About memory, silence and deafness in Kenzaburo Oe's novel: The Silent Scream 1
>> Part 1
In the first part of this article, dedicated to Kenzaburo Oe's novel: “The Silent Scream”, we investigate the link between memory, silence and deafness 2 with the interpretation of the personal space of the characters in said novel, trying to understand from a metaphorical reflection how these qualities articulate the ways of being of said characters, locking them in impossible things (senses, dialogues, interpretations, social ties, etc.) from a memory infected with deafness or opening them to understanding from the possibility of silence.
In this second part we want to investigate—to complement our reflection—how memory in the novel not only focuses on the personal level, but also how its metaphorical load reaches the collective level. There, the novel allows us to understand the active and passive qualities of memory, silence and deafness , configuring itself according to two dimensions: one based on the idea of a memory assumed as a hierarchical thing that coheres indifferently and another based on the construction processes, which gives us It allows us to understand how said memory is forged and the limits it has in its active or passive dimensions. 3
In fact, the actual title of Oe's book contains an interesting body of meaning. By using the name of a historical event, from which the struggles of memory begin, the history of the novel allows us to transcend the personal level of interpretation. The event is the rebellion that occurred in Shikoku in the first year of Man'nen and which featured the descendants of Mitsu and Taka.
Man'nen Year 1 Football
Upon returning to their town, after selling their old house to the supermarket owner, the brothers find him changed. The market has entered in the form of a supermarket and many of the habits of its inhabitants have changed (from the level of daily relationships to the spiritual level). But this change occurs based on a particular fact: the owner of the supermarkets is Korean and a former resident of the town, and for this we must take into account that the history of the Koreans in said community was ignominious: before they had been slaves who lived in a remote and poor space. But now, one of them was almost its owner and this had been achieved little by little; first, taking over the properties of his compatriots and over time buying the main houses in the town to be able to set up his business: an expanding supermarket, which he ran from the city.
At the time of the brothers' return, the owner had given the young people the opportunity to start a business by caring for and selling chickens. But the young people have no knowledge of chickens or business management. Thus, they end up failing in both aspects, since the chickens inevitably die due to lack of care. At this juncture, Taka manages to take advantage of his relationship with the owner of the supermarkets—as he is the main manager of the sale of his house—to gradually gain the total support of the young people. By winning them over, Taka configures absolute leadership through a series of symbolic and practical uses. For example, he uses soccer to unite the group, creating a formal team of players, since they do not know how to play.
On the other hand, it also unites them using traditional symbols, such as the return of farming tools that in the year of the Man'nen rebellion were taken from their families and which had the name of each of them. Or, finally, it enhances their cohesion, organizing from their memory the reading and interpretation of the rebellion, trying to get young people to identify with the violent characters of said event. But, this situation is designed to reproduce his interpretation of the story of the rebellion of Man'nen's first year. That is, create a new rebellion, but this time against the owner of the supermarkets, who in the eyes of the town's inhabitants has become the reason for their evils. In fact, he has all the supposed qualities to be one, since he is Korean and Koreans have been, in addition to slaves, enemies of the people in some other rebellion after that of Man'nen; In that event, the older brother of the Nedokoro also died at the hands of the Koreans.
Taka drives the community to a new rebellion, this time against the owner, using the soccer group as his forces of imposition. In this way, the people join in the actions of looting the supermarket, encouraged by the actions of the group and the gradual confidence that Taka's leadership emits. Thus, Taka's deafness (in terms of the interpretation from his memory of what happened previously) is configured as an axis from which loose and essentialist modes of interpretation of the community are articulated, such as: exacerbated nationalism; the closed interpretation of historical and present events, sustained by the changes that occur due to the arrival of the supermarket or the events of past confrontation with the Koreans; hierarchical forms of organization, from which, for example, generational dimensions are exploited, since young people want to become the absolute form of how the people should understand themselves; and, finally, the daily form of hidden violence that the inhabitants practice. 4 In that sense, the memory of the community itself contains a dimension of deafness around history, which ends up being complemented by the deafness that emerged from Taka. The two absolutely cohere, and within closed logics of interpretation and understanding, the subjects, ultimately converting them into inert things, without creativity, without personality, without true capacity for agency.
But, again, defeat: the rebellion fails and everyone ends up immersed in an aura of inevitable shame. Deafness imposes its own quality, that of being made only for itself, an empty and homogeneous form, without an exit, absurd in itself, but of an active, dominant and exclusive absurdity.
Now, it must be made clear that Oe, by criticizing this closed dimension of the community, which maintains a closed link with its tradition or everyday life, is also still critical of the closed interference of modernity and capitalism, a tax and utilitarian interference, which reifies traditional symbolism and suffocates it. In that sense, deafness from closed modernity ossifies traditional forms, but changes social functions or, on the other hand, transforms traditional forms but ossifies hierarchical functions. 5 The modernity that reaches the people maintains the dimensions of power that are exercised within them and subjects them externally to its domain. In fact, we can say that this externality is read and felt by the residents, however the way they interpret it remains infected by the deafness of their memory, which feeds back from this closed and unilateral modernity.
However, Oe, lets the silence flow, gives it that encompassing place that is its own, a silence that, as Bachelard tells us, will allow him to integrate the logic of ambiguously betraying the ghosts of the past in order to continue living. 6 And to interpret this and conclude our reflection, we must return to the metaphorical image that represents unraveling the past in order to relocate our interpretation of the world. Oe closes the book with a powerful idea: the incomplete beats at the bottom of the personal, traditional, modern or historical, and beats especially in that which supposedly, and from them, is completely said and has an already given form.
The Nedokoro house, representative of the last significant bastion in the history of the town, is destroyed by the owner of the supermarket: the ghosts unearthed from said destruction are ghosts of memory that allow us to betray personal ghosts, but also collective ghosts. or modern ones whose means of incarnation is deafness . For this we must understand that the meaning of this metaphor is no longer only to exemplify Mitsu's defeat, but rather shows us that this personal defeat is essentially based on a general defeat: the silence of History surpasses Mitsu and envelops He encompasses everyone around him and shows that his failures can no longer be understood under the absolute light of the central character, but under the paradoxical light of the defeat of said exclusive light.
Such defeat is located in the dimension of silence and, therefore, acquires another type of clarity: in it, the disabilities expelled from deafness are shown as possibilities, as new beginnings, as an opportunity to renew ties or reformulate the way in which We look at and make the world, both from a personal and collective level. These possibilities do not mean that deafness is absolutely defeated, since Oe shows us how it continues to be installed in the community, through closed modernity or traditional hierarchy; However, it allows us to understand that deafness is not the only way to understand and assume future practices organized from memory, since memory is born and maintained in processes of permanent construction, from which its meaning and practice constantly beat open and in struggle, both within dimensions of deafness that we must try to overcome, and from necessary fields of dialogue. 7
Kenzaburo Oe, gives us a novel whose metaphorical charge leads to redefining the way in which memory is articulated and articulated on the social and personal level, showing us that identity and social praxis, whether national, regional, spiritual or individual, are It is configured based on a constant reconstruction of our inabilities and limits, after having understood them as constitutive, but not in order to put emphasis on their negative sides, but on the contrary, converting this negativity into something positive, into a quality capable of open ourselves to new contexts, people, stories and opportunities.
Thus, in his novel, Oe allows the silence to end up consuming in its flame all those impossible walls of dialogue and practice, all those supposed absolute and total determinations, immersing us in the possibility of a renewed dance, which, in its movement incomplete and perpetual, it will keep the fire of hope burning...
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. Pollak Michael. Memory, oblivion and silence. The social production of identities in the face of extreme situations. Buenos Aires: Ed. Margen, 2006.
4. Here the work of framing is not only linked to the imposition of memory and its significant and social practices from the official level to the subaltern space, as Pollack rightly says, but in the subaltern space itself, this framing can arise as hierarchical and imposing as from the official space. Hence our refusal to use a term as a framework to reflect on the dimension of deafness , which crosses any social dimension in a passive and active way. However, we assume Pollack's idea that there is memory work, and that this is inseparable from the social organization of life. Ibid., pp. 29 -31.
5. Cohen, Abner. “Political Anthropology: the analysis of symbolism in power relations.” In: Political Anthropology . Barcelona: Ed. Anagrama. 1979.
6. Bachelard Gastón. The intuition of the moment. Poetic Instant and metaphysical instant . Mexico: Ed. FCE. 1987.
7. In fact, these dialogues can only be sustained if we understand that at the level of socio-symbolic networks, which articulate the ways of understanding, interpreting and practicing the world, the symbolic aspect of dialogue is only part of a dimension that includes certain material and organizational aspects (social): political possibilities, infrastructure, education, economy, etc. That is to say, dialogue can only be dialogue if it can contain this double dimension, which can truly give us an overcoming of deafness .
* 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
