Lost Citizens: Memory and Mourning in William Faulkner and Elena Garro

Abstract

Nations arise from collections of narratives that tell their stories, articulating and organizing the multiple relationships that allow communities to be imagined as singular and whole. Because of this, any nation—along with its state policies, social practices, and economic systems—is vulnerable to narrative revision. In all nations, multiple narratives link diverse peoples, lands, and events in an attempt to present a unified identity through what Etienne Balibar terms “a retrospective illusion” (86). The idea that the nation constitutes a singular entity or continuous subject is predicated on a belief that

the generations which succeeded one another over centuries on a reasonably stable territory, under a reasonably univocal designation, have handed down to each other an invariant substance. And it consists in believing that the process of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as to see ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only one possible, that is, it represented a destiny. (Balibar 86)