Literature As Survival: Allende's The House Of The Spirits
The article “Literature As Survival: Allende’s The House of The Spirits” by Peter Earle argues that literature such as The House of the Spirits and One Hundred Years of Solitude brought historical awareness of what occurred in Latin America. Additionally, the story is “living on” and it is a celebration of reality in Latin America (Earle 543). Both Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende wrote about Latin American history in a way that it can be forever remembered.
Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a huge success because he incorporated all of the motifs from the celebration of reality in Latin America into a fictional yet a realistic story (Earle 544). Peter Earle wrote that the motifs include “forms of aggression, one finds oases of lyricism, intense paternal, maternal, filial, marital, and extramarital relationships, bizarre …show more content…
Earle mentions that Isabel Allende said “reality is always richer than anything one can dream” (Earle 544). He continues with “It invites storytelling and sharpens historical awareness, for history is something that needs constantly to be deciphered through literature-probably its best instrument” (Earle 544). Without literature there would be no ‘history’ because it would not be written down and after some generations past they are not going to know. History and Literature co-exist together. Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits was her way of celebrating a “momentous social struggle” in her maturing intellectually “with her uncle’s socialist movement and became a novelist at her reactionary grandfather’s death” (Earle 545). The people and places in Allende’s book were fiction, but “the implications are obvious: this was to be a composite testimony of many voices” (Earle 545). This book is her and a lot of other people's realities. The House of Spirits was not only her voice but the stories of
Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a huge success because he incorporated all of the motifs from the celebration of reality in Latin America into a fictional yet a realistic story (Earle 544). Peter Earle wrote that the motifs include “forms of aggression, one finds oases of lyricism, intense paternal, maternal, filial, marital, and extramarital relationships, bizarre …show more content…
Earle mentions that Isabel Allende said “reality is always richer than anything one can dream” (Earle 544). He continues with “It invites storytelling and sharpens historical awareness, for history is something that needs constantly to be deciphered through literature-probably its best instrument” (Earle 544). Without literature there would be no ‘history’ because it would not be written down and after some generations past they are not going to know. History and Literature co-exist together. Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits was her way of celebrating a “momentous social struggle” in her maturing intellectually “with her uncle’s socialist movement and became a novelist at her reactionary grandfather’s death” (Earle 545). The people and places in Allende’s book were fiction, but “the implications are obvious: this was to be a composite testimony of many voices” (Earle 545). This book is her and a lot of other people's realities. The House of Spirits was not only her voice but the stories of