The arts of memory are diverse.

Awareness of the past can be achieved by the publication

of a document or by the erection of a monument; by writing a memoir or by creating a
memorial; by launching a discussion or by opening a museum. In culture, as in a computer,
there are two forms of memory, which might be likened to hardware and software. Soft
memory consists primarily of texts (including literary, historical, and other narratives),
whereas hard memory consists primarily of monuments (and, sometimes, state laws and
court decisions). Of course, the soft and the hard are interdependent (pointed out in D.
Kujundis article).
There is a common quality in both they tell stories and in telling stories, the past (or
history) is presented as personal experience. History disrupts identity; memory constructs it.
If history follows its subjects multiple transformations (and usually consequent loss of
identity), memory keeps identity continuous despite all disturbances. It is in this broad sense
that Skworecky speaks of personal (individual, private, intimate) accounts of the Soviet and
other experiences. These concerns with the past and the dead, more common in mystical or
theological contexts than in political ones, were partially theorized by Walter Benjamin, who
wrote, There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. That
secret agreement very often reveals itself in nostalgia, and occasionally in irony, subdues
satire and parody. Allusions to the past, through the nostalgia means, form an important
part of the political and social present of the narrator (or the author). The act of ironizing
(while still implicitly invoking) nostalgia undermines modernist assertions of originality,
authenticity, and the burden of the past, even as it acknowledges their continuing (but not
paralyzing) validity as aesthetic concerns and is one of the means by which it creates the
necessary distance and perspective on that anti-amnesiac drive1.
Skworecky provides accounts that describe human lives shaped by violent historical forces,
focusing on Stalins terror and the war (experienced first-hand or vicariously). What comes
through is a sense of self derived from the experience of fear, repression, and deprivation
imposed by the state; a self-worthy to be submitted as almost historical material, presented,
depending on temperament and literary skill, as a literary monument or a document for the
archive.
Memory is pervaded with software texts and immediate experiences, which do not fit into
stable, indisputable, monumental forms. The hardening of memory is an individual process
with specific functions, conditions, and thresholds. It promises that the events themselves
will not return, that the demons of the past are exorcised, that the present exists and
prevails. In a democratic society, it requires relative consensus in the public sphere. Such
Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue by Linda Hutcheon & Mario J. Valds. Poligrafas 3 (1998-2000)
revistas.unam.mx/index.php/poligrafias/article/download...
1

consensus follows, and because, the intensity of the soft debates reaches a certain
threshold.
Concerned with the survival of his established (individual and collective) identities, the
author constructs on paper a tangible self-embedded in history and an extended community
of the intellectuals projecting an imaginary continuity of the previous (Eastern-European,
Czheck) tradition. He constructs an identity based on values of intellectual elitism, intimacy,
opposition, and victimization a paradigm that is good enough for the imaginative
recreation of tradition, but not for the needs of the present day.
With the zeal for self-creation and self-surveillance he reads his life as a text. This
autobiographical project is underwritten by a peculiar merger of philosophical historicism,
religious and secular apocalypticism, the communal ethos of the intelligentsia, and the
methodological pathos of the literary profession. Writing about ones life (or reading about
the life of the other) is not only about commemorating and mastering the past. It is also
about filling the vacuumness of the present. Moreover, in reconstructing the past,
Skworecky opens up to a utopian project: to inhabit the future. The temporal condensations
allow the author to question historical process in novel ways, without, however, providing
answers. What Kundera once said of the novel form applies absolutely to the texture and
methodology of this novel:
A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know
whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right . . . The
stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the
novel comes from having a question for everything . . . The novelist teaches the reader
to comprehend the world as question. There is wisdom and tolerance in this attitude.2
Immanuel Kant said that it is through the mind that we acquire truth and through the body
and senses that we acquire reality. The characters in the novel are primarily in the process
of acquiring reality; the writer longs for truth, without attaining it, and thus,he is brought back
to the previous self and reality and recreates a new self.
The new self encounters an alterity, an otherness, through language, and the voices of
those from whom it is constituted and borrowed as discourse. The self comes upon its
splintered and divided core, upon a subject (auto) writing about itself as an object
(biography), hence upon a subject-object split, that is also an unhealable temporal split, and
a split between writing (graphy) and speech, as well as language and lived experience. So
2

Milan Kundera, "Afterword: A Talk with the Author by Philip Roth" in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry
Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 237.

pure autobiography is obviously impossibility, as Bakhtin said, and this autobiographical

writing proclaims itself as nothing but fiction (like those he reads and makes references to).
Even if the author-creator had created the authentic autobiography or confession, he
would nonetheless have remained, insofar as he had produced it, outside of the
universe that is represented in it. If I tell (orally or in writing) an event that I have just
lived, insofar as I am telling . . . this event, I find myself already outside of the timespace where the event occurred. To identify oneself absolutely with oneself, to identify
one's "I" with the "I" that I tell is as impossible as to lift oneself up by one's hair.
The novel is written in superficially conflicting, but consistent collage-like scenesthe
deliberate confusion of Conrads psychological realism. The self is offered ultimately as
model or representative of an era because it had had some special experience of revelation
or enlightenment through which it had been healed, or repaired, or made whole. The self
remains dispersed, a heterogeneous experience that cannot be drawn together into a unity
or logos. And authors work is representational, among other reasons, because it also offers
no resolution or closure to the contemporary issue of the self, to the loose adjacency of
autonomous, independent, and diverse voices and lived moments and moods that we seem
to be, perplexingly excessive, displaced, fragmented, scattered, and abundant.
The book is organized almost entirely around other books, other authors and their themes of
life, women, fate, dreams, humanity and its division, love and death, love of literature, love
of life, among many. The narrator and the reader at once might be driven by a need to
commemorate the dead, repent, accuse, and denounce, or simply talk about experiences.
There seems to be the writers imperative to write about himself, the scholars urge to make
his life into an object of investigation, like the public demand to disclose the lives of
everybody and anybody. The text also invites a special reading: reading as a silent
production of a story of ones own, in which the text is borrowed, inhabited, like a rented
apartment; another persons text is mentally transformed into a story that accommodates
ones own life or ones own self. The narrator is an implied reader who conceives writing as
turning intimate life into a public space inhabited by so many lives.
Could we, please, try to reflect on the themes through the following hints:
1. Poe (mystery, melodrama and parody (including self-parody) as one of the
features of the gothic and detective fiction with themes love, death, subconscious
self, hope, uncertainty, among others). Lets try to see the raven as "thought" and
"memory" which calls the narrators reliability into question.
Is he trying to give his experiences a rational explanation, but by the end he
ceased to do so?

Is this opening chapter a fragment of his soul representing novels characters

as figures of obsession or mourning?
Is the narrators experiencing a perverse conflict between desire to forget and
desire to remember?
2. Hawthorne (featuring moral allegories with a Puritan foundation. Themes centered
on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, with moral messages suggesting that guilt,
sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity.
Is narrators depiction of the past a version of historical fiction used only as a
vehicle to express common themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution?
3. Twain (social commentaries addressing ideas of the moral sense and the
"damned human race"):
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human
race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish
dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a
useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
M. Twain
Is narrators use of humor to criticize society rejection of the statement above
or ?
4. Crane (rejection of sentimentality, asserting that "a story should be logical in its
action and faithful to character. Truth to life itself was the only test, the greatest
artists were the simplest, and simple because they were true. Crane).
The narrator says: Nit-picking analysis that illuminates sources, influences and
relationships is something immensely concrete, and concrete things have a lasting
worth. I am not at all sure this is true of my works. In them, it seems to me, I have
tried to second-guess life, to interpret it, to conjure it up out of fantasy. Skvorecky)
Having the novel in mind, is the truth claim on interpretation of life or fantasy
of it?
5. Fitzgerald (love, egoism, self-confidence, jazz, art). The daydream is the true
basis of all literature. The real religion of life, the true idolatry of literature, can
never flourish in democracies, in those vague, boring kingdoms of the freedom not to
read, not to suffer, not to desire, not to know, not to understand.

What are your thoughts on this anomaly?

6. Conrad (parallelism, a deep abhorrence for socialism, "infernal doctrines born in
the continental backslums") and democracy ("I have no taste for democracy"); faith,
morality, fidelity. Conrad wrote:
Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words,
once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of
to-morrow.... In this world as I have known it we are made to suffer without the
shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....
There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of
ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and floating
appearance....
A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains but a clot of mud, of cold
mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun.
Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.
For Conrad fidelity is the barrier man erects against nothingness, against corruption,
against the evil that is all about him.
What view of the human condition is author elaborating on in this novel?
7. Lovecraft,(horror, fantasy, forbidden knowledge, inherited guilt, entire society is
threatened by barbarism)
Even horror has its beauty, Svensson, I replied. And anyway, what is beauty in
art? The realization that this is exactly how it is in reality or in nightmares. But
nightmare and reality often overlap, and reality is always less perfect, in both the
positive and the negative sense. Art captures that essence which reality, sometimes
more, sometimes less, spreads thin. In art, the essence presents itself as an
undiluted, powerful possibility. And because art incarnates what is possible, it can
mean anything under the sun. Skvorecky, 549
Is the narrator driven by a need to commemorate the dead, repent, accuse, and
denounce, simply talk about experiences or to honour both the art and life?