When the dead call the alive: memory as ethic commitment

Abstract

This text presents an approach to the Contemporary novel O espírito dos meus pais continua a subir na chuva (2011), by the Argentine writer Patricio Pron from the hypothesis that the narrator assume an ethical commitment with his father´s generation, that fought against the dictatorship, and with its own generation. The perspective adopted establishes relations between knowing and narrating, between the real testifier, who is mute, the father, and the heritage that gives the word to the son, leading to a commited writing from the heir as a way to fix the memory in a disenchanted world. The approach to the question of memory is done from an especific reading of the main mechanisms adopted by the narrator who proposes the construction of an amount of paralelisms and the simulation of a detective history to represent his own process to achieve the truth, wich can be reached only because de father has organized an archive with texts from different non literary materialities such as journalistic articles,
photographies, adds, annotations. Beyond the theme of memory, we approach to the theme of violence respecting the ordinary crime ocurred in the present time relating it to the forced disappearance of people during the Argentine dictatorship and the trauma in the survivors. This relation results in the argument that both generations were defeated because of the contradictions between social and historical permanences and changes that prove the maintenance of fear as an instrument of oppression.