REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING IN UMBERTO ECO’S THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA AND MURAT GÜLSOY’S NİSYAN (OBLIVION)

Abstract

This article compares Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004) and Murat Gülsoy’s Nisyan (2013, Oblivion) in terms of how they explore the relationship between memory and selfhood. The unique multi-layered ways in which the novelists depict remembering and forgetting render such a comparative analysis insightful. In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, the protagonist, who suffers from memory loss following a stroke, embarks upon a journey of remembering to re-establish who he is/was. In this journey, the books he had read become his guide as he rebuilds his sense of self through his remembering of bookish memories. Approaching the topic from the opposite direction in Nisyan, Gülsoy portrays forgetting as a fragmentation of selfhood through a writer-narrator who suffers from dementia and struggles to write his final book. In his case, his scribbles of yellow pieces of post-it notes serve as the manifestation of the dissolution of his writerly self. The two characters of the two novels lean on the un/written word in their attempts at anchoring back to life as a reader and as a writer. In these narratives, the unreliable memory work becomes the precarious connection between life and death as the un/written word becomes the life force that holds together (or not) the broken structures of memory and selfhood.