In her novel La casa de los espíritus (Allende), Isabel Allende constructs, brick by brick, word by word, the interlocking spaces of mind and dwelling. This is a significant gap as the specific connection between time, place and culture deeply shapes the novel’s unfolding narrative and political commentary. Despite the wealth of criticism on the role of The Big House in the novel, the spatial chronemics of La casa has not yet been analysed. That is, until its defences are breached by the encroaching globalist forces, which impose linear monochronicity upon the building and its inhabitants. The house, with its amorphous architecture, dynamic connectivity, and capacity for endless renewal and expansion, creates a magical temporal space: a radical polychronicity, which presides over the cycles of the Trueba family. The novel, situated within a Chile increasingly infiltrated by globalising forces, explores both ends of the spectrum, a cultural encounter which is recreated in miniature within the microcosm of The Big House on the Corner. Isabel Allende’s classic novel, La casa de los espíritus (1985), stages the confrontation between traditional Latin American and Western cultural orientations of time, described by the discipline of chronemics as a spectrum running from polychronicity to monochronicity.
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