Screen Memory - Department of English

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,
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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).
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