Screen Memory - Department of English

metaphor of the archive persists it is the archive as
pandemonium, as infinite wandering in Borgesian tales like “The
Secret Miracle” or “The Library of Babel.” In Alain Resnais’s
1957 film, Toute la mémoire du monde, the camera drifts across
library stacks and storage rooms filled with endless rows and
piles of useless and forgotten print.
In the postmodern turn we lose the past, but this connection
had originally been an act of faith on the order of Locke’s
belief that perceptions actually correspond to the qualities of
objects. Why, then, continue to bother about a past that is so
far removed from the noble concept staked out by philosophy and
history? The past is now a commodity, the “date-mark” of Freud’s
day dreams or Barthes’s “effect of the real”--necessary but
meaningless (Freud 9.147 and Barthes 1968). Beckett’s work is
emblematic of this turn: His narrator “cannot remember the past,
because he has no identity except the one assigned to him from
his surroundings. He repeatedly chooses silence rather than
assimilate himself into an oppressive collective memory” (Remmler
27).
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