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Part of
Discourses on the Edges of Life
Edited by Vicent Salvador †, Adéla Kotátková and Ignasi Clemente
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 26] 2020
► pp. 147–166

Memory, mothers and post-Freudian melancholia in Mercè Rodoreda’s ‘Night and Fog’

| Cardiff University | University of St Andrews

This chapter explores the relationship between post-Freudian melancholia, memory and mothers in the short story “Nit i boira” [“Night and Fog”] (1947) by Mercè Rodoreda. I relate the story to the concept of “desnéixer” from Maria-Mercè Marçal’s Raó del cos [The Body’s Reason] (2000). Both texts articulate the (im)possible task of freeing the maternal from controversial approaches to it such as that of classical psychoanalysis which determines the patriarchal rupture of the alleged plenitude of pre-Oedipal mother-child bond, or from the effects of a Western culture that, as Luce Irigaray claims, “repose sur le meurtre de la mère.” Alison Landsberg’s and Michael Rothberg’s views on memory help to read Rodoreda’s story, in which affection and loss are inevitably intertwined with history and politics.

Keywords: psychoanalysis, representation of the maternal, prosthetic memory, multidirectional memory, Post-Freudian melancholia, “desnéixer”, body, Holocaust / Shoa, twentieth-century Catalan literature, Mercè Rodoreda, Maria-Mercè Marçal
Article outline
  • Maria-Mercè Marçal’s concept of “desnéixer”
  • Mercè Rodoreda’s “Night and Fog”
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.26.10lun
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