey her grandmother, but as soon as she began to take notes with her mind, the doghouse
[i.e., her undersized, dark prison cell] filled with all the characters of her story, who rushed in, shoved
each other out of the way to wrap her in their anecdotes, their vices, and their virtues, trampled on her
intention to compose a documentary, and threw her testimony to the floor, pressing, insisting, and egging
her on. She took down their words at breakneck pace, despairing because while she was filling a page, the
one before it was erased. This activity kept her fully occupied. At first, she constantly lost her train of
thought and forgot new facts as fast as she remembered them. The slightest distraction or additional fear
or pain caused her story to snarl like a ball of yarn. But she invented a code for recalling things in order,
and then she was able to bury herself so deeply in her story that she stopped eating, scratching herself,
smelling herself, and complaining, and overcame all her varied agonies.
Of course, after Alba is set free—and it is through the intervention of Tránsito Soto, a prostitute friend of
Esteban Trueba's from many years back who owes him a favor, that her release is made possible—she
tells us in the first-person singular Epilogue that her grandfather was the one "who had the idea that we
should write this story." He also helped write it, with a memory that was intact "down to the last second
of his ninety years." More basic still is the contribution of Grandmother Clara, who had superior psychic
powers but a poor memory; but even before becoming deliberately mute at the age of ten she had begun
to write copiously in her notebooks about everything that happened in her eccentric family. It is only after
finishing the book and then returning to the first page that we can identify with certainty the "I" in the
phrase, "never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and
overcome terrors of my own." Clara's notebooks—arranged not chronologically but according to the
importance of events—are mentioned on the last page in the same context as they were on the first.
Clara the Clairvoyant was, then, the creative spirit who at the same time that she bore witness to history
was able, on occasion, to alter it and even to perceive its predetermined elements (for the same reason she
frequently foresaw what was going to happen). If observation of what occurs, changing the course of what
occurs, and understanding what must occur are the three most important attributes of the narrative writer,
then Clara fully and dynamically symbolizes the narrative writer. Although she kept forgetting things—
menial everyday details—she forced her memory to work through writing (the Notebooks). Although
Esteban Trueba pampered her and regaled her with luxuries including a canopy bed with gauze curtains
"that looked like a sailboat on a sea of silken blue water," she had a keen social conscience and on her
first stay at Tres Marías immediately sensed the workers' "resentment, fear and distrust" upon which
Colonel García as a boy was nurtured. Although with distracted sweetness she "lived in a universe of her
own invention," she simultaneously endured the abuses of society and her husband—who knocked out
four of her front teeth when he discovered that their daughter Blanca was Pedro Tercero García's secret
lover.
Clara became immune to surprise (her nursemaid tried for several years to frighten her into speaking
during the nine-year silence).
Clara interpreted dreams.
Clara predicted with demonstrated accuracy deaths, earthquakes, and evil actions.
Clara was able to move objects without touching them.
Clara could invoke ghosts.
Clara played Chopin on the piano without raising the lid over the keyboard. And so forth.
Only a writer endowed with a comparably wide range of secret powers is likely to exercise effectively the
art of survival in the twentieth century. By the art or literature of survival I mean the ultimate power of
testimony through the creative use of memory. That is, creative memory enables testimony to transcend
obstacles, ignorance, and repression.
In The House of the Spirits magic and the flights of fancy are the instrumental privilege of a select few:
the "extraordinary women" to whom Isabel Allende dedicates her novel. Amidst the abuse and the
madness that surround them, orientation is not lost. When Alba is finally released one night on a garbagestrewn vacant lot, she is granted provisional freedom, a possibility of putting things together again if only
in writing. She doesn't know whether the child in her womb was engendered by a rapist or by Miguel, for
whom she'll wait. She considers what has happened to her as "another link to the chain of events that had
to complete itself." Yet she is determined "to break that terrible chain" that hatred has so relentlessly
fashioned. She finds her basic hope in Grandmother Clara's insightful Notebooks, and in the pages she
herself is engaged in writing.
Source: Peter G. Earle, "Literature as Survival: Allende's The House of the Spirits," in Contemporary
Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter, 1987, pp. 543-554.