Memory and Hermeneutics: Remembrance as an Act of Reading in Claudio Magris’s “Esterno giorno - Val Rosandra”

Abstract

This paper centers on the relationship between memory and hermeneutics in Claudio Magris’s “Esterno giorno - Val Rosandra”, a story about the protagonist's efforts to remember his past from a series of mediated representations of his youth. The article departs from the aesthetics of reception to posit that, in the story, remembrance functions as an act of reading insofar as these mediated memories need to be interpreted, actualized, and inserted in the hermeneutic circle. In other words, memory becomes legible. At the same time, the story's structure has an effect on the reader's concretization processes since, in “Esterno giorno”, the empty spaces behave like silences. These particularities indicate that the process of concretization needs this network of representations and intradiegetic mediations, which presents a significant variation from how the act of reading is normally understood. This article puts forth that this understanding of the relationship between memory and hermeneutics raises some questions in the context of reception theory. That is, by seeing himself inserted in the protagonist's hermeneutic circle, the reader is decentralized, which causes, not so much a dismissal of the theoretical framework, as an opening towards new paths of literary interpretation.