The round table discussion of this year's Ohrid Regional P.E.N. Conference
will be on the theme "Literature as Memory"

1. Literature as an individual and collective memory

After winning the battle against the Titans, the Olympians asked Zeus to create divinities who were capable of celebrating their victory and always reminding them of it. The master of the gods went to Pieria, where he shared Mnemosyne's bed for nine consecutive nights. When her time had come Mnemosyne gave birth to nine daughters, who formed the choir of the Muses. Since then neither the Immortals nor the mortals remained the same. The world had received a new dimension – arts and, consequently, literature as a part of it.

The way an individual creates his/her identity is a narrative construction, i.e. a complex process of remodelling, analogous to the process by means of which a nation creates legends from its past. Therefore, the author very often, if not always, tries to establish a dialogue with the legends and myths created by the collective, a dialogue with the collective memory and its traditions within which the individual has grown. The problem which may appear in the attempt is that complete reconstructions of the past are not possible due to the individual’s inability to establish a chronologically linear chain of events that starts from and returns to the seminal event.

Therefore, the creation of a literary work may be understood as a process which in many respects depends on memory, whether individual or collective. Memory, or "the layer of stored facts" and images, "the foul rag-and-bone shop" of this civilisation, has mostly been created by heritage, whether written or oral. However exact or complete these facts and images may be, they remain "traces" or "fragments" which, disregarding whether selected consciously or unconsciously, may live in us with such intensity "as if they incorporated the message of the text along with the atmosphere that goes with it" (Koneski).

The relationship between the collective and the individual may not necessarily be harmonious. The presence of the past in the memory of the collective is intensely expressed, often taking on the form of a convention. Then, as has often been the case, the author finds himself in opposition to the collective. This opposition may result in friction and conflict, as the innovations that the author wants to introduce (or has already introduced) in his work become subject to the sanction of the collective. This opposition (innovation « sanction) generates the dynamics of the continuous development of literature and culture in a society.

2. Literature as memory and forgetfulness

Reading and writing of a text are processes that include in themselves not only memory (individual or collective), but also forgetfulness. To read the texts of the myths and legends may mean not only to understand them, but also to problematise them, to forget, erase, efface, repeat… In short, it is a process of "endless prosopopoeia" by means of which the dead are given a face and a voice, allowing the expression of the allegory of their rise and fall. Therefore, literature eradicates the stasis of the past and, even if partially, establishes it as our wider contemporaneity. It is a reflection which conquers the past, but yet it exists with it and builds itself on its layers. In this way literature cannot be understood as an autonomous, completed or closed "structure," but as an entity which does not only add, "memorise," and store the events, but also "forgets" and eliminates them.Therefore, literature does not replicate the past, thus making it a noncreative, static and "foul" dunghill, or a semantic preserve, an alienated reservation; rather, it creates an image of it as vivid, effectual and potent.

3. Literature as palimpsest

Similarly, literature is neither an interior nor exterior "structure," but an entropic one. It is not just a list of strictly determined facts, ordered by some neutral methodology or by a purely objective and therefore "anesthetic" chronology; rather, it is a "structure" which includes the facts by colouring them with meaning and importance. The "structure" of literature is not constituted according to universal principles, but is, above all, a contingent, open "structure" which changes its form according its dialogism, intertextuality or the "free play" of its constituents. Literature is a dynamic and constantly open dialogue among the receding past, the elusive present and the postponed future. When preserving the past, literature creates an image of distance; when bridging the distance, it creates an image of an abyss; when bringing points together, it gives reality to the distance. It incorporates both conflict and division, its continuation depending not on itself alone - as it erases itself, it continues towards another narrative structure, so that at the same time it ends and continues, dies and lives, erases and (re)writes itself. Such narrative structure is not a "trancendental signified," but an opera aperta (Ecco), constantly "under the threat of erasure," a structure determined by the traces of its otherness, which is always absent; it is an anasemic, parergonal, palimpsestic "structure" (Derrida).

(Thesis provided by Zoran Ančevski, Ph.D.)

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