TINTA, Vol 8 (2008)

Fragments of Self: Forging a Transliteration of Forgetting in Clarice Lispector’s, A Paixão Segundo G.H.

PAIGE SWEET, ,

Abstract


What I am proposing is simple, if counter-intuitive: when one has an experience that cannot be interpreted or represented within any familiar system of knowledge, two things occur. Immediately an awareness pressed between memory and forgetting emerges. On the one hand, G.H. has a desire to remember what just happened (which requires forgetting everything she previously knew). In order to be faithful to her experience she must find an expressive form capable of accommodating it. On the other hand she has a concordant desire to forget absolutely the experience she just had, which amounts to an absolute remembering and return to the comfort of her prior life. Both options reveal intimate and immanent connections among memory, time, and narrative or, in terms more appropriate to my study: forgetting and expression. And, if words (as servants of the familiar and inadequate epistemes) fail to accommodate what has been lived, one of three things may occur. One: the experience is lost irretrievably. Two: (what amounts to the same thing) the experience is articulated through ill-fitting words that must transmogrify the experience in order to enclose it within available systems of knowledge. Three: a new mode of expression, whose form is consonant with the experience, must be forged.

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TINTA is a research journal of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara