Recalling Memory in Buñuel's and Darío's Autobiographies

• Author(s): Azevedo, Rui Vitorino
• Date: 2010
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/7906
• Origin: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
• Subject(s): Buñuel, Luis, 1900-1983; Darío, Rubén, 1867-191; Autobiography; Memory
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Autobiography is intriguingly complex and dependent on the autobiographer’s access to memory. This access, however, becomes increasingly selective and susceptible with the passing of time. It is within the context of this frailty, that I will attempt to look at the construction of memory and detect its use in two autobiographies from the Spanish-speaking world. Although the autobiographies of Luis Buñuel and Rubén Darío were written nearly a century apart, their common use of memory as a constitutive element in autobiography reveals how memory is never &xed or static, thus showing its expected transformative capacity and inherent dynamics. In fact, a reader of both texts is exposed to the act of remembering as a signi&cant theme within the narratives, which functions as both an authenticator and destarui vitorino azevedo "Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. " Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh 1 2 bilizer of the past. My main question then is how these two authors construct what they call their lives through the use of memory. Moreover, I presume that it is memory’s ephemeral and fallible nature that allows these two authors to construct their narrative.