AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
TWO ASPECTS OF MEMORY FORMATION IN HISPANIC AMERICAN LITERATURE
a
MONIKA BREZOVÁKOVÁ,
b
MAGDA KUČERKOVÁ,
c
NATÁLIA RUSNÁKOVÁ
Department of Romance Languages, Faculty of Arts,
Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Hodžova 1, 949
74 Nitra, Slovakia
email:
a
monika.brezovakova@ukf.sk,
b
mkucerkova@ukf.sk,
c
nrusnakova@ukf.sk
This paper has been supported by research project UGA called “Chilean and Argentine
literature in exile” based on the contract n. III/4/2020 and Constantine the Philosopher
University in Nitra, Slovakia.
Abstract: This paper deals with the theme of collective memory and its formation in
Hispanic American literature. After the introduction to the topic, it is presented by
specific literary works of Hispanic American authors, mainly the Chilean writer Isabel
Allende and Argentine novelist Elsa Osorio. Both of the authors deal with the theme
of memory which we try to illustrate with concrete examples from their literary works.
Keywords: Memory, Hispanic-american literature, oral culture, testimonial narrative
1 Introduction
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1927 - 2014)
presented the first part of his memoirs called Vivir para contarla
(2002; Living to Tell the Tale, 2003) with the following words:
“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how
one remembers it in order to recount it.”
1
(2014, 7) Since he is
one of the most famous Hispanic American authors, the epoch-
making story of the Buendía family from the novel Cien años de
soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) does not
need to be presented. The autobiographical narrative constructs
for the readers of his memoirs at the end of his life that clearly
reveals the meaning and creative potential of memories: his
native village of Aracataca, as we learn there, became the model
of the famous Macondo, a literary micro-world that in the form
of a synecdoche evokes the history of Colombia as well as the
other Hispanic countries. In this forgotten Caribbean region
originates the fruitful García-Márquez tension between the tragic
and comic aspects of life or between real and miraculous
elements, that is also the source of oral culture carried by
distinctive female characters, symptomatically immersed in the
author's work. These women are full of magical skills and a
sense of rituals, with an extraordinary ability to communicate
with invisible world, the women as storytellers and founders of
oral tradition, as well as the women representing the indigenous
world.
This brief outline of Gabriel García Márquez's poetics, realized
at the edge of the author's biographical narrative and the fictional
world of his prose, allows us to state that literature is an
impressive, creative space for the renewal of memories and the
memory constitution. The oral history of communities and
nations clearly confirms that remembrance has always been
something natural but also necessary for a human being.
Therefore, it can be argued that “[memory] is [...] one of the
basic characteristics of humanity and the basis of our existence
continuity.” (Maslowski - Šubrt, 2014, 7) That is also shown by
various forms of thinking about this topic, recorded from
Antiquity: Plato developed the concept of memory paradox and
within it identified the ability to present things in the human
soul; on the other hand, Aristotle thought about the differences
between memory and imagination.
The theme of memory and imagination found its specific
expression the Middle Ages, mainly in the Italian Medieval
literature. The poets were inspired mostly by their physical
separation from their beloved ones where the memory, and
imagination helped them to make such an object present and real
1
Unless it is not stated in the bibliography, texts published in the Slovak, Spanish and
in the Czech language are translated into English by Monika Brezováková.
(Pamulová Šavelová, 2019, 53n)
2
. The Italian Renaissance
tradition left a deep footprint in the development of literary
tradition and evolution of literatures, written in Spanish
language
3
. It has founded the concept of literature as an
alternative or substitute reality respectively as a willingness
intentionally aimed at memory creation. Francesco Petrarca
(1304-1374) in his poetics of remembrance (poetica delle
rimembranze) followed the medieval line of thoughts and set the
basis of interiorisation poetics, lived or thought reality in the
poetry, where such reality was sensually lived or mentally and
spiritually conceived. His experience of individual, subjective
memory expressed in autobiographical notes has gradually
became a collective one.
4
The concept of writing as creation of
an alternative reality was reinforced and perfectioned by the
Classicist poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837), where he did
not bear in mind the reality sensually perceived by a person, but
the reality to which is his intelligible and emotional willingness
of a human wanted to be projected even in retrospective
direction.
5
Based on the mentioned concept, the literature has
been for centuries perceived as a willingly conditioned creation
of an alternative memory, an individual or a collective one. A
very similar approach in the thoughts on memory was
manifested by Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) when he developed
“élan vital
”
, the concept of the life principle
6
, as a force,
immanent to all living creatures, in organising the structure and
evolution of all forms of natural life, the human life and
existence included. Bergson explains this principle as inherent to
consciousness of existence of every man, thus to consciousness
and awareness of the inner time passing, which he conceives as
an interiorized life realization.
7
2
The analysis and interpretation of the imaginative processes in the work of Medieval
Italian poets, Francesco Petrarca included, as explained in the work of ŠAVELOVÁ,
M.:
Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca. Nitra: UKF v Nitre, 2020. 124 p. ISBN 978-80-558-
1598-5.
In this way, Bergson deepens the
Schopenhauer´s postulate on independent existence of a will-to-
live and transposes it to the philosophy of the life realising
principle. The psychoanalytic approach, widely applied in late
19th century in philosophy and literature, has led in the French
(or Parisian) ambience to the formulation of the so called
selective-memory concept: active creation of own consciousness,
using of will which from the memory selects the reality of its
own interest. Such attitude of consciousness is naturally
3
The influence of Italian literature on the American colonial culture is documented in
the work of Bellini, G.:
Presencia de la literatura italiana en la América hispana de
los siglos XVI y XVII. Alicante : Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2008.
Retrieved from:
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmcn01n1
4
In his poetics of interiorization he focused on the reality of love emotion, which was
transposed by its spiritual form in verses, thus the literary reality had become
the second face of the same love reality. Compared with the Medieval and Pre-
Renaissance authors, Petrarca was able to identify the theme and its verbal expression
into one unit, so the poetry itself was able to evoke the images of the beloved one, the
memories or projections of future (Šavelová, 2020, 91-93). In
Canzoniere. the
collection of poetry, he was aiming to put such a memory into a perfect stylistic and
composition form, making it objective by establishing the topicality and motives of his
inner spiritualized emotion. His autobiographical notes were poetically transposed to
love poetry with distinguished, extraordinary form that it later became a poetic style
manner. The theme of the impossibility to handle or impossibility to conceive the
present moment, always in fugue, possible to be expressed only through the memory,
provoked the fight in poetry for a stable and fixed external form, as it was believed
that only such a form is capable to preserve the memory and make it objective. Ref.:
Petrarca, 2018 a Torre, A.: „Lege memoriter“. Petrarca e l´arte della memoria. In:
Lettere italiane, vol. 56, num. 1. Leo Olschki, 2004, pp. 12-49. ISBN 9788822262790.
5
Leopardi´s concept of remembrance (
ricordanza / rimembranza) was legated first of
all to the poetry, but in the modern age it penetrated into some other disciplines, i.e. to
psychology. Ref.: Polizzi, G.:
Leopardi e le «ragioni della verità». Scienze e filosofia
della natura in Giacomo Leopardi. Roma: Carocci, 2003. pp. I-xix, 1-288. ISBN 88-
430-2818-9. For Leopardi, in the time of writing
Canti, the absence of real time, or the
human incapability to live it contemporaneously with its passing, was the confirmation
of human mind´s incapability to conceive the infinity (
l’infinito), which it can perceive
only as an indefinity (
l‘indefinito). Infinity is for Leopardi an astral time analogy of
terrestrial time passing and of the being of the single forms in it (Rusnáková, 2012).
6
Ref. Bergson, 1908.
7
Bergson´s theory can be found also in the poetic work of Giuseppe Ungretti, the
Italian poet of the first half of the 20th century, who conceives and expresses time as
an inner fact and element, perceivable only by intuition. There is no objective time, we
can admit only the existence of consciousness of the individual living and being, an
individual´s inner, personal time. The feeling of the end of historical time and period
stands in the centre of almost all modern avantgardes influenced by the
phenomenological thought. The phenomenology, in an ontological way, identifies the
concrete historical moment, with its perception within the human consciousness. Ref.
Rusnáková, 2009.
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