The reader and the writer meet in the space of the text, but they do so incompletely. For Lévinas, the Other is both the condition for recollection and the condition for the representation, since it is in conversation with the Other that the subject can communicate.The monument Kofman creates with Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is, finally, a home, but not a private home. It is a home that acknowledges the ways in which people and spaces interpenetrate one another. Kofman’s text is, on the one hand, deeply private. She makes no metatextual statements to introduce the reader to the space she is creating, for instance, and she does not do work for the reader’s benefit, such as explaining the significance of July 16, 1942 or The Lady Vanishes. This lack of gestures towards the reader may seem unwelcoming. Yet this very lack of purposeful welcome enables the reader to interact with Kofman and her text, to help build it out by providing the historical context and following the intertextual references where they lead. The home Kofman and the reader build together is a Möbius-monument, a space of escape routes and thresholds that allow for, perhaps, a measure of mutual comprehension while simultaneously acknowledging and preserving individual subjectivity. Architect Julian Bonder employs Lévinas when he explains how the ethical “working memorials” he builds should create a space in which the visitor can enter into a conversation with the Other and with the otherness of the past . While Bonder builds physical monuments, such as the Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage in Nantes, France, text may in some ways be a more appropriate medium for an ethical monument. As Ann Smock notes, text, especially for Kofman, is “sure to dispossess you,” weed growing systems robbing the writer and the reader of their subjectivity and enabling them to transcend themselves and, as Lévinas would say, to have a conversation .

Kofman maps her memories and city space onto one another, using the inherent intersubjectivity of text to create a monument in their intersection where both she and the reader may dwell.Mercè Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies differs in several significant ways from Perec’s and Kofman’s texts. Rodoreda’s text is a novel, not an autobiography . It takes place in Barcelona, not Paris, and it is written from Rodoreda’s exile in Geneva, in Catalan, not in French.That this text is in certain ways so different from the other two throws into relief their intriguing similarities. All three texts involve a painful and divisive wartime period, and all three are meditations on the relationship between historical and personal memory, and on monuments of the war period and the postwar. Finally, the meditation in all three texts involves the creation of a unique textual space that lays the foundation for a more nuanced monument than a simple chronological account or a physical monument. If Kofman’s text is about intersubjective space and Perec’s text is about the network of one’s own memory , Rodoreda’s text is about balancing memory with the tendency to ossify the past: that is, it treats the question of how to remember the past but not be trapped by it. Rodoreda seeks to create a monument that incorporates the present and allows for change and growth, a living monument. She does this by constructing a synchronous network of symbols, contrasting this network with a tendency to look to the past and towards one’s “roots. “Rootedness” implies fixedness; rooted monuments do not admit polysemy or change. For Rodoreda, both textual monuments and physical monuments may have this immobile quality, which contains an element of violence or constraint. At several points in El carrer de les Camèlies, the protagonist is violently fixed with a name or a mark. In contrast to these scenes of violent inscription stands Rodoreda’s vast and polysemous symbolic network.

In El carrer de les Camèlies, writing and language can be violent, pinning meaning and identity in one place like the name etched on a tombstone, but they also have the potential to provide freedom through the circulation of symbols, a process of signification and resignification. Rodoreda thus contends with a tension between, on the one hand, those physical monuments and the acts of writing, which is also a monumentalizing practice, that pin meaning in one place and, on the other hand, those monumentalizing processes that allow for a degree of polyvalence and freedom. This tension may also be seen on the difficult border between collective and personal memory. Collective memory does not exist as such, independent of individuals. As Halbwachs writes, “the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories” . On the other hand, the way that a collective has agreed or come to remember something, and the things it chooses to remember and forget, molds the individual’s recollection. “The past is not preserved,” writes Halbwachs, “but reconstructed on the basis of the present” . The individual has no access to the pure, preserved past, but only to the memories that he or she can create, which are shaped by the larger collective. The issue of what remains in collective memory, and how it remains there, is of particularly urgent interest to Rodoreda, writing as she was during the Time of Silence, when Republican and Catalan suffering was either officially forgotten and, when it was officially remembered, differed greatly from the way the victims remembered it . If we follow Halbwachs in thinking that memory is constructed through a kind of dialogue between “collective frameworks” and the individual, we see how an individual can influence the creation of collective memory as much perhaps as the “collective frameworks” can influenced what is remembered and how. Thus Rodoreda’s insistence on the maleability and mobility of memory is an insistence on the individual capacity and need to modify collective memory. Like the physical monuments produced by a society, language may also be considered a manifestation of the Halbwachs’ “collective frameworks.” Through that language, a group may experience, share and create a common heritage. On the other hand, that binding function of language can be restrictive.

El Carrer de les Camèlies is a textual monument out of language that is polyvalent, and both personally and collectively significant. In creating such a monument, Rodoreda is advocating for a writing that binds a community together but does not suffocate it in doing so. This loose binding allows individuals and the memories they possess to allow the larger “collective framework” to grow and change. A few central images express the tension between Rodoreda’s synchronous symbol network and monumentalizing practices that arrest the flow of meaning and are oriented exclusively towards the past. First, she treats the paradox of a stone angel or a stone bird: the angel is an image of flight and movement, but the stone angel can do nothing of the sort. A bird is a similar image of freedom and flight, yet in El carrer de les Camèlies, birds are often associated with stones. The second set of images are a pair: the cemetery and the garden. A cemetery is filled with immobile stone monuments, promising a fixed, unchanging memory that only looks backwards21. In the garden, the flowers may, like the monuments, carry associations with them, but they are also alive, able to grow and change22. For Rodoreda, the best garden is ungated: just as the stone monument in the cemetery constricts possibilities for memory, the gated garden constrains the flowers inside, fixing them in one space like the tombs in the cemetery. The story of Cecília’s life proceeds chronologically, indoor farming systems stretching from just before the Spanish Republic to the postwar economic boom . Cecília’snarration, however, is sometimes anti-chronological, moving from the effect of an event back to the event itself. The network of symbols in the text similarly pulls against reading chronologically, inviting the reader to follow the thread of a symbol and make connections between past and present. Such a reading is more synchronous than chronological, as the appearance of a symbol recalls to mind its other appearances. At times, the reader does not understand the full weight of a symbol until later in the text, recontextualizing its previous appearances. El carrer de les Camèlies thus has two structures: the chronological structure and the one created by her dense symbolic network. Because a reading of the text necessitates considering more than one moment in the text at a time, a quick summary of the text may help orient the reader of this piece. El carrer de les Camèlies is the story of a beautiful woman, Cecília, who was found as an infant by a night watchman outside of a garden gate in Barcelona, on the street named in the novel’s title. Pinned to her clothing is a piece of paper with “Cecília Ce” written on it. Cecília grows up with adopted parents, Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena.

She continually searches for clues to her parentage, in particular to the identity of her father, and runs away from home twice in search of him. Once she goes to the Liceu Opera House in search of him, thinking he may be a musician. She spends the war years with her adopted family, then runs away for good with her first lover, Eusebi, to live in a shantytown on the outskirts of Barcelona. After Eusebi is arrested and a subsequent lover dies, Cecília becomes a street prostitute and eventually a kept woman. Her living situations become progressively more oppressive and unpleasant, finally culminating in imprisonment in the apartment of a lover, Eladi, who forces her, over a long but unspecified period of time, to drink to the point of hallucination. After this episode, she is left on the street and rescued by an acquaintance who nurses her back to health. After she recovers, her fortunes change and she becomes a wealthy demimondaine in possession of her own home. Throughout, she is often pregnant, but always either aborts or miscarries the fetus; she never has a child. The text ends with Cecília in conversation with the night watchman who found her. He tells her that she had been originally left at the gate of another family on the street, but he decided that Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena, childless, would prefer to raise a baby. He also confesses that he was the one who pinned the name to her clothing, naming her after a girl he had been in love with who had died.The preservation from the rapid deposition of volcanic ash results in the archaeological visibility of flora that were either growing at the time of the eruption or were collected, stored, and utilized in some manner by the ancient inhabitants. Thus far, plant material has been recovered at this site in two main forms: carbonized macrobotanical remains and plaster casts taken when archaeologists encountered voids within the volcanic ash during excavations. Using paleoethnobotany as a methodological tool at Cerén reveals significant plant-human interactions of ancient Mesoamericans that add to other studies of less wellpreserved domestic settings, where investigations have typically focused on architecture and artifacts , creating a stronger and more in-depth interpretation of ancient household life in ancient Mesoamerica. The paleoethnobotanical collection efforts at Cerén have been highly productive, revealing foodstuffs within homes, kitchens, and storage facilities as well as exterior spaces such as small household garden plots, clusters of fruit trees surrounding each structure, and extensive infields and outfields of maize, manioc, and wild and weedy plant species. The assorted array of culturally and economically useful species reveals a detailed variety of foodstuffs readily accessible to the inhabitants on a daily basis that would have been incorporated into meals and contributed towards daily life as medicine, tools, construction material, fuel, and more. Typically, the recovery of ancient plant remains in Mesoamerica is challenging due to the generally poor preservation of organic materials in the tropical environment, with carbonization leading to the best preservation conditions . The long history of paleoethnobotanical research at Cerén allows for a deeper study of the social meanings behind Mesoamerican agriculture and home gardens with an intimate view of how these ancient people interacted with and viewed their environment in the past.