The Importance Of Memory In Literature

The word ‘memory’ comes from Latin ‘memoria’ and ‘memor’ meaning ‘mindful’ or ‘remembering’. Memory is a faculty which plays an important role in the lives of human beings and it seems to become obtrusive in certain acute hours of personal history. In literature, the phantom of memory became apparent in the works of Rousseau, Goethe, and the famous Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who delved into the sustaining capacity of memory for the tormented selves. In the present world, memory attends as code to our multiple modes of being and shapes who we are as part of a historic sense of belonging. A collection of memory and its accumulation gives rise to what we know as nostalgia. Nostalgia is at “the very core of the modern condition, a symptom

In the historic sense of the term, diaspora is understood as a large scale migration of people backed by sectarian banishment. In the contemporary scenario, however, it is burdened with debated conceptions and suggestions. It has become a term which is ubiquitous in research areas of globalization, hybridization, migration, multiculturalism, exile, and territorial binarism. In literatures of diaspora, both memory and identity holds a special position and are interrelated and complementary to each other. Memory is central to the examination of one’s personal identity, which is understood in terms of longing and desire – for a lost home, place, and/or time. We find in studies of exile a kind of nostalgia which is the “suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return” (Kundera, 2003; 1). To talk about identity, expatriate zones have “relocated the Self there and Other here” (Dirlik, 1994; 581) and the spaces of in-betweens fabricate a demanding paradigm wherein one’s identity is disturbed and

“Leafless trees with ice-covered branches. Dog urine and excrement embedded in the snowbanks. Not a soul on the street.” (Lahiri, 2004; 30) The apartment she has to live in consists of three rooms “without a corridor”. (Lahiri, 2004; 30) The Namesake is a tale of composite indigenous images sketching the lives of immigrants and the problems they face in the host land. The affair of identity is the defining theme of The Namesake. It is without any doubt, a question of the ‘self’. The quest for identity in the case of immigrants is affected by a lot of factors, fundamentally cultural ones. The Indian immigrants in The Namesake undergo an intrinsic communication and confrontation between the culture of their home and the culture of the host nation: America. The second generation immigrants are attacked with furthermore anxiety and confusion as they are expected to learn and retain the culture which their parents hold so dearly, and they cannot connect with. “The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside.” (Lahiri, 2014, p.34) The Lowland is not a diasporic text in the full meaning of its term, but like a typical Jhumpa Lahiri work, it has in itself, the characteristic of diasporic dilemma, presented in many ways. The experience of