| Botho Strauss a writer of prose, essays and plays, belongs to the most interesting and controversial authors of the last thirty years. Like a seismograph he picks up numerous discourses, the most important one being Memoria . His peculiar and eccentric way of representing and reflecting on memory, in the early texts, is innovative, critical, self reflective, but in the later texts becomes neo-conservative, elitist and patriarchal. This later discourse sparked off a discussion, involving writers such as Peter Handke, Martin Walser and Peter Sloterdijk, about the role of the intellectual in German society.; I begin by examining how cultural studies approaches the topic of Memoria. I then apply to the texts of Strauss a ‘mnemonic reading,’ meaning, to explore and discover topographies of memory. Literature and the arts in general are perceived as places of memory, or as archives where cultural memory is kept alive. Quoting, or rewriting selections from texts, as described in theories of intertextuality, changes and keeps alive a tradition of literature within literature. A text becomes a palimpsest in which fragments of foreign texts suddenly become visible and can enter the readers memory. In Strauss, to form a memory from the fragments is not without major problems. The pieces move in all directions to form a paradoxical body of text.; In his early texts the narrator laments the impossibility of creating an identity based on personal memories and so he concentrates on the problem of how to represent memory within the context of increasing amnesia. The seemingly dead subject moves about within the texts where he hopes to build himself a place for his identity to survive. In reaction to loss of memory and identity, a calculated game appears in which the representation and experience of the past plays only a minor role. The author turns towards the models of aesthetic memory, adapting, for example, the romantic mode of writing. The metamorphosis of texts, such as those from the romantic period, occurs as a backdrop against which the writer projects his erotically inspired allegorical “memory theater.” Dramatization of the memory process leads him to conclude that memories only exist within the aesthetic world of literature, where they manifest themselves beyond a historical and social reality. At the end of his writing project, Strauss creates an aesthetic refuge of personal memories by turning himself into a “diarist.” The male voice regresses to an aggressive and melancholic mode of limited perception, which the author knows cannot be more than an artificial construction. |
