Abstract
In these quotations from My Invented Country and The Sum of Our Days, Allende suggests that people are “territories” and places to which we belong and that love is an “essential” part of this belonging. It is my view that understanding this concept sheds light on how Allende experiences belonging as an “American” when she is able to attribute her sense of belonging to the people she loves. As Allende explains, in order to write about nation, she must write about loving personal relationships with her husband, family, and friends because “nation and tribe are confused in [her] mind” (MIC xv). In The Sum of Our Days, Allende continues to emphasize the space of love and affective engagement and its relation to nation and “tribe”; in the final two pages alone, the word love is used five times. What are we to make of Allende’s description of love as a “territory” where we are not “foreigners”? How does this space help her reconcile being an “American” within the Americas?
I don’t know whether my home is the place where I live or simply Willie. We have been together for a number of years, and it seems to be that he is the one territory I belong in, where I’m not a foreigner.
—Isabel Allende (My Invented Country 193)
The entire tribe was there to celebrate her, and once more I found that in an emergency you toss overboard the things that are not essential, that is, nearly everything. In the end, after a thorough lightening of loads and taking account, it turns out that the one thing that’s left is love.
—Isabel Allende (The Sum of Our Days 292)
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Notes
Isabel Allende, The Sum of Our Days, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London: Fourth Estate, 2008).
Bennett W. Helm, Love, Friendship, and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of Persons (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1.
Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 7.
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 68.
See Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Introduction,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 4–5.
Ronald De Sousa, “The Rationality of Emotions,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 141.
Sara Ahmed, “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation,” in Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 100.
John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory (London, UK: Routledge, 1988), 30.
Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 241.
John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2004), 74.
Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 12.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 192.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 231.
Julia Kristeva, Seule, Une Femme (Tour d’Aigues, France: Editions de L’aube, 2007), 217. Kristeva writes, “Je te crois: je crois en toi en toute lucidité, et je ne suis pas forcément d’accord, mais je me cherche en toi comme tu te cherches en moi, différemment et ensemble.” My translation into English is as follows: “I believe you: I believe in you with complete lucidity, and I am not necessarily in agreement with you, but I look for myself in you as you look for yourself in me, different and together” (217).
Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 51.
John Lechte, “Julia Kristeva,” Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism (London, UK: Routledge, 2008), 400.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London, UK: Vintage Books, 2002), 99.
Noëlle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 69.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, 1838–42, ed. A. W. Plumstead and Harrison Hayford (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 342. Emerson writes, “In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”
David Marr, “American Worlds since Emerson” (Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 4.
R. W. Emerson, Friendship and Self-Reliance (London, UK: The Holyrod Books, 1908), 44, 63.
See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode and Malcom Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1946), 138–64. However, for as much as Emerson places extreme importance on the individual, his views on love do suggest an alternative social framework, such as when he writes, “A man has the right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.”
R. W. Emerson, “Politics,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 203.
As discussed in Peg Birmingham, “Political Affections,” in Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 128.
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156.
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© 2013 Bonnie M. Craig
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Craig, B.M. (2013). “The Intangible Space” of Belonging. In: Rewriting American Identity in the Fiction and Memoirs of Isabel Allende. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337580_3
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