Form and Negotiation in Fictions of Memory

Drawing on recent research in the field of cultural narratology, this article contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogue between narrative theory and memory studies. After an overview of discussions at the intersection of narrative and memory, I build on Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s model of narrative negotiation and circulation to show how processes of memory-making in narrative are closely bound up with formal choices. This theoretical framework can help illuminate both the entanglement of narrative and memory, and the interplay of individual and cultural memory. I exemplify this discussion through a close reading of South Korean novelist Han Kang’s Human Acts. Dealing with the traumatic aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, the novel displays two formal strategies—multiperspectivity and second-person narration—to negotiate processes of remembering and foreground the ethical stakes of coordinating and collecting victims’ memories and experiences.