AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
reflected in the literary narrative
8
, affected not only by selective
recollection, but also by specific frames of reference (time,
space, language) in which the individual moves, or how a person
realizes himself. The aspect of the social conditionality of
memory was pointed out by the French philosopher and
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877 - 1945), who was
influenced by the theory of collective consciousness by Emil
Durkheim (1858 - 1917): “Memory is constituted and functions
and reproduces in certain social frameworks that are created by
people, living in the society.” (Lehmann - Maslowski - Šubrt,
2014, 17)
Both 20th and 21st centuries have brought several new and
undoubtedly inspiring theoretical considerations seeking to
conceptualize the memory phenomenon, and within their context
the terms of cultural memory (J. Assmann, P. Nora), Cosmo
lithic memory (D. Levy, N. Sznaider) or multidimensional
memory (Michael Rothberg)
9
are considered. We decided to
grasp the interpretation of selected aspects depicting the topic of
memory in Hispanic American literature on the background of
literary and cultural-theoretical works illuminating the collective
memory phenomenon going hand in hand with individual
memory phenomenon. According to Halbwachs (2009, 50) he
himself is the first witness to whom a person turns to during
remembering, only then the process of remembering becomes a
meeting of two people: one who perceives and testifies to what
is seeing at a given moment, and the other who forms an opinion
based on the statement.
2 Memory in the context of oral culture
The collective unconsciousness of the Hispanic American
community is directly linked to the autochthonous past and
experience of the mestizos within the individual regions of the
Central and South American continent. In particular, the national
literatures represent one, internally differentiated local picture of
what is universally valid for Latin America - an immediate,
fruitful connection with the tradition of oral character where
narration creates the core. The mentioned resource was not
exhausted by the arrival of technological achievements of the
(post)-digital age but it was still activated by writing, and the
original existence in contemporary literary discourse is
evidenced by the work of authors during 20th century.
“Activating the coexistence of oral and written expresses not
only literary language drawing on communicative liveliness,
tonality of oral expression, its distinctive symbolism and
metaphor, but also the overall composition of the work: living
plotting, the presence of rituals, archetypal characters, poetics
rich in sensory stimuli. The coexistence of oralism (as an old
way of talking) and audio-visual media (as a new way of talking)
has also resulted in the development of a specific genre in the
Latin American environment - radio broadcasts and soap
operas.”
(Kučerková, 2011, 87).
The depth of semantic constitution of memory in Hispanic
America pars pro toto is illustrated by the Paraguayan writer
Augusto Roa Bastos (1917 - 2005). In the essay Oral Culture
(Una cultura oral, 1988) he shares the experience of writing
fictional stories in which he develops an imaginary substance,
but that is not possible without the contact with reality, “of all
possible forms of reality, even that which has not been yet, or
which has already ceased to be” (Roa Bastos; Housková, 2004,
8
Almost parallel to the literary avantgardes was the thinking of Benedetto Croce
(1866 – 1952), who conceived the theory of relation between the human´s inner life
made of material in memory, and its literary representation. The Italian philosopher
has distinguished two types of knowledge, in simple words:
the knowledge in images and a knowledge in terms. Only the image is pertinent to the
immediate inner life, therefore to the artistic expression, without any need of other
integration or explanation discourse. Ref. Croce, B.:
Poesia e non poesia. Bari:
Laterza, 1923. The sense of literature is, according to Croce, the realisation of images,
where time interferes into their interpretation by the change of the receiving and
perceiving optic. Such a thought is in accordance with in that period already widely
established Freud´s thought, which compares the surmounting of the space between
the original image and its interpretation to the suppression of the „cultural“ non-
consciousness, by formatting the time-optic. Ref. Bhabha, H. K.:
DisemiNácia: čas,
rozprávanie a hranice moderného národa. In: Medziliterárny proces VII. Nitra: FF
UKF, pp. 348-376, 2010. ISBN 978-80-8094-753-8.
9
Ref. Lehmann, Maslowski, Šubrt, 2014, 15.
273). Writing in the region where the culture was formed on the
bedrock of the mestizos, more precisely the living presence of
indigenous components necessarily presupposes their creative
processing at various levels, but in the terms of memory, are
especially related to meanings, carried within the individual life
story but also in the national community context. “I have always
been convinced that in order to be able to write stories in
Paraguay, the first is necessary to read, or better said to listen to
an unwritten text; thus before I start writing, I will be able to
perceive and listen to the sounds of oral speech, unformulated
but always present in the tones of memory. [...] These living
sediments of mother tongue, inherited from ancestors, allow a
new semantization and the appearance of new meanings when
changing them into the scriptures, it is a text in which man does
not think, but which “thinks” of man, as it is the case of
language or history in general.” (273-274)
Returning to the introductory words on the creative reach of
remembering in the authorial style of Gabriel García Márquez,
the oral culture proves to be essential in shaping the narratives of
personal and collective identity in the Hispanic American
cultural environment, with memory being an important
constitutive element. Together with Aleida Assmann, who
defines memory beyond the medium nature that preserves
information, our study does not think of the memory in literature
only as of the space in which the memories are organized into a
special poetic and narrative form, but primarily understood as
vis, as “an immanent force associated with imagination and
reason” (30, 2018; Hromová Burcinová, 2019, 139). Thus, in the
process of writing it can be interpreted as a life-giving energy,
that by the words of the Argentine novelist Elsa Osorio
(Goldkorn, 2014), it has “the power to bring life back to the lost
[desaparecidos]”, to overcome fear, find the truth or create the
future.
However, at the level of personal and individual survival, such
notions of creation can also represent a common effort to
understand life or simply not to forget, or as the Chilean-
American writer Isabel Allende claims, to nurture the roots “that
are no longer set in any geographical location” (Correas Zapata,
1998, 16).
Allende's book of essays My Invented Country (Mi país
inventado, 2003), published a few years later than her interview
with Celia Correas Zapata, confirms the rooted (conscious and
unconscious) need to revive the faded, and transform it into
something vital, give the sense to unrest, uncertainty,
unclassification, abnormality, unhappiness, the circumstances of
life, etc. It permeates the social, political, cultural-
anthropological, sociological history of Chile, as well as own,
intimate story of I. Allende. It is the vision of country, created by
memories, but furthermore it can be understood as a metaphor
for memory. As blurry as it may seem (“Things that happened in
the past have fuzzy outlines, they’re pale; it’s as if my life has
been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of
events I don’t understand, or only half understand. I have
absolutely no sense of certainty.”; (Allende, 2020, 132) it is a
fundamental pillar of the author's literary, reflexive, reportage, or
other images about Chile.
The narrative art of García Márquez, in which the daily events
intersect with elements drawn from a distinctive Caribbean
mentality and imagination, in a specific way “pays off an
imaginary debt to all those who have shown him that storytelling
presupposes continuity.”
(Kučerková, 2011, 51) This specific
dimension of author's writing co-creates the essence of magical
realism poetics, also influenced the work of Isabel Allende, and
what literary critics often mentioned connected with her novel
debut La casa de los espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits,
1985). Although this poetics is not the subject of our thinking, it
should be emphasized that some of its specific features can
significantly help to reveal the concept of memory in verbal art.
For example, “[d]isruption of the chronology of narration
(retrospective) in an original way helps [...] to reconstruct both
the collective memory and the individual memory. The
immersion into human memories through the return to a new
- 32 -