If Memory Serves
Reviews
By Sam Carter
S. makes the call every night, even if she is traveling. She checks in with M.L., her longtime friend, erstwhile collaborator, and one-time lover. As in so many conversations, a rhythm emerges: the same pleasantries, the same responses to the same questions. In this case, though, the repetition is far more pronounced. M.L. is struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s, which not only erodes her memory but also makes it impossible for her to understand what is happening to her. The phone line that briefly brings S. and M.L. together also reinforces how far apart they are—it helps them temporarily overcome a literal distance even as it amplifies its symbolic qualities.
As befits a technology that exemplifies ephemerality, those telephone conversations are loosely recollected rather than precisely recorded in Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations (Charco Press). First published in Spanish in 2010, the novel now appears in English courtesy of Jennifer Croft’s skillful rendering of Molloy’s sparse and precise prose. The forty-five titled yet unnumbered sections—most of which run less than a page—even constitute an episodic, quasi-telephonic structure, with each one producing the effect of jumping into a conversation that is, at one and the same time, a freestanding exchange and a single part of a much longer and more complex dialogue.
Those phone calls are not our characters’ only means of communication, but the distance still surfaces when S. is face-to-face with M.L. They have known each other for forty-five years, and S. now understands her role to be that of a friend as well as a scribe, one whose responsibility is “to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences.” But as S. reaches out over the phone or in-person to provide some sense of normalcy as so much else slips away for M.L., the novel—which Molloy herself has also described as a collection of impressions or scenes—keeps circling around the same questions. How can S. wield language to responsibly capture what happens to M.L., for whom that same language now becomes ever more elusive? What is the writer called on to do when faced with someone who is fading away from their former self?
These concerns set the tone early on. “I need to try and understand this being but not being here on the part of a person who is coming apart before my very eyes,” explains the novel’s short prologue. “I need to do it this way in order to keep going, to hold onto a relationship that keeps going in spite of ruination—that subsists, although all that’s (barely) left is words.” It is in the seams of this “in spite of,” in the space that S. attempts to pry open with her prose, that Dislocations focuses its attention, meditating on what it means for language to disappear when it might be the only thing that ever really mattered in the first place.
For M.L.—who, like S., once worked with words by putting them on the page and poring over them both alone and in classrooms—language now lacks its ability to reach out and establish a connection to some real referent. In one string of fragments, S. portrays M.L.’s hit-and-miss relationship with the traditional Argentine cookies called alfajores. Sometimes she utters the name Alfonsina; at other times, she confesses that she has no inkling of what the word might be. In another striking scene, M.L. becomes a sort of switchboard operator who wires together two speakers by translating across their linguistic divide. Most distressingly, however, she facilitates conversations between caretakers about herself, making it possible for others to articulate what is happening to her even as she cannot.
Molloy, who died earlier this year at the age of 83, also lived between languages. She grew up in Buenos Aires speaking Spanish as well as the English of her father’s side of the family, and she would later learn the French that her mother’s parents had spoken when she went on to complete a doctorate at the Sorbonne. She could not only switch languages but also shift from one genre to another, producing well-regarded academic criticism and fiction in Spanish. Those interests were ultimately overlapping and longstanding, and Molloy even helped create the first MFA program in Spanish in the United States. That NYU program has counted Diamela Eltit, the late Sergio Chejfec, and Antonio Muñoz Molina among its faculty. Among its alumni, Federico Falco and Alia Trabucco Zerán.
It was partly as an academic that Molloy shared so much with María Luisa Bastos—the M.L. of this work who lingers in a liminal zone between nonfiction inspiration and fictional license. Both of them wrote books on Borges, whose well-known story “Funes the Memorious,” a parable about the pitfalls of perfect recall, Dislocations alludes to. Although M.L. cannot remember with such precision, she ends up resembling Borges’ character. Funes simply recites the past without recognizing similarities or continuities, understanding all interactions and events in isolation rather than learning to link them. But another interlocutor haunts the text: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the subject of two articles that Molloy and Bastos wrote together. With a structure shaped by both fragments and spectrality—one that Susan Sontag memorably describes as “made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time”—that novel resonates with Dislocations and its attempts to grapple with absence.
One of Molloy’s longstanding critical concerns, one that contributed to her considerable influence on generations of scholars working in both the U.S. and Latin America, was autobiography. As she put it in one of her most famous works, that genre “is as much a way of reading as it is a way of writing.” This underscores the possibility of locating autobiographical elements in a wide range of texts. In Dislocations, however, the question of the “I” takes on a different, somewhat more tragic tone. As S. wonders at one point, “How does someone who remembers nothing speak in the first person? What is the location of that ‘I’, once the memory has come undone?” S. first considers these questions with respect to M.L. But she later turns them back on herself, particularly as she begins to realize that her own past is susceptible to change: M.L., the sole remaining witness to some of it, can no longer confirm or contradict S.’s version of events.
As S. dwells on the impossibility of reconciling the different versions of M.L. she has known, Dislocations reveals itself to be the chronicle of a disappearance foretold. S. holds onto the past even as she holds off fully confronting the present. Indeed, S. notes that, in the presence of M.L., she cannot get used to avoiding the word “remember” because she is “still trying to maintain, in those slivers of our shared past, the furtive ties that bind us together. And because in order to keep up a conversation—to keep up a relationship—we have to recollect things together, or pretend to.” We have to act as if, S. contends. Ultimately, in the fragmented space that Molloy invites us to inhabit briefly, it is as if we are the ones watching a dear friend’s devastating dissolution.
Sam Carter is a writer whose work has appeared online at Public Books, Music & Literature, Real Life, Full Stop, and Asymptote, among other publications.
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