Screen Memory - Department of English

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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