History and Memory in Almanac of the Dead (Silko) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez) (original) (raw)
Latin American Report 1 (2), 39-50, 2009
Both Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons focus on ‘third world’ transitory communities struggling to survive amidst internal and external forces which threaten to erase them from existence. The two communities are conceived, by the writers and some critics, as metaphors of Africa and Latin America’s respective pursuits of nationhood in the face of challenges ranging from internal conflicts to Western imperialism. While the results of the struggles by these communities may differ in the end, it is the researcher’s observation that memory and/or forgetfulness are made central to both cases as the ultimate keys to self-preservation or characteristic obliteration. Through a metaphoric reading of the ‘insomnia plague’ incident in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the researcher looks at the various ways in which threats emerge and how, subsequently, memory and forgetfulness are configured and ritualised by communities and their representative individuals in both texts when faced with these threats. By focusing on the two fictional communities, the researcher will also try to establish the significance of memory and forgetfulness in the ultimate survival or demise of all communities, especially in the ‘third world.’
The Hidden Depths of García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Annals of Ovidius University Philology Series, 2011
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, an anonymous narrator examines the murder of a young man more than two decades after it had occurred. Although a judicial inquest determined that two brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, murdered Santiago Nasar in order to avenge their sister's loss of virginity, the narrator intimates that the entire town, which remains nameless, was complicit in the crime. In murdering Santiago, the Vicario brothers appear to obey a collective will. Ostensibly a quest for truth and an attempt to decipher a recurring and eternal present, the narrative conveys a terrible self-knowledge through a tragicomic language of dreams. The narrator is imprisoned in circular communal thought patterns and the past adumbrates the future of a society in spiritual bondage. This essay explores the symbolic imagery of Crónica and the acts of concealment contained in its narrative.
Memory and Fantasy: The Imaginative Reconstruction of a Lost Past in Las cartas que no llegaron
Mester, 2007
Since the end of World War II "Holocaust literature" has generated an intense debate regarding the relationship between historical reality and its representation through fiction. One could even say that representation itself, when faced with the collective trauma of the Holocaust, entered into a profound crisis. As philosophers and thinkers of all kinds struggled to come to terms with the horrors endured by millions in Nazi concentration camps, they began to question the possibilities and limits of representation as well as the problems associated with collective and individual memory. Adorno's well-known dictum, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarie" (34), often serves as a point of departure for this discussion and has provoked different reactions from many, ranging from those who reject any artistic approach to the Holocaust to those who defend fiction as a possible means of overcoming the limits of historical representation. Although it does not ne...
Art of Memory in García Márquez and Vargas Llosa
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Remembering History in Contemporary Spanish Fiction
Letras Hispanas Revista De Literatura Y De Cultura, 2009
Historian Jay Winter claims that historical remembrance-entails not only first-person narratives but scripts which later generations form and disseminate about significant events in the past. That is why any consideration of the contemporary memory boom much [sic] recognize the role‖ of cultural producers in-this varied set of cultural practices we term historical remembrance‖ (278). The-scripts‖ can take the form of documentaries, historiographies, fiction films, novels, plays, etc. Passing knowledge on from generation to generation is vital for keeping the historical memory of a community alive, or at least remembered. The role of the arts in this remembrance can be that of simple remembrance, or more interestingly, that of some type of agency: using their cultural capital to problematize hegemonic historical discourses, subvert commonly held assumptions about the past, and revive formerly silenced memories. In this paper, I focus on two best-selling recent Spanish novels, Eduardo Mendoza's Mauricio o las elecciones primarias (2006) and Almudena Grandes' El corazón helado (2007), in order to show how cultural producers are problematizing historical remembrance in Spain. That is, through their varied narrations of memories from Spain's complicated past, they are expressly showing how Spain is still coming to terms with the memory of the civil war, Fracoism and the transition. While El corazón helado is set in current-day Spain and incorporates flashbacks ranging from the República to the current day, Mauricio… is set entirely during the latter-end of the transition to democracy, in the mid-1980's. Consequently, the two novels highlight different narrative strategies used to remember the past that we see coming out of this particular ‗memory boom' in Spanish culture between the years 2000 and 2007: this rich period of remembering and remembrance, of cultural agency and political responses, of the unearthing not only of bodies from mass graves but of previously ignored historical facts. Spain's historical memory of the transition to democracy is what is fueling today's politics, just as that of the civil war fueled the transition so as to ‗never again' have another war. 1 Today Spain is again experiencing a series of associations activating latent memories that are causing a second-never again‖ scenario. Yet, inversely: instead of pushing aside, burying or ignoring the atrocities committed during and after the Civil War so as to conserve stability, certain societal players are centralizing, uncovering and discerning the memory of these events in order to consolidate the government into an even stronger, healthier democracy that has confronted and reconciled with its past. In addition, these artists have been working in concert with social activists to inform the Spanish public and foster debates about today's legacies of the transition to democracy. Cultural communication has been saturated with the idea that if Spain does not settle its past sins, or account for them, it can never develop as a healthy democracy.
Since the end of World War II "Holocaust litera ture" has generated an intense debate regarding the relationship between historical reality and its representation through fiction. One could even say that representation itself, when faced with the collective trauma of the Holocaust, entered into a profound crisis. As philosophers and thinkers of all kinds struggled to come to terms with the horrors endured by millions in Nazi concentration camps, they began to question the possibilities and limits of representation as well as the problems associated with collective and individual memory. Adorno's well-known dictum, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarie" (34), often serves as a point of departure for this discussion and has provoked different reactions from many, ranging from those who reject any artistic approach to the Holocaust to those who defend fiction as a possible means of overcoming the limits of historical representation. Although it does not necessarily fall within the category of "Holocaust literature," the autobiographical novel Las cartas que no llegaron (2000)' by Uruguayan playwright and novelist Mauricio Rosencof can be read within the context of this debate. Rosencof is the son of Jewish parents, who emigrated from Poland in the late 1920s hoping to improve their life in Uruguay. In the 1960s, Rosencof became one of the leaders of the National Liberation Army (the socalled "Tupamaros"), an urban guerilla group that was overthrown by the Uruguayan army in 1972, leading to his arrest and subsequent imprisonment during the military dictatorship (1973-1985). In Las cartas que no llegaron^Rosencof tells us the story of his life, in which he confronts not only his memories of thirteen years of terror and deprivation, but also an earlier traumatic episode in his family's lifethe disappearance of the relatives left behind in Poland, all of whom 38
The Human: Journal of Literature and Culture, 2014
Memory, defined as enabling the storage, encryption, and retrieval of information, is the collective archive of subjective emotions and socio-cultural fugues. However distinguished, "memory" inhabits an elusive zone of debates and deliberations; aimed at preserving a shared socio-cultural history from threats of extermination, modification, and disparity, the current memory boom has only intensified academic disputes and discourses. This paper will focus on the dialectic of memory and time engaging in questions like, does the past exist as a monolithic entity, or is it susceptible to polygamous interpretations? Is remembering a construct? How often is the past (in encompassing the collective) mediated by individual memory? This paper attempts to negotiate with some of these polysemic issues that increasingly baffle the field of Memory Studies. In deliberating upon and elucidating the dynamics of remembering, the paper draws upon works such as Elie Wiesel's Night, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, and particularly, Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz.