REITERATIVE ATTEMPTS OF RETRIEVING THE PAST IN FRED D’AGUIAR’S THE LONGEST MEMORY (1994) AND JULIAN BARNES’S THE SENSE OF AN ENDING (2011)
REITERATIVE ATTEMPTS OF RETRIEVING THE PAST IN FRED D’AGUIAR’S THE LONGEST MEMORY (1994) AND JULIAN BARNES’S THE SENSE OF AN ENDING (2011)

Summary/Abstract: A driving force in both Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory (1994) and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), memory is self-defining for the protagonists of the two novels whose association becomes possible due to their common message regarding the condensation of time both in life and fiction. Providing a psychological as well as a psychoanalytic interpretation of D’Aguiar’s and Barnes’s novels, this paper follows the characters’ attempts of retrieving repressed memories starting from the assumption that traumatic memory needs to be inhibited. Nevertheless, personal time has its own meanders leading to a continuous (re)construction of memory and implicitly to the revelation of a different facet of reality which might completely undermine previous beliefs. Our intention is to prove that the novelists under scrutiny change either the perspective of the same character or of different characters in order to question the idea of individual and historical truth. If in D’Aguiar’s novel individual traumatic memory is turned into collective traumatic memory leading to centuries of slavery equivalent to a loss of personal and social identity, in Barnes’s novel the first person narrator tries to prove that the same phenomenon holds valid in the sense that what happens to the protagonist of the story at an individual level could be applied to a wider and more complex historical level reflecting the mechanisms functioning at the level of an entire society. Whether voluntarily or not, the main characters pass through a memory reconstruction process which becomes imperative but too painful to withstand since the traumatic episodes had far too greater repercussions upon the protagonists’ lives.

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