La memoria escenificada. Estetización de la memoria y su función

Abstract

The present article is a reflection on the literary staging of a memory. Two cases are presented: Marco Denevi’s short story “La historia” and Antonio Ferres’ “El exilio del parque”. The first is installed in the simple fact of making an aesthetic object of memory (historical or personal), producing a confrontation between a ‘true’ discourse by ‘how it is said’ (through the rhetorical elements used) in contrast to another discourse that boasts of being true because it lacks adornments. The art of telling and its narrative and rhetorical strategies finally prevail; it is what the public believes. In the second case, a text presents us with the memorization of a Spanish exile, his childhood space (a park before the Civil War) which today has been transformed. There is a confrontation between the memory of what that space was and what it is today (true and falsified, respectively). The ‘park’ space becomes symbolic-metonymic of the entire Spanish nation, producing a symbolic aestheticization in the figure that the story itself constitutes as a whole.