Screen Memory - Department of English

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
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