https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.079
“Then I remembered”: Memory and Recognition in Ciaran Carson’s Still Life
ASWIN VIJAYAN
Research Scholar (Part-time)
Research and PG Department of English
St. Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Devagiri
Affiliated to the University of Calicut
Supervisor: Dr. Dennis Joseph
& Assistant Professor
Research and PG Department of English
The Zamorin’s Guruvayurappan College, Kozhikode
Email: aswinvijayan@zgcollege.ac.in
Abstract:
“…the power of a work of art consists in the way it triggers powerful unconscious memories, buried in the amnesia of daily life—almost like the ring of recollection” (Ramanujan 93).
Ciaran Carson (1948-2019) was a poet, novelist, and translator from Northern Ireland whose poetry is often compared to James Joyce’s prose for its cartographic quality. Attentive reading of Carson’s poetic oeuvre reveals how he uses memory and recognition as tools to enhance the narrative power of his poems. A. K. Ramanujan, in his essay “The Ring of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Indian Literatures” (quoted above), traces the role memory plays in Indian literary traditions. This paper applies the framework provided by Ramanujan to analyze Ciaran Carson’s Still Life (2019), his final collection published posthumously. This paper explores how Carson uses the power of art (in the form of paintings, music, and literature, both his and the works he alludes to) in Still Life to evoke memory to reflect on his life, on time, and on mortality. Carson draws on various aspects of memory and this can be understood at four levels: the factual, the collective, the imagined, and the memory of things. Using Ramanujan’s theoretical meditation on memory as a launchpad, the paper attempts to understand how Ciaran Carson exposes the essential nature of language itself as memory.
Keywords: Memory Studies, Poetry, Ciaran Carson, Northern Ireland, A. K. Ramanujan, Ekphrastic Poetry
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