Romulus My Father

analysis
Truth, writing and national belonging in Romulus, My Father|
by Brigitta Olubas|
© all rights reserved|
Raimond Gaitas acclaimed 1998 autobiography of his father, Romulus, has recently returned to public instinct with the force out this year of the Richard Roxburgh film starring Eric Bana. In this try I want to make use of this occasion of a revival of interest in Gaitas story to return to the memoir and to consider the shipway it raises questions of truth in relation to the specifics of the lives it depicts in the context of the vexed and shifting terrain of national belonging. These questions were further rehearsed and explored by Gaita, in the years amidst the publication of the memoir and the release of the film, most pertinently for this discussion in his 2004 Quarterly Essay,  break down of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics, which explores the pressing question of political mendacity in the light of a larger consideration of the disposition of human and national belonging, and I want to draw on this writing in my discussion of the memoir.



1I begin by considering the ways memoirs foregrounding of the puzzle outings of memory (over, for instance, narrative) grant it a surplus propensity to open up the question of the temporality and the porosity of the self-importance, to explore the question of the self in time and in relation to the other, and to consider the relation between these ideas and understandings of individual selfhood and those of residential district and national belonging. Central to these issues in Gaitas memoir is the relation between the parent and the child, a relation that by its nature is accomplished in temporal terms, and one that in the end cannot declare a refusal of otherness. In these terms, Romulus, My Father foregrounds a foundational interimplication and interanimation at work in the self produced in and through memoir, a self that is spread out across time by this formulation, and that however speaks to the specifics of a particular life, and a...If you want to get a in effect(p) essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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