Title: Emotion and the Reconfiguration of Memory: On the Representation of Memory in The Buried Giant

Abstract: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant revolves around an old couple’s search for their son, and shows how traumatic emotions trigger, affect, and even limit the reconfiguration of memory on two levels: individual and collective memory. On the one hand, constructed memory can heal the historical pain of emotion, on the other hand, it may be abused by greed, paving the way for violence. The individual or collective traumatic experience caused by the historical betrayal is constantly and forcibly involved in the present in the form of fragments, which promotes memory; the spatial movement of the body promotes the collision and communication of fragment memories, and in this process the individual or collective memory is constantly modified and shaped; the transmission of emotion in the past and present of individuals, as well as across generations, makes individual or collective identity recognized. In the whole process of emotion participating in memory construction, the two are in the dynamic of triggering and stimulating each other, and communicating and negotiating with each other. The accumulated traumatic emotion forces the individual to a balanced point (historical justice), but this balance may soon be broken.

Keywords: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, emotion, memory

Author: Xiuli Zhang, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2022.04.004