AWAKENING MEMORY IN PETER KRIŠTÚFEK'S THE HOUSE OF THE DEAF MAN

Abstract

The article explores the role of sensory perception in the constitution and reactualization of memory in Peter Krištúfek’s novel “The House of the Deaf Man” (Dom hluchého, 2012). Building on phenomenological approaches to memory developed by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the sociological concept of memory proposed by Maurice Halbwachs, the study argues that memory in the novel is not represented as an abstract cognitive process but as an embodied experience mediated by the senses. Rather than functioning as equivalent mechanisms of recollection, the individual senses perform distinct mnemonic and semantic roles. Smell is associated with childhood, family history, and the immediate return of lived experience, corresponding to the so-called “Proust phenomenon,” while taste introduces the bodily, naturalistic, and hereditary dimensions of memory. Hearing, despite occupying the conceptual center of the novel through the figure of deafness, does not trigger recollection directly; instead, it operates as a metaphor for historical trauma, absence, and the limits of communication. The article demonstrates that sensory modalities constitute a structural principle of the novel, organizing both its composition and its philosophy of memory.