Scholarly record

SPACING MEMORY: TOPOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY NARRATIVE IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S AND ANITA LIEPA’S FICTION

S. Meskova

Abstract

The present paper is dedicated to investigation of a specific pattern of memory narrative – recollecting the past by the protagonist when visiting sites of personal memories – as a framework of reconstructing personal and collective identity in Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye” (1988) and Latvian writer Anita Liepa’s memory narrative “Davana jeb Flensburgas noskanas” (A Present or Reflections of Flensburg, 2013). The methodology of the research draws on contemporary developments in the field of memory studies, autobiography and life writing as well as psychoanalytical and gender studies concerning such issues as subjective perception and reconstruction of memory space, sites of memory, identity reconstruction, trauma and loss, mourning and creative self-expression. Margaret Atwood’s novel is produced in the form of memory narrative that traces in the urban environment of Toronto the autodiegetic heroine/narrator Elaine Risley’s recreation of memory space of her childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood. The narration unfolds her travel in memories relating them to actual impressions in present and the aesthetic reality in her paintings. The dynamic of the heroine’s subjective experience leads to working out the traumatic experience in her consciousness and achieving spiritual transcendence through normalization of sexuality, motherhood, religious experience, and creativity. Anita Liepa’s autobiographical narrative traces the author’s memories when visiting Flensburg, a town on the northern border of Germany where she spent some years as a refugee after World War II that she perceived as happy time of her youth, by juxtaposing the memory time-space (the post-war Flensburg) to that of the present (Flensburg nowadays). The subjective point of view foregrounded by the author’s personal voice is contrasted to the collective memory dimension episodically introduced by referring to the community of Latvian refugees and local residents of Flensburg. Blending of the personal and the collective voices in this work highlights the collective memory dimension in the autobiographical narrator’s individual memory, attributing greater cultural and communal significance to the autobiographical narrator’s attitude, evaluation, and experience as revealed in the narrative.

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