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Section 4. General questions of philology and linguistics
DOI: 10.29013/EJLL-23-4-45-49
THE ROLE OF MEMORY IN THE FORMATION OF THE STORY GENRE IN THE NOVELS OF HERTA MULLER
Mamatov Ravshanbek Rustamovich 1
1 Namangan State University, Namangan, Uzbekistan
Cite: Mamatov, R. R. (2023). The role of memory in the formation of the story genre in the novels of Herta Muller. European Journal of Literature and Linguistics 2023, No 4. https:// doi.org/10.29013/EJLL-23-4-45-49
Abstract
Herta Muller received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. The memoirs of Herta Muller became the reason for writing works. In this article, you can read the scientific reflections of European scientists on the works of art written by Herta Muller. In the scientific article, you can also see the objective attitude of world scientists to Herta Muller..
Keywords: Herta Mullers life memories, Herta Mullers world view, scientific views of World Scientists, memory, symbol, allegory, metaphor
Introduction
Reflections on the place of the past in the present and on the nature of memory, sounding in German-language literature, occupy an important place in it, but are very diverse. Categories such as "memory", "history" and "past" can be instrumental zed in different ways. Collective and individual memory can both intertwine and act separately. Different authors may consider memory from a psychological point of view, or more attention will be paid to social memory, within which priority may be given to cultural or subject varieties of social memory. Memory can be represented as a mechanism structuring a human personality, or special attention can be given to its
artifacts - monuments, "places of memory". Whether writers raise historiosophical or anthropological questions, memory somehow acts as a medium, an intermediary between an individual and the world around him. Thanks to it, both the subjectivity of a person and his understanding of historical processes are built. Memory, therefore, is inextricably linked with the processes of self-perception and perception of the laws of the outside world.
Materials and Methods
Philosophical understanding of the essence and work of memory was carried out by Plato, but Aristotle made a significant contribution to the study of memory as such in his
treatise "On Memory and Recollection". Unlike Plato with his idea of anamnesis, Stagirit linked the work of memory with the reproduction of perceptual experience, and not the restoration of knowledge about eternal ideas. Aristotle compared the work of memory with the printing of an image on wax: the image of a sensed object is preserved in the same way as a ring leaves an imprint. This trivial, at first glance, idea is of great importance for the development of the philosophy of memory in general. Aristotle himself drew attention to the fact that behind this comparison lies the problem of what is considered an object of memory: the memory object itself acting from the outside or the mental image that was formed during perception. The Greek philosopher solves this question as follows: the idea itself is a product of the imagination, and if it refers us to another real thing, what it depicts, then it is a memory, an object of memory. The concept of representation developed by Aristotle will find its application in the philosophy of the twentieth century, in the work of P. Rik-er "Memory, History and oblivion", based on the ideas of Bergson and Husserl.
Commenting on Riker's work, A.B. Aniki-na writes that the above-mentioned Aristotelian division "into an image in itself and something else, what it indicates, will constantly appear in Riker's concept as the basis of representation" (Anikina, A. B., Traktat, A. B., 2016). Following the thought of the Greek philosopher, Paul Ricoeur remarks: "Aristotle's dictionary is clear; he leaves the term phantasma behind the inscribed image as such, and the term eikon behind the correlation with something other than the image" (Riker, P., 2004).
Aristotle, according to Riker, thus distinguishes the concept of eikon as an image formed in memory. Comparing it with typos - the initial "imprint", Riker, according to A. B. Anikina, draws the following relations between them: "Some initial, involuntary perception under the influence of memory and imagination turns into an image-representation of the perceived. In it, the separation of the significant from the insignificant takes place, logical connections are built that are elusive at the initial perception". Memory, thus, acts as a kind of herme-neutical mechanism that builds involuntarily
received information into a logically coherent narrative.
Following the reflections of the culturol-ogist K.G. Frumkin, one can come to the conclusion that collective historical memory acts in the same way as individual memory: the phenomenon, after its termination, seems to shrink into one point, and after that it "radiates" no longer in the form of a temporal sequence, but in the form of spatially ordained events.
It has been repeatedly noted that memory is a fundamental phenomenon for the poetics of Herta Muller. Thus, Greta Ionkis notes that "Herta Muller's personal memory expands to historical," (Ionkis, G., Muller, M., 2010) and the translator of Herta Muller quoted by her, M. A. Belorusets, identifies memory as the main material and "fabric basis" of her works, defines it as an artistic device.
Aleida Assman in her article "Who owns the story?" relates the "Swing of Breath" by Herta Muller to the genre of the novel memories. Assman believes that the genre of the novel memories, unlike the novel of upbringing, is always associated with trauma: "this is not the story of the formation and formation of identity, but traumatization and its consequences." Unlike Siguan, Assman believes that in the "Swing of Breath" Muller does not distance the experience, but on the contrary, exposes the trauma: "her poetic "ruthless" language brings readers closer to the painful experience... There is no salvation, looking back, narrative structures and defense mechanisms in her text" (Assman, A., 2011).
Results and Discussion
In his later works, Muller often uses a non-linear plot construction - the sequence of events is interrupted by the narrator's memories.
So, in the novel "The Heart is a Beast", the narration is interrupted by episodes reproducing the childhood impressions of the main character associated with the images central to the novel. On the very first pages of the novel, the heroine talks about her non-trivial associations associated with death, the atmosphere of which haunted the heroine throughout the entire action of the novel: "And also, when I think about death, it seems to me that every deceased person leaves a bag of words
for himself. I keep thinking of a hairdresser and nail scissors, because they are no longer needed by the dead. And more: that the dead will never lose a button".
Thus, the status of a person - his being in the camp of the living - is confirmed by his being between the poles of nature and culture. Accordingly, the first in opposition are "botanical" images of grass, vines, trees, etc. Verbalization of memories is compared with "trampling grass", mass killings - with "breeding cemeteries", and a person is likened to a cultivated plant: the heads, according to the childhood memories of the heroine, are cut in the village as "dry bushes", nails are cut off with scissors for vines, etc.
The associative field is supplemented by observations drawn from the recent past. In the personal notebook of her roommate who committed suicide, the main character finds the following entry: "Fleas start on everything when the sun is scorching. Even the wind carries fleas. And we all have leaves. When you stop growing, the leaves fall off, because your childhood is gone. But the leaves appear again when you diminish, because your love is gone."
The image of grass in the novel is associated not only with memories, but also with love, which "mows down" and grows anew, "like thick grass", like "the past mixed with straw" or "a stupid bush". In the "stupid" bush, the father of the main character hides a "guilty conscience" - "botanical" images become expressions of emotional experience stored in memory - both about bad offenses and about a loved one. The combination of all the "botanical" images creates a three-dimensional picture in the novel with a wide range of interpretation. The biological life of plants is compared with the spiritual human life in the metaphor developed in the text of the novel. The change of foliage and its cultivation are similar to the renewal and restructuring of images- representations in memory, in which the events of the linear flow of life acquire and renew their meaning.
As with Herta Muller, in the novels of V. G. Zebald, memory becomes the key to understanding individual identity. This happens in a detective form: the narrator finds witnesses or evidence of events, step by step eliminating gaps and ambiguities in them.
The form of the psychological detective is embodied in the novel Austerlitz, in which the origins of the identity of the central character, Jacques Austerlitz, are investigated. During a creative crisis, he comes to the conclusion that he is alienated from history and "in fact deprived of memory and the ability to think, and existence in general". An accident helps him to get out of this crisis: he finds himself in the waiting room of the train station, to which he arrived in early childhood in England from the German-occupied territory. The space of the waiting room revives the emotions received during the arrival in it, and becomes an impetus for the reconstruction of its past. As for Herta Muller, for Zebald, memory is not a knowledge of the sequence of events, but a property of the worldview, which "makes the head spin and feel heavy, as when looking from a great height at the earth from one of those towers that disappear in the sky" (Sebald, W. G., 1994). It is worth noting the most important works of foreign researchers on the prose of Herta Muller. One of the earliest studies is a collective monograph edited by N. O. Eke "How Perception is invented. To the study of the work of Herta Muller", in which the most important articles for this artikel are the works of F. Apelya "Letter. Separation. Towards the Poetics of Herta Muller's Wayward View" and "The Serapion Principle in the Political Position...". K. Becker, considering the poetics of Herta Muller in its proximity and repulsion from Romanticism and expressionism, and N. O. Eke's review of critical reviews of the work of Herta Muller. In 2005, P. Bozzi's work "An Alien View" was published (Bozzi, P., 2005), in which the study of Herta Muller's prose is based on the ideas of feminist criticism and multiculturalist ideas about the hybridity of the postcolonial subject, Herta Muller's early work is compared with the works of T. Bernhard, F. In-nerhofer and P. Handke. In the same year, the work of L. was published. Marven "The Body and narrative in modern literature in German" (Marven, L., 2005), in which the researcher most clearly examines the work of Herta Muller from the standpoint of the theory of trauma, comparing her prose with the works of L. Monikova and K. Hensel. In 2008, Ani Johannsen's work "Boxes, Crypts, labyrinths. Images of space in modern literature"
(Johannsen, A.K., 2008), in which the researcher expresses valuable ideas about the role of spatial images in the work of Herta Muller, the importance of which is emphasized in this article. In 2017, the collective monograph "Herta Muller. Handbook" (Muller, H., Eke, N., 2017) edited by one of the first researchers of the writer N. O. Eke. The creation of works that seek to cover the work of Herta Muller in the most complete, multidimensional way has been undertaken before - for example, the monograph "The Attraction and provocation of Herta Muller" (Predoiu, G., 2001). Predoyu, collection of articles "Herta Muller" (Muller, H., Haines, B., Marven, L., 2013) edited by B. Haines and L. Marven, collection of articles "Poetic creativity and dictatorship. The writer Herta Muller" (2013) edited by H. Mardt and S. La-gride, monograph "Language tact. The style of presentation of Herta Muller". However, the collective monograph of N.O. Eke presents today a work in which the work of Herta Muller is considered in the most multidimensional way. This is not a complete list of foreign works about Muller, which I would like to mention. In Russian Germanistics, there is a rather limited number of works devoted to the prose of Herta Muller. The research devoted to the prose of Herta Muller in the Russian-speaking space was announced in sufficient detail in the report of E. V. Andri-anova "The work of Herta Muller in the East Slavic cultural space" (2015). Attention is paid to the writer I. S. Roganova in her monograph "German literature of the late XX century and the actualization of the postmodern paradigm" (2007), where the sociocritical potential of the writer's prose is considered, the works of L. N. Poluboyarinova on poetol-ogy (2010) and the images of "hybrid beings" in the prose of Herta Muller (2013) are indicated. It is also worth mentioning the review article of this researcher about the work of Herta Muller in the collective monograph "The History of German Literature. New and Modern Times" (2014) edited by E. E. Dmi-trieva et al. The article by D. S. Kabanova "The modality of trauma: the City in Herta Muller's novel "Journey on One Leg" (2009), in which the writer's work continues to be considered from the standpoint of the theory of trauma, and the novel "Journey on One Leg" is
called postmodern. In the list of references attached to the publication of the report, her dissertation is also noted. Khairulina's "Conceptual metaphor as a mechanism for understanding the dictatorial regime in German artistic discourse (based on the works of Herta Muller)", which analyzes the functioning of conceptual metaphor in the discourse of Herta Muller. It is also worth noting the article by A. V. Nesmeyanov "Methods of sub-jectification of narration in the novel by Herta Muller "Atemschaukel", which discusses "I am compositional-architectural and lexico-grammatical techniques for creating a subjective narrator" (Muller, J., 2014).
From the excerpts from the following fiction novels, the writer has made the most of allegories, metaphors and symbols.
When the winter was over, Tereza said, a lot of people went for a walk in the city in the first sun. Walking like this, they saw a strange animal slowly coming into the city. It came on foot, although it could have flown. Tereza lifted the open coat with his hands in his pockets like wings. When the strange animal was in the big square in the middle of the city, it beat its wings, Tereza said. People started screaming and fled to strange houses in fear. Only two people remained on the street. They didn't know each other. The antlers flew away from the head of the strange animal and sat down on railings of a balcony. Up in the bright sun, the antlers shone like the lines of a hand. The two saw in the lines their whole life. When the strange animal began to flap its wings again, the antlers left the balcony and sat back on the animal's head. The strange animal slowly walked out of the city along the bright, empty streets. When it was gone from the city, the people from the strange houses came back to the street. They went about their lives again. The fear remained in their faces. She confused the faces. People have never been more lucky (Muller, H., Herztier, Fischer, 2021).
Conclusion
The novels of Herta Muller are currently of great interest to scientists around the world and Europe. Her scientific works on memories and spiritual experiences, written by Herta Muller, have become the cause of scientific research by many European scien-
tists. Russian scientists S. A. Kuznetsov and A. R. Khairullina have written dissertations on the work and creativity of Herta Muller. It can be concluded that the novels of Her-
ta Muller are still little translated into Asian languages. A lot of research work on the novels of Herta Muller can be continued by young scientists.
References
Anikina, A. B., Traktat, A. B. (2016). On Memory and Recollection by Aristotle and the concept of History as a Representation of Rikers Past, Philosophical Antiquity and classical Tradition, - l(2), - P. 398-399.
Assman, A. (2011). Wem gehört die Geschichte? Fakten und Fiktionen in der neueren deutschen Erinnerungsliteratur, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur. - 1(36), - 224 p.
Bozzi, P. (2005). Der fremde Blick, Konigshausen & Neumann, - 2(4), - 192 p.
Ionkis G., Muller, M. (2010). I am a memory of myself, Partner. - 1 (2), - 2. URL: http://www. partner- inform.de/partner/detail/2010/1/237/4041
Johannsen, A. K. (2008). Raumfigurationen in der Gegenwartsliteratur, Transcript Verlag, -1(3), - 240 p.
Marven, L. (2005). Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German, Clarendon Press, - 4(5), - 294 p.
Muller, H. Herztier, Fischer, (2021). - 1(2), - 124 p.
Muller, J. (2014). Sprachtakt: Herta Mullers literarischer Darstellungsstil, Bohlau, - 2(3), -324 p.
Muller, H., Eke, N. (2017). Handbuch, Metzler Verlag, - 5(6), - 287 p.
Muller, H., Haines, B., Marven, L. (2013). Novels, Oxford University Press, - 1(1), - 288 p.
Predoiu, G. (2001). Faszination und Provokation bei Herta Muller, Peter Lang, 2(4), 236 .
Riker, P. (2004). Memory, history, oblivion, Publishing House of Humanitarian Literature, -2(3), - 39 p.
Sebald, W. G. (1994). Die Ausgewanderten vier lange Erzählungen, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, - 2(3), - 215 p.
submitted 03.11.2023; accepted for publication 18.11.2023; published 16.01.2024 © Mamatov, R. R.
Contact: ravshanbek-mamatov@mail.ru
