Anthropology, Genealogy, and Personal Theory in Spanish American Literature: An Introduction and the

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Anthropology, Genealogy, and Personal Theory in
Spanish American LiteratureAn Introduction and
the Case of Isabel Allende
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Overview

• Fascination with genealogy, the idea of genetic
  descent or lineage, constitutes a common link
  between anthropology and the Spanish American
  literary tradition.
• Recent theoretical critiques of conventional
  genealogical thought multiply the ways in which
  this discourse relates to writing and
  literature.
• An analysis of texts by Isabel Allende will show
  that a writers particular use of genealogical
  concepts can reveal personal theoretical
  priorities.

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Main ideas to be explored

• The centrality of anthropology and genealogy to
  modern Latin American literature
• Traditional vs. theoretical definitions and
  uses of genealogy
• Genealogical models of narrative and literary
  criticism
• Autobiography and personal criticism or
  theorizing
• Genealogy and the personalized feminism of Isabel
  Allende

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Anthropology as masterstory

• In Myth and Archive A Theory of Latin American
  Narrative, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria calls
  anthropology and modern Spanish American
  literature parallel discourses.

Since the eighteenth century, all forms of
narrative, but particularly the novel, have had
to compete with those created or adapted first by
the natural and later by the social sciences. . .
. (In) Latin America . . . the mediating force of
science was such that the most significant
narratives did not even pretend to be novels, but
various kinds of scientific reportage (11).
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• This particular mediation (nineteenth-century
  science) prevails until the crisis of the 1920s
  and the so-called novela de la tierra or telluric
  novel. This modern novel avails itself of a
  different kind of mediation anthropology. . . .
  The truth-bearing document the novel imitates is
  the anthropological or ethnographic report
  (12-13).
• Anthropological knowledge provided Latin
  American narrative with a source of stories, as
  well as a masterstory about Latin American
  history. In fiction, Latin American history will
  now be cast in the form of myth, a form derived
  from anthropological studies (151).

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• The regionalist or telluric novel was conceived
  through this institutionalized anthropological
  grid. These novels are concerned with myth,
  religion, magic, language, genealogy, the impact
  of modern modes of production on traditional
  societies, retentions from earlier periods, in
  short, with the totality of culture viewed and
  described from the outside, often through a
  narrator who follows a protagonist traveling to
  the jungle, the llano or the pampa (155).
• Cuentos de la selva, Horacio Quiroga, 1918
• La voragine, Jose Eustasio Rivera, 1924
• Don Segundo Sombra, Ricardo Guiraldes, 1926
• Dona Barbara, Romulo Gallegos, 1929

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Genealogy and the novel

• Anthropology as a form of hegemonic discourse is
  also evident in the regionalist novel because of
  the inordinate attention paid to matters of
  genealogy. Genealogy, as we know, is very much an
  element in conventional novelistic tradition. . .
  . (It) is a fundamental element in modern Latin
  American fiction, not merely as a measure of
  time, nor as a reflection of myth, but also
  because the regionalist novel studies the family
  as a group, and how values are transmitted from
  generation to generation, as well as in social
  practices (158).

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What is genealogy?
(Actually, it depends who you ask!)
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Traditional genealogy

• What most people mean when they use the term
  genealogy
• The Oxford English Dictionary provides a succinct
  definition of genealogy as An account of ones
  descent from an ancestor or ancestors, by
  enumeration of the intermediate persons a
  pedigree.

• who traces ancestry?
• why do they do this?
• What are the benefits?

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Genealogy goes theoretical

• Several philosophers and theorists have
  questioned the premises of conventional
  genealogical inquiry, especially its tendency to
  privilege remote origins (which are supposed to
  have special foundational significance and
  guarantee legitimacy, rights, etc., over time).
• Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault promote
  the use of traditional genealogys emphasis on
  meticulous tracing to critique its focus on
  presupposed origins.

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• In his preface to On the Genealogy of Morals,
  Nietzsche makes clear his intentions to depart
  from conventional origin-seeking, which amounts,
  in his view, to gazing around haphazardly in the
  blue after the English fashion
• For it must be obvious which color is a hundred
  times more valuable to a genealogist of morals
  than blue namely gray, that is what is
  documented, what can actually be confirmed and
  has actually existed, in short, the entire long
  hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the
  moral past of mankind! (21).

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• In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault
  writes
• Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently
  documentary. It operates on a field of entangled
  and confused parchments, on documents that have
  been scratched over and recopied many times
  (130).
• If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith
  in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he
  finds that there is something altogether
  different behind things not a timeless and
  essential secret, but the secret that they have
  no essence or that their essence was fabricated
  in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms (142).
• What is found at the historical beginning of
  things is not the inviolable identity of their
  origins it is the dissention of other things. It
  is disparity (142).

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Postmodern genealogy

• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari critique
  genealogical inquiry by focusing on the
  inadequacy of its most recognizable metaphor. In
  A Thousand Plateaus they write
• Were tired of trees. We should stop believing
  in trees, roots, and radicals. They have made us
  suffer too much (15).
• The tree and the root inspire a sad image of
  thought that is forever imitating the multiple on
  the basis of a centered or segmented higher
  unity (16).

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• In Genealogy in Literature Pruning the
  Genealogical Tree, Gian Balsamo provides a
  definition of genealogy that clearly bears the
  traces of the terms passage through these
  multiple theoretical permutations
• One must engage genealogy as a construct, whose
  contrived architecture is best exemplified in the
  trope of the genealogical tree a modular
  assemblage of legitimate filiations, a treelike
  structure, whose ramifications, apparently
  all-inclusive, hide the intricacy of exclusion,
  discrimination, and abusive graftings (17).
• (In much critical theory conventional genealogy
  and its premises are rejected or subjected to
  intense scrutiny.)

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Genealogy and literature

• Alongside the critiques of these theorists,
  literary critics have expressed interest in
  genealogy, its terms, and its tropes, in at least
  two important ways
• They document the interdependence (or
  incompatibilities) of genealogy and to narrative,
  both in content and structure
• They appropriate genealogical models to frame
  discussions about writing and writers (literary
  paternity)

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Genealogy and narrative

• Robert Nisbet argues that the metaphor of
  genealogy has been the principle structuring
  rhetoric for history, narrative, and any number
  of discourses since primitive times
• Genealogy, the idea of genetically linked
  descent, is one of the oldest and profoundest
  ideas in Western, possibly all civilizations. Few
  experiences could have been more vivid and
  encapsulating to primitive man than that of the
  descent of the generations. From this experience
  he could, and did, work metaphoricallyreligiously
  , then in time rationallyto other spheres of
  reality.

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• More from Nisbet on genealogy and narrative
• The pervasiveness of the genealogical metaphor
  means that writers and readers generally accept
  that events in time have a genetic relation to
  one another that is exactly comparable to the
  visible relation of the generations in a kinship
  line. The family-tree logic to which Nisbet is
  referring simplifies things for the writer of
  tales or the historian because the concept of
  causality already inscripted into the metaphor of
  genealogy settles before they even arise all the
  troubling questions of causation and
  responsibility that might otherwise plague us.

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• Tess OToole also notes the similarities between
  genealogical and narrative structures
• Narrative and genealogy are both operations that
  must unfold in time, and both impute a homology
  between chronology and causality. Moreover, both
  systems rely on a simultaneous grasp of sameness
  and difference for the apprehension of their
  logic. The operation of genealogy is perceptible
  through the instances of continuity and variation
  that mark the relationship of ancestor to
  descendant, simultaneously linking the two and
  distinguishing them. Similarly, standard
  definitions of narrative . . . hinge upon the
  interplay between resemblance and difference.

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• The compatibility of genealogy and narrative
  forms is questioned by other critics. For
  example, Julia Watson sees genealogy as an
  inadequate and restrictive model for
  autobiographical narratives
• Genealogy makes truth claims about the
  knowability of family history and its power to
  authorize the individual while resisting the
  incursions of autobiographical storytelling.
  Tracing ones genealogy requires verifying
  biographical detail as documentable fact and
  suppressing subjective autobiographical detail.
  . . . Genealogical pedigrees are an inadequate
  and even misleading schemata for explaining the
  multireferentiality of autobiography. . . .
  Objectivity is crucial personal connection to
  the object of study, who can talk back, hold
  back, or, worst of all, distort and fantasize, is
  discouraged.

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Genealogy and literary criticism

• Genealogy-based models are used to talk about
  literary generations and to describe the
  relationships between the writers of different
  generations.
• Prominent instances of equating the dynamics of
  literary precursors to patterns of ancestry
  include Harold Blooms model of inter-poetic
  influence between generations of poets and the
  feminist revisions of his theory.

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• In the Anxiety of Influence, Bloom appropriates a
  genealogical model to explain the dynamics of
  literary influence between the great poets of
  Modernity. He treats poetic influence in terms of
  intra-poetic relationships
• Poetic history is indistinguishable from poetic
  influence since strong poets make that history by
  misreading one another, so as to clear
  imaginative space for themselves (5).
• His model examines the relations between poets
  as cases akin to what Freud called the family
  romance (8).

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• In response to Blooms rigidly patriarchal model,
  feminist theorists Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan
  Gubar proposed the female affiliation complex.
• The notion of affiliation frees women writers
  from the restrictive patterns of biological
  genealogy by exploiting the concepts of adoption
  and choice They also see themselves as . . .
  free to adopt the powers of paternal and/or
  maternal traditions. That the concept of adoption
  is ambiguously present in the definition of
  affiliation suggests, moreover, an evasion of the
  inexorable lineage of the biological family even
  while it implies the power of decision in two
  historical decisions one may be adopted, and
  thus legitimized, as a literary heiress but one
  may also adopt, and thus sanction others to carry
  on, the tradition one has established.

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Autobiography and Personal Criticism

• One recent tendency in critical theory across
  disciplines has been to personalize theoretical
  writings, to introduce or support theoretical
  arguments with autobiographical evidence.
• A complementary trend is also evident in recent
  autobiographical writings authors are
  increasingly concerned with matters of theory as
  they relate to them personally.

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• Feminist theorist Nancy K. Miller coined the term
  personal criticism, which entails an
  explicitly autobiographical performance within
  the act of criticism. Indeed, getting personal in
  criticism typically involves a deliberate move
  toward self-figuration, although the degree and
  form of self-disclosure of course vary widely.
• Autobiography scholar Laura Marcus writes that
  Autobiographical texts are engaging directly
  with theoretical accounts of subjectivity and
  history, while criticism and theory are calling
  for a recognition of the subjectivity of the
  theorist.

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The case of Isabel Allende

• I propose to read Isabel Allendes memoir Paula
  as a work of personal criticism in which specific
  genealogical elements are foregrounded to define
  her personalized feminist priorities.
• Despite her incomparable success as a female
  writer in a male-dominated tradition, the level
  of Allendes commitment to feminism is routinely
  questioned. She is at odds with certain
  influential premises of feminist theory, such as
  womens writing, but Allendes use of genealogy
  and myth in her memoir Paula reveals a
  personalized brand of feminism that effectively
  opposes patriarchal norms and, if sales are any
  indication, resonates with readers across gender
  lines.

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But I am a feminist, really!

• In interviews and scholarly articles, Allendes
  commitment to feminism is often called into
  question, usually because critics feel that
• The style and structure of her narratives are too
  conventional to question the patriarchal norms of
  writing
• While her novels give prominent roles to female
  protagonists, these are not always aggressive in
  challenging gender roles or patriarchal order
• She expresses ambivalence about criticism and
  theory and insists that she is only concerned
  with storytelling

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Is writing gendered?

• Influential feminists say yes, Allende says no.
• French feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous
  and Julia Kristeva have argued that womens
  writing should somehow be different than
  patriarchal models they must write as women.
• Allende does not believe in this distinction
  What is masculine writing? I mean does
  literature have a sex? Writing is writing.
  Language is language, and you write from a human
  point of view

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Where is her feminism?

• Allende ardently defends her claim to be a
  feminist writer, but if she is not committed to
  gendered or womens writing, or if her
  characters dont always seem to reject
  patriarchal norms, then exactly where is her
  feminism?
• I propose that we look beyond the surface of her
  writing to the dynamics of the relationships she
  foregrounds
• Story-level There is a clear emphasis on womens
  relationships, but even abusive men often fare
  well or are eventually redeemed
• Romance, heterosexual love, gentle patriarchs
• Narrative/rhetorical level In Paula, this
  becomes matrilineal because men are excluded from
  this mother-daughter relationship between
  narrator and narratee.

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Paula an overview

• Began as a letter to Allendes daughter Paula who
  was comatose and eventually died
• The author sets out to write the legend of our
  family in case her daughter wakes up with no
  memory of her own
• It is also a memoir, Allende alternates the
  autobiographical moments of her past and that of
  her ancestors with reports on Paulas present
• The memoir/novel is addressed directly to Paula,
  a rare literary device that deserves closer
  scrutiny

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Genealogy in Paula

• Content re-telling of the family legend to
  Paula
• In terms of content, kinship is bilateral men
  and woman both figure prominently and fare well
• There is a purposeful meditation on genealogy and
  writing, especially regarding the genesis of
  Allendes vocation as a novelist (the composition
  of The House of the Spirits)
• The relationships of the texts rhetorical or
  narrative dimension are exclusively matrilineal
• The narrative pretense evokes the mythological
  pantheon, with a significant emphasis on the
  female figures of Demeter and Persephone

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Listen, Paula . . .

• The rhetorical structure of Paula is strictly
  matrilineal, but does it really matter that
  Allende addresses her daughter directly? What can
  this focus on the narrator-narratee relation
  reveal?
• In Introduction to the Narratee, Gerald Prince
  argues that the relations between the narrator
  and the narratee in a text may underscore one
  theme, illustrate another, or contradict yet
  another. Often the theme refers directly to the
  narrative situation and it is the narrative as
  theme that these relations reveal . . . it
  sometimes happens that we must study the narratee
  in order to discover a narratives fundamental
  thrust (22).

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Demeter and Persephone

• Allendes anguish over the death of her daughter
  in Paula evokes this myth of mother-daughter
  loss.

• Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter,
  abducted by Hades (or sold by Zeus) and taken to
  Underworld
• Wandering in anguish, Demeter refused to nourish
  the earth drought and famine ensued
• Zeus relented and Persephone was eventually
  restored to Demeter, but still consigned to Hades
  a third of the year

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The Eleusinian Mysteries

• Ancient rites at Eleusis celebrated the storys
  promise of life and abundance after death.

• The basis of the cult to Demeter was
  Persephones symbolic death and rebirth
• The rites involved a procession from Athens to
  Eleusis with initiates re-enacting certain
  aspects of the myth, ritual drinks
• In the final initiation ceremony, initiates were
  shown sacred objects and saw a vision of fire
  symbolizing life after death
• Details of the ceremony were kept secret

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Significance of the mysteries

• According to C. Kerenyi, the major revelation
  contained in the symbolism of the mysteries was a
  consciousness of the continuity of life
• Objectively, the idea of the goddess regaining
  her daughter, and therefore herself, flashed on
  the experients sole. Subjectively, the same
  flash of revelation showed him his own
  continuity, the continued existence of all living
  things. The not-knowing, the failure to
  understand that attached to the figure of the
  grieving Demeter, ceased. The paradox contained
  in the living ideathat in motherhood, death and
  continuity are one in the losing and finding of
  the Koreis now resolved (142).

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• C.G. Jung observes that the Eleusinian ideal of a
  matrilineal genealogy extending both upwards and
  downwards contributes to womens psychological
  association with the notion of immortality and
  forms the basis of their identity
• A woman lives first as a mother, later as a
  daughter. The conscious experience of these ties
  produces the feeling that her life is spread out
  over generationsthe first step toward the
  immediate experience of being outside time, which
  brings with it a feeling of immortality. The
  individuals life is elevated into a type, indeed
  it becomes the archetype of womans fate in
  general (162).

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Reclaiming feminine relations

• There is a growing concern among some feminist
  theorists in the long-neglected topic of
  mother-daughter relationships. Some, like
  Adrienne Rich, consider it a central concern for
  feminism.
• In Of Women Born, Rich observes that this
  relationship has been minimized and trivialized
  in the annals of patriarchy at the expense of
  the eternal, determinative mother-son dyad
  because like intense relationships between women
  in general, the relationship between mother and
  daughter has been profoundly threatening to men
  in general (226).

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• Luce Irigaray interprets the Demeter-Persephone
  myth from a feminist perspective and argues that
  restoring mother-daughter ties should be a
  feminist priority
• Through incredible neglect and disregard,
  patriarchal traditions have wiped out traces of
  mother-daughter genealogies.
• To re-establish elementary social justice, to
  save the earth from total subjugation to male
  vales (which often give priority to violence,
  power, money) we must restore this missing pillar
  of our culture the mother-daughter relationship.

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Motherline narratives

• Allendes Paula is an example of a Motherline
  text as they are defined my Naomi Lowinsky In her
  book Stories from the Motherline Reclaiming the
  Mother Daughter Bond, Finding our Feminine Souls.
• The Motherline is narrativeoral or writtenthat
  stresses matrilineal genealogies and embodies
  Eleusinian principles by placing special value on
  the notion of intergenerational connectedness
  between women. Lowinsky defines the Motherline in
  part as the ancient lore of women, as
  something we have forgotten that we know.

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• Lowinskys Motherline is a genealogical model
• They are stories of the life cycles that link
  the generations of women mothers who are also
  daughters daughters who have become mothers
  grandmothers who always remain granddaughters.
  They are stories that evoke the dead a mother
  who dies while her child was very young a child
  who never made it to adulthood.
• Imagine cords of connection tied over
  generations. . . . These cords of meaning weave
  through our life-giving experiences like
  umbilical cords, connecting us through those we
  bear to those who bore our mothers and fathers.
• Motherline stories (1) are the product of
  matriarchal consciousness, (2) are about kith
  and kin and relationships that loop through
  time, (3) describe a world in which the
  boundaries of fantasy and reality are permeable,
  and (4) develop across boundaries of life and
  death that are easily crossed.

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How is this feminism?

• Connecting with ones Motherline and its general
  Eleusinian principles is crucial to feminism in
  Lowinskys vision because women who do so reclaim
  important benefits that have been forgotten
  through cultural impositions that have produced a
  climate of ambivalence about the feminine When
  a woman sees her life story as being connected to
  the Motherline, she gains female authority in a
  number of ways.

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• A study by Stephanie Demetrakopoulos on recent
  autobiographies by women demonstrates that even
  within the current climate of postmodern
  fragmentation and diversityor perhaps as a
  direct consequence of such tenetsnotions such as
  roots, wholeness, and community are anything
  but passé
• The energy with which women autobiographers are
  establishing their matrilineal roots seems the
  clearest and perhaps most publicly accessible
  demonstration of this force, now emerging,
  becoming more articulate in a period of human
  history thirsting for spirit and meaning.

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• And Andrea OReilly observes that concerns about
  mother-daughter relations are pertinent to
  feminist objectives on a variety of fronts
• The scholarship on mothers, daughters, and
  feminism falls into four interconnected themes
  empowerment, agency, narrative, and the
  motherline. All four centre upon and call for
  reciprocal mother-daughter identification to
  achieve a lasting politics of empowerment.
• Told and retold, stories between mothers and
  daughters allow us to define female experience
  outside the phallocentric narrative of
  patriarchy.

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Conclusions from Paula

• Genealogy continues to be an importance presence
  in Spanish American narrative texts, but its uses
  vary with each writer
• Interrogating a writers approach to and
  treatment of genealogy can often reveal other
  priorities within a text
• In the case of Allende, her characters seem to
  support traditional notions of genealogy and
  gender roles, but women and matrilineal relations
  control the function of storytelling
• Allende personalized feminism makes her a
  feminist despite the doubters, and she probably
  has more influence and resonates more with
  readers than they do