Metatheater and mnemotechnics: postmodernist conventions in El olvido está lleno de memoria, by Jerónimo López Mozo

Abstract

Combining the recuperative power of memory and the existentialist contexture of metatheatre, Jerónimo López Mozo indistinguishably (con)fuses art and life in El olvido está lleno de memoria (2002). Incapable of distinguishing between his profession as an actor and the roles he plays on the stage and reluctant to come to terms with the traumatic past of his exile following the civil war, the protagonist of the play, Edmundo Barbero, is a decentered and unfixed character. Like all postmodernist works, El olvido está lleno de memoria centers on the problem of artistic representation, rejects the possibility of constructing an objective view of the world and categorically discards the notion of an absolute authority to reveal that the traditionally hierarchical relationship between the real and the fictive, past and present, and self and other has been irrevocably abolished