Um mergulho no passado pelas ondas profundas da memória : “O mar” de John Banville

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the novel The Sea (2005), by the renowned Irish writer John Banville. The central themes addressed here are those of memory and space in the narrative. Space as an important constituent of the narrative, as well as of the subject's memories, his identity and traumatic relationship. This novel reveals human dramas and the ephemerality of life. The narrator and protagonist, Max Morden, is a sexagenarian man, who deals with the pain of loss and his own condition of aging and mourning. Max talks about love, sexuality, identity, old age, loss, death and grief, all loaded with a melancholy and reflective tone. The narrative takes place in two moments, at Max’s extremes life - childhood and old. The protagonist loses his wife, Anna, a victim of cancer and is imbued with an urgent need to deal with pain and understand life. Going back to the past seems to be the best alternative. Therefore, he returns to the small summer town in Ballyless, where he experienced his childhood, especially at The Cedars, rented by the Grace family. Max, as an art critic, decides to write about Pierre Bonnard, a French painter of his admiration, but his writing ends up becoming his own story, or rather, a therapeutic account of the important moments of his life. Still in childhood, the death of twin brothers Myles and Chloe, his friends, affects and traumatizes him, to the point of not wanting to go swimming again. Facing his anguishes and dramas, knowing that life is fleeting, a risky contract, reveals the emotional charge of the novel. Thus, the return to the ruins of the past, to the childhood home, inspires Max in his remembering act, in an invitation to immerse himself in memory. This resignification of the past, through therapeutic writing, alludes to a possible overcoming of Max in moving forward with the marks and tracks of yesteryear. Good or bad experiences, but that constitute the subject's being. This mnemonic and melancholy prose reflects deeply on the transience of life. Therefore, to analyze this novel is to expose these human dilemmas. And to observe how space is fundamental in the life of the human being that provides the memories experienced in him. The theoretical foundation is based on theorists, such as: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1999), Pierre Nora (1993), Harald Weinrich (2001), Sigmund Freud (2013), Joël Candau (2016), Aleida Assmann (2018), among others.