Experience and memory: Walter Benjamin and Alejandro Zambra in dialogue

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze the novel Formas de volver a casa, written by the Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, from two categories: memory and experience. In view of Benjamin's inspiration in Zambra's text and considering that Benjamin is also one of the experts on the subject of experience, the texts of the German thinker will be used as analytical tools. To do so, we will evoke The Storyteller, Experience and Poverty and On Some Themes in Baudelaire. In this theoretical entanglement, we identify some characteristics that can be apprehended to understand the situation of the narrator and main character of the novel of Zambra. He is a person who resents for supposedly not having experienced the period of the Chilean military dictatorship in the most extreme form, that is, as one of the victims of the regime. This "non-experience" reported in the novel is capable of provoking new reflections on categories and social actors postulated by Benjamin, such as: the silent soldier of the First War; and the ancient narrators, divided between the categories of the traveler and the farmer.