History

Past-on Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call
Author(s): P. Gabrielle Foreman

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 369-388
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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PAST-ON STORIES:
HISTORY AND THE MAGICALLYREAL,
MORRISON AND ALLENDE ON CALL
P. GABRIELLE FOREMAN
The storytellertakes what [she] tells from experience- [her]own

or that reportedby others. And [she] in turn makes it the expe-
rience of those who are listeningto [the]tale .... In every case the
storyteller is a [wo]man who has counsel for [her] reader.... To-
day having counsel is beginningto have an old-fashionedring ...
because the communicabilityof experience is decreasing.
-Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations
In the postmodernworld of dead authors and destabilizedsub-

jects, "experience" resounds like something embarrassinglyanti-
quated.Nonetheless,repossessinghistoricalexperiencewhich "re-
claim[s]the past"'is IsabelAllende'swork, as it is, similarly,Toni
Morrison's.In TheHouseof theSpirits,Allendewritesto "keepalive
the memory"of her country, Chile. Similarly,in Songof Solomon,
Morrisonis explicitlyconcernedwith the process of "rememory,"
as she will be laterin Beloved."Somewhere,"she often says, "some-
one forgotto tell somebody something."2
We don't live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents
don't sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological, arche-
typal stories that we heard years ago. But new information has to get out, and
there are several ways to do it. One is the novel.3
For these authors,memory is groundedin a recuperatedrelation
to the historical. Allende and Morrison, like the storytelling
women protagoniststhey create,are animatedby the desireto pre-
serve pasts too often trivialized,built over, or erased,and to pass
them on.
Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992). ? 1992 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
369

370 P. Gabrielle Foreman
The interrelation of history, ontology, and the magically real-

and how these authors' interventions posit women as both the site
of and link between these categories-will be the subject of this
essay. The relation between ontology and naming is explicitly al-
though discretely figured in both TheHouse of the Spiritsand Songof
Solomon, the two novels I will here address. Morrison locates de-
fining power in speech and listening, survival skills quite distinct
from mere mimetic talking and passive hearing. In TheHouse of the
Spirits,Allende subverts the Adamic power of literal naming and so
posits a new genesis, one in which woman challenges her always-
already fallenness and instead, as in Morrison, is the site of a
history which survives, and so nurtures the present.
It is in the revelation of family histories that the worlds of The
House of the Spiritsand Song of Solomonare constituted-worlds full
of walking, talking ghosts, women with green hair or no navels,
marvelous worlds. "Magicalrealism,"unlike the fantastic or the sur-
real, presumes that the individual requires a bond with the tradi-
tions and the faith of the community, that s/he is historically con-
structed and connected. Echoing Alejo Carpentier who originally
named the phenomenon, critic Marguerite Suarez-Murias con-
tends that "the marvelous [or magic realism] presupposes an ele-
ment of faith on the part of the author or the audience."4 She
argues further that both the fantastic and the surrealistic require
"the total negation of faith and tradition. It is here where magic
realism splits away."5Unlike magical realism, the other similarly
categorized genres posit the individual who experiences a world
outside of a larger community's parameters.
Although the term has been used primarily to categorize a Latin
American genre, I assume its relevance in examining an aspect of
African American literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One
Hundred Years of Solitude is the genre's most famous novel, often
cites the African Caribbean coast of Colombia as the source of his
magically real. Allende has asserted that magical realism "relieson
a South American reality: the confluence of races and cultures of
the whole world superimposed on the indigenous culture, in a vio-
lent climate."6These, too, are the dynamics of Africans in the
Americas; they are inscribed, although differently, in both
Allende's and Morrison's texts. Ultimately, I will argue that
Allende revises Garcia Marquez's master text by positing women
as the sites of the magical. Additionally, in contradistinction to

P. Gabrielle Foreman 371
GarciaMarquez,her magicalrealismgives way at last to political

realism.Yet, despitecriticalvalorizationof her use of the magical,
I will contend that finally Allende does not comfortablyfit into
Suarez-Murias's paradigm.Instead,she feminizesgenericcodes to
employ magicalrealism as a bridge to a traditionrecoverablein
politicalhistory, a history she ultimatelyconstitutesin her text as
distinctfrom the magical.
The fathers may soar

And the children may know their names
-Epigraph, Song of Solomon
In Song of Solomonwomen are simultaneouslythe site of the
historicaland the magical.AlthoughMorrison,like Allende,uses a
male character,Milkman Dead, as the principalnarrativechar-
acter, his Aunt Pilateperformsthe role WalterBenjaminnames:
she is the giver of stories, of counsel, the link to a precariousbut
necessary past. Althoughwe hear the stories told by Macon and
Ruth, Milkman'sparents,they do not communicatethe past free-
ly, but only when they feel coerced.The firsttime Milkmanhears
of his father'schildhoodis when Maconis forbiddinghis son to go
to Pilate's.
"You keep saying you don't have to explain nothing to me. How do you think
that makes me feel? Like a baby, that's what. Like a twelve-year-old baby!!"
"Don't you raise your voice to me ....
Watch your mouth!" Macon roared.7
As a result of this confrontationMacon decides to relatehis own
version of Lincoln'sHeaven, the farm where he and Pilate grew
up, and of how his father got his name. Yet he ends saying, "I
haven't changed my mind, I don't want you over there."'Why?
You still haven'tsaid why,"his son pleads. And Macondoesn't.At
the end of the conversation"hisfather had explainednothing to
him"(pp. 54-55).
Far from the ostensible complicityof a Billy Holiday in "Hush
now, don'texplain,"Milkman'spersistencethat the past be related
to him provokes both his father'spersonaland projectedcensor-
ship. Not only does Maconrefuseto "tellthings,"but he also insists
that his son watch his own mouth. The power of the oral, as in
Shahrazad Ali's hysteric best-seller on the dangerous Black

woman, is marked as potentially out-of-control, a darkened "wild

zone" to be feared and controlled.8
Pilate, unlike her brother, tells stories both continually and
spontaneously. She is a symbol of kinetic orality, a Shahrazad Ali-
an nightmare.9
When she was neither singing nor talking,her face was animatedby her con-
stantly moving lips. She chewed things. As a baby, as a very young girl, she
kept things in her mouth-straw from brooms, gristle, buttons, seeds, leaves,
string . . . Her lips were alive with small movements. (P. 30)
Pilate is also the symbol of aurality. She takes the only word her
father ever wrote, her name which he copied from the Bible, puts
it in her mother's snuffbox and strings it to her ear to give it mean-
ing. Morrison inverts the Black tradition of recording family
names in the Bible. Pilate, instead, takes the word out of the Bible
and puts it in her ear to symbolize her belief that the value of the
word is in the hearing, in the telling, that the living tradition is an
oral/aural one, rather than a written one.
Pilate the counselor, the storyteller, teaches Milkman to value
these traditions. She begins, as critic Joseph T. Skerretpoints out,10
by teaching the teenaged Milkman and his best friend how to talk
properly:
"Who'syour little friend? ... Do he talk?"
"Yeah.He talk. Say something."Guitarshoved an elbow at Milkmanwithout
taking his eyes off Pilate.
Milkmantook a breath, held it, and said, "Hi."
Pilate laughed. "Youall must be the dumbest unhung Negroes on earth.
What they telling you in them schools?You say 'Hi"to pigs and sheep when
you want 'em to move. When you tell a human being 'Hi,'he ought to get up
and knock you down."(P. 37)
Their manhood, Pilate schools them, has more to do with speech
than sexuality; it is contingent on their no longer being "dumb,"on
their mastering speech. Her admonishment that "you all must be
the dumbest unhung Negroes on earth"appropriates into her own
educational discourse fetishized phallic myths about the Black
male. The power to subvert myths of phallic symbolism, change
their locus, and avoid their violent translation, their hanging, she
locates in the power of speech.
Pilate also teaches them how to listen, a survival strategy not
taught, she points out, at the schools they attend. Hearing her
speak, they must also learn to respect the storyteller. When Pilate

startsout, Guitarinterruptsher, asking:

"Who shot your daddy?? Did you say somebody shot him?" Guitar was
fascinated....
"Five feet into the air..."
"Who?"
"I don't know who and I don't know why. I just know what I'm telling you:
what, when, and where."
"You didn't say where." He was insistent.
"I did too. Off a fence."
"Where was the fence?"
"On our farm."
. .He gave up on "where." "Well, when then?"
"When he sat there-on the fence."
Guitar felt like a frustrated detective. "What year?"
"The year they shot them Irish people down in the streets. Was a good year
for guns and gravediggers I know that." (Pp. 41-42)
By the end of theirvisit, the boys learnto value the interactionbe-

tween Pilate and themselves as well as the information,double
entendres,and codingof the tales;they absorbthe lessonsbarnacl-
ed to the undersidesof speech and meaning, without imposing
their own demands on the story. They "watched,afraid to say
anythinglest they ruin the next partof her story, and afraidto re-
main silent lest she not go on with its telling"(p. 43). They must
learn to occupy the space between speech and silence, between
stories to pass on and not to pass on, between being hung and
unhung, both to acquire and define their "manhood" and also to
stay alive.
Listening,not only to what he wants to hear but also to what is
being said, becomes central in Milkman'squest for life. These
values are learnedbut not yet incorporatedby a twelve-year-old
on an afternoonvisit. Years later in Shalimarhe finally realizes
that the commodities in which his father has invested are not,
ultimately, of value. There, on a midnight hunt, "therewas
nothing . . . to help him-not his money, his car, his father's
reputation,his suit, or his shoes. In fact they hamperedhim"(p.
280). Realizingthis, Milkmanbegins to rely upon the values that
Pilatehas taught him, how to talk, be silent, and listen.
Feeling both tense and relaxed, he sank his fingers into the grass. He tried to
listen with his fingertips, to hear what, if anything, the earth had to say, and it
told him quickly that someone was standing behind him and he had just
enough time to raise one hand to his neck and catch the wire that fastened
around his throat. (P. 282)

The power of listening allows Milkman both to save his own life
and to figure out what it is, who he is, that he is saving. Listening
also allows him to puzzle out the pieces of Pilate's song and recog-
nize in it his family history. And again that which he had relied
upon in the past proves useless. On a sleepy Shalimar morning,
Milkman is pulled out of his own thoughts by the children playing
a game, singing Pilate's song.
Milkman took out his wallet and pulled from it his airplane ticket stub, but he
had no pencil to write with, and his pen was in his suit. He would just have to
listen and memorize it. He closed his eyes and concentrated while the children
.. performed the round over and over again. And Milkman memorized all of
what they sang. (P. 306)
In Milkman's search, Pilate's values again triumph over Macon's
censorship and constraint. There is nothing in Milkman's wallet
which will help him; in listening to the children, he must rely
upon the skills he has learned. Stripped of pencils and pens, Milk-
man abandons his status as observer and becomes a participant in
his own history.
In African American culture, naming is often a creative subver-
sive practice in a country which has historically denied, manipu-
lated, and mangled Black names. Reappropriation,in other words,
leads to agency-to the power to redefine white declaratives. The
community in Song of Solomonrenames Mercy Hospital, 'No Mercy
Hospital."The street they call "DoctorStreet"city officials insist is
not "DoctorStreet."Fine, they nod, "NotDoctor Street."On Pilate's
porch, during that first storytelling session, Milkman first feels
that his identity is connected somehow to his name.
Again Guitar spoke up. "You his daddy sister?"
"The only one he got. Ain't but three Deads alive."
Milkman, who had been unable to get one word out of his mouth after the
foolish "Hi,"heard himself shout: "I'ma Dead! My mother's a Dead! My sisters.
You and him ain't the only ones!"
.... He wondered why he was suddenly so defensive-so possessive about
his name. He had always hated that name.... Now he was behaving with this
strange woman as though having the name was a matter of deep personal
pride, as though she had tried to expel him from a very special group.... (P. 38)
Names, Milkman finally realizes, bear witness, bear witness to
"yearnings,gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses," and re-
sistance." Morrison herself contends that "each thing is separate
and different; once you have named it, you have power."l2Drunk

one night, trying to sort out all his father's retaliations for the blow
Milkman had dealt him at the dinner table, Milkman and Guitar
again end up pondering names.
"What'syour trouble? You don't like your name?"
"No.... No, I don't like my name."
"....Sweet Hagar. Wonder what her name is."
"....Ask Pilate."
"Yeah. I'll ask Pilate. Pilate knows. It's in that dumb-ass box hanging from
her ear. Her own name and everybody else's. Bet mine's in there too. I'm
gonna ask her what my name is." (Pp. 88-89)
Although he doesn't know it, Pilate has already taught him that
simple explanations aren't there for the asking. Names are histori-
cally embedded; their recovery involves a certain kind of responsi-
bility to them, a responsibility that Milkman isn't yet ready to ac-
cept. The always-already absence in the history of Black naming in
the United States emerges in Milkman's exchange; he doesn't like a
name he doesn't, he says lines later, even know. Pilate replaces
that absence with collective naming-Milkman's, her own, and
"everybody else's." Only after Milkman acknowledges this nexus
can he connect himself in history.
Whatever the man called

each living creature,
that would be its name.
-Genesis 2: verse 19
Like Pilate, whose biblical name also takes on its analogue, pilot,
one who leads the way, Allende's character Clara Del Valle's name
literally means light, brightness, lucidity -one who lights the way.
The House of the Spirits revolves around Clara's family: Esteban
Trueba, whom she marries, a conservative senator, patron, and
patriarchal "head"of family; Blanca, their daughter; and Alba, their
granddaughter. Allende plays on Clara'sname, having Trueba call
out to "Clara,the clearest" [Clara, clarissima] (p. 295),13writing of
her death that "she seemed to be detaching herself from the world,
growing ever lighter [mas clara], more transparent [aun mas clara],
more winged," (p. 289) and, at his death, when he murmurs, "Clara,
clearest, clairvoyant"(p. 431).14 Clara'sfemale offspring are chris-
tened with revised homonyms; her daughter is called Blanca or

white; and Alba means dawn, the beginning of light, Claraboth dif-
fused and renewed.
Like Morrison with Pilate, Alende locates Clara as the site of
naming; and this wrests Adamic power from her husband, Trueba.
When she is pregnant he starts:
"I hope this time it will be a boy so we can give him my name," I [Trueba]
joked.
"It's not one, it's two," Clara replied. "The twins will be called Jaime and
Nicolas, respectively."
... I got furious, arguing that ... no one in my family or hers had ever had
such names, that at least one of them should be called Esteban, like myself and
my father, but Clara explained that repeating the same name just caused con-
fusion in her notebooks that bore witness to life. Her decision was inflexible.
(P. 115)
Despite Trueba'stemporary first-person narrative "control,"Clara's

appropriation of his rights of patrilineage displays Allende's irony,
for Trueba delimits his expansive use of the droit du seigneurpre-
cisely on the basis of maintaining an economically "pure"and pa-
triarchal familial structure.
Whenever a woman showed up at his door with a newborn baby in her arms
asking for his surname ... he would send her away.... He figured that when
he was ready to have children he would find a woman of his own class, with
the blessings of the Church, because the only ones who really counted were
the ones who bore their father's surname; the others might just as well not
have been born. (P. 66)
Yet ultimately the family, including his wife, reject his surname or
the values it signifies. By the end of the novel his daughter Blanca
is the only family member using it, in open defiance of his will, for
Blanca'sname evidences her daughter Alba'sbirth out of wedlock.
Clara dies using her maiden name, as does Jaime, one of the twins.
Significantly, only Esteban Garcia, Trueba and Pancha Garcia's
illegitimate grandchild is a "Trueba,"and Esteban Garcia, like
Blanca, is without Trueba's sanction.
As she does with naming, Clara embodies the principal site of
the magical, which, like Pilate's magic storytelling, men wish to
privatize and contain. Blanca would benefit from limited exposure
to her mother's magic; Trueba believes
that [Blanca's] destiny was marriage and a brilliant life in society, where the
ability to converse with the dead, if kept on a frivolous level, could be an asset.
He maintained that magic, like cooking ... was a particularly feminine affair.
(P. 136)

Trueba'strivializationof his daughter'smagical inclinationscon-

firms his fear of the public, the feminizedpolitical,and power of
the magical-for to what, by the end of this novel, will Chile'sdead
be testifying?Trueba responds to the power of the magical by
moving from the familialto the protectedpolitical.When Clara's
grandmother,Nivea, worriesthat "peopleare going to startlining
up and lookingat her as if she were a monster,"he anticipates"the
damageto his politicalcareerthat could be causedby havinga be-
witched child in the family"(p. 9). Women'spower, even when ob-
scuredby the prepubescentgenderneutralityof "child," men toler-
ate if it does not impingeon the masculinistworldof publicaffairs.
Ultimately,it is Blanca'spoliticaland sexualdisplaysratherthan
her magicalones thatcause her fatherdispleasure.The conflictbe-
tween women'sdesires,expressions,and the expectationsof their
decorum within the established social order is at issue when
Trueba responds to Blanca'slove for (and lovemakingwith) the
peasant and political singer, Pedro Tercero.As he wished to do-
mesticate her magicalpower, he also wishes to delimit any step
outside of the paternallyprotected domestic world, particularly
one which in his sexual/politicaleconomy signalsa "fall." Afterdis-
covering her affair,Truebabeats Blanca and then vents his anger
on Clara,accusing her of raising her daughter"withoutmorals,
without religion,without principles,like a libertineatheist, even
worse, without a sense of her own class."
"PedroTercero hasn't done a thing you haven't done yourself," Clara said when
she could interrupt him. "You also slept with unmarried women not of your
own class. The only difference is that he did it for love. And so did Blanca."
Trueba stared at her [and then] he lost control and struck her in the face,
knocking her against the wall. (P. 200)
In his construction of the affair, Trueba erases his daughter's
displayed agency and instead insists on his wife's responsibility.
By denying his own role in the upbringingfor which he upbraids
Clara,he implies that the mother,Woman,Eve, is responsiblefor
such "falls."Still, although Clara is implicated in this fall, she
herself has not forsaken the privileges she enjoys as a yet non-
fallen woman. When Clararesponds by naming Trueba'sbeha-
vior, however, she, too, oversteps the line. It is Clara'sbringing
Trueba'spast from the unspokento the articulatedprivatewhich
precipitateshis strikingher. This defining act symbolizes Clara's
step beyond the slash separatingthe fallen/nonfallenopposition,

for the violence he had directed at other women and from which
he had refrained with Clara is what had marked her "privileged"
and contained status.
Clara, like Pilate, and like Ursula in One Hundred Years of Soli-
tude, appropriates naming power and ontological empowerment.
Critic Gordon Brotherson asserts about One Hundred Years of
Solitude that
the [Buendia] family ... owes its existence and its coherence to Ursula, their
guardian. Her insight alone can detect the "real"motives behind her offspring's
actions; her memory alone can retain their history.... 15
Pilate, similarly, is literally responsible for both Milkman's concep-
tion and birth. She gives her sister-in-law, Ruth, a potion to add to
Macon's food in order to bring him back, if temporarily, to their
unshared bed. The Trueba family similarly, owes its existence to
Clara, who almost magically impels Trueba to marry her.
Clara and Pilate pass the insight and coherence of this defining
power on to their descendants. Alba "writes"the text which be-
comes the novel with the help of Clara'snotebooks which name
and "bearwitness to life."When Alba is being tortured under Este-
ban Garcia's direction,
her Grandmother Clara, whom she had invoked so many times to help her die,
appeared with the novel idea that the point was not to die ... but to survive ...
Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pen-
cil, to keep her thoughts occupied and to escape the doghouse and live. (P. 414)16
As Pilate teaches Milkman the skills which save him the night of
the hunt, and which allow him to memorize the song of Solomon
when he had neither pencil nor pen, through Clara'steaching Alba
lives. And, as Milkman sings to Pilate while she dies the song she
sang as he was being born, Alba lives to take on Clara's task to
record family history and politicize it.
Instead of the magical and the historical magnetically repelling
as they do in Garcia Marquez, Allende subverts the apoliticism of
his magical realism. Ultimately, she eclipses it with political
realism, that is, an adherence to and maintenance of the historical,
preserved and handed down, as magical realism was earlier, by
her women characters. Mario Rojas argues that
The House of the Spirits is a femino-centric novel in that the female characters
here are not in the traditional roles found in masculine writing, rather they
constitute . . . gynoforces that challenge patriarchal despotism, social-sexual
prejudices, the dictatorship and political repression.17

At least one critic also argues that the feminist perspective that
Allende brings to her novel "surely prevents it from being cate-
gorized as a mere reworking of One Hundred Years of Solitude."'8
Yet, despite how valorized intertextuality now is, the critic's choice
of "mere"expresses the dynamics of reception with a novel which
so heavily reworks a (male) master.19 In other words, Allende's
allusions in this first novel, for some who have read Garcia Mar-
quez's earlier masterpiece of magical realism, work too loudly.
Yet, rather than being simply mimetic, they often create textual
ruptures, spaces through which she both feminizes and politicizes
the genre.
Allende's ultimate allegiance to the political and historical marks
her text's difference. Brotherson notes that
the greater the danger that a given event may seem to be historical, the
stronger is Garcia Marquez's mythical antidote: the banana company's
massacre of thousands of strikers, for example, is followed by endless rain ...
which washes away precise memory.20
Allende inverts this technique-the stronger the historical mo-
ment, the more distant the magical-as if to counter the threat of
history's becoming "merely"enchanted and so subsumed. The his-
torical references in Allende's novel are particularly strong; her
characters often describe Chilean political figures.21Blanca'slover,
Pedro Tercero, represents the famous political poet-singer, Victor
Jara, whose hands were also mutilated. The Poet, with his ship-
figure collection and his death soon after that of The President's, is
obviously Pablo Neruda. The Candidate/President is, of course,
Allende's uncle, Salvador Allende. These characters, moreover, are
firmly rooted in a historical context; in them we find no traces of
the earlier marvelous in the Del Valle and Trueba homes.
In the beginning of The House of the Spirits, Allende seems to
employ a feminized magical realism as a technique to pull the
reader into a political-historical novel. Suarez-Muriassuggests that
"myths and historical references coexist; they nurture each
other,"22but in The House of the Spirits,they most often do so only
in the isolated domestic spaces that Clara'sfamily inhabits. In Nar-
rativeMagic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende, Patricia Hart goes even
further, suggesting that there is an authorial "continuous campaign
during the novel ... to place magical realism in trivial settings."23
With the exception of the limited town reactions to Rosa the Beau-
tiful and the interaction of the Mora sisters and their seanced en-

tourage, the magical world of Clara and her family is practically

theirs alone; or at least we have little indication of how it intersects
with the rest of the community, as Suarez-Murias'sanalysis would
posit it must. As a result, the immediacy of this world fades after
Nana, Nivea, and Clara, the primary three family members who
have premonitions, die. Alba attests to this, saying:
It is a delight for me to read [Clara's] notebooks from those years, which
describe a magic world that no longer exists . . . where the prosaic truth of
material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws
of physics and logic did not always apply. (P. 82, emphasis mine)
By the novel's close, Alba has little living access to her magical
matrilineage. Rather, only the memory of the magical survives, as
it helps Alba to survive the penetration of the patrilinear political.
In contrast to the coexistence of myths and historical references
throughout Morrison's novel, the magic in Allende's world is
swept away by the ultimate political cataclysm she describes.
It is a critical commonplace to note that marginalized authors
code their texts when they have reason to anticipate that their per-
spectives will threaten an audience's assumptions and challenge
hegemonies which have the power to silence their voicing.24 Ex-
plicit politics in the literary world are still dangerous terrain,
gauche reenactments of the "protestnovel" which ostensibly com-
promise aesthetics for "mere" polemics. Critics still speak of
Allende's (and others') ability to "transcend"the political.25Allende
seems to have realized that the literarymarket of readers and critics
expects novels of the Latin American "genre"to follow certain pat-
terns-a family chronicle in a magical world. And it is exactly this
stereotypical vision of Latin American fiction on which many re-
viewers myopically focus.26Many Latin American male authors en-
joy an avid international audience. Allende, however, is presently
the only post-Boom Latin American woman novelist to have won
international recognition. Allende makes a conscious and political-
ly astute gesture, I would argue, to maneuver within the realm of
Western reception and create the wedge which gained her book
crossover status. Robert Antoni suggests that "there is a gradual
shift in the focalization ... as the book shifts ... from family saga
(fantasy), to love story, to political history."27Allende uses the for-
mula of the "magical"to drive home her point, not the "alluring,
sometimes magical tale [and] tumultuous story of love among
three generations,"28but, rather, a powerful fictive intervention in
the historical construction of the Chilean coup.

Where there is a woman there is

magic.... This woman is a consort
of the spirits.
-Ntozake Shange,
Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo
That which is mythical,magical,does not fade in Morrison'snar-
rativebut ratherbecomes sharper,more immediateas Milkman's
story unfolds. Guidedby Pilate,Milkmantravelsfrom his father's
world in which there is no room for spiritsnor spiritualityto his
own where he absorbshis history,and like his grandfather,learns
to fly. Morrisonherself says that in Songof Solomon,she blends
"theacceptanceof the supernaturaland a profoundrootednessin
the real world at the same time, without one taking precedence
over the other."29 Suarez-Muriassuggests that the "keyof magic
realismis the validityof interiorworlds of faith which blossom in
everydayrealitiesand coexistwith otherdisposedrealities."30 Mor-
rison'snovel is an example of a site where the mythical and the
historicalcoexist and indeed nurtureeach other.
As Clarais the principalvessel of the magicalin TheHouseof the
Spirits,Pilate functions as the center of the marvelousin Songof
Solomon.Milkmanconfirmsthis when he thinks to himself,
Here he was walking around in the middle of the twentieth century trying to
explain what a ghost had done. But why not? ... One fact was certain: Pilate
did not have a navel. Since that was true, anything could be.... (P. 298)
Pilate's perfectly smooth belly acts as Milkman's confirming
referent. He measures the limits of "reality"against that which he
knows; and he knows that Pilate has no navel, and so he reasons,
"whycan'tghosts exist?"
Milkman'sbeliefs are not confined to domestic realities;rather,
they are sharedwith the community.Pilate'sdaughterReba'sfight
with her most recent man illustratesthe community'scollective
acceptance.
A few neighbors who had heard Reba's screams had gathered in Pilate's
backyard. They knew right away that the man was a newcomer to the city.
Otherwise he would have known ... not to fool with anything that belonged
to Pilate, who never bothered anybody, was helpful to everybody, but who
also was believed to have the power to step outside of her skin, set a bush afire
from fifty yards, and turn a man into a ripe rutabaga -all on account of the fact
that she had no navel. (P. 94)
Pilate reads her neighbors'respect in the opposite way; she feels

that her having no navel isolated her from her people

for, except for the relative bliss on the island [where no on knew her secret],
every other resource was denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional
friendship, and communal religion. Men frowned, women whispered and
shoved their children behind them. (P. 149)
Yet in truth the community of the Southside accepts her; theirs is a
relationship of dynamic resource. Rather than isolating Pilate,
they build their own intricate sets of beliefs around her difference;
and once they have defined it and its limitations, they play by the
rules they have established. When Reba's man beats her, the com-
munity feels that he should have known not to mess with "any-
thing that belonged to Pilate.... So they didn't have much sym-
pathy for him. They just craned their necks to hear better what
Pilate was telling him." Milkman is not Pilate's sole listener; as she
does with her nephew, Pilate tells them a story. And once the
story is over, and Reba's man has run off down the road "aneigh-
bor offered to drive them [to the hospital] and off they went" (p.
95). Even the broader community supports her, if grudgingly.
Marcelline accepts Reba's Hagar rushing into the shoppe at closing
expecting somebody to do her hair because she's Pilate's: "Pilate
know I turned her down, she wouldn't like it" (p. 316). As Guitar
and Milkman have learned, the community knows that difference
must be respected and learned from.
What is commonly regarded as lying outside the parameters of
"reality"in the Western world is accepted and confirmed by the
community in Song of Solomon. Suarez-Murias argues that this
faith differentiates magical realism from fantastic or surrealistic
literature. Morrison approaches the marvelous in Song of Solomon
through the everyday; she places it within her cultural context.
African Americans "area very practical people," she tells us,
but within that practicality we also accept what I suppose could be called
superstition and magic. Which is another way of knowing things.... To blend
those two worlds together at the same time is enhancing.31
It is this cosmology that Alejo Carpentier spoke of when he, for the
first time, separated surrealism and the fantastic from what he
called "lo real maravilloso."This world did not explore another or
second reality but, rather "an amplification of the scales and cat-
egories of reality."32Morrison "commands the storyteller's skill to
persuade a reader to suspend disbelief by discovering the credibil-

ity in the magic of the tale"33and thus bringsher or him into the
world of amplifiedrealities.Moreover,she often does this through
the storytellingitself. The readerhas no privilegedrelationwith an
omniscientnarratorbut, rather,learnsat the same time and in the
same way as, for example, Ruth does. Throughthis storytelling
strategy,as Pilate unfolds the tale to Ruth, we first discoverthat
Pilate has seen her father.
Macon seen him too. After we buried him, after he was blown off that fence.
We both seen him. I see him still. He's helpful to me, real helpful. Tells me
things I need to know. (P. 141)
The audiencebecomes "participatory extendedlisteners
readers,"34
of the tale, and thus inclined,by extension,to imbibe the cosmol-
ogy of the community.
In contrastto the Del Valle world, charactersother than family
members experiencethis world of talkingghosts and strangepre-
monitions;and Pilate is not the only storytellerfrom whom we
hear these events. Macon's workman, Freddie, tells Milkman
stories of his family:"Ghostskilled my mother,"he explains.
She was walking cross the yard with this neighbor friend [and there was] a
woman comin down the road .... When the woman got near, the neighbor
called out howdy and soon's she said the word, the woman turned into a white
bull. Right before their eyes. (P. 110)
Nor is the belief in the magicalconfined to the communityof the
Bloodbankand storiesof theirancestors.It is duringMilkmanand
Guitar'sfirst storytellingsession on Pilate'sporch that she tells
them of the man for whom she worked whom she tried to save
from falling off a cliff one day as he stood in the kitchen asking
Pilatefor some coffee.
He said he couldn't figure it out, but he felt like he was about to fall off a cliff.
Standing right there on that yellow and white and red linoleum, as level as a
flatiron.... So I told the man did he want me to hold on to him so he couldn't
fall. He looked at me with the most grateful look in the world. 'Would you?"...
But as soon's I let go he fell dead-weight to the floor.... And you know what?
He went down so slow. I swear it took three minutes...." (P. 41)
It is not the realityof the cliff of which we are convinced;rather,it
is the experiencePilateand this man shared,and the intensity of
his faith which we are expected to believe. Interestingly,the
two-the realityof the cliff or the man'sbelief in it and the subse-
quent consequences-are equally "marvelous"and demonstrate

aptly the nuances Carpentierimplies when he speaks of the "am-

plificationof scales and categoriesof reality."
Morrisonsuccessfullypullsreadersintoher own amplifiedreality
but one which is solidlyrootedin the world of AfricanAmericans,
one which springsfromBlackculturaltraditions.The faithwhich is
a formalcomponentin magicalrealismis organicto the cosmology
upon which Morrisondraws.Yet it has a complicatedrelationship
with the way her novels are receivedby the wide audiencethaten-
joys them.35In enteringher world, most readersare drawninto a
space which is so differentfromtheirown thatthey must suspend
theirconnectionwith the "logical" and the "real"to enter.Yet hers is
not a completebreakfromthatwhich is "real." Becausethis worldis
not a fantasticone, not one which is cut off from a traditionbut,
rather,one thatis tied to a culture,it functionsto bringreaderswho
are not familiar with it into a space which is clearly African
Americanand is so without pretenses,without explanations.
Morrisonassertsof the flying myth in Songof Solomonthat
if it means Icarus to some readers, fine; I want to take credit for that. But my
meaning is specific: it is about black people who could fly. That was always
part of the folklore in my life; flying was one of our gifts. I don't care how silly
it may seem ... it's in the spirituals and gospels. Perhaps it was wishful think-
ing ... but suppose it wasn't?36
Solomonthe flying Africanis not simply a fantasticfigment of a
single author'simagination;rather,he springsfrom her imagina-
tion andBlackculturaltraditions.Thathe is presentedin her novel
without explanation-his "gift"is simply assumed as is all of the
magical in the novel-symbolizes both the element of faith in
magicalrealismand a breakingpoint with the explanatorymode
of AfricanAmericanliterature.37 "Iam not explaininganythingto
anybody,"Morrisonasserts. She does not write to offer legitima-
tion for her culture,her traditions,her words. In many ways, how-
ever, Morrison'srole is explanatory,for she recovers history for
her people, using her languageon her own terms.
While we remained silenced it was as

if nothing ever happened; that which
isn't named, almost doesn't exist.
-Isabel Allende, Eva Luna
AlthoughAllendeand Morrisonuse the magicallyrealquitediffer-

ently- Allendeto bridgeto the powerfulstory of a troubledpoliti-

cal era and Morrisonto strengthengenerationalties to African
American cosmologies and survival strategies-both assume
similarresponsibilities.Like Clara,Alba, and Pilate,they are the
storytellers;they are women recordinghistory."Mynovels,"Mor-
rison tells us, "oughtto clarify the roles that have become ob-
scured;they oughtto identifythose thingsin the past that are use-
ful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourish-
ment."38 This, too, is Allende'sgoal. "InTheHouse of the SpiritsI
recuperated,in some sense, the loss in the world that was mine
and they took from me,"she has said;the novel "hasthe form and
shape of a brick to show to the world what was my house. . ."39
Her vision reacquaintsus with a historywhich has been erasedor
has writtenwomen out of it; she works to keep memoriesalive so
that we can learnfrompast mistakes,can take her brickand use it
in the foundationsof what we build.
Yet neitherAllendenor Morrisonattemptto offer definitiveex-
planations.Benjaminsuggests that the storytellergives "counsel
[which]is less an answerto a questionthan a proposalconcerning
the continuationof a story which is unfolding."40 Both TheHouse
of the and
Spirits Songof Solomon resist linearityand closure.Mor-
rison incorporatesthat which "suggestswhat the conflicts are,
what the problemsare. But it need not solve those problemsbe-
cause it is not a case study, it is not a recipe."Both novels work
richly with the task Morrisonsuggests.They createnovels which
are 'beautiful and powerful, but . . . also work to record and re-
claim their histories,"41histories which like Clara'sname, en-
lighten,and like Pilate's,point the way to an understandingof the
past, which can lead to a more fruitfulreckoningwith the present
and future.
NOTES
I would like to thank CherrieMoraga,LauraWexler,and the FeministStudieseditorsfor
their generous comments and suggestions.
1. Isabel Allende, TheHouseof theSpirits(New York:Knopf, 1985),433. All references

are to this edition; subsequent citations appearin parenthesesin the text.
2. Toni Morrison,interviewed by Ntozake Shangeon Steve Cannon'sradio show "It's
Magic,"WBAI,New York, April 1978. Critic BarbaraChristianalso often quotes this
phrase.

3. Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," in Black Women Writers,

ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), 340.
4. "Lomaravilloso presupone un elemento de fe por parte del autor o parte del publico"
(English translations mine) (Marguerite Su,rez-Murias, "El Realismo Magico: Una
definicion etnica," in Ensayos de literatura hispana/Essays on Hispanic Literature
[Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982], 100). Alejo Carpentier often
speaks of the responsibility of the writer to name and describe the unnamed realms
which he calls "lo real maravilloso." See, for example, his Introduction to El reino de este
mundo (Caracas: Primer Festival del Libro Venezolano, 1974).
5. Suarez-Murias, 103.
6. Isabel Allende, "Ventana: Barricada Cultural," La Barricada (Nicaragua), no. 323, 23
Jan. 1988, 7.
7. See Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969),
86-87. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Signet Press, 1977), 50, 54-55. All
references are to this edition; subsequent citations appear in parentheses in the text.
8. Shahrazad Ali, The Black Man's Guide to Understanding the Black Woman (Philadel-
phia: Civilized Publications, 1989).
9. In "Black Culture and Postmodernism" Cornel West defines "kinetic orality" as
"dynamic repetitive and energetic rhetorical styles that form communities." My usage is
more specific to the literal meaning of kinetic. See Cornel West, "Black Culture and
Postmodernism," in Remaking History, ed., Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1989), 93.
10. See Joseph T. Skerret's "Recitation to the Griot: Storytelling and Learning in Toni
Morrison's Song of Solomon," in Conjuring:Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), for an excellent discussion of this
theme.
11. Morrison writes that Milkman closed "his eyes and thought of the black men in
Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg .... ,in the Blood Bank, on Darling Street, in the pool
halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws,
events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness" (p. 333).
12. Toni Morrison, quoted in Thomas LeClair, "The Language Must Not Sweat," The
New Republic, 21 Mar. 1981, 25.
13. The obvious double entendre with the repeated emphasis on Clara's name is lost in
the translation.
14. Allusions to the deaths of Garcia Mfrquez's Ursula and Remedios are clear in this
passage.
15. Gordon Brotherson, The Emergence of the Latin American Novel (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977), 128.
16. This conflicts with Alba's later contention that it is Trueba who suggests that they
should write this story. At the end Alba suggests that Clara was a "helper"and does not
precipitate the writing (pp. 430-31). Yet the ending is problematic for several reasons,
and her depiction of Clara's role in this section contradicts all that Alba says before she
concludes.
17. Mario Rojas, "Un Caleidoscopio de Espejos Desordenados," Revista Iberoamericana
(Espafia: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana), nos. 132-33 (July-
December 1985): 919. Roja's text reads: "Lacasa de los espiritus es una novela femino-
centrica en que los personajes femeninos ya no son el pre-texto tradicional de la
escritura masculina, sino que constituyen centros de fuerzas que desafian el despotismo
patriarcal, los prejuicios sociosexuales, la dictadura y la represion politica" (translation
is mine).
18. Sharon Magnarelli, "Review," Latin American Literary Review 14 (July-December
1986): 120.

19. Uncle Marcos and his alchemy invokes images of Melquiades (pp. 10, 97); the
familiar Buendia adage, "the more spent the more returned," comes up with the Truebas
(pp. 226, 399); Clara's death, like Ursula's, signals an "era of decline" (p. 283), against
which Blanca, like Amanda Ursula, tries vainly to struggle (p. 301). Rosa the Beautiful is
so obviously modeled on Remedios the Beaufitul that readers can be catapulted out of
Allende's narrative while pausing to retrace Remedios's story. The anecdotal story of
Mr. Brown, the gringo ant killer, works similarly. See Robert Antoni, "Parodyor Piracy:
The Relationship of The House of the Spirits to One Hundred Years of Solitude," Latin
American Literary Review 16 July-December 1988): 16-28, for more and different ex-
amples.
20. Brotherson, 127. This is an interesting moment because Garcia Mfrquez inverts the
classic definition of magical realism in having the marvelous of this incidence hinge
upon the community's disbelief of a historical moment rather than its belief in a
"magical"one.
21. Chile is never mentioned by name. Yet it is obvious by the numerous geographical
and historical allusions that Allende writes of her own country.
22. See Suarez-Murias (p. 100): "los mitos y los referentes hist6ricos coexisten, se
nutren unos a otros."
23. Patricia Hart, Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende (London: Associated
University Presses, 1989), 39. Hart, too, suggests that Allende uses "magical realism to
make a feminist point." Yet she argues forcefully that the magical in The House of the
Spirits is a metaphor for female passivity and so Alba must break from it in order "toac-
cept responsibility for the world in which they live." She counters my argument that
magic is used "toget our attention" and is then abandoned by suggesting that if clairvoy-
ance (which she comes close to conflating with magical realism) is a trope for bourgeois
passivity, it must be abandoned in order to preserve the stronger feminist text. Her
reading, then, radically alters the way Allende and many who read her connect her to
magical realism and instead posits the writer as generically and "genderically" opposi-
tional. See her chapter "Clara/Clarividente."
24. Nineteenth-century conventions of the sentimental novels are a case in point. Both
African American and white authors manipulated the genre, encoding challenges to
gender and racial expectations. See Valerie Smith, "Loopholes of Retreat," in Reading
Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1990);
and Susan Harris, "'But is it any good': Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American
Women's Fiction," American Literature 63 (March 1991).
25. See Jonathan Yardley's WashingtonPost review excerpt in the opening quotations of
the Knopf edition.
26. "The House of the Spirits mixes fiction . . . and a sense of magic in an epic that
qualifies hers as one of Latin America's most inspired writers ...," and "Allende is a
talented writer who deftly uses the techniques of magical realism ...." See the opening
pages of The House of the Spirits for many other similar reviews.
27. Antoni, 22.
28. See opening pages of Knopf edition.
29. Toni Morrison, "Rootedness," 342.
30. Suarez-Murias, 105.
31. Morrison, "Rootedness," 342.
32. Carpentier, 12.
33. Darwin Turner, "Theme, Characterization, and Style in the Works of Toni Mor-
rison," in Black Women Writers, 361.
34. Morrison tells us: "My writing expects, demands participatory reading.... It's not
just about telling the story; it's about involving the reader" (Claudia Tate, Black Women
Writers at Work [New York: Continuum, 1983], 125).

35. The magical is clearly present in both Sula, most notably in the Deweys and the
plague of birds which precede Sula's return, and in Tar Baby with the blind horsemen
who inhabit Isle de Chevaliers and the breathtaking scene of the African woman in the
yellow dress who spits at Jadine while balancing an egg on her shoulder. Beloved's very
premises lie in the magical-again, it is the community's shared belief in that magical
which enables them to save Sethe.
36. Toni Morrison, quoted in LeClair, 26.
37. One can trace the trajectory of this explanatory writing from the beginning of
African American fiction writing, where women and men like Frances E.W. Harper and
William Wells Brown attempted to draw counterstereotypes to the existing negative
depictions of Black people both in media and literature. This continued through the
Harlem Renaissance, and one can still see novelists, critics, and community struggling
with this issue-the responsibility of the authors to provide "positive"characterizations
of their own people in a society that constantly sketches us in the most negative light.
The debate over The Color Purple and other recent novels and theater pieces by African
American women clearly demonstrates this.
38. Toni Morrison, quoted in LeClair, 26.
39. "ConLa casa de los espiritus, la perdida del mundo que era mio y me quitar6n y que
de alguna manera lo recupere. Y tengo la sensacion de que La casa de los espiritus tiene
el tamaiio y la forma de un ladrillo para mostrale al mundo lo que era mi casa...."
(Veronica Cortinez, "Polifonia: Interview with Isabel Allende and Antonio Skdrmeta,"
Plaza [Spring-Fall 1988]: 77).
40. Benjamin, 87.
41. Morrison, "Rootedness," 340, 341.


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Past-on Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call

Author(s): P. Gabrielle Foreman

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Where there is a woman there is

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that her having no navel isolated her from her people

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