The memory of the future and the anticipation of the past in Caderno de um Ausente, by João Anzanello Carrascoza

Abstract

This article aims to discuss memory as a projection for the future and not as a simple repository of the past. In this way, memory will be studied as the time of becoming. Writing plays a fundamental role in this process of preservation and extension of the present, which happens to be narrated as memory to be read in the future. Authors such as Anne Cauquelin (2008), in conceptualizing the ‘incorporeal’, and Norbert Elias (1998), who focuses on the human being's ability to synthesize time, contribute to the discussion about time, and therefore about memory. After the course of bibliographical revision, we will discuss the novel Caderno de um ausente, by João Anzanello Carrascoza (2017), as a representation of the need to build a memory for the future, for the time of absence. In this sense, Carrascoza’s narrative problematizes the question of the present time, absence and silence, which allow the narrator-character John, a university professor in his fifties and who has a newborn daughter, to apprehend the present corroded by time at the moment the events emerge, which leads him to an obsession to register each movement as past, finding in  fragile words the only mechanism to preserve the first few years in which he witnesses  his daughter’s life. Finally, time and memory will be seen as ‘incorporeal’, which are outlined in the act of the narrative, materializing themselves into words as momentary representations of preserving facts, but with the capacity to reduce the anguish awakened by the uncomfortable feeling of ‘non-being’, which corrodes the novel’s narrator.