About memory, silence and deafness in Kenzaburo Oe's novel: The Silent Scream 1
Part 1
What we are looking for with this small article is to try to understand the power that memory has within the novel “The Silent Scream” by Kenzaburo Oe (Nobel Prize winner in Literature), to integrate identity with extreme realities, which do not stop binding each other. to the elusive and, as Oe says, “burning” hope. This understanding would emerge around the way memory is configured within two qualities—silence and deafness 2 —which in the course of this article will be unraveled and will help us dive into the deep waters of this novel.
Oe's "The Silent Scream" encourages us to join the dance of memory. And in that dance it immerses us in the density of its logic, creating a space for dialogue between our disabilities and identity, but where the former are shown as the hidden and determining axis of the latter. In that sense, it restores the power of acceptance of our weaknesses, defects or fragmentation; It restores it against violence and transforms it into the space, from which it is possible to understand the human being always in a nascent state 3 , within the relationship with others. In this way, the dance of memory becomes necessary, essential, without it the past, when repeated, could resurrect its violence; but, above all, it could prevent the construction of some new path, which would arise from this acceptance of limits and the impossibility of totalities.
The spaces of memory. By way of introduction
Kenzaburo Oe tells us the personal story of the translator Mitsusaburo Nedokoro and the relationship he has with his brother and his friends, with his wife, his hometown and its inhabitants. These relationships are built around a series of extreme situations: the central character's defective eye; the disabled son and the attitude of abandonment that he and his wife assume in the face of this fact; Mitsusaburo's conflicted and discordant relationship with Takashi, his brother; and, finally, the problem of modernity redefining new forms of relations between a modern Japan and an apparently traditional one in crisis.
This story is told linearly and in the first person; That is, it tells us chronologically the historical and psychological development of Mitsusaburo. However, the author also gives us a series of stories incorporated around the protagonist's ability to remember. This quality not only overcomes the triple location of the story (the character, a city and a town), since the memories configure multiple complex temporal scenarios, in which the protagonist and the other characters develop, but it also allows delve deeper, from these scenarios, into the processes of construction of the personal universe - from the vision of the protagonist - of those who configure the identity of the protagonist. In that sense, if there is a linear and chronological personal memory, this is determined in a scenario where several disputed memories come together 4 : the personal, the foreign, the friendly, the collective, family, the national, modern or rural. The story, then, gives us a dance that initially attempts to homogeneously specify – from a single vision – the heterogeneity of the meaning of memory, being ultimately defeated by this last quality.
Thus, Oe leads us to understand memory according to this remembrance condition in its double condition: living object, which falls as a surprising weight determining attitudes or feelings and intentional verb; that is, transformed into a search activity to find some type of truth, necessary, saving. This double condition, from which we will reflect on Kenzaburo's novel, is based on Ricoeur's idea about memory: the past is memory and this is articulated according to two axes, one passive and the other active 5 . This idea will help us to investigate, in this journey of searches and struggles, the way in which memories and memories become both objects that surprise and enclose us, and forms of unfinished activity, immersed in a continuous flow from where We are allowed to build new spaces of understanding about the double material of memory.
Finally, the way in which the novel is translated into Spanish is interesting. If the actual title were translated, it would literally be: “Man'nen Football of the Year 1” 6 . With all this, the translation made by Wandenbergh: “Silent Scream”, will allow us to reflect according to two modes of interpretation: the first (Part 1, the present), from the impossibility manifested by the idea of “silent scream”, with the aim to understand the condition of deafness and silence from a personal level; and the second (Part 2), based on the reflection that arises around the true title, will allow us to think about the link between History, memory and the past with silence and deafness but already on the macrosocial level. Such, two conditions that, although they can be abstracted, are in a constant process of exchange and bond, of struggle, mixture and relationship.
Scream and Silence
After the central character's friend commits suicide, hanging himself with his face painted and a cucumber inserted into his anus, his wife, upon finding him, emits a scream of horror, despair and sadness deep inside herself: a silent scream . This powerful metaphor helps us to understand, in reality, the way in which Oe has articulated the logic of many of his characters, who move within a nebula of impossible dialogues or total discourses that subjugate wills, desires and hopes. However, we must take into account the trap that means placing silence itself as a constituent form of said metaphor. And to understand these dimensions in the characters a little more, I am going to allow myself a small digression around the aforementioned dimensions: silence and deafness .
Although silence encompasses deafness , we want to separate it to understand it in its specificity and thus be able to reflect more clearly on the novel from memory. Deafness does not refer to physiological dimensions, understood as the inability to perceive sound. Silence does not refer to physical dimensions, characterized by the absence of noise. Deafness is that which makes understanding impossible: closed to the diversity of sounds, one hears a single, homogeneous noise, which ends up enclosing the meaning of the world under a single compact form, which differs from and towards itself. On the other hand, silence goes beyond its physical quality and becomes the cumulative and expansive condition of various murmurs, noises, furious roars of meaning in the things of the world, which resonate in and from it, with a quality of its own. . In this way, in silence, sound manifests internally in those who “manage to listen-understand-understand” or in fact not do so, but there we enter the plane of deafness . Therefore, even if there is someone who does not physiologically perceive physical sounds, even in their physiological silence, they can hear the sound of the meaning of things, in the physical silence, constructed by their understanding of the existential diversity in the world. These two dimensions, finally, are active and passive, and can be articulated as qualities of memory, within the double characteristic that we explained in the previous section.
Oe's characters travel through and are “transversed” with these characteristics from the dialogues they have with their memories: object and verb. The brothers, for example, maintain an impossible dialogue throughout the novel, both with their own past, which they cannot fully grasp, and with each other. Thus, each one has a particular vision of memory, the dialogues conceived from it are carried out between the two as a dialogue of the deaf or of impositions, of unheard calls or corrosive refusals. For example, when they remember the death of their brother, Taka constructs his location in that past in an imaginary way, recounting the death with the exclusive purpose of presenting himself as the protagonist of the feelings that surround said death, in addition to its meaning. Mitsu, on the other hand, denies this construction by simply recounting what “really happened”; This story is made not with the purpose of creating a new bridge of dialogue but simply to close the meaning in a positive, absolute way, trying to prevent any type of relationship, since Mitsu only hopes to completely separate himself from what Taka believes he is. himself, both in his memory and in the present. In this way, deafness settles between them: understanding is impossible.
Thus, this form of deafness acquires a passive dimension as it is born or articulated around the very passivity of the central character, who makes dialogue with those he interacts impossible: Taka's friends, the former servant, her children, or even the inhabitants of their native community. Mitsu prevents dialogue or lets this impossibility, this deafness envelop him like a flame that devours not only him but everything around him. In fact, the only coherent and active dialogue is that of his personal memory, which seeks hope in himself. Now, this memory is passive because Mitsu turns it into a solidified object: an absolute and oppositional truth against which the other possibilities of memory collide, supposedly illuminating them in order to manifest "the reality of their falsehood." In that sense, this apparently true memory, although it emits a type of clarifying light, said light is in the end, paradoxically, opaque : it extinguishes in it and from it the possibility of a significant sound, which as a bridge of relational understanding would allow a different type of light.
But there is not only a memory infected with passive deafness , the novel also shows us a verb memory emitting a form of active deafness , a type of closed intersubjective field, sustained by the dominant and violent attitudes and thoughts of the brother.
Takashi, unlike Mitsaburo, activates his memory, unleashes it from a fantastic construction aimed at justifying his attitudes, his personal search for identity and the salvation of his soul infected by a guilt that is impossible to murder in himself. This memory also contains the quality of an active deafness , since said memory rises above the significant way of acting of those characters linked to it, subjecting it to its unidirectional logic. With a strong and influential personality, Taka manages to envelop those around him with his aura and thus creates fanatical attitudes, focused on the path that only he knows and practices. In this way, Mitsu's exiled characters are integrated into Taka's symbolic universe. All of them articulate their ways of thinking according to Taka's absolute and fictitious way of interpreting and acting, they follow him according to the parameters he imposes and try not to advance beyond what he delimits. Taka's memory is an active construction, which impregnates the space through which he operates with deafness , densifying the environment under the significant parameters of his selfishness and search. And he achieves this from his personal interpretation—and the mystical aura that flows from his attitudes—of political events, convincing his friends and the young people of the town; of daily events, which involve the people; or family events, convincing the servants or the wife. In this way, although a type of understanding is created, a type of symbolic universe of interpretation of the world, it is cloistered within a single, homogeneous and homogenizing vision, which prevents diversity and multiple possibilities of meaning from flowing. and practical, far from the violence of this tormented character.
Now, these two types of absolute memories, active and passive deafness , expanded from two individuals to those around them, are not without consequences and limits. The consequence is terrible in this dance of misunderstanding and impossibility of dialogue. Mitsu deteriorates her marital relationship and sinks deeper and deeper into loneliness and depression. Taka, who tries through the activity of his memory to create a bridge with his brother—the only character possible to offer him salvation, since the virulent guilt developed in his being is linked to him (Taka is guilty of the death of his sister , within events of incest and cowardice)—he sees himself crashed against the wall of the same ; that is, against this quality of deafness where the homogeneous and impossible is inherent. Mitsu little by little looks more desolate, and the truth, supposedly absolute that he handles and dominates, is not enough for him to find at least some hope capable of freeing him from that feeling of death and defeat. Taka takes the town to an extreme situation of violence and humiliation before the owner of the supermarkets, ending in two equally violent events: the death of a girl, for whom he blames himself - it is not known if fictitiously or really - for having murdered her. and raped, and the suicide of Taka himself 7 , who does not achieve forgiveness for his past, since he seeks in Mitsu, absolutely alien and decisive, the medium of said forgiveness.
The limit, on the other hand, arises from silence, a silence that ontologically contains diagonals of mixed reality, encompassing any homogeneous or closed dimension. And that happens, paradoxically, upon the defeat of Mitsu's own interpretations, a defeat that shows him as doubly disabled; but, in that characteristic, with the possibility of opening oneself to the understanding and recognition of others, of the other and of oneself: Taka had sold the traditional house of the Nedokoro family, owner of a complex story linked to both the protagonist and the the village. This house also held an event that both Taka and Mitsu interpreted from a personal and social perspective in a different way. An old relationship between his grandfather and his great-uncle—inhabitants of said house—had obsessed both of them. The two characters had been interpreted based on what they believed these two characters were according to the story that had constructed them. The grandfather, traditional and passive, was identified with Mitsu; the great-uncle (coincidentally also younger), rebel and leader of ancient rebellions in the town, with Taka. The latter had supposedly gone into exile after a frustrated rebellion, and thus, with the passage of time and in the distance, said character had had a regular relationship with the family, gradually transforming into a peaceful person, which justified the absolute truth of Mitsu 8 .
But, when the sale of the house becomes effective, after Taka's death, the demolition brings to light a fact that changes the perspective of the brotherly relationship of the past. The brother had not left but was hiding in a false basement, closer than anyone imagined. The truth hidden under the protection of silence, in that basement, changes Mitsu's perspective, as she finds that the grandparents' relationship was different than she thought; That is, the dichotomous and non-negotiable interpretation of character or action, or physical distance as a need for reconciliation, was a significant creation of the present, arbitrarily constructed and assumed by him and his brother. This defeat of his personal interpretation creates the opportunity to reconcile through repentance with himself—also achieving a limited but hopeful reconciliation with his wife and son—and with his brother or his memory; and, also, to rethink his absurd attitude, which had made it impossible to create a relational bridge, of forgiveness or of reformulation of attitudes and personalities in time. Silence, in that sense, manages to overcome that internal deaf space, that place in which the central character had taken refuge, and that now, in the midst of a new vision and hearing of the multiple forms of the past, was transformed into a space of possibilities to restart the search for that ardent hope , leaving free, or rather, assuming, in its heterogeneous sense, the silence, far from that dimension that makes the meaning of a cry for help or understanding impossible.
Grades
1. Kenzaburo Oe, The Silent Scream. Translation by Miguel Wandenbergh. Barcelona: Ed. Sol 90. 2003.
2. Deafness is a neologism with which we want to establish a difference with the word deafness , the latter linked to a biological inability to apprehend physical sound. Deafness is an ontological-political condition, whose objective is to phenomenologically describe a dimension of impossibility. In this way, the sound that cannot be perceived must be understood as a significant sound or linked to social practice, transcending physiological dimensions and being linked to qualities of understanding, interpretation, dialogue and bodily experience. What is then impossible from deafness is a dimension of understanding; In this dimension, ideas, words, images, even actions, events and objects acquire a particular sound that can only be perceived by that ear that Gadamer calls internal. This ear allows us to give the world a form, a background, a function; In short, a sense. But, a meaning located within a necessary space of relationships that allows the socio-symbolic networks that articulate these relationships to be constantly redefined, from the social, in all its institutional, structural, daily, economic, etc., and symbolic dimensions, with a reconfiguration constant of different significant dimensions.
I hope, in a future article, to expand on this quality: deafness , with all its philosophical, sociological and metaphorical resonances. Within this essay there is a small interpretive approach to this quality in the section of Scream and Silence .
3. Merlau-Ponty says that consciousness, by becoming a corporeal existence, ends up being part of the world it is building; For this, it delimits a phenomenology of a world always in a nascent state , which can also fit very well in Neruda's poetic phrase: because to be born I was born . Wandenfels, Bernhard. From Husserl to Derrida. Introduction to phenomenology . Madrid: Ed. Paidós, 1997.
4. Pollak Michael. Memory, oblivion and silence. The social production of identities in the face of extreme situations . Buenos Aires: Ed. Margen, 2006.
5. Ricoeur Paul. Memory, History and oblivion . Buenos Aires: Ed. FCE, 2004.
6. Wandenbergh Miguel, Diario 16 (April 14, 1995 ), obtained from "http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_grito_silencioso_(novela)"
7. But it must be made clear that this option is extremely ambiguous symbolically. Is Taka's option for silence in his suicide not a way in which he also saves himself? The novel, far from moral considerations, does not resolve it and we prefer to leave it open.
8. However, he did not contradict Taka since this character's memory was built on fantastic arbitraries, subsuming in them all types of contingency or evidence of supposed falsehood. Taka himself says that memories are built on dreams and dreams integrate everything, what was interesting to him was the effect this had on the dominance of those around him or on the tormented business with his inner being.
* This article is published under the San Marcos Foundation Agreement of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos - Japanese American National Museum, Discover Nikkei Project.
© 2008 Mario Zúñiga Lossio
