According to Jan Assmann, for Halbwachs collective memory should not be understood metaphorically: communities themselves do not have memories, but they condition the memories of their constituent individuals (Assmann, 36). Although conditioned by personal perceptions, individual memories are contextualized in the framework of collective memory discourse. denoted by the German term “Landkarten der Bedeutung”, or “maps of meaning” (Clarke, 41). As Maurice Halbwachs phrased it in his theory of collective memory (Halbwachs, 121), individual memory is always subject to the existing collective patterns of thought, or what Clarke et al. In this paper I will argue that through a complex network of individual and collective memories the protagonist emerges as a medium of ethnic memory. In a compelling combination of a first- and third-person omniscient narration, this family saga of three generations of Greek immigrants from Asia Minor to the United States challenges not only the framework of the novel, but also the constructions of remembering and forgetting. In terms of memory the protagonist goes to the extreme: Claiming to remember his life from the moment of his conception on, Cal/Callie even goes as far as narrating grandparents’ memories. “I was born twice”, states the narrator of the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
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