Login
Isabel Allende image
, view more Isabel Allende
pictures
The Clare Hall Ashby Lecture 2001
194 Views
0
vote
Top voted Isabel Allende images
Added to
Isabel Allende on Storytelling
On 9 May some innocent passers-by may have well wondered whether there was a rock concert going on in Herschel Road. A long queue of people was attempting to get into Robinson College, many without success. It was not a rock star performing, but a petite woman who had grabbed an attentive and heterogeneous audience with a gentle but powerful voice. She was telling how her life history wove into political coups and asylum seeking; and how it connected the rise of Latin American writings and feminist consciousness. She also introduced us to some of the tricks and the ‘obsessions’ of the art of ‘Storytelling’. She was Isabel Allende.
The Ashby Lectures focus on the presentation and discussion of ideas which inspire human values in a wide sense: values that relate, in compelling and contemporary ways, to important philosophical questioning of the nature of life and society. The strength of Isabel Allende’s talk was her capacity to address many of these themes with humour and wit.
The audience was also very varied. Many Latin American ambassadors and cultural attaches attended, as well as numerous students who had read Allende’s work as part of their academic training or just for pleasure. There was also a noticeable public audience, mixed with academic staff. I think we were all enchanted by the way in which Isabel Allende performed her talk. She led us through her story and explained that her novels have not been just books but lived processes: a vital necessity to staying alive (see the book Paula about her daughter’s death), to remembering and paying tribute to her close family in exile (The House of the Spirits, which she wrote while in exile in Venezuela) and to understanding the idiosyncrasies and beauty of getting acquainted with a new society and gender relations (The Infinite Plan, where she narrates the story of her Californian, radical lawyer husband William Gordon).
From her talk we learned that storytelling and writing have to do with both the discipline of transforming a creative gift into a captivating work as well as with the revelation of everyday life enchantments. In line with the magical realism of her writing we learned that her English translator, Margaret Sayers Padey, accepted to translate her first, and still relatively unknown novel at the time - La Casa de los Espíritus - after a premonitory trip to Mexico. She was in Mexico City on vacation and while one day reading the description of a devastating earthquake in Allende’s manuscript she had a premonitory sign. She wanted to leave the city at once. And she did. That was the day before the major earthquake that hit Mexico City in 1985.
For Isabel Allende storytelling is not only a literary endeavour. It is testimony to the development of female writers’ voices in Latin America - especially during the 1970s and 1980s when military regimes were suppressing the growth of democratic citizenship - as well as the capacity to listen and to convey the ‘small’ signs of life that make living more magical than our quotidian rhythm allows us to see. So storytelling is about consciousness raising and the flow of histories of families, groups and nations into a pool from which readers may pick up these stories and interpret them in the light of their own histories.
Moreover, this year’s Ashby Lecture was also gracefully enhanced by the time that Isabel Allende and her husband William Gordon spent in College. They went into lunches, talked to students, participated in some college events and had a taste of Cambridge hospitality and intellectual stimulation. Many Fellows have poignant memories of our guests and their personal warmth and wit. Daniela Rhodes, for instance, recalls standing outside the courtyard of Robinson College listening to the broadcast of Allende’s lecture and watching the effect her speech had on tens of young people sitting on the ground. She moved many to tears and laughter in the space of a minute. Listening made us look at ourselves differently - as persons. We perhaps forget to honour this dimension in our academic lives.
We also had the unexpected chance this year to host our Ashby Lecturer alongside our Tanner Lecturer, Anthony Appiah, from Harvard University. It was very stimulating to see – over a dinner at the President’s house - the interchange between the South American writer and the Ghanaian-English historian on the relation between civil society and academia, as well as on the present condition of world politics. It reminded me that Clare Hall is really a privileged place in which experiences are shared among people with very different backgrounds, who are nonetheless very willing to confront, engage with and share their diverse points of view. But if at Clare Hall we have the privilege to witness sophisticated rhetoric meeting diversity, then we also have a duty to open it up. I was really pleased there was a rock concert queue at this year’s Ashby Lecture.
Valentina Napolitano
On 9 May some innocent passers-by may have well wondered whether there was a rock concert going on in Herschel Road. A long queue of people was attempting to get into Robinson College, many without success. It was not a rock star performing, but a petite woman who had grabbed an attentive and heterogeneous audience with a gentle but powerful voice. She was telling how her life history wove into political coups and asylum seeking; and how it connected the rise of Latin American writings and feminist consciousness. She also introduced us to some of the tricks and the ‘obsessions’ of the art of ‘Storytelling’. She was Isabel Allende.
The Ashby Lectures focus on the presentation and discussion of ideas which inspire human values in a wide sense: values that relate, in compelling and contemporary ways, to important philosophical questioning of the nature of life and society. The strength of Isabel Allende’s talk was her capacity to address many of these themes with humour and wit.
The audience was also very varied. Many Latin American ambassadors and cultural attaches attended, as well as numerous students who had read Allende’s work as part of their academic training or just for pleasure. There was also a noticeable public audience, mixed with academic staff. I think we were all enchanted by the way in which Isabel Allende performed her talk. She led us through her story and explained that her novels have not been just books but lived processes: a vital necessity to staying alive (see the book Paula about her daughter’s death), to remembering and paying tribute to her close family in exile (The House of the Spirits, which she wrote while in exile in Venezuela) and to understanding the idiosyncrasies and beauty of getting acquainted with a new society and gender relations (The Infinite Plan, where she narrates the story of her Californian, radical lawyer husband William Gordon).
From her talk we learned that storytelling and writing have to do with both the discipline of transforming a creative gift into a captivating work as well as with the revelation of everyday life enchantments. In line with the magical realism of her writing we learned that her English translator, Margaret Sayers Padey, accepted to translate her first, and still relatively unknown novel at the time - La Casa de los Espíritus - after a premonitory trip to Mexico. She was in Mexico City on vacation and while one day reading the description of a devastating earthquake in Allende’s manuscript she had a premonitory sign. She wanted to leave the city at once. And she did. That was the day before the major earthquake that hit Mexico City in 1985.
For Isabel Allende storytelling is not only a literary endeavour. It is testimony to the development of female writers’ voices in Latin America - especially during the 1970s and 1980s when military regimes were suppressing the growth of democratic citizenship - as well as the capacity to listen and to convey the ‘small’ signs of life that make living more magical than our quotidian rhythm allows us to see. So storytelling is about consciousness raising and the flow of histories of families, groups and nations into a pool from which readers may pick up these stories and interpret them in the light of their own histories.
Moreover, this year’s Ashby Lecture was also gracefully enhanced by the time that Isabel Allende and her husband William Gordon spent in College. They went into lunches, talked to students, participated in some college events and had a taste of Cambridge hospitality and intellectual stimulation. Many Fellows have poignant memories of our guests and their personal warmth and wit. Daniela Rhodes, for instance, recalls standing outside the courtyard of Robinson College listening to the broadcast of Allende’s lecture and watching the effect her speech had on tens of young people sitting on the ground. She moved many to tears and laughter in the space of a minute. Listening made us look at ourselves differently - as persons. We perhaps forget to honour this dimension in our academic lives.
We also had the unexpected chance this year to host our Ashby Lecturer alongside our Tanner Lecturer, Anthony Appiah, from Harvard University. It was very stimulating to see – over a dinner at the President’s house - the interchange between the South American writer and the Ghanaian-English historian on the relation between civil society and academia, as well as on the present condition of world politics. It reminded me that Clare Hall is really a privileged place in which experiences are shared among people with very different backgrounds, who are nonetheless very willing to confront, engage with and share their diverse points of view. But if at Clare Hall we have the privilege to witness sophisticated rhetoric meeting diversity, then we also have a duty to open it up. I was really pleased there was a rock concert queue at this year’s Ashby Lecture.
Valentina Napolitano