Screen Memory - Department of English

Screen Memory
At just the moment Proust was seeking salvation in
hypermnesia, Freud was projecting memory as a
consummate and perpetual trickster that transforms
everything in accordance with needs of which we
are not aware.
Terdiman
Freud deserves a crucial place in this survey because he
severely destabilized classical notions of memory. Freud’s
theorizing about memory was itself, Terdiman suggests, a response
to memory crisis: “when memory fails or we fear its failure, we
devise hermeneutics to remedy that gap”:
When, in dreams, in parapraxes, in hysteria, and in the
other transference neuroses, the present unexpectedly
becomes inexplicable on its own terms, Freud discovered
he could productively invoke the covert persistence of
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the past and the determinations of a memory whose
extent and intensity no one before him had ever
conceived as so ubiquitous or so sovereign (1993:247).
More than creative memory, more, even, than the confusion of
memory and fantasy, Freud tried to demonstrate dynamics of
fabrication in the psyche that could cunningly duplicate the
effects of memory (even duplicating its stamp of authenticity).
Memory was a “hypocritical counterfeiter,” a version of
Descarte’s malin génie (Terdiman 1993:292). Memory was not
natural or original, but a species of calculated after-effect.
Freud also textualized memory: it was not transparent but layered
and coded. A strict believer in the indelibility of memory, he
also made memory much more inaccessible, subject to a fierce
dynamic of desire; what counted as memory for him was outside of
or under the storehouse.
The instrument of this undoing was an entity Freud called
the screen memory, signifying that the memory in question was not
a memory at all but a screen for an inaccessible memory. To the
rememberer, the movie playing on the screen feels natural. The
clue to its falsity is a surface paradox: that it is really quite
insignificant as memories go, but held on to as if it were
significant.
Screen memories are usually childhood memories carrying
pleasant reminiscences. Not only are screen memories pleasant,
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they also tell a relatively insignificant story; and this is the
screening designed to protect their catastrophic importance. Like
so many items in Freud’s mental universe, they must be read
through their opposites; in this case: after childhood,
unpleasant, significant. The subject of memory is thus a huge
enigma for Freud.
After finishing the essay, Freud told Wilhelm Fliess that he
had liked the paper “immensely” while producing it, “which does
not augur well for its future” (1985:351). Approaching the
subject in a spirit of common-sense rationalism, he assumes that
memories are retained and reproduced in direct proportion to
their importance. In the case of childhood memories this law
seems to be reversed, and Freud pretends to be astonished by
these “mnemic images, whose innocence makes them so mysterious”:
“I feel surprised at forgetting something important; and I feel
even more surprised, perhaps, at remembering something apparently
indifferent” (3.306 and 303). We find, Freud says, such
displacement strange to contemplate.
Screen memories, then, work to conceal “an unsuspected
wealth of meaning . . . behind their apparent innocence”: “They
relate to [repressed] impressions of a sexual and aggressive
nature, and no doubt also to early injuries to the ego
1
(narcissistic mortifications)” (3.309 and 23.74). Freud
characterized them as “‘mnemic residues’ which take on a
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compulsive quality as they act to protect the subject from
repressed trauma or desire” (19.20 and Furnari).
These memories are of course not completely fabricated; they
incorporate actual memory-traces. Each of the details that makes
up the representation, Serge Leclaire states, “is evidently
borrowed from a different context and assembled into the
uncertain composite image” (78). Screen memories are apparent
memories of one's earliest years that are actually formed during
other periods of emotional arousal. The retrogressive screen
memory is constructed at the site of a later event, out of
psychic events from many periods of our lives, and organized into
a strong, clear memory: “In these [later] periods of arousal, the
childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say,
emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives,
with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming
them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves"
(3.322).
In 1899, Freud proclaimed a law of childhood amnesia which
stipulated that memory does not function until the fourth or
fifth year and if a memory carrying an earlier date stamp does
arise, it is invariably false. This is not due to fading memory
or psychological development, but blockage (distinguishing, as he
says so, between a memory and a memory-trace). Memory is, in
fact, operative much earlier:
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No one calls in question the fact that the experiences
of the earliest years of our childhood leave
ineradicable traces in the depths of our minds. If,
however, we seek in our memories to ascertain what were
the impressions that were destined to influence us to
the ends of our lives, the outcome is either nothing at
all or a relatively small number of isolated
recollections which are often of dubious or enigmatic
importance (3.303). 2
By way of contrast, Vico had claimed that children have
exceptionally strong memories, and Ribot felt that “The earliest
memories are the most secure and solid of all” (Roth 1989:56).
Diderot had simply declared that “The time of childhood is the
time of memory” (Poulet 198). And certainly no childhood amnesia
operates in Proust when he is blessed with the receipt of his
entire childhood in Combray.
Like most entities in Freud’s mental universe, screen
memories both conceal and express past meaning. They are a double
formation: “Two psychical forces are concerned in bringing about
memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the importance
of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while
the other--a resistance--tries to prevent any such preference
from being shown” (3.306-7).
In addition to pleasure and triviality, screen memories are
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also characterized by an unusual sharpness of image and produced
in a register of clarity--“too clearly, one is inclined to say”
(3.305). In the analysis of the specific dream behind his 1899
essay on this subject, Freud exaggerates the qualities of
pleasure and clarity, convicting the unconscious of being a comic
artist. Of the dandelion episode at the center of the memory, he
writes,
Now what is there in this occurrence to justify the
expenditure of memory which it has occasioned me . . .
. Altogether, there seems to me something not quite
right about this scene. The yellow of the flowers is a
disproportionately prominent element in the situation
as a whole, and the nice taste of the bread seems to me
exaggerated in an almost hallucinatory fashion. I
cannot help being reminded of some pictures that I once
saw in a burlesque exhibition. Certain portions of
these pictures, and of course the most inappropriate
ones, instead of being painted, were built up in three
dimensions–-for instance, the ladies’ bustles (3.311-
312).
The memory is one of the subject at play in a meadow of
dandelions with a boy and girl cousin, John and Pauline, his
half-brother Emmanuel’s children. At a nearby cottage “two women
are standing chatting busily, a peasant-woman with a handkerchief
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on her head and a children's nurse.”
We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is
holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The
little girl has the best bunch; and, as though by
mutual agreement, we--the two boys--fall on her and
snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in
tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her
a big piece of black bread. Hardly have we seen this
than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage,
and ask to be given some bread too. And we are in fact
given some; the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long
knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious--
and at that point the scene breaks off (3.311).
Freud distinguished three types of screen memory: an early
memory screening an equally early experience, a late memory
screening a childhood event [the “pushed forward” variety], and
retrogressive screen memory, in which a childhood memory screens
a later concern (3.320). Freud suggested that C. F. Meyer's novel
The Monk's Wedding
magnificently illustrates the process occurring in
later years in the formation of fantasies . . . . a new
experience is in fantasy projected back into the past
so that the new persons become aligned with the old
ones, who become their prototypes. The mirror image of
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the present is seen in the fantasied past, which then
prophetically becomes the present (1985:320).
The 1899 essay is almost wholly concerned with this third
type: an innocent childhood memory that was ignited by some later
trauma and a substitute memory of childhood composed to hold that
later trauma in its coils. Freud’s translator James Strachey
found this emphasis to be a “curious thing,” since “the type of
screen memory mainly considered in the present paper . . . almost
disappears” from the psychoanalytic record, to be replaced by a
second type, the “pushed forward” memory (3.302). The second type
of screen memory soon comes to be regarded as the regular type,
and it is the only type of screen memory that Freud deals with in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life only two years later. 3
Why did Freud feature only one of three types of screen
memories in this essay and why was this choice almost immediately
cancelled in (and by) the development of psychoanalysis? The
answer seems obvious: with the abandonment of the seduction
theory in 1897 and the development of a theory of infant
sexuality (by 1899), the period of early childhood became the
only period in which serious repression occurred and thus the
period whose memories had to be most rigorously screened by
memories of the “pushed forward” variety. 4
The subject of the 1899 essay, is fully in possession of his
childhood memories, or so he believes:
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I have at my disposal a fair number of early memories
of childhood which I can date with great certainty . .
. all these memories of mine relate to my birthplace
and therefore date from my second and third years. They
are mostly short scenes, but they are very well
preserved and furnished with every detail of sense-
perception, in complete contrast to my memories of
adult years, which are entirely lacking in the visual
element (3.309).
Freud is the patient in fact if not in behavior; this therapeutic
transcription was quasi-autobiographical.
The patient soon comes to know that the experience
registered by this memory never occurred. All the analyst has to
do to dispel it is ask whether this memory had recurred
“periodically since his childhood, or whether it had perhaps
emerged at some later time,” and the patient immediately knows
that this childhood memory never occurred in his earlier years
(3.312). He can, however, identify its later trigger, “the
occasion which led to my recovering this and many other
recollections of my earliest childhood”: a return visit to
Frieburg at seventeen where he nourished a secret love for
Gisella Fluss, the fifteen-year old daughter of the family with
whom he had previously stayed (3.312-23). He then recalls a
second “occasion” three years later when he again saw the two
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playmates of the childhood memory-scene. There was no love on
this occasion: he was at the University, “a slave to my books. I
had nothing left over for my cousin.” He believed, however, that
his father and uncle had made a plan for him to marry the girl
(3.314).
The childhood memory emerged on the second occasion,
attached to two experiences: desire for Gisela and shame over the
financial crisis that had originally caused his father to
relocate the family. Freud tells his alter ego that he “projected
the two phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory
of them. The element about the alpine flowers is as it were a
stamp giving the date of manufacture. I can assure you that
people often construct such things unconsciously––almost like
works of fiction” (3.315). Freud’s later experience of certain
yellow flowers in the Alps had helped to trigger this childhood
recollection of the meadow scene with its dandelions when he was
aged three and still in Freiburg. 5
Do screen memories connect us to our childhood in any way?
Freud hesitates among various answers. At times he is positive
that there is a connection: "Not only some but all of what is
essential from childhood has been retained in these memories . .
. . They represent the forgotten years of childhood” (12.148). In
the essay, Freud offered a compromise position:
You have accepted my assertion that every suppressed
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phantasy of this kind tends to slip away into a
childhood scene. But suppose now that this cannot occur
unless there is a memory-trace the content of which
offers the phantasy a point of contact–-comes, as it
were, half way to meet it . . . . So the phantasy does
not coincide completely with the childhood scene. It is
only based on it at certain points. That argues in
favor of the childhood memory being genuine (3.318-19).
Freud resists concluding that screen memories are false but,
in his vacillations, thoroughly undermines the validity of
childhood memory. The final sentences of the essay suggest that
there is no such memory, only screen memories projected back into
a mythical childhood: “The raw material of memory-traces out of
which [the screen memory] was forged remains unknown to us in its
original form.” And the recognition of this fact, he concludes,
"must diminish the distinction we have drawn between screen
memories and other memories derived from our childhood." Freud
ends the essay with a radical challenge to the integrity of early
memories: “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any
memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our
childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show
us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at
the later periods when the memories were aroused” (3.322).
In an 1898 letter to Fliess, Freud had declared childhood to
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e constitutionally mantled in forgetfulness because of the
crucial work that is done in the “prehistoric period of life,”
the constitution of our curiously angular psychology. Childhood
is “the source of the unconscious and alone contains the
aetiology of all the psychoneuroses, the period normally
characterized by an amnesia analogous to hysterical amnesia”
(1.274).
Freud’s conclusions are confirmed by “Diverse and wide-
ranging studies” that agree
that childhood amnesia for most events before the age
of four or five is universal . . . . True, most of us
possess a set of internal pictures of those early
times. But these pictures seem to fall into several
classes: (a) memories stimulated or created by photos
or family lore which may or may not be our memories;
(b) frightening or otherwise intense or traumatic
experiences which seem to be recallable due to the
sheer impact certain events had on our lives; and (c)
so-called "screen" and "telescoped" memories, which are
the most common memories of early childhood (Hedges
15).
The second category is presumably the “seduction,” which Freud is
in the process of abandoning. 6
James Strachey noted that the concept of "screen memories"
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was closely related to other psychoanalytic concerns, other
“problems concerning the operation of memory and its distortions,
the importance and raison d’être of phantasies, the amnesia
covering our early years, and, behind all this, infantile
sexuality” (3.301). It also resembles other psychoanalytic
formations, like the symptom, the fetish, nächtraglichkeit, and
the dream.
Like the symptom, the screen memory is produced by a
compromise between the thrust of repressed contents and the ego’s
defense against them, a substitute formation that both obscures
and reproduces the original content. Freud claimed the fetish to
be a “screen memory,” a “remnant and precipitate” that conceals
“a submerged and forgotten phase of sexual development” (7.154).
Nächtraglichkeit describes the ways in which an incomprehensible
or traumatic infantile experience is nonetheless somehow retained
unconsciously and reactivated as screen memory at a later time in
a different context: “the delay which is in the beginning”
Derrida called it (1978:203). Nächtraglichkeit is the mechanism
for “pushing back” that produces the screen memory discussed in
the essay. In “Recollecting, Repeating and Working Through”
(1914), Freud stated that screen memories represent the forgotten
years of childhood “as adequately as the manifest content of a
dream represents the dream-thoughts" (148). The dream is another
formation analogous to the screen memory; made out of memory but
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passing as something else. 7
The falsification of the past produced in screen memories
plays its part in the construction of subjectivity (or, as Lacan
would have it, “resubjectified” through the “mnemonic
catastrophe” of nächtraglichkeit): the innocent, pleasant, clear
principles of existence thus displayed would obviously support a
particular myth of childhood and human nature (Smith 85). Screen
memories are part of a system (perhaps the system itself) that
produce narratives of normality, of a glowing childhood.
But if screen memories are partly or wholly false, is there
an alternate concept of true memory in the Freudian system? In
the screen memory essay, Freud pays lip service to “normal”
memory, a memory that is abruptly bracketed by the existence of
these aberrations, but it is unclear whether he really credits
its existence. Is the state of childhood memory the condition of
all memory? Leclaire seems to think so: “The practice of analysis
forces us to recognize that all the recollections registered in
what we call memory always create . . . a limit or a screen,
beyond which unfolds the scene of another memory” (76). Terdiman
puts an extreme case:, conscious “recollection exhibits a
positively wanton disloyalty to the truth. There seems no
seduction before which its representations will not yield”
(1993:291). Forgetting also seems to be traumatic for Benjamin, a
form of repression; as he says, “forgetting is never innocent”
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(Bogaç 73). 8
There is another systematic split in psychoanalysis–-
conscious/unconscious–-and it also is crucially inflected by
memory. In a seemingly paradoxical turn, memory belongs only to
the unconscious: Freud “only acknowledged memory insofar as it is
unconscious, denying to consciousness even the capacity of
memory” (Leclaire 76). In one sense, the rationale for this
seeming paradox is almost simple-minded, the sort of mathematical
thinking that lay behind Augustine’s cavern, Déscartes’
intellectual memory, or Bergson’s soul: that consciousness is not
sufficiently capacious to store all our perceptions and thoughts,
“Consciousness has no capacity for the retention of anything”
(Freud 5.540).
A more complex version of this difference, according to
Terdiman, is that the unconscious “lodges an integral and
unchanging reproduction of the past (though not the past our
conscious self has lived), whereas consciousness circulates a
mobile and ungroundable representation of these contents to which
direct access is theoretically impossible. These two memories
cohabit within us but cohere nowhere” (1993:289-90). The process
of nächtraglichkeit allowed Freud to conclude that leaving a mark
in memory and being conscious of something are independent
processes: “such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the
fact of becoming conscious” (18.25). The impression of an
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experience leaves “behind a laborious [memory] trace which has
never been perceived, whose meaning has never been lived in the
present, i.e. has never been lived consciously” (Derrida
1978:214).
This may explain why for Proust and Benjamin as well as
Freud what we retrieve from memory is something we have never
experienced: “Concerning the mémoire involontaire, its images do
not only come without being called up; rather, they are images
which we have never seen before we remember them”; “Memory
fragments are often most powerful and enduring when the incident
which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness”
(Benjamin in Cadava 100 and Freud 18.27-28).
Finally, in a psychic system where memory is always false
and forgetting tragic, how can memory also be held up as the key
to healing? Obviously, what we have here are two systems in
tandem, another version of Freud's dual archaeological model of
Rome as the visible city of ruins and Pompeii as the lost city,
buried whole. Psychoanalysis, like Christianity or Marx’s
political economy, betrays itself as a transcendental system in
which memory is actually only false and ideally only true. The
course of treatment is governed only by the former; the goal of
treatment dreams only of the latter: the recovery of memory as
the recovery of health. The goal of psychoanalysis is
remembering, an end to neurosis (an end to personal history).
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Freud and Josef Breuer worked with an enlightenment model whereby
hysterical symptoms evaporated after “bringing clearly to light
the memory of the event by which it [the trauma] was provoked and
in arousing its accompanying affect" (2.6).
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Collective Memory
The very idea of unique memories rooted in the
autobiographical past of an individual self may itself
by the result of particular Western narrative practices
and conventions.
Jens Brockmeier
A seemingly irresistible desire to pluralize memory has led
to the growth of a second body of memory studies that looks at
memory as collective, social, cultural, historical or national.
Given the stunning fit between memory and subjectivity, this
1
desire to relocate memory in a collective seems perverse. The
meanings of a phrase like “collective memory” range from the
literal to the metaphoric and the ordinary to the mystical.
Shadowing ordinary notions of collective memory, there is often a
second, uncanny variant: in anthropology collective memory refers
to a society’s sense of its past but also the vaguer notion of a
past as an agency, preserving itself into the present and shaping
social thought and feeling.
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A deeply mystical version of memory held sway in the
nineteenth century, in the belief, for example, that memory
persisted after the death of its original holder. The final
sentence of Ewald Hering’s 1870 lecture on organic memory to the
Vienna Imperial Academy of Science was, “Man’s conscious memory
comes to an end at death, but the unconscious memory of Nature is
true and ineradicable: whoever succeeds in stamping upon her the
impress of his work, she will remember him to the end of time”
2
(Otis 26). Transmitted atmospherically, memory could drift
through the material cosmos; Charles Babbage, John William Draper
and others believed that the universe contained an Akashic memory
(from the Sanskrit word for space) that stored every thought,
word and action that had ever occurred in it (Lowenthal 19). In
Tony Morrison’s Beloved, memory adheres to the places where stark
experience occurred: “The past, its memory, is out there still,
real enough to capture the living in its grip . . . . what's
more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there
and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it
will be there for you, waiting” (36). This version of memory was
not exclusively human or animal but referred to a general
function of all organic matter.
Collective memory was more commonly conceived of as having
been transmitted genetically or biologically: as “racial” or
“organic” memory. Nietzsche and other contemporary thinkers
2

elieved that “man carries within himself the memory of all past
generations” (Barash 716). It was carried along the trail of
blood: one inherited memories from ancestors just as one
inherited their physical features. Herbert Spencer offered the
universality of some knowledge (i.e., fear of snakes), which
cannot be tied to experience or education, as the basis for this
belief (Young 1996:92). Racial memory also drew on Ernst
Haeckel’s notion of epigenesis, the idea that a species’
evolutionary history is recapped in the embryological development
of its individual member. Freud and Jung both subscribed to
theories of racial memory, Freud in Totem and Taboo and Moses and
Monotheism, particularly, and Jung in his theory of archetypes. 3
The concept of racial memory has also been put to political use,
to prop nationalism or attack differences.
Throughout history, the body has been perceived as a
receptacle of memory, from the memory of bodily
movement, such as walking, to the memory of past events
in physical scars, to the memory of one’s genetic
history in every cell . . . . the immune system as a
system of memory, remembering, for instance, the
viruses it has previously encountered (Sturken 12 and
220).
Organic memory was stored in the body not the brain. According to
Henry Maudsley who introduced the concept in 1867, memory exists
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in every part of the body, even in “the nervous cells which lie
scattered in the heart and in the intestinal walls.” Three years
later Hering claimed that every cell contained the memory of the
experience of all its parent cells (Kern 40). These beliefs are
to be distinguished from a more ordinary body memory whereby,
say, the body remembers to stand or bow as a gesture of respect.
As the quotation from Sturken indicates, biological memory, the
memory that drives heredity, has been scientifically recuperated
with the application of computers to biology; the “archival
ordering of the body's code,” DNA, discovered in the 1950s, opens
a new act in the drama of organic memory (Guertin).
These and other conjectures underwrote a series of Romantic
tropes: the eternal tidal expansion of experience in Poe’s “The
Power of Words,” for instance, or the haunted portraits in the
tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, at the turn of the century,
the haunted-house tale generally. This collaboration continued
into the Modern period when unconscious (and ancestral) memory
became a standard motif in the work of Proust, Joyce, and Mann.
A less mystical version of racial memory, “cultural memory,”
as presented by nineteenth-century mythographers and art
historians like Aby Warburg, conceives of memory working
intertextually across the ages. For Warburg and Benjamin,
crystallizations of the past are scattered throughout the present
in small, symbolic cultural details, like street names, which
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preserve the memory of the heroes and deities of antiquity. In
the form of art, these symbols of civilization preserve “intense
basic experiences” of primitive life (Gombrich 243).
It is likely that the purely secular notion of collective
memory entered Western thought as a metaphoric deposit of racial
memory. The major players in this twentieth-century development
were the sociologist Halbwachs, the art historian Warburg, and,
later, the historian Nora. The emergence of such a concept may
very well have been an inevitable consequence of the development
of the social sciences, anthropology, sociology, and history.
Halbwachs began as a student of Bergson but later switched
his intellectual allegiance to Emile Durkheim. In 1922 he wrote
Collective Memory, the pioneer study of the workings of group
memory; a second book on the subject, The Social Frameworks of
Memory, was published in 1925. For Halbwachs, memory was not an
attribute that belongs to one in the way that vision does.
Individual memory was a secondary, phantasmic, effect: a “man who
remembers alone what others do not remember,” Halbwachs wrote,
“resembles somebody who sees what others do not see. It is as if
he suffers from hallucinations” (Boyer 26). The individual was
nothing but the “crossroads of collective memories” (Tai
2001a:52).
Many writers agree that collective memory is metaphor not
memory because the collective lacks such an agency; so, for
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example, Yosef Yerushalmi--“Just as ‘the life of a people’ is a
biological metaphor, so too ‘the memory of a people’ is a
psychological metaphor”; Susan Sontag--“not remembering but
stipulating that this is important”; and Amos Funkenstein--
Consciousness and memory can only be realized by an
individual who acts, is aware, and remembers. Just as a
nation cannot eat or dance, neither can it speak or
remember . . . . The employment of “collective memory”
can be justified only on a metaphorical level–-and this
is how historians of old have always employed it–-as a
general code name for something that is supposedly
behind myths, traditions, customs, cults, all of which
represent the “spirit,” the “psyche,” of a society, a
tribe, a nation (Boyarin 23, Sontag 2003:86 and Gedi
34-35).
Collective memory can also be thought of as a combination or
consolidation of individual memories, a category of abstraction.
Robert Bevan considers it to be “a bundle of individual memories
that coalesce by means of exchanges between people and develop
into a communal narrative” (15).
For others, collective memory is not simply a metaphoric
analogue. Qualitative differences have been proposed between the
two memories: collective memory is more intersubjective and
dialogical than personal memory, more “act than object, and more
6

ongoing engagement than passive absorption and playback” (Lambeck
1996:239). Many of the terms are not transferable, so we are
warned to keep collective memory free from the taint of
psychoanalysis. “The concept of trauma, as well as the concept of
repression,” Wulf Kansteiner writes, “neither captures nor
illuminates the forces that contribute to the making and unmaking
of collective memories” (187). Nancy Wood reminds us that while
personal memory is governed by the laws of the unconscious public
memory “testifies to a will or desire on the part of some social
group or disposition of power to select and organize
representations of the past” (2). But even studies that warn us
to avoid psychologizing collective memory, Klein points out, “do
precisely this: “Freudian vocabularies are far more common than
4
Halbwachsian or even Lacanian ones” (135). Historians like Anne
Rigney insist that a collective memory with no analogical
relationship to personal memory can be theorized. It is not the
only instance of a memory without rememberers. Mikhail Bakhtin
attributed this facility to language (“Our practices and language
remember,” he wrote) and Warburg to imagery (Cole 27). 5
Like memory itself, collective memory has a range of
meanings: it can refer to the fact that our memories are woven
out of social strands (shared items of knowledge and experience,
the nature of language itself, etc.); it can simply mean that
memories can be validated and fleshed out through social
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exchange; or, at the other extreme, it can refer to the process
by which memories suture the rememberer into particular social
groups. In the case of language particularly, the individual
speaker is always being colonized by the group, already inhabited
by the other; our experience is not the unmediated reality we
believe it to be. Our memories are filled with alien contents,
for example, other people’s recollections passing as our own, For
Hamlet, memories are not individual possessions but shared
commonplaces:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there” (877).
Halbwachs insisted that people inhabit a social arena when
they remember:
. . . it is in society that people normally acquire
their memories. It is also in society that they recall,
recognize, and localize their memories . . . . if we
examine a little more closely how we recollect things,
we will surely realize that the greatest number of
memories come back to us when our parents, our friends,
or other persons recall them to us (1992:38).
We have as many kinds of memory as there are groups that we
belong to, and these groups inflect their common memories in
8

different ways. Conversely, these groups are the products of
collective memory: the family, for example, the fundamental
social group, is held together by shared memories at least as
much as shared genes (Kihlstrom 5). “On the very same day, the
birth of the Prophet is . . . jointly remembered by Muslims in
Malaysia, Guyana, and Sierra Leone. By the same token, on Good
Friday, Christians all over the world come to recall the
Crucifixion together, as a single community” (Zerubabel 4).
For Halbwachs, the main social categories that generate
collective memory are religious community, social class, and
family, but many other groups and groupings–-by generation,
gender, relationship and friendship--function in this way. Memory
belongs to the group even though members may disagree about the
details of a common experience, particularly, popular culture has
it, the gender couple, as in the song “I Remember it Well” from
Gigi where the man’s and the woman’s memories of their early
relationship are totally at odds. Halbwachs’s collective memory
was a product of consensus and made no room for conflict, but
most current models have room for a range of consolidating
processes, “sharing, discussion, negotiation, and often conflict”
(Brundage 4).
Memory is social not merely because of its content and its
acquisition but because it operates through cultural frameworks
that condition even those memories that appear to be the most
9

private; it is “constructed along the lines of old chains of
associations laid down in the mind: schemata, models, paradigms”
6
(Cole 25). Bartlett called these frameworks schemata, and for
Halbwachs they were “social contexts and relationships at a given
moment in time when a memory is made, which colour and inflect
the memory itself” (Russell 13).
We acquire group memories by hearing people talk about them,
by participating in commemorations and rituals or by reading
about them or viewing their representations. Collective memory is
an anthology of different kinds of mental and communication
events, “multimedia collages” consisting in part of “a mixture of
pictorial images and scenes, slogans, quips, and snatches of
verse, abstractions, plot types and stretches of discourse, and
even false etymologies” (Kansteiner 190 and Fentriss 47). These
memories are brought to us by what Confino calls “memory
carriers,” semiotic systems like commemorations, popular movies,
or scholarly works of history, and the two primary routes are art
and politics: on the one hand, artists “from whose imagination
new representations of collective experience enter into public
currency via cultural gatekeepers such as the publishing and
movie industries,” and, on the other, “institutionalized forces
such as governments, political parties and pressure groups”
(Confino 1997a:1395 and Boutine 6).
As a consequence of all this, we “own” memories of events
10

that we did not or could not have experienced, events that
happened to groups to which we would later belong (this
concatenation begins to fulfil the mythic promise of organic
memory). “You do not need to have stormed the Bastille,” Confino
writes, “in order to celebrate 14 July as a symbol of national
identity”:
Even in the midst of such a commemoration there is
nothing within us that we could properly call a
“memory” or “remembering.” And yet in this and other
similar instances, the call to commemorate evokes a
string of memories (lessons, narratives, allusions)
that underwrite the emotional connection (1997b:8 and
1997a:1400).
Jews who never suffered from Nazism, African Americans who never
experienced slavery--in some sense they own those memories by
virtue of their identification with those groups. Marianne Hirsch
calls this more abstract process “postmemory,”
a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely
because . . . [it is] mediated not through recollection
but through an imaginative investment and creation . .
. . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those
who grow up dominated by narratives that preceeded
their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by
the stories of the previous generation shaped by
11

traumatic events that can be neither understood nor
recreated” (22).
How far back can these memories go? While collective memory
at most attains to three generations, cultural memory reaches far
back into the past: Jan Assmann divides collective memory into
collective and cultural memory and has the latter take us back to
ancient traditions and myths, to what Freud called the childhood
memories of the nation (2006:48). What is being remembered is a
body of knowledge that defines the community and is deemed
necessary for its continuity. So, for example, Assmann writes,
“What the children of Israel must not forget is . . . the story
of the exodus from Egypt . . . . To make sure that this memory
does not die with them, it has to be transmuted into . . . the
symbolic forms of cultural memory,” the Passover seder
(2006:18). 7
Despite Halbwachs’ balanced picture of collective memory fed
by all the groups to which we belong, we know that certain groups
are particularly powerful in establishing this body of
understanding and belief. Collective memory is not something that
just happens; it is often orchestrated as a politics of memory by
dominant elites who control powerful modes of representation.
Most theorists take for granted a top-down process of influence
that follows the terrain of power. But some also believe that
resistance and interference from lower strata enter into the
12

equation.
There are few satisfactory models of how collective memory
is constructed, how it is received, and what factors govern its
endurance. Unlike its near synonyms, myth and tradition,
collective memory is an active stratum of mentality, constantly
8
in the process of reformulation. Like personal memory,
collective memory is determined by present needs and desires and,
in their service, distorts or invents the past. As examples,
David Thelen relates that in the relatively prosperous 1970s
Americans recalled the 1930s not as a time of misery and struggle
but as a time when people had been closer to each other, warmer
and more caring, and John Foster and Wayne Froman cite the very
late appearance of the Amistad mutiny of 1839-42 as a central
part of the cultural memory of Sierra Leone (Thelen 1124 and
Foster 90).
Because collective memory is not memory it must circulate in
the public realm in material form before it can lodge itself in
our minds: in documents, memorials, commemorations, rituals,
slogans or songs; “rules, laws, standardized procedures, and
records . . . . books, holidays, statues, souvenirs” (Schudson
1992:51). George Washington remains an important part of the
American collective consciousness, for example, because he is
commemorated through the celebration of his birth, the Washington
Monument and his profile on quarters and dollar bills (Johnson
13

37).
Libraries and museums are the great repositories of
collective memory. Cinema, television, and now the internet are
the most powerful agents in its construction and dissemination,
although this non-confrontational, semi-conscious, non-
referential, and decentralized process is extremely
difficult to reconstruct after the fact . . . . The
media of representation tend to disappear from the
consciousness of the audience in the process of
consumption. Radio listeners, for instance, regularly
forget the source of their memories . . . and often
attach them to other sources” (Kansteiner 194-95).
If memory constructs subjectivity for the individual it
offers a corresponding group identity to the collective in which
it is somehow archived. Collective memory is the glue that holds
groups and societies together. The cultivation of certain texts,
images, objects, and rituals “serves to stabilize and convey that
society’s self-image,” and this allows a society to become
visible to itself and others (Assmann 1995:132). Jan Assmann
calls this form of memory “bonding memory,” and finds its
theoreticion to be Nietzsche: “Just as Halbwachs has shown that
people need bonds in order to develop a memory, Nietzsche has
shown that people need a memory in order to be able to form
9
bonds” (2006:5). It is the form of memory incorporated into the
14

discipline of anthropology.
But if a particular body of memory is the identifying
property of a group, isn’t it also always being modified to
justify the existence of that group, to apologize for its past
mistakes and elide its shames? Writing of the family album,
Bernadette Flynn finds that while it “allows the construction of
narratives of collective family memory out of freestanding images
. . . it most always constitutes a story of domestic life from
which conflicts and difficulties are erased” (online). Meditating
on the left’s fetishization of its own pantheon of heroes and
heroic moments, Ahmet Bayazitoglu asks if there is “a way of
remembering that is not a narcissistic reification?” (online).
National memory
Collective memory has been held to be the primary form of
plural memory, developed to stabilize and solidify the nation-
state, which is built on shared memories of joy and suffering,
and above all of collective sacrifices. Collective memory is
nationalism’s project, shared by people who have never seen or
heard of one another. National memory trumps the corresponding
memories of other groups, which may, for example, hold the Great
Depression in memory in their own ways: still, there will also be
a national version of this memory that tends to hold sway. After
the American Civil War, through the mid-twentieth century,
15

American conservatives fashioned a memory of slavery, a benign
fiction of honorable masters and contented slaves–-a perspective
that effectively silenced “alternative memories of violence,
exploitation and cruelty” (Climo 28).
As defined by The Popular Memory Group (a Birmingham study
groups that works at the boundaries of collective and oral
memory), national memory refers to representations of the past
that “achieve centrality” within the public domain, because
“Their institutional propagation by the national and local state,
the culture industries, or the public media ensure their scope to
make public meanings for vast audiences” (Ashplant 13). The
players in this game consist of various “status groups who become
society’s symbolic bankers and whose efforts to preserve sites or
artifacts often assume the character of symbolic crusades”
(Barthel 152). National memory is thus a map of the vectors of
power in a social system.
In the early modern period, Europeans were somehow made to
internalize a nation and “in a remarkably short time” it became
an everyday mental property–-“a memory as intimate and authentic
as the local, ethnic, and family past” (Confino 1997a:1402). Once
this happened, Le Goff adds, the capital city becomes “the center
of a politics of memory” and the king deploys “a program of
remembering of which he is the center” (60). The nation and its
new form of memory gave meaning to human life after religion
16

waned; the nation, Peter Fritzsche writes,
can be usefully thought of as a memory system that
enabled individuals to recognize their lives in
nonrepeatable, historical time. Because of their
boundedness in time and space, national narratives have
an unusual ability to organize remembrance and to make
the past sensible . . . . At the same time, the very
forcefulness of the representative powers of the nation
10
have worked to disable other narratives (108).
National memory is frequently charged with bias, with being
the champion of and apologist for dominant elites. Nations
remember largely what suits them, so Japan remembers the bombings
of Hiroshima and not its own prior history of militarism. America
remembers Japan’s history of imperialism but not the dark side of
the Enola Gay episode. Control of the national memory is a
crucial weapon of the ruling class, since, as Foucault has
stated, “If one controls people’s memory, one controls their
dynamism . . . . It is vital to have possession of this memory,
to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain” (25-
26).
Societies, therefore, expend great energy to control the
circulation of recollection, generally by supervising the
mechanisms of memory exchange. For the U. S., Gary Taylor
instances a variety of regulatory mechanisms, including the
17

Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Communications
Commission, the antitrust division of the Justice Department, the
Central Intelligence Agency and the Interior Department’s
Register of Historic Buildings (1996:15). In addition to the
obvious, highly visible, forms of national memory, Matsuda
discusses a second type: “What Max Weber would refer to as the
‘domination through knowledge, specifically rational,’ which
characterized modern bureaucratic organizations, the knowledge of
the file” (121-22). This might be called “institutional memory”
and would include the fingerprint system, the census, mechanisms
of surveillance, registries, and transcipts.
Dominant forms of memory tend to be melodramatic, already on
their way to nostalgia. Svetlana Boym makes a distinction between
collective memory and national memory: the latter tends “to make
a single teleological plot out of shared everyday recollections.
The gaps and discontinuities are mended through a coherent and
inspiriting tale of recovered identity” (53). Very little of the
ruck and welter of history gets into it.
National memory has been further accused of being a
deliberately false and manipulative narrative, a progressive
melodrama in which nationals are always right and foreigners
always wrong--devoted to supporting an impossibly ideal image of
a people, their leaders and their past. War memorials embody what
John Mack calls “the egoism of victimization.” Commemoration in
18

general “seeks most often to supply us with heroes to worship or
with enemies to detest; it deals in desecration and consecration”
(Perlman 27 and Todorov 2003:133). And there is often an intense
struggle (around the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, say, or
the 9/11 attacks) to keep unflattering information out of memory.
Are there collective screen memories? Many writers have
pluralized this concept as well as a way of explaining ideology.
For example, historian Daniel Biork claims such are the stirring
memories of the American Revolution, masking the trauma of this
national childhood event (Biork 276). National memory is thus a
primary example of what Marx and Engels called “false
consciousness”--or nostalgia, which Marx termed “memory’s lie”
(Sennett 11). There are more benign ways of viewing this
manipulation: Halbwachs, for example, suggested that “society can
live only if there is sufficient unity of outlooks among the
individuals and groups comprising it . . . This is why society
tends to erase from its memory all that might separate
individuals, or that might distance groups from each other”
(1992:182-83).
Time itself can break up these melodramas. The founding myth
of postwar France, for example, that the French who had
collaborated with the Nazis were limited to a few misfits while
the majority of citizens resisted and eventually drove the German
armies from France was dislodged by the 1970s when this
19

comforting illusion was shattered by The Sorrow and the Pity and
Lacombe Lucien (Golsan 25). Austria’s attempt to cast itself as a
victim of Nazi aggression crumbled as its role in Nazism was
11
increasingly acknowledged in public discourse.
Remembering the nation has often taken the ironic form of
simply inverting an accessible, actual history, e.g., the stories
of native American aggression designed to justify the genocidal
slaughter of the tribes or stories that blame the fall of
American business empires on labor unrest and governmental
regulations. In Renato Rosaldo’s essay on “imperialist nostalgia”
agents of a dominant culture conjure up fond recollections of the
old ways that they are in one way or another responsible for
destroying. Algerian pied noirs repressed any memory of racial
tensions, remembering “Algeria as a ‘paradise without colonial
sin,’ a land where everyone, Arabs and Europeans, lived in
harmony and plenty” (Greene 243).
According to Aleida Assmann, monuments are part of a culture
that is stage-managing itself (Holthorf). The practice that most
sustains national memory is commemoration, one of the primary
forms taken by nostalgia, “the ultimate attempt to master the
past and render it innocuous forever” (Ankersmit 166). But
commemoration has a tendency to freeze into permanent forms that
cannot be changed without cries of sacrilege–-although dynastic
changes, like the collapse of the Soviet empire, can radically
20

alter the commemorative map--and is thus also a way of forgetting
(Todorov 2001:21). As Casey writes: “To commemorate a war such as
the Civil War or Vietnam is at the same time not to remember its
many horrors, its unspeakable and even unthinkable mutilations
and agonies. For an individual to recall the horrors is to
undermine participation in the public event of commemoration”
(xii).
One of clearest sign of the crisis of memory has been the
acceleration, intensification, and amplification of
commemoration. Commemoration intensified after the first world
war, elevating all citizens who had fallen in nationalist wars to
a post of honor. The most basic commemorative text in a culture
is its sequence of holidays which become ever heavier with
anniversaries. In The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm
discovered that “an astonishing number” of the ceremonies and
rituals “that define the ‘traditional’ pole of nineteenth-century
society . . . . were simply created wholesale” (e.g. the tartans,
12
kilt and bagpipe of Scotland) (Terdiman 1993:36). Now that
tourism has become a major industry for most nations memory is
its primary commodity. Stories about the past are “appropriated
by transnational corporatism, tourism, multicultural nationalism,
and many other forces, ultimately domesticating their unsettling
qualities and endorsing only the ideas of pluralism that produce
an illusion of harmonious diversity” (Fujitani 21-22).
21

Collective amnesia
Amnesia was also pluralized in the twentieth century, when
it came to be regarded as a social disease. Modernity and
postmodernity are said to carry heavy charges of it, so much so
that we are frequently told that we have now lost our sense of
the past. John Frow describes postmodernity as “the time of a
fall from . . . history into amnesia” (218). But Marx and his
followers had already written amnesia into the psychology of
capitalism: “Ideology and amnesia have long been linked,”
Nicholas Dames writes, “from Lukács’s analyses of the structural
forgetting embedded in reification to Althusser’s well-known
argument that ideology ‘has no history’” (2001:17). “All
reification is a forgetting,” Adorno and Horkheimer had declared,
and Herbert Marcuse announced (after Adorno) that “the spectre of
man without memory . . . is more than an aspect of decline–-it is
necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois
society” (Jay 229 and 234).
Earlier, the historical novel of Scott and Hugo was often
occasioned by an inability (in Waverley and Nôtre-Dame de Paris)
to find any signs of the past in the present as a result of
radical social change. The absence of memorial signs produces the
amnesia that Eliot described in Silas Marner: “Minds that have
been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought
this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy
22

ecause its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is
dreamy because it is linked with no memories” (1978:22).
Richard E. Sullivan lists as the occasions of such amnesia
“massive migrations of peoples across the face of the earth, both
voluntary and forced,” the “rapid emergence of world
interdependency,” the “astounding developments in mass
communications” which “have drowned us in the present to the
point where our minds have no room for remembering” and
“incessant waves of new material products.” He goes on to assert
that “Even more deadly to collective remembering have been two
potent intellectual movements”: the brightening of the future
through the idea of progress and the darkening of the past
through modern determinism in the form of social Darwinism and
Marxism (98).
Radical change and upheaval lead to either amnesia or a form
of false memory Nora calls “historicized memory” (10). Genocide
and violent exile break the human chains of communication so that
“cultural memories, identities, and practices do not flow simply
or predictably from one generation to the next or from the
homeland to the diasporic people” (Landsberg 2004:10). It also
follows that such disruption should lead to memorial hoarding:
Whereas middle-class families in Britain and the United
States had shown little concern about their origins
before the nineteenth-century, after 1800 a feeling of
having been ravaged by time turned “living rooms into
23

family portrait galleries” and “attics into archives” .
. . . the early nineteenth-century [also] witnessed an
explosion of autobiographical writing, diary keeping,
scrapbook pasting, and portrait taking. Families took
more care to commemorate personal occasions such as
birthdays, holidays and Christmas (Fritzsche 111).
Territories that have suffered great historical upheaval are also
likely to retreat into memory; for example, the American South,
at least in the popular imagination, which, like Tennyson’s
lotos-eaters, chose “To muse and brood and live again in memory”
(79).
Forced forgetting, however, is at least as old as history.
As a weapon against imperial tyranny, the Roman Senate instituted
the damnatio memoriae, removing the name of a defiant emperor
from archival documents and monumental inscriptions (Le Goff 67-
68). After the hated Domitian was assassinated, the Roman Senate
immediately had images of him torn down and mentions of his name
chipped out of inscriptions in order to remove all memory of him
from the world (Weinrich 33). Monuments have been razed long
before the fall of the Soviet Empire or the invasion of Iraq: a
famous instance was the fall from favor of Tiberius’s aide,
Sejanus (as described by Juvenal), and the melting down of his
equestrian statue: “Then from that face which was second in the
entire world are made pitchers and basins, frying pans and
bedpans” (Hedrick 99).
24

Commemoration is only one of the systems designed to anchor
national memory; another is censorship, socially dictated
forgetting, which may be even more important. Ernest Renan laid
this rule down:
Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, are
essential factors in the creation of a nation; in this,
the progress of historical studies is often a danger
for nationalité. Historical investigation, in effect,
brings to light facts of violence which took place at
the origin of all political formations, even those
whose consequences were the most beneficial. Unity is
always brutally created (Matsuda 206).
Renan further pointed out that there was a fundamental procedural
forgetting that holds the people of a nation in place: they
“forget that they are not inevitable and that their internal
fissures may be as significant as their external boundaries”
(Olick 117).
Although empires have been systematically obliterated and
lost to memory (e.g., the Incas), the “tyrants of the twentieth
century,” Todorov writes, seek “to capture memory systematically
and to bring even its most secret repositories under control . .
. . The traces of what once existed have been either erased or
doctored or transformed, lies and inventions replace reality”
13
(2003:113 and 11). The image of a toppling statue following a
25

egime change is familiar television fare: The Chinese communist
government tried to destroy all places of memory, “such as
temples and monasteries, after the occupation of Tibet in 1951"
(Misztal 18). Is this so different from the digital removal of
the World Trade Center from television and movies? Milan Kundera
offers the following wry example of a doctored image: “After the
Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948 the fur hat
on Party leader Klement Gottwald’s head was the only trace that
remained of former Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis because it
had started to snow and he gave Gottwald his hat” (Sayer 76).
Censorship has become an all-embracing policy for nations;
the modern landscape is pocked with absences and disappeared
people, monuments, histories, images. Contemporary states monitor
memory in an ongoing way in the name of national security and
engage in techniques of disinformation. In George Orwell’s 1984,
Winston Smith puts facts that are embarrassing to the present
conduct of the state down a “memory hole” (188). Czech writer
Ivan Klíma notes that “In our country, everything is forever
being remade: beliefs, buildings, and street names” (Sayer 76-
77). One of the more extraordinary stories of memory manipulation
came out of the Korean War, under the name of brainwashing.
Brainwashing was one of several imaginary events that made the
writing of cold war history possible; it was a phantasmal
rediscovery of state force which America used to frighten itself
with during the early 1950s. According to Robert J. Lifton,
26

popular writings established brainwashing as "an all-powerful,
irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total
control over the human mind" (Biderman 549):
The word was seized upon by the public, not only to
refer to the actions of the POWs [in Korea] but to
describe such phenomena as the forced public confession
of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary in 1949, [and] the
earlier forced confessions during the Moscow Show
Trials of 1936-1938 . . . and to every type of
Communist propaganda and indoctrination (James
1986:242).
Memory and history
Despite the circulation of a term like “historical memory,”
memory and history have been engaged in a serious struggle for
several decades. Mnemosyne was originally goddess of both memory
and history. Herodotus, “the father of History," wrote his work,
he said, in order to preserve memory--opening in this way: "These
are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he
publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the
remembrance of what men have done" (3).
Memory also has has a long history as the handmaiden of its
sister art, as a source of material to be reworked by the other
more disciplined practice. As Le Goff writes: “Memory is the raw
27

material of history. Whether mental, oral, or written, it is the
living source from which historians draw” (xi). Popular history
often appeals to memory as a form of wisdom (those who do not
remember the past are doomed to repeat it) or an invocation to
revenge (Remember the Alamo! The Maine! Pearl Harbor! Never
forget!).
Hegel distinguished the two as parallel intellectual
currents, memory the subjective and history the objective (Jonker
15). Halbwachs saw them as opposites, since there was a break in
the continuity “between the society reading this history and the
group in the past who acted in or witnessed the event” (Hutton
1993:76). He thought that history focuses on change, memory on
continuity. History, writes Michel de Certeau, tends to depict
the past as “other than ourselves, memory as the same” (1988:16).
If there is no other difference between history and memory, there
is a difference between their nominal subjects: what happened in
the past and how we remember it.
R. G. Collingwood had also declared them distinct, but
believed in the clear superiority of history. “Memory is not
history, because history is a certain kind of organized or
inferential knowledge, and memory is not organized, not
inferential at all” (252). If memory now lords it over history,
it has been a long-awaited shift in the balance between these two
mentalities. In the work of Halbwachs and Nora, memory and
history are not even two separate but equal activities: memory is
28

everything, history is less than nothing. That is why, according
to Nora, memory “is always suspect in the eyes of history, whose
true mission is to demolish it, to repress it” (3). In a high
Platonizing vein, both declared that history, memory’s poor
synthetic substitute, only becomes necessary when the reign of
memory fails, and this is the occasion of great loss. History
begins when memory is lost: the condition of history is the
disappearance of the past from the present. Memory, on the other
hand “‘reincarnates,’ ‘resurrects,’ ‘recycles,’ and makes the
past ‘reappear’ and live again in the present (Spiegel 162).
Nora equates memory with presence and continuity in all
their fragility, history with the opposite:
Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and
as such in permanent evolution, subject to the
dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of
the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in
various ways to appropriation and manipulation . . . .
History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction,
always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer
(3).
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi similarly distinguishes collective memory
from historical recollection: the former unbroken and perpetually
available, while the latter is the act of recovering that which
has been forgotten (197-98). Memory is to history as nature is to
artifice, an “organic” flow versus “calculated accounts of the
29

past” (Davis 1989:2).
According to Nora and others, living memory has been
replaced by artificial, deliberately fabricated memory-sites,
lieux de mémoire–-a reincarnation of the loci memoriae of the art
of memory. They “arise out of a sense that there is no such thing
as spontaneous memory, hence that we must create archives, mark
anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and
authenticate documents because such things no longer happen as a
14
matter of course” (Nora 7). The memory left over, the memory
that co-exists with history, is false; “True” memory “subsists
only in gestures and habits, unspoken craft traditions, intimate
physical knowledge, ingrained reminiscences, and spontaneous
reflexes” (Nora 8).
“Just when this rupture took place,” Peter Fritzsche writes,
“is not clarified by Nora, but his sturdy artisanal metaphors”
suggest that one of the fictions of loss that he has in mind is
“the onset of the industrial revolution and the sustained
movement from the countryside to the city, which suggests
sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century”(92).
Whenever it occurred, the fall is marked by a dominance of
writing: the last two centuries have been periods devoted to the
institutionalization of memory in every discipline, producing
ever-swelling archives. 15
History is writing; in its most accomplished state,
30

narrative. In a postmodern age that is characterized by a
distrust of grand narratives, memory is again the valorized mode:
Memory is partial, allusive, fragmentary, transient,
and for precisely these reasons is better suited to our
chaotic times . . . . The moments that produce it are
those that, as with the Vietnam War and the AIDS
crisis, “disrupt master narratives of American
imperialism, technology, science, and masculinity.”
History is modernism, the state, science, imperialism,
androcentrism, a tool of oppression; memory is
postmodernism, the “symbolically excluded,” “the body,”
“a healing device and a tool for redemption” (Sturken
in Klein 138).
Remembrance “must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or
still less that of a report,” Benjamin declared, “but must, in
the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-
new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers”
(1978:26). Halbwachs believed that memory came to us in
fragments, “formed on the tactics of surprise, ruptures, and
overturnings,” as Christine Boyer puts it (68).
Narrative betrays even history, so one common argument goes,
because it is then shaped more by the laws of its own
construction than the truth of the past. “The most powerful form
of forgetting,” Michael Roth writes, “is narrative memory itself,
for it is narrative memory that assimilates (filters,
31

econfigures) the past into a form that can be ‘integrated’ into
the present. Narrative memory, which is at the core of historical
representation both on paper and on film transforms the past as a
condition of retaining the past” (1995a:100). The argument
against historical narrativity was set by Hayden White. It arises
out of a desire to have real events display the
coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image
of life that is and can only be imaginary. The notion
that sequences of real events possess the formal
attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary
events could only have its origin in wishes, daydreams,
reveries (1987:24).
Within the context of film theory, Christian Metz developed
a model of memory in which, between the end of a film and the
lighting of the theatre, an instantaneous act of narrativization
organizes the diverse understandings and associations we have had
of the stream of images. It is a model based on Freud’s notion of
nachträglichkeit, and it can be applied to other imaginative
experiences, like reading a novel: “the very issue of
authoritative meanings in a story can be raised only once the end
of the story is known. With a novel, for instance, it is only at
the end that one can tell the adumbrations from the false leads;
things fall into place in retrospect” (McCole 276).
Others argue that memory is just as dependent on narrative
32

as history, that narrative is the natural form of remembering.
According to Bachelard, for example,
It is reasoning about our past which serves to compose
together disconnected instants, forming a temporal
narrative. This involves a process of reflection which
creates a sense of time–-it is not time or duration
itself which gives coherence to a disconnected past. We
take events out of the temporal flow in order to reason
with them . . . . Events do not simply lay themselves
out along a temporal flow–-they must be ordered
(Russell 11).
There is no original memory which is later transformed through
narrative; memory cannot be thought apart from narrative: it
“does not have any concrete existence in itself and it is always
contiguous to the act of being narrated . . . . In short, we do
not make stories out of our memories, because memories exist only
16
within our narratives” (Sepulvida 174). Collective memory,
certainly, is only narrative.
Various other binaries are used to proclaim the superiority
of memory. History is frozen on the page before us, while memory,
Halbwachs argued, “always occurs behind our backs, where it can
neither be appropriated or controlled” (Boyer 67). Memory is
concrete, history is abstract: “Memory is the history that cannot
be written, that eludes codification, that remains stubbornly
discreet and that refuses consistency and fixity” (Lambeck
33

2003:211). Nora states that “Memory is rooted in the concrete: in
space, gestures, image, and objects. History dwells exclusively
on . . . changes in things and in the relations among things”
(3). Memory is more than history, it contains the excess of the
past: “the phenomenon of historical consciousness continually
exceeds those documentable moments which result in texts and
narratives” (Crane 46).
History is detached and uncommitted while memory is
emotional and politically active. James credited memory with a
warmth and intimacy that could not be found in history, and
Steven Ostovich insists that memory is an “activity in [Hannah]
Arendt's sense of this term . . . . Memories are not simply the
usable raw materials or resources for writing history. Rather,
the activity of remembering is itself part of political life”
(Warnock and Ostovich 245). That politics is certainly
democratic: Halbwachs regarded history as scholarship for the
very few while the collective memory of the past is shared by the
whole community.
Le Goff, however, warns us against the contemporary
valorization of memory:
Recent, naive trends . . . give preference in some
sense to memory, on the ground that it is more
authentic, “truer” than history . . . . [Because the]
workings [of memory] are usually unconscious, it is in
reality more dangerously subject to manipulation . . .
34

than the discipline of history itself . . . . To
privilege memory excessively is to sink into the
unconquerable flow of time (xi-xii).
Most of the binaries in play in this field of discourse can
and have been inverted to assert the supremacy of history over
memory. Memory is faulty, prone to error and fading–-unlike the
written text, memories change in time--while history is stable,
the result of a solid process of investigation and its own
inscription. Michael Frisch and his fellow researchers summed up
the objections of others to oral history: “memory was unreliable
as a historical source because it was distorted by physical
deterioration and nostalgia in old age, by the personal bias of
both interviewer and interviewee, and by the influence of
collective and retrospective versions of the past” (Frisch
1994:33). Peter Novack claims that collective memory simplifies,
“sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient
with ambiguities of any kind,” while history renders “the
complexity of the past . . . . To understand something
historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient
detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the
ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, of protagonists’
motives and behavior” (3-4). But, conversely, one could also say
that testimony (memory on behalf of the community) complicates
the simplicities of history.
Memory is subject to its own psychic laws, so for Dominick
35

LaCapra history is a corrective to memory because it “attempts to
retrieve what it has repressed or ignored, and supplements it in
ways that may provide a measure of critical distance on
experience and a basis of responsible action” (1994:195). As
Freud demonstrated in his study of screen memories, memory is
achronological, liable to work in loops--forward as well as
sideways and backward. “Memory,” historian Mona Ozouf has
remarked, “is largely indifferent to a linear unrolling, the
calendar is not its religion” (Matsuda 10). Later commemorations
of an event, for example, can be imported into folk memory and
projected back on the original event. And to further complicate
matters, for collective memory, much of “memory” is written by
“history.” This collective memory, however, is a mock effigy of
the real thing, as Nora objected, a resuscitated collective
memory frozen in a stereotypical form.
The dominant binary so magisterially set in place by
Halbwachs and Nora (i.e. memory as real experience and history as
mediated representation) has come under critique as romantic,
nostalgic, and reactionary (see Frow 222 and Levy 89-90). Nora’s
work has been called a “hopelessly nostalgic master narrative”
that obscures “the historicity of its own stance vis-à-vis the
premodern past” (Hess 40). Finally, the opposition of memory and
history has been challenged, simply because it is a binary in
which memory and history are continually made to play out the
stark, unresolvable opposition between nature and culture. Once
36

we shake ourselves free from the melodrama of differences, both
activities look like similar highly mediated discourses separated
only by institutional differences.
Counter-memory
Control of collective memory is one of the great ends of
groups, classes, and societies engaged in national or global
politics. Contesting the nation as the primary site of collective
memory for many peoples is the global village, represented by
minority populations who have come into their voice and power
strongly motivated by a feeling that they have been left out of
memory, including their own. Jay Winter feels that in some ways
counter-memory has replaced national memory; that although, for
example, commemoration has traditionally celebrated the
historical winners, there have recently “been many other
instances of commemoration as an expression of the tragic history
of persecuted minorities,” the Jewish, gay, African-American and
Japanese-American communities, for example:
Commemoration no longer serves those centripetal forces
that made the nation in the previous century into the
most important social and historical agent, but the
centrifugal forces that are generally considered to be
the defining characteristics of postmodernism.
Contemporary commemoration and the return to memory
37

that is expressed by it were both born on the grave of
the state as the center of all creative politics
(Winter 74 and Ankersmit 171).
As Walter Benjamin wrote, the task of remembrance is “to save
what has miscarried” (Jay 22).
Group identity is worked out against the dominant discourse.
At every moment, countless revisionist versions of countless
official narratives are circulating in rich ambient play.
National memory may be deemed false not only because it is shaped
by national desires and the laws of narrative but also because it
is rhetorically totalizing, intent on absorbing the entire past.
Another effect of narrative is to make the past feel told, fully
understood, what Claude Lanzmann calls an “absolute obscenity in
the project of understanding” (Roth 1995b:209).
Utterances and images that articulate the memories of
relatively powerless groups, usually written in resistance to
dominant narratives, are commonly referred to as counter-
17
memories. National memory and counter-memory meet and struggle
at various sites of contention:
In the United States, monuments such as the Vietnam War
Memorial, special displays such as the Enola Gay
exhibit, commemorative occasions such as the
Christopher Columbus quintecentennial (?), the decision
to honor Martin Luther King Jr. through a public
holiday, and attempts to create theme parks out of
38

hallowed sites such as Gettysburg have all been the
focus of intense scrutiny, negotiation and contestation
(Tai 2001a:9).
This other more diffuse and multivoiced discourse represents a
democratization of memory: “For those who regard the national
‘heritage’ as a sacred text,” John Gillis reminds us, this
democratization “is equivalent to profanation, or, what is worse,
18
cultural suicide” (Tai 2001b: and Gillis 19).
What should ideally come out of this struggle? Do the
various versions ultimately combine in a new totalizing
narrative, a more or less acceptable authoritative version of the
past? Do they arrange themselves in sequences of probability or
do they just keep multiplying? This last is the conservative
nightmare, but it is also the condition of history in
postmodernity. However, memory and counter-memory may not lay
themselves out so neatly against one another; counter-memory,
Svetlana Boym reminds us, is “not merely a collection of
alternative facts and texts but also an alternative way of
reading by using ambiguity, irony, doublespeak . . . [and]
private intonation” (62).
As opposed to the specious comfort of the closure offered by
official narrative, counter-memory, it has been argued, offers
true healing. It allows for empowerment, the re-enchantment of
experience, and the possibility of properly mourning the past.
Discussing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in
39

South Africa, the writer Njabulo Ndebele was hopeful that “the
narratives of memory” which are brought forth will help establish
a more truthful understanding of the history of apartheid.
The dynamics and therapeutics of counter-memory are most
brilliantly presented by Toni Morrison in her slavery novel,
Beloved, as it works to create new national memory, to provide
(quoting Catherine Hall) its share of the “‘memory work’ which
which needs to be done so that African Americans and white
Americans can recover the history of slavery and understand its
foundational place in the construction of the United States”
(31). In the novel, the black community is scattered by
suffering, so “disremembered and unaccounted for,” that the story
to be passed on “is not a story to pass on”; if it is not re-
remembered, Morrison suggests, “it will haunt and disrupt
contemporary society” (Morrison 274-5 and Hall 31).
Truth and reconciliation hearings like those in South Africa
have also been held in Chile and Serbia. And these line up with
current philosophical interest in the ethics of memory: memory as
an act of justice, because, as Christa Wolf says in her memoir, A
Model Childhood, “memory is not a solid block fitted into our
brain once and for all; rather, perhaps–-if big words are
permitted–-a repeated moral act”(143).. In his Ethics of Memory,
Avishai Margolit considers the inscription in our ethical code of
an absolute obligation to remember. Regarding the Holocaust,
Margolit asks if we also have an obligation to forgive and if
40

forgiveness does not inevitably lead to forgetting. His
conclusion in this case is that we do have an obligation to
forgive–“an obligation founded in the duty that we have to
ourselves to prevent the deformity of our own lives”–-but he does
not admit that this includes forgetting (Barker ).
Dangerous memory
Into the sea of repressed “rememory” that Morrison lays down
as a condition of African American life comes the dialectical
image of Beloved, murdered at her mother's hand. Not content to
remain a mere memory trace, frozen in history forever as “the
crawling-already baby" of two, she arrives in corporeal form as a
young woman of twenty, and
disrupts the lives of Sethe, Denver and Paul D just as
the pleasure of their reunion threatens to override
once and for all the horror of their past. . . . she
embodies and brings with her the Then, the collective
memory, and the collective rage, of the slaves forced
from their ancestral homes, piled in ship holds for the
Middle Passage, brutalized by the system of slavery
(Nutting online).
Ankersmit posits an extreme opposition between memory and
history as unconscious and conscious. Memory “stands for all that
was repressed, ignored, or suppressed in the human past and
41

therefore by its very nature could never attain to the . . .
domain of ‘history’ in the traditional sense” (154). In defiance
of memory’s many connections to subjectivity, at times it emerges
violently, threatening to undo the subject. Memories flash up to
overwhelm or undermine the subject and put a temporary halt to
simple, progressive narrative understanding. Steven Ostovich
calls this “dangerous memory,” and, according to the theologian
Johann Baptist Metz, such memories “break through the centre-
point of our lives and reveal new and dangerous insights for our
present. They illuminate for a few moments and with a harsh
steady light the questionable nature of things we have apparently
come to terms with” (241).
In The Content of the Form, White identifies these radical
visitations with the traditional sublime–-that which is too
terrible to be known (Megill 53). Saul Friedlander distinguishes
common memory (after Lawrence Langer), “which tends to establish
coherence, closure and possibly a redemptive stance,” and deep
memory: “that which remains essentially inarticulable and
unrepresentable, that which continues to exist as unresolved
trauma just beyond the reach of meaning” (Friedlander 1992:41 and
Young 1998:666-67). An apt contemporary image for dangerous
memory might be the Japanese monster figure Godzilla who,
Yoshikuni Igarashi has argued, represents
wartime memory that haunted postwar Japan. Godzilla’s
monstrous body stood in for the memories of war and
42

loss that could not be recuperated by the resurgent
Japanese nationalism of the 1950s . . . . Memory
returned to the city of Tokyo as a monstrous body,
mercilessly destroying what had been reconstructed
since the war” (16 and 154).
Freud’s repressed or traumatic memory and Benjamin’s
dialectical images are also versions of dangerous memory:
“Central to the differently nuanced modernisms of Benjamin and
Freud was a view of memory as a hidden substratum whose meanings
might run counter to those of surface understanding–-of ideology,
19
or of consciousness” (Radstone 2003b:168). “Traumatic memory,”
Winter writes, “was a time bomb that once detonated could wreck
lives and families. Its evident and troubling existence
undermined more comforting or officially sanctioned memories,
heroic narratives about war, about the reintegration of soldiers
20
into peacetime society” (84). Dangerous memories are
unconscious and involuntary memories. Recovered memories of
childhood abuse are a controversial contemporary form of
dangerous memory; critics declare they emerge from nothing deeper
than therapeutic insinuation.
Benjamin was one of the early chroniclers of dangerous
memory and its great poet. He adapted the notion from his reading
of Proust, but his dialectical image was a subversive version of
Proust’s involuntary memory; he called it “Humankind's
involuntary memory” (Rieusset-Lemarié). In his "Theses on the
43

Philosophy of History," he wrote that “The past can be seized
only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be
recognized and is never seen again” (1969:255). Benjamin’s
storyteller creates dialectical images that “fuse past and
present, images that shock the reader into a critical awareness
of what has been left out . . . and now must be reclaimed and
redeemed”–-an image in “which the Then and the Now come together
into a constellation like a flash of lightning” (Nutting and
Bejamin 1989:50).
Benjamin also wrote of a recovery of memory “When the half-
light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years,
until one day, from an alien source it flashes as if from burning
magnesium powder, and now a snapshot transfixes the room’s image
on the plate”; “Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man
in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically
glossed the text” (Benjamin 1978:56-57 and 89). 21
If history is responsible narrative, then dangerous memory
(perhaps all memory) is disruptive, working toward narrative’s
subversion. Derrida opened his lectures on memory with the
following question, “Why do those who love Mnemosyne lack the
ability to tell stories? Is it possible to narrate a history out
of our memories?” (Sepulvida 168). Memory is disruptive for two
reasons: At its best it is involuntary, as Proust declared; it
speaks through us against our will. Secondly, it is assaultive,
in line with Freud’s and Benjamin’s recasting of experience in
44

modernity--no longer a tranquil flow, but a battery, a series of
shocks. Memory for Benjamin “is unable to deliver a full
reconstruction of the past. It recovers “images which are
detached from their original contexts and which are like torsos
and broken statues in the gallery of a Renaissance collector”
22
(Emden 219-20). As Nutting says, Benjamin’s dialectical images
interrupt and destabilize the comforting narrative of history:
“Progressive history, which looks ever-forward and sees its past
only in terms of its present and future effects, omits mention of
past injustices and facilitates the devastation of the oppressed”
(online). Dangerous memories are performed in a minor historical
mode (“the Leidensgeschichte or history of suffering”) that runs
under the “history of progress” (Ostovich 243).
Dangerous memories are often belated effects of the great
traumas of modernity, like Hiroshima (a flashbulb memory par
excellence) or the Holocaust. Michael Schudson observes that
“There are two kinds of studies of collective memory--those that
examine the Holocaust, and all the others” (Perlstein 16). That
event is posed by contemporary students of memory as a unique,
virtually transcendental, moment, occurring in history yet
marking an outside or an end to history: an event, Hayden White
writes, which escapes “the grasp of any language even to describe
it and of any medium–-verbal, visual, oral, or gestural–-to
represent it, much less of any historical account adequately to
explain it” (date:30). LaCapra considers Auschwitz to be an event
45

where “an extreme threshold or outer limit of transgression was
crossed,” and Klein regards the attempted Nazi extermination of
the Jews as the “ultimate traumatic decentering of history and
subjectivity” (LaCapra 1998:6 and Klein 139). 23
Given such attitudes, the Holocaust can only be held in
place by memory, not history. History, with its all-knowing
subject position and its appropriating language, is felt to be
disrespectful to such events (Ankersmit 178). History is the Nazi
extermination all over again: “In short, the totalizing gestures
that are part and parcel of the Hegelian subject appear to
replicate a certain fascist gesture and to evade the fundamental
trauma of the Holocaust by recouping some meaning from it”
(Eisenstein 13).
Although other genocides have been quite easily forgotten
and dropped from Western collective memory, arguments exposing
this particular exceptionalist claim seem to carry no force; the
Holocaust is protected by a “double-binding injunction perhaps
best articulated by Elie Wiesel: ‘Never Forget/you can never
know’” (Spiegel 158). “For Levinas it is the immemorial, for
Lyotard the unrepresentable, for Blanchot the catastrophe that
erases the possibility of knowledge,” Frow writes, and yet, he
notes, just the opposite seems to be the case; the Holocaust is
also a ubiquitous trope in Western culture: “It is an
overwhelming fact of our daily lives, constantly referred to both
in scholarly and political cultures and in the mass media. There
46

are Holocaust museums and memorials in most countries of the
Western world”(241). Yet this horrific uniqueness, Friedlander
warns, has a term to it: “With the passage of two or three
decades at most, the memory of the Shoah will be essentially
ritualized for some and historicized for the great majority, like
any other past event saved from oblivion. The destruction of the
Jews of Europe will become an empty formula and, in any case,
‘mere history’” (1993:48). 24
Collective memory does not so much claim to be an accurate
account of an event (actually, it does claim to be that but we do
not credit that claim as we do the similar claim of history), as
an accurate account of how it is remembered. Personal memory,
therefore, can correct history but collective memory never can.
Perhaps counter-memory and dangerous memory should not be aligned
with collective memory but opposed to it. The relationship
between the larger and lesser concepts is slippery. The phrase,
after all, is invoked to refer to counter-memories that challenge
an official record, as well as the opposite: the dominant meaning
of an event within a culture at that time, against which wave
after wave of revisionary history is written. Michael Lambeck
finds “a curious tension between looking to memory for a new
source of authority . . . and looking to memory in order to defer
and displace the very idea of certainty and authority”
(2003:211). Geoffrey Hartman distinguishes between two senses of
collective memory, between a collective memory which is bound up
47

with community, as Halbwachs proposed, and a public memory
“dominated by the media that all but destroys the former” (Bal
xvii).
Memory as theological
Remorse--is Memory--awake--
Her Parties all astir--
A presence of Departed Acts--
At window--and at Door--
Emily Dickinson
Counter-memory and dangerous memory are considered to be
redemptive. One last binary should be mentioned as dividing
history from memory: history as secular and memory as sacred.
Klein argues that memory is always implicitly a theological
concept, that “the secularization and privatization of memory”
cannot really unhook it from that context (132). He infers from
its genealogy that the work we wish memory to do is “to re-
enchant our relation with the world and pour presence back into
the past”: “It is no accident,” Frow also writes, “that much of
the vocabulary Nora uses to describe memory–-that of piety, of
ritual, of the relation to the ancestors–-is religious, and
evokes a continuity of passage between the living and the dead”
(Klein 145 and Frow 223).
For Nora and others, memory and history encode the more
general opposition of sacred and secular: “If we still dwelled
among our memories,” he says, “Every one of our acts, down to the
48

most quotidian, would be experienced, in an intimate
identification of act and meaning, as a religious repetition of
sempiternal practice” (2). The mystical “true” memory that Nora
invokes is one in which there is no separation between the
present and the past. As in Mircea Eliade’s realm of the sacred,
the past inhabits the present (but blissfully, without weight or
pain), and the long run of historical time collapses under its
grace.
Judaism and Christianity have been described as “religions
of remembrance.” “Divine acts of salvation situated in the past
form the content of faith and the object of rites.” Deuteronomy
calls the faithful to remember in the Old Testament, and in the
New, “The Last Supper founds redemption on the remembrance of
Jesus,” a command to the disciples, “Do this in remembrance of
me” (Le Goff 69 and Weinrich 22). A “plethora of memorial
injunctions eventually becomes condensed into the Six
Remembrances that observant Jews still recite each day,” and the
injunction “Remember!” appears in the Christian bible 170 times
(Schwarz 57 and Heller 231). For Yerushalmi and others, the Jews
were the archetypal people of memory, a people who had only
recently adapted themselves to living with history.
Coda: The Postmodern Turn
Modernism was hostile to memory in its art and architecture,
49

ut its literature contained extensive memory palaces in the work
of Proust, Mann, and Joyce in particular. Postmodern literature,
according to Fredric Jameson, is saturated with the presence of
the past, but it is a paper-thin and unruly past circulating as
pastiche. Klein on the other hand seems to suggest that our
current interest in memory is essentially postmodern and quite
essentialist: “The new memory work displaces the old hermeneutics
of suspicion with a therapeutic discourse whose quasi-religious
gestures link it with memory’s deep semantic past” (141). For
Klein, the postmodern turn is a return to premodern community
(via the Internet) and orality (via electronic imaging).
A more familiar postmodern establishment, heralded by Freud,
claims there is no difference between memory and one of its
others, fantasy--that indeterminacy rules in its production
(several earlier moments in the history of memory discourse have
brushed up against this conclusion). Like the screen memory,
postmodern memory is produced at the site of remembering. It does
not retrieve the past but recreates it–-an already familiar
conclusion. As Belinda Barnet writes, “There is no lived memory,
no originary, internal experience stored somewhere that
corresponds to a certain event in our lives. Memory is entirely
reconstructed by the machine of memory” (online).
In the postmodern world not only has the concept of an
archive been abandoned for “memorial dynamism,” but even the
notion of an indelible trace is no longer meaningful ( ). If the
50

metaphor of the archive persists it is the archive as
pandemonium, as infinite wandering in Borgesian tales like “The
Secret Miracle” or “The Library of Babel.” In Alain Resnais’s
1957 film, Toute la mémoire du monde, the camera drifts across
library stacks and storage rooms filled with endless rows and
piles of useless and forgotten print.
In the postmodern turn we lose the past, but this connection
had originally been an act of faith on the order of Locke’s
belief that perceptions actually correspond to the qualities of
objects. Why, then, continue to bother about a past that is so
far removed from the noble concept staked out by philosophy and
history? The past is now a commodity, the “date-mark” of Freud’s
day dreams or Barthes’s “effect of the real”--necessary but
meaningless (Freud 9.147 and Barthes 1968). Beckett’s work is
emblematic of this turn: His narrator “cannot remember the past,
because he has no identity except the one assigned to him from
his surroundings. He repeatedly chooses silence rather than
assimilate himself into an oppressive collective memory” (Remmler
27).
51