"All The Names” and places of memory in José Saramago's fiction

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira Neto, Pedro Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.58155/revistadeletras.v1i5.330

This essay is a critical-interpretative reading about the Central Registry of All the Names. The place where people’s civil data are recorded is in this novel physical and symbolic structure. We observe the construction of space from the perspective of a formalizing ideology, since in the novel this category is exercised as an element of the narrative and as a field of meaning for the theme highlighted here: the bureaucratization of memory in the technical society. This is a reading accompanied by the theoretical elaborations of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Paul Ricœur, Jacques Le Goff, among others. By valuing individual memory, José Saramago’s narrator warns that if artificial memory and collective memory are an achievement of civilization, they are still, as a structure of control and power, a paradox to the human.