Le due memorie di Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between memory and oblivion in Rousseau’s Confessions, in the belief that oblivion is not simply memory loss, but that it plays an active role in the construction of memory itself. We will analyse some episodes of the above mentioned autobiography, focusing first of all on that of the broken comb, which in the author’s memory performs the function – rather late – of “premier souvenir”. By setting the beginning of his conscious life to so an advanced time, Rousseau relegates all other memories to a kind of prehistory of the individual, which is why they appear loose, impressionistic and ‘idyllic’. What precedes the trauma of the comb must be ‘forgotten’, so that two types of memory take shape. The first of these memories, of an immediate and sentimental character, connects directly the present to the past (or so it seems), while the second one, of a more fragmentary nature, intertwines remembrance and oblivion. Moreover, from the excess of confidence with which the autobiographer uses these instruments derives also the tangle of contradictions that compromise the functioning of these mechanisms and leave residues, which we can connote as “clues” that refer to another possible story.