Memory and Authenticity

Ten years ago Natalie Davis and I decided to put together a special issue of Representations we would call "Memory and Counter-Memory... This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/13 Memory and Authenticity Randolph Starn University of California-Berkeley Ten years ago Natalie Davis and I decided to put together a special issue of Representations we would call "Memory and Counter-Memory." When the issue appeared in the spring of 1989, the click of discovery, the buzz of current interest, the echo of old debates were becoming a roar; by the spring of 1993 when Stephen Greenblatt and I offered a Berkeley graduate seminar on "Pasts in the Present and the Institutionalizations of Memory," we were part of a movement questioning proprietary claims over the past by history and historians. Only a few years later the movement has become an industry, with an extensive product line and, so we might think, some worries about overproduction. Such is the short academic life-cycle at this fin de siecle, R to D, glimmer to glut. The quick pace makes it easy to forget that the historical study of collective memory is already in its second or third generation, or even older, depending how the reckoning is done. Just to take French examples one could start, say, with the work of Maurice Halbwachs, then go on to the collective effort of Pierre Nora and his collaborators, before arriving at a current cluster of studies of remembering and forgetting Vichy and the Algerian war. Ian Hacking has recently argued that French positivist sciences of psychology began a "rewriting of the soul" in terms of memory in the 1870s, and Richard Terdiman has located a consciousness-raising crisis of memory in France much earlier in the nineteenth century. One way or another, a rich corpus of histories of memory exists from which we may draw some conclusions before rushing on, as it may be, like lemmings.' Here is a sample list of basic propositions that seem to me established or reconfirmed by the memory literature I have read off and on over several years: 1 Starn: Memory and Authenticity Published by New Prairie Press 192 STCL, Volume 23, No.1 (Winter, 1999) As in a classic, Aristotelian distinction, memory (mneme) is involuntary, memory that comes up unbidden, or a deliberate act of recollection (anamnesis); although recent historical studies tend to blur the distinction, as the ancients also did, they are mostly concerned with memory of the selective sort. Individual memory may be of both kinds, but collective memory is always constructed because, absent an ether of transcendental, organic, or communal memory, people can't remember things they haven't experienced. Therefore, collective memory has no unmediated access to the past but is about the articulation of identity from the vantage of the present; it is continuously reconstructed rather than recalled pristine, and it attributes the causes and truths of things that it claims to know. Collective memory can best be characterized as a practice or a set of practices rather than a faculty or an entity such as-these are common suggestions-a storage bin, an aviary, a wax tablet, or a palimpsest.' To clinch these points could take whole tomes. But considering that I am fairly confident about being able to make the case, why can I also be certain of resistance and feel it in myself besides? There's evidently more to this feeling than my having listed propositions without making arguments. Even Ockham's razor needs whetting by argumentation, but the objections that come to mind go beyond reasonable arguments. To begin with, I suspect that many people, including perfectly respectable academics, want to obfuscate because memory proffers relief from humdrum history, a promise of intimacy, access to "lived experience," critiques of official complacency or duplicity, and at the same time an imagined universality that transcends everyday routines. This is nothing new, of course. Nineteenth-century historicism wanted to recall the past into the present; "living memory" was in all senses of the word a "medium" of time travel, and there were and still are many frequent flyers. My guess is that not even the most determined postmodernist sensibility can altogether resist this magic carpet. If anything, programmatic postmodernist opposition to such flights may have something to do with some kinds of objections I'm anticipating. It is, for example, textbook Deconstruction that a positive claim hinges on some more or less encrypted Other, and this means that deconstructed versions of memory will call up, ironically or not, shadowy versions that are allegedly organic, unmediated, whole, present, etc. But there are more pressing reasons for wanting 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 23, Iss. 1 [1999], Art. 13 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/13 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1462