Clara keeps a series of notebooks in The House of the Spirits, which she claims bear witness to her life, and these notebooks symbolize the importance of recording history and preserving the past. From a young age, Clara habitually writes down all of life’s events, both big and small, and her notebooks are later used by her family (specifically Clara’s husband, Esteban, and her granddaughter, Alba) to “reclaim the past” and “overcome terrors.” Throughout Clara’s life, she writes everything in her notebooks—which she organizes by event because she never records the date—and then promptly forgets about them. She refuses to repeat names within her family (Clara won’t name her son Esteban after her husband or allow her daughter, Blanca, to name her own daughter Clara) because it creates confusion in her notebooks. “Memory is fragile,” Clara claims, and her notebooks allow her “to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”
When Alba is detained and tortured by the police during the coup d’état, she tries to summon Clara’s spirit to help her die. Clara’s spirit does come to Alba, but instead of helping her die, Clara suggests that Alba “write in her mind” a testimony of the terrible events unfolding in their country, so those who want to ignore them will know the truth. Later, at a concentration camp for women, Ana Díaz gives Alba a notebook, in which Alba immediately records her experiences. Again, the notebook represents the importance of preserving one’s story for posterity. After Alba is released from police custody, Esteban suggests they write down their stories. When his story is finished, Esteban dies peacefully, free of the torments that plagued him in life. “The space of a life is brief,” Clara writes, and it passes “so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events.” Recording the past allows one to “gauge the consequences of our acts,” which is exactly what Allende’s characters attempt to do in The House of the Spirits.
Clara’s Notebooks Quotes in The House of the Spirits
Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.
At times Clara would accompany her mother and two or three of her suffragette friends on their visits to factories, where they would stand on soapboxes and make speeches to the women who worked there while the foremen and bosses, snickering and hostile, observed them from a prudent distance. Despite her tender age and complete ignorance of matters of this world, Clara grasped the absurdity of the situation and wrote in her notebook about the contrast of her mother and her friends, in their fur coats and suede boots, speaking of oppression, equality, and rights to a sad, resigned group of hard-working women in denim aprons, their hands red with chilblains.
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously—as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of ail eras mingled in space. That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
Clara’s Notebooks Symbol Timeline in The House of the Spirits
