For my penultimate blog post, I found myself reading Agualusa’s text closely to find overlap on the various themes found across the course readings. Memory is something which we looked closely at in all the readings—the certainty of events, and the unreliable narration which so often leads to the label of fiction for the stories. Can events inspired from the author’s experience indeed be called fiction, or instead embellished reality? “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers,” through use of false memory and dreams which can be interpreted and picked-apart by the most aspiring Freudian, serves as a fitting bookend to this central question.
Memory is a tricky thing. While it may be a chronicling of events, if one is of the belief that one’s own reality shapes their perception, there is no way to avoid a skewed perspective. This reaches its climax when political matters are at hand. Angolan independence is what the plot of the book revolves around, yet the main character Daniel Benchimol is not involved in these events, left to dream of revolutionary rapture instead of spearheading tangible change. When he finds a camera on the beach filled with photos of a woman he does not know, he quickly falls in love—he struggles with the concept of what is real and what is a mere illusion of happiness.
A defiance of convention is the best way to view this phenomenon. Memory in the book is best viewed as a past story within the present story, serving as a break from convention. Through these flashbacks, the author shows how narratives of the romance world are affected by outside influence, and indeed toys with the very label itself. What is the Romance World other than an umbrella term to describe a set of common motifs found across the texts, memory among them?
As the professor notes in the final lecture, it is simplistic to identify the authors of the Romance World as all working together to form a mosaic of culture. It is better to view the label as a shining of the spotlight on literature less-known outside their borders—the “cult classics,” as Western readers might say. Agualusa’s “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers,” our last read for the semester, fits into this focused category. By sharing the central theme of memory and unreliable narration as other readings, it is both made unique in its setting and plot while also conforming to the standards of what we refer to as the Romance World.
My final question is: Is the Romance World a catch-all term, or a tangible force in literature?