Aadya Sharma Roll no-41 TERM PAPER, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Memory in Chronicle O A !ea"h #ore"old$ Memory : the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous previous experiences ‘I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it piece by piece from the memory of others.’ Through this quote from from the text and various various instances, we will try to establish the reliability of memory as a source of information. Memory, as dened above, is a mental capacity and hence is dierent for every individual. This is exactly why the narrator decides to rely on the memory of others, hoping it would not be as hazy as his. ne important thing to be noted here is the possibility that the narrator!s memory is hazy because he had been intoxicated the previous previous night and some eects of this are still present. This however must be ta"en into consideration for the whole town, as they were all involved in the merriment merriment of the night before. #f one ta"es this into account, a shadow of doubt is cast upon a lot of contributions to the narrative. Memory implies a past, a lapse in time. The act of recollection recollection involves an action or event that has already occurred and is hence in the past. This event, in $hronicle $hronicle of a %eath &oretold, &oretold, is 'antiago (asar!s death. This death is being recollected recollected twenty seven seven years after it happened. happened. This gap in time, especially a gap this this long, can cause memory to alter. alter. Memory goes through a lter) not all events from the past are retained. The ones that are, are are sub*ect to alteration. The fragmentation of memory memory is one such case. Memories Memories are most often *ust a series of smaller events, which the mind places in logical order and hence creates into one longer, continuous event. This continuity is an established one. This fragmentation causes ssures in the actual occurrence, as it can be wrongly chronicled ie., it can be sequentially wrong. &or example, when we recollect an event, we tend to mess up the order and start tal"ing about a part of the story towards
the ending in the middle, then realize this mista"e and resume from the correct spot. This is seen in the narrative too. Though it claims to be a chronicle, its timeline is extremely non)linear. There are plenty of digressions in the chronology and the story is often pic"ed up from where it was left. &or example, nobody remembers having seen 'antiago go to &lora Miguel!s house. The events in the house though are recorded. &ragmentation, in this text, does not happen only as an eect of time on memory. There is also a fragmentation in terms of it not being one man!s narrative. #t is a compilation of memories. #t is rescued +piece by piece! from the memories of various people and threaded together to form one narrative of a death. This ma"es the narrative more reliable as it is not possible to gather information about the events of the whole day from *ust one person, as he could possibly have not been present to witness the entire scene. The narrator, by engaging with various people, provides the best collation of events. e is allowed to trac" the events leading to the consummation, even though they occur at dierent places, by gathering eyewitness accounts of people present at dierent locations. -y doing this he is able to "now the simultaneous, parallel moments of the icario twins and 'antiago (asar. This ties up interestingly with the previous point about fragmentation of memory. /e said that memory is usually a series of smaller remembered events that we logically arrange into order. This is what the narrator does except with the memories of various people. e ta"es snips of memory from various people and strings it into a longer, more 0uid narrative. e uses the very concept of memory, to create a memory. This will be further discussed in the point about individual and collective memory. The collection of various individual memories is also problematic because of the very nature of the word individual. The idea of perception must also be considered. Memory is the retention of an experience and experience itself is perceived through one!s sub*ectivity. ow we experience a certain event is dependent on how we feel about or view the people1place corresponding to it. 2eople close to 'antiago would see his death with sympathetic eyes, while the ones who did not care much for him would not. The ob*ectivity of the narrative now comes under debate. ad this been the narrative of *ust the narrator, we could not expect ob*ectivity as the narrator was a close friend of 'antiago. owever, there would be only one sub*ectivity
to consider and understand the text through. owever, with the collation of memories, we now have various perceptions. These become a problem because we cannot believe the text to be completely factual. 3s the experience itself is marred by sub*ectivity, its memory will be too. There will be an imaginative misinterpretation of the event and this will be retained. 3s the people of the town would have an established attitude towards 'antiago, his death would be recorded sub*ectively in their minds. The fact that his murder was an honour "illing would also aect people!s sentiments. They would view it as inevitable and correct. They would remember it as an example. This brings in another way that memory is altered. 3 sub*ective memory is already an incorrect source of information. 3dd to this the practice of gossip and rumours. This further aects the memory by in0uencing it. The individual memory gets shaped by the rumours and gossip as it assigns to itself a certain sub*ectivity that it borrows from what it hears. Thus the memory of an event isn!t merely the experience of that event but also incorporates the element of how the event is collectively understood after its occurrence. This becomes the transformation of an individual memory to a collective memory. This can also be analysed in the context of the collation of memories to form a narrative. Through various individual memories, a collective history is formed. %ivina &lor changes her story after her mother!s death. 4arlier she claims that her mother, ictoria 5uzman, did not "now that 'antiago was going to be "illed and hence didn!t warn him. owever, she later confesses that her mother had prior "nowledge of the proposed murder and did not warn 'antiago because of a feeling of hatred. This ma"es the reader question the authenticity of memories that ma"e up the text. ow many people have contributed stories and not true memories is a question the reader is forced to as". There is a possibility that even after twenty seven people would not contribute facts simply because they would not want to be accused of passive participation. They can rewrite history through this narrative and hence come forward with versions of the story that leaves them absolved of all sin. This is what %ivina &lor does and thus one becomes extremely suspicious of the entire narrative. /e also thin" about 3ngela icario!s insistence that it was 'antiago who was her perpetrator. /hen she actually names him to her mother, she selects his name as it is the rst to come to her mind. -ut later, she says it in a sure tone. This becomes
an example of how the thoughts after an event help shape the memory of the event itself. 3s this narrative is written twenty seven years after the murder, there are many memories that have become inaccessible to us. &or example, ictoria 5uzman is dead and cannot contribute to this chronicling even though she was an eyewitness. Many memories are lost because of the time in between the occurrence and its review. Time also rids memories of details. There must be millions of details that do not get through the lters of memory and get lost. These details could!ve been unimportant, but as this narrative is an investigative one, their presence would serve as clues. Memory as a source of information for a form of writing that claims to be highly factual is extremely unreliable. The best example of the inconsistency of memory is the confusion about what the weather was li"e. /hile some claim it was funereal, others claim it was nice. There is no resolution reached. #n a *ournalistic piece about a murder, this would not be a contested issue. #t is the time lag between the event and its recording that causes this. #t is the inconsistency and the fallacies of memory that cause this. Though the whole event is reported, it does not follow chronologically. Memory deforms and selects. #t omits and changes. #t then, is an unreliable source. #t is sub*ective, contorted and erroneous. This is in contradiction to what the narrator hopes to achieve.
