Screen Memory - Department of English

ut its literature contained extensive memory palaces in the work
of Proust, Mann, and Joyce in particular. Postmodern literature,
according to Fredric Jameson, is saturated with the presence of
the past, but it is a paper-thin and unruly past circulating as
pastiche. Klein on the other hand seems to suggest that our
current interest in memory is essentially postmodern and quite
essentialist: “The new memory work displaces the old hermeneutics
of suspicion with a therapeutic discourse whose quasi-religious
gestures link it with memory’s deep semantic past” (141). For
Klein, the postmodern turn is a return to premodern community
(via the Internet) and orality (via electronic imaging).
A more familiar postmodern establishment, heralded by Freud,
claims there is no difference between memory and one of its
others, fantasy--that indeterminacy rules in its production
(several earlier moments in the history of memory discourse have
brushed up against this conclusion). Like the screen memory,
postmodern memory is produced at the site of remembering. It does
not retrieve the past but recreates it–-an already familiar
conclusion. As Belinda Barnet writes, “There is no lived memory,
no originary, internal experience stored somewhere that
corresponds to a certain event in our lives. Memory is entirely
reconstructed by the machine of memory” (online).
In the postmodern world not only has the concept of an
archive been abandoned for “memorial dynamism,” but even the
notion of an indelible trace is no longer meaningful ( ). If the
50