Present Absence: Memory and Narrative in Los recuerdos del porvenir

Abstract

Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir (Recollections of Things to Come, 1963) describes a world in which memory is at once paramount and unreliable. The novel's collective narrator (the town of Ixtepec) recalls the past while perched on a "seeming stone" that is, in fact, the petrified body of Isabel Moncada, one of the novel's two female protagonists. Garro's novel offers a powerful evocation of both the attraction and the difficulty of memory as that which is past and at the same time present. Although it contains concrete references to the violence of Mexico's Cristero Revolt of the 1920s, Garro's novel also presents a mythical time of long horizons and uncertain duration. The novel closes with the inscription, in stone, of an explanation of Isabel's betrayal of her family and community. The inscribed stone makes the female body legible and this readable body, in turn, makes memory possible. Yet Isabel's body is at the same time a monument to forgetting, to absence. The crucial link between body and memory becomes evident in the stone monument that preserves the body without its contents, an empty figure of unresolved loss. The voice behind the inscription, moreover, is that of a marginalized woman whose "definitive" version of events is unreliable. At once visible and invisible, the stone body of Isabel becomes a double figure of presence and absence that situates memory at the juncture of embodiment and disembodiment. The unresolved tension between presence and absence shapes the novel's approach to memory.