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COUNTER-HEGEMONIC POETICS IN THE WORK OF ISABEL ALLENDE TIM GAYNOR A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Oxford Brookes University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 1996 CONTENTS Abstract (iii) Note on References and Translations (iv) Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Placing the Text 9 Chapter 2: Popular Novels, Popular Causes 28 Chapter 3: Making Strange: The Politics of Magical Realism 57 Chapter 4: Historiography: Allende, Marx and the Liberal Tradition 99 Chapter 5: Labour Power: The Lost Politics of Subjectivity 123 Chapter 6: The Triumph of the Banal 153 Conclusion 182 Appendices 185 Bibliography 193 ABSTRACT Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read writers from Latin America this century. Her work has been translated into 26 languages and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide. Her success has been, however, somehow double-edged. Serious academic scholarship has tended to shun Allende on the grounds that her work is little more than a form of best-selling literary pastiche that panders to the bourgeois values of the mass market. While ambiguous in her use of the paradigms of mass culture, I argue that Allende's work should yet be read with shared reference to a Latin American tradition of politically committed literature. It is in advancing this adverse argument that I seek to make an original contribution to literary study. In the first chapter of the thesis I seek to develop a strategy for reading Allende's work that takes into account the multiple contexts upon which it draws. The second chapter suggests the continuities between Allende's work and the tradition of the political novel in Latin America, suggesting an often ignored network of affiliations to popular causes and popular aesthetics within her oeuvre. Contrary to a somewhat repressive post-colonial orthodoxy, the third chapter seeks to place Allende's use of magical realist technique in relation to the Brechtian technique of alienation, an influence resolutely at odds with the hegemonic values of bestselling fiction. The argument that Allende's fiction makes use of Marxist insight and argument- which I term "counter-hegemonic poetics" - is sustained in chapters four and five. These chapters explore Allende's critique of the hegemOnic narratives of bourgeois historiography and subjectivity respectively. The concluding chapter seeks to examine the arguments of Allende's detractors. It traces a submerged strand of conservative thought that shadows Allende's ostensibly radical project from her first novel to the efflorescence of petit-bourgeois values in her latest work. It seeks to question Allende's commitment to the radical project outlined, and to determine the efficacy of such a project within the recherche form of the best-selling literary novel. (iii) NOTE ON REFERENCES AND TRANSLATION After the preliminary discussion of the introduction I refer to each of Isabel Allende's novels throughout by its English title. Each reference to the text of Allende's works cites both the standard English translation and the Spanish original throughout. Allende's children's story La gorda de porcelana has never been published in English so the translation cited in the text is my own. Only one of these texts regularly cited, "Writing as an Act of Hope," appears only in English throughout since it was originally published as an English language piece. The particular English and Spanish editions of Allende's works that are referenced are noted below. All page references to works cited throughout the thesis are placed in brackets at the end of each quotation to save unnecessary notes. The House of the Spirits, Magda Bogin (tr)., (London: Black Swan, 1985.) La casa de los esp{ritus, (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1985.) Of Love and Shadows, Margaret Sayers Peden (tr)., (London: Black S 1988.) De amor y de sombra, (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1995.) Eva Luna, Margaret Sayers Peden (tr)., (London: Penguin, 1989.) Eva Luna, (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1991.) The Stories of Eva Luna, Margaret Sayers Peden (tr)., (London: Penguin, 1991) Cuentos de Eva Luna, (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1995.) The Infinite Plan, Margaret Sayers Peden (tr)., (London: Harper Collins, 1993.) El plan infinito, (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1995.) Paula, Margaret Sayers Peden (tr)., (London: Harper Collins, 1995.) Paula, (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1994.) La gorda de porcelana, (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1983.) "Writing as an Act of Hope," William Zinnser (ed.), Paths of Resistance, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989.) Where reference to supplementary material such as author interviews has required translations of my own, such translations are noted within the text. Works by other critics, writers and commentators first published in Spanish, French and German are referred to solely in standard English translation for the sake of access and brevity. (iv) Introduction In an essay on Third World cinema Homi Bhabha remarks that the conceptual separation of First and Third Worlds along lines of exploitation and domination is quite legitimate in what he calls 'the language of political economy.'! John King, writing in response to Bhabha, questions however the appropriateness of borrowing from such paradigms to account for the broad field of cultural production. 'It is still unclear/ he writes 'whether it is possible to premise some sort of unitary aesthetic for non-American and non- European cinema.' (p.4Y While the language of political economy has a broad explanatory power at the level of productive forces, at the cultural level such a claim is almost certainly more problematic. The problem of theorizing a 'Third Cinema' raises questions that are also relevant to the study of literature. Ought writing by Third World writers be homogenized? Should such writing, by dint of being from the far side of the spatialized separation of classes that the terms First and Third World announce, be assumed to be a unitary weave of oppositional proletarian discourses? What are the problems that attend this attractively simple methodology? Such a view is predicated upon an analysis that locates class conflict between First and Third Worlds, locating the forces of capital in the former and labour in the latter. It fails to recognize, however, that class society is not simply inter-systemic but intra-systemic. The fact of class society within Latin America - the area of this study - suggests that literature could be other than the unitary expression of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls 'subaltern experience'.3 Even if it could be assumed that Latin America were uniformly proletarian, it would nevertheless still be inadequate to suppose that its literature would be of a consistently radical outlook. Any such understanding would be predicated upon a vulgar and economistic conception of literary production. A rudimentary conception of the insidious functioning of ideology would call into question the purity of such a culture's self understanding. There can be little doubt from even the most cursory glance at the broad field of Latin American literature that this is so. The wide variety of genres and texts from within the corpus of the continent's literature reflect the full gamut of class relations and 2 consciousness.4 It should be assumed that Latin American literature is as subject to what Louis Althusser has called 'over determination' as that of the First World.s It needs to be stated here that my critical reading of the Chilean writer Isabel Allende for her adept and insightful use of the theoretical apercus of Marxism - which I term 'counter-hegemonic poetics' - does not rely upon placing her as that monolithic and somewhat chimerical thing, a Third World writer. As a basis for producing a scrupulous textual reading, I have tried to establish a flexible yet rigorous methodology that locates Allende's work outwith a simplistic topos of class. In order to do as much, I believe it is important to lay some of the ghosts of a facile Third Worldist criticism and appreciate the flawed reality of Allende's success for what it is. Any attempt to place Isabel Allende in the stable significatory context that the term Third World suggests is in any case flawed from the outset. While Allende is a Chilean author, her biography begins to resist the incipient metonymic extrapolation that such a placing implies. Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru where her father was serving in the Chilean diplomatic corps. Shortly afterwards her parents' marriage broke down and her mother returned with the children to the Chilean capital Santiago. The young Isabel Allende was raised in her maternal grandparents' house until her mother remarried. Allende's stepfather, like her own father before, was in the Chilean diplomatic service. Travel inevitably followed. A posting to the Chilean embassy in La Paz in neighbouring Bolivia was followed a few years later with a posting to the Lebanon. Isabel's subsequent return to Chile in her teens and the early years of her first marriage provided a period of settled life in the Chilean capital. This stability was cut short in 1973 by the coup d'etat which deposed the Marxist government of her relative Salvador Allende. The subsequent terror of the Pinochet regime placed Allende's life- like that of thousands of other Chilenos - in danger. In 1975 she and her family fled into exile in Venezuela. Allende spent more than a decade in exile in Caracas until the success of her first novel, The House of the Spirits (first published as La casa de los espfritus in 1982) brought more travel and 3 upheavals. In the late 1980's, Allende left her first husband and went to live in Berkeley, California, where she married a North American lawyer. The final, self-imposed upheaval is perhaps the most significant for any critical attempt to locate her in terms of the Manichean dichotomization of First and Third Worlds.

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