Screen Memory - Department of English

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