Remembrance of Homes Past. The narration of memory in Baumgartner’s Bombay, The Bus Stopped and The God of Small Things

      Аннотация: How does the concept of memory unfold through the narration of memories, and how is the threefold relationship memory, the remembered and the one remembering, given narrative form? Seeking to elucidate how three narratives render the paradox of memory as the presence of the absent, Remembrance of Homes Past ponders the poetics of memory and touches upon its haunting effect on the exile. Another main consideration in this book is how memory is determined by and devoted to certain spaces, such as the ambiguous entity of home. A common denominator for the three narratives Baumgartner’s Bombay, The Bus Stopped and The God of Small Things is the over-representation of the absent. The obsession with what is lost is an orchestrating principle for the novels: aesthetically, semantically and structurally. This book seeks not only to study the narrative renderings however, but also calls the categories of home, remembrance and perception into question, leaving the reader to not only observe the characters’ experience of memory, but to question her own.

Ключевые слова: absence, Alienation, Association, Bachelard, bergson, Childhood, collective memory, Confabulation, Desai, Diaspora, Exile, Fixation, forgetting, Gaze, Habit, History, home, House, Imagination, immigrant, Indian English literature, layers, loss, Memory, Mimetic, Mirror, old age, Other, paradox, Past, Place, Post-Colonial Literature, Present, Recalling, Recollection, remembering, remembrance, Ricoeur, Roots, roy, seeing, self, Space, The God of Small Things, time, trace, uncanny, Wounds, absent, Looking, perceiving, obscured, historical trauma, mnemonic triggers, petrification, Haunting, regional novel, impossible return, Walls, Imprint, exilic desire, magic pad, Elsewhere, elsewhen, Nacht und Nebel, Khair, Rushdy, Milosz, Berger, Proust, The Bus Stopped, Baumgartner’s Bombay.