Storytelling as Subsistence Strategy:The Literary and the Political in Isabel Allende's Eva Luna

Abstract

Storytelling in postcolonial fiction is all about reliving the forgotten or erased past thereby preserving and repossessing it. The novel Eva Luna narrates the story of Eva Luna, who is endowed with an intuitive potential of entertaining and nourishing people by her stories each of which she generates in no time piecing together shards of her past with slivers of her imagination. Like most of the woman protagonists of Isabel Allende's fiction, Eva Luna is a storyteller who has a flair for animating the past through her stories and in so doing nurtures the present. Through her stories, she not only records history but also fortifies the inseparable ancestral bonds which thwart the oppressed and the marginalized from extinction in a country - perceivably Latin America - torn asunder by political upheavals. Subjected to the manifold hegemony of the church, the state and the military, which are the mainstays of patriarchy, Eva Luna's stories work towards a rememory of the past and reclamation of her lost world which had been snatched away from her and her mother from whom she has inherited the legacy of storytelling.