What Is (Not) Told: Memory and the Rhetoric of Silence in Domnica Radulescu’s Country of Red Azaleas as an American Émigré Novel

Abstract

The essay discusses rhetoric and multiple functions of silence as a means of remembering and forgetting in Domnica Radulescu’s novel Country of Red Azaleas as a typical example of exile fiction. Silence in the novel is presented as a blocker of traumatic memory transmission and expresses the untranslatability of trauma. Silence also becomes constitutive in the formation of characters’ new identity based on forgetting. The essay analyzes other forms of non-verbal/silent memory, such as memory of places and sensory memories and emphasizes their social and political dimension.

Keywords

• silence
• traumatic memory
• forgetting
• memory of places
• memory transmission
• sensescape