Epistemology of affections from the historical-memorialistic archives in the tale of a certain Orient

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur's thought, in Memory, history, oblivion, invests in the epistemological elaboration of historical discourse, invests in the epistemological elaboration of the historical discourse, through the memorialistic elements that instrumentalize the narrative representation. In the phase named as “documentary”, the “inhabited space”, the “historical time”, the “testimony”, the “archive”, and the “documentary evidence” configure the “archived memory” (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 155). In this perspective, the objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between memory archives and the devices that operationalize the inscription of historical discourse in the narrative, which are preponderant instruments to understand the hermeneutics of affections of Tale of a Certain Orient, first novel by the Amazonian writer of Arab descent, Milton Hatoum, published in 1989. The novel performs a mnemonic incursion through the rubble of the past of a family of Lebanese origin, which Manaus inhabits, in the first decades of the 20th century, as indicated by the time frames marked by the narrative voices.