Narrating History and Memory: A Comparative Reading of Shujuan and Boku in Geling Yans The Flowers of War and Murakami Harukis Killing Commendatore

Abstract

According to Pierre Noras argument on the relationship between memory and history, these two concepts are not synonyms but antonyms. In the modern world, critical history begins from rational reflection, and it represses memory, which correlates more to the personal narrative field. The memory theory gives us the insight to reexamine the narration in literary works reflecting the war memory. This paper demonstrates different voices in narrating the individualized traumatic memory of the Nanking Massacre through the comparative reading between fictional works of Murakami Haruki and Geling Yan, Killing Commendatore and The Flowers of War. Shujuan, the protagonist in the novella of Yan, is both the observer and survivor of the massacre. Her storyline obtains two heterogeneous narratives that respectively belong to the field of personal memory and history; while her responsibility of memorizing the unrecorded experience makes her to pick a historical view to narrate her past. Boku, the first-person protagonist in Murakamis fiction, on the other hand, is a contemporary character with no experience or direct memory of the war. However, he gets connected with the war memory through the Murakami-style surreal experience. His experience demonstrates how personal memory can console the trauma after the war, usually neglected by the grand history. In the paper, I argue that although the two authors are from different cultural backgrounds and apply different styles, their narrations that focus on the personal memory field show the consoling power that connects the past and present and heals the trauma left by the war. Further, their fictions still contribute to the political and historical discussions on Nanking, presenting the power against revisionists and bridging the conflicts inside the discussions around such a traumatic historical issue.