Screen Memory - Department of English

Philosophy of History," he wrote that “The past can be seized
only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be
recognized and is never seen again” (1969:255). Benjamin’s
storyteller creates dialectical images that “fuse past and
present, images that shock the reader into a critical awareness
of what has been left out . . . and now must be reclaimed and
redeemed”–-an image in “which the Then and the Now come together
into a constellation like a flash of lightning” (Nutting and
Bejamin 1989:50).
Benjamin also wrote of a recovery of memory “When the half-
light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years,
until one day, from an alien source it flashes as if from burning
magnesium powder, and now a snapshot transfixes the room’s image
on the plate”; “Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man
in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically
glossed the text” (Benjamin 1978:56-57 and 89). 21
If history is responsible narrative, then dangerous memory
(perhaps all memory) is disruptive, working toward narrative’s
subversion. Derrida opened his lectures on memory with the
following question, “Why do those who love Mnemosyne lack the
ability to tell stories? Is it possible to narrate a history out
of our memories?” (Sepulvida 168). Memory is disruptive for two
reasons: At its best it is involuntary, as Proust declared; it
speaks through us against our will. Secondly, it is assaultive,
in line with Freud’s and Benjamin’s recasting of experience in
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