Screen Memory - Department of English

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,
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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
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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
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