Considering that Teresa de la Parra is hardly as legendary a figure as some of the other authors in this course, I quite liked Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. As the oldest book on the syllabus, I expected it to read more like a nineteenth-century text, but found it to be quite stylistically modern, despite its setting. Maybe I’m searching for relationships that aren’t there, but many parts reminded me of Marcel Proust – the instable, fluid relationship to memories that are always already lost is the most obvious connection, but other themes like the preoccupation with the function of names, the fascination with that which is forbidden, and the critique of social norms through the eyes of a child seemed to recall passages from the Reserche. Given that de la Parra was living in Paris during the 1920s, I wouldn’t be surprised if Proust was an influence on her writing, though I am curious to know if there is any documented evidence of a connection.

One line towards the end of the book stood out to me as oddly troubling: “memories do not change, and change is the law of existence.” I understand the point she is making about the dissonance that can occur between our memories of things and their present reality. Yet the two halves of the quote seem to contradict each other, and I am drawn to agree more with the latter – are not memories a part of existence and thus subject to change? And is not the variability of memory integral to her entire story?

Memories are not static in two senses. First, there is their ebb and flow, forgetting and remembering; secondly, there is the way in which even those memories that seem so set in stone are constantly open to new possibilities for reframing. Both are subject to the contingencies of the present. One can learn something that radically changes how a memory is interpreted to the point of changing the memory itself (for lack of a better example from the text – the discovery that Papa is not, in fact, God). Sometimes this knowledge need not even be new; perhaps a buried memory that had seemed lost to time is unearthed and shakes one’s entire personal history. All this seems quite in line with Mama Blanca’s humble approach to life, aware that “our capacity for error is infinite” and always open to contingencies and reimaginings. Perhaps this reflection on the unchanging quality of memory is not said with the voice of the elderly Mama Blanca but with that of seven-year-old Blanca Nieves, who saw herself as “an experienced person who, aside from certain trivial details, knew all there was to know about life.” Or perhaps this freezing of memories is a conscious choice, a way to preserve the innocence of childhood that could otherwise be lost.

How do others interpret this line? Am I overthinking an offhand observation, or is there a tension between memory as a static object and a dynamic process in this text?