Extremes of ‘narrative by proxy’: ‘Memory’ in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery and ‘Oblivion’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words and Whereabouts

Abstract

This research is a comparative study of narrative strategies by Umberto Eco (1932–2016) and Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–) as the most extreme and diverse examples of the ‘narrative by proxy.’ Eco, in his narrative and critical writings, insists on ‘memory,’ on the act of remembering the past in order to build an identity and a future, while Lahiri with her novels in Italian puts emphasis on ‘oblivion’ and forgetfulness as the key to liberation from the conflict of languages and cultures. In the novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco builds an encyclopedic and paper memory of 20th-century Italy by means of memorabilia such as images, journals, novels, and comics. In the novel The Prague Cemetery, he uses not only a double narrator and the exchange between the model author and the narrator to render the narrator's identity ambiguous but also the false document on the Jewish conspiracy, which caused hatred against the Jews and changed the course of history. Lahiri, on the other hand, follows the style of Gertrude Stein, which is impersonal autobiography. In the novel In Other Words, she constructs a linguistic autobiography and in Whereabouts an impersonal one, by avoiding to name and identify the characters and places. Thus, this article is an attempt to demonstrate how the opposite concepts of ‘memory’ and ‘oblivion,’ in Eco's historical and at the same time anti-historical strategies and Lahiri's transnational and anti-conventional ones, can contribute to the development of the narrative by proxy.