Memory

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Consulting Editors

Sally Alexander (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Stephan Feuchtwang (London School of Economics)
Kate Hodgkin (University of East London)
Jo Labanyi (New York University)
Constantina Papoulias (Middlesex University)
Richard Terdiman (University of California at Santa Cruz)

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 Memory

H I S T O R I E S , T H E O R I E S , D E B AT E S

Edited by S U S A N N A H R A D S T O N E

and B I L L S C H WA R Z

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 2010

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Copyright 䉷 2010 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior
permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Memory : histories, theories, debates / edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill
Schwarz.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8232-3259-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8232-3260-4 (pbk. : alk.
paper)—ISBN 978-0-8232-3261-1 (ebook)
1. Memory (Philosophy) 2. Memory—Social aspects. I. Radstone, Susannah.
II. Schwarz, Bill, 1951–
BD181.7.M49 2010
128’.3—dc22
2010012400

Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
First edition

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 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Mapping Memory
SUSANNAH R ADSTONE A ND BILL SCHWARZ 1

PA R T 1 . H I S T O R I E S

I. EPOCHS

1. How to Make a Composition: Memory-Craft in

Antiquity and in the Middle Ages
MARY CARRUTHERS 15
2. The Reformation of Memory in Early Modern Europe
PETER S HERLOCK 30
3. Memory, Temporality, Modernity:
Les lieux de mémoire
BILL SCHWARZ 41

I I . I M AG I N I N G M O D E R N M E M O R Y

4. Bergson on Memory
KEITH A NSEL L-PEARSO N 61
5. Halbwachs and the Social Properties of Memory
ERIKA A PF ELBAUM 77
6. Memory in Freud
RICHARD TERDIMAN 93
7. Proust: The Music of Memory
MICHAEL WOOD 109
8. Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin:
Memory from Weimar to Hitler
ESTHER LESLIE 123

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 CONTENTS

9. Adorno on the Destruction of Memory

BRIAN O’CONNOR 136
10. Acts of Memory and Mourning: Derrida
and the Fictions of Anteriority
GERHARD RICHTER 150
11. Deleuze and the Overcoming of Memory
KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON 161

PA R T 2 . H O W M E M O R Y W O R K S

I. THE INNER SELF

12. Memory and the Unconscious

ROGER K ENNEDY 179
13. Memories Are Made of This
STEVEN RO SE 198
14. Memory and Cognition
JOHN SUTTON, C ELIA B. HARRIS,
A N D AM A N D A J. BA R N I E R 209
15. Physiological Memory Systems
HOWA RD CAYGILL 227

II. SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SOCIAL

16. Memory-Talk: London Childhoods

SALLY ALEXANDER 235
17. Affect and Embodiment
FELICITY CALLARD AND
CONSTA NTINA PAPOULIAS 246
18. Telling Stories: Memory and Narrative
MARK FREEMAN 263

III. PUBLIC MEMORY

19. Ritual and Memory

STEPHAN FEUCHTWANG 281

vi

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 CONTENTS

20. A Long War: Public Memory and the Popular Media

PAUL A HA MI LTO N 299
21. Sites of Memory
J AY W I N T E R 312
22. Cinema and Memory
SUSANNAH R ADSTONE 325
23. Machines of Memory
STEVE G OODMAN A ND LUCIANA PARISI 343

PA R T 3 . C O N T R O V E R S I E S

24. Slavery, Historicism, and the Poverty

of Memorialization
ST EPHAN PALM IÉ 363
25. Soviet Memories: Patriotism and Trauma
CATHERINE MERRIDALE 376
26. The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/
Memory Studies
MARIANNE HIRSCH AND LEO SPITZER 390
27. The Long Afterlife of Loss
EVA HOFFMAN 406
28. Migration, Food, Memory, and Home-Building
GHASSAN HAG E 416
29. The Seventh Veil: Feminism, Recovered Memory,
and the Politics of the Unconscious
JANICE HAAKEN 428
30. The Gender of Memory in Post-Apartheid
South Africa
ANNIE E . C OOMBES 442
Afterword
LUISA PASSERINI 459

Notes 46 5
List of Contributors 53 7
Index 54 5

vii

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 Acknowledgments

We are very grateful indeed to our consulting editors—Sally Alexander,

Howard Caygill, Stephan Feuchtwang, Kate Hodgkin, Jo Labanyi, Con-
stantina Papoulias, and Richard Terdiman—who helped guide us at the
outset of this complex project. Richard Terdiman, an enthusiast from
the beginning, was responsible for putting us in contact with Helen
Tartar at Fordham University Press, an introduction for which we will
be eternally thankful, for Helen has proved an ideal editor. We are grate-
ful, too, to Katrina Clifford, an early inspiration for the book; to Rich-
ard Kearney, who proved supportive at a critical time; to Mary Stevens,
for her help in chasing the English references for Chapter 5; to Janet
Reed for producing the index at speed and to Felicity Collins and Lynne
Segal, who at the end of the project both commented on a draft of the
introduction. Tom Lay at Fordham supplied copy editing of the highest
order, the product of immense labor, for which our profound thanks;
and thanks as well to the managing editor at Fordham, Eric Newman.
Steven Rose’s chapter was first published in Harriet Harvey Wood
and A. S. Byatt’s edited collection Memory and is reproduced here with
permission of the author and of Chatto and Windus. Keith Ansell-Pear-
son’s chapter on Bergson, commissioned for the present book, first ap-
peared in a different version as his introduction to the 2007 Palgrave
edition of Bergson’s Mind-Energy and is published here with the per-
mission of the author. We thank all concerned.
Institutional support came from the School of Humanities and So-
cial Sciences at the University of East London and from the School of
English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.
We owe great thanks, too, to our contributors, a number of whom
we have met only virtually. All responded with enthusiasm to our initial
requests, and all worked hard to bring the book to fruition.

ix

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 Memory

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 Introduction
Mapping Memory

Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz

The idea of memory runs through contemporary public life at high

voltage, generating polemic and passionate debate in the media, in the
spheres of politics and in the academy. Yet although the contemporary
‘‘presentness’’ of memory is evident, how this is to be understood re-
mains a matter of dispute. It is not clear what meanings attach them-
selves to the generic conception of memory itself; and while in the
academy there is a common belief that memory is ‘‘everywhere,’’1 what
this means remains an open matter. Memory: Histories, Theories, De-
bates constitutes one collective response to the contemporary salience
of memory and to the controversies it has activated. Our purpose is to
guide readers through the interdisciplinary fields of memory research.
In doing so we aim to bring out into the open what, intellectually and
politically, is at stake in contemporary debate.

The Politics of Memory

As we demonstrate in the chapters that follow there have been many

divergent currents that have fed into the present preoccupation with
memory. We can take here, as one starting point, the various investiga-
tions into the phenomenon of postmodernism that began to cohere in
the 1980s. From this theoretical moment there emerged the notion that
what most characterizes the times in which we live is a social amnesia,
in which we, as modern subjects, are cut off from the pasts that have
created us. In this account, the current fascination—or even obses-
sion—with memory is ineluctably associated with the idea of its ab-
sence, atrophy, collapse, or demise. One version of this approach
proposes that historical consciousness has been eroded by the recycling

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 S U S A N N A H R A D S T O N E A N D B I L L S C H WA R Z

and commodification of the past characteristic of late capitalism;2 another is that organic
memory has been destroyed by the transmissions of new media technologies.3 To think
in these terms leads one to conclude that ‘‘real’’ memory is not so much ‘‘everywhere’’ as
it is ‘‘nowhere.’’ Indeed, many argue that it is precisely because memory is in jeopardy
that the present critical hyper-activity has occurred. Whether the fragility of memory
defines the epistemic imperative of the age is a question that has come to shadow current
preoccupations, in a range of different areas of inquiry. This argument, in its many partic-
ulars, is a theme addressed in the chapters here. However, if it is true, or partially true,
we need to know concretely how this collapse in memory operates, in what domains of
subjective and social life, and with what consequences. To make such a notion work we
have to break open the capacious category of memory and disinter its complex, shifting
meanings. Only through careful sifting of concrete evidence, working close to the ground,
can the larger claims of systemic forgetting be assessed.
If arguments concerning the atrophy of memory provide one route into the field of
contemporary memory debate, it could be equally effective, conceptually, to start from a
contrary premise: not that memory is no longer possible, but rather that we are witnessing
an unprecedented politicization of memory, such that public engagement with memory
is taking on new and more complex forms. If we follow this perspective, emphasizing the
imbrication of memory with political imperatives (widely understood), we would be
obliged to think at a different level of abstraction. We would need to move from the high
level of generality on which the premise of the decline of memory is based to lower, more
concrete levels of analysis, closer to the historical ‘‘real,’’ taking us to particular arenas,
moments, and conjunctures. It moves us from the general—the absence of memory—to
the concrete: to historically specific formations of remembering and forgetting, in which
each is articulated in the other. To think like this highlights, for instance, how specific
acts of forgetting—purposeful or involuntary—inform and reorganize the terrain of poli-
tics itself. And it allows us to think as well more carefully about the complexities of
temporality, and about the heightened perceptions of the workings of the past-in-the-
present.
These conceptualizations of memory—its decimation or disappearance, on the one
hand, and its presentness and politicization, on the other—need not necessarily function
as contraries, for work at a lower level of abstraction necessarily depends on broader,
general categories. But these conceptualizations do point to different theoretical priorities.
As editors, our inclinations lean more to the ‘‘presence’’ than to the ‘‘absence’’ of memory,
though differing emphases occur across the chapters collected here. It seems to us that
what—subjectively—most drives investment in the study of memory, in the academy and
in allied domains, is less the notion of the impossibility of memory than the conviction
that memory has become the site of, or the sign for, many intersecting issues: the temporal
imaginings of past, present, and future; subjectivity and identification; the passage from
the inner life to the outer world; even the politics of being in the world and of recognition.

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 INTRODUCTION: MAPPING MEMORY

Whether it is wise for memory to be assigned such inflationary properties is a conceptual,

strategic question that a number of contributors discuss. We need to ask as well why, at
this point in history, such inflation in the category of memory has occurred. Yet whatever
the appropriate methodological protocols, the fact that memory has become the theoreti-
cal medium for these varied concerns is clearly the case. Notwithstanding these difficul-
ties, there is, we believe, much in the contemporary investigation of memory that is vital
intellectually, and that carries too an engagement with pressing political realities. That we
believe this to be so accounts for this book.
Invariably the relations between the practices of memory and the practices of politics
are compacted and difficult to unravel. The injunction to ‘‘remember,’’ determined in
every instance by the social locations of those involved, inevitably raises important ques-
tions of ethics. One of our aims is to critically address the memory–politics nexus, demon-
strating the diverse ways in which memory works both in the public sphere and in
everyday life. As we have implied, what constitutes the formal domain of politics is itself
in question, partly as a consequence of the operations of memory. Theorizations founded
on an expansive conception of politics—understood as the politics of culture, of everyday
life, of sexuality, of ethnicity, of the self, and so on—draw in part on notions of memory
in order to signal the means by which transactions between public and private, external
and internal, occur. Memory and forgetting are frequently invoked, in public life, to
acknowledge and indict diverse acts of violence, present and past, perpetrated by states,
groups, and individuals. The politicization of memory is to a degree driven by the suffer-
ings attendant upon the making of the modern, globalized world, encompassing instances
where memory, as a site of social practice, has intensified. In the afterlife of collectively
experienced catastrophes—slavery, the Holocaust, and many genocides; wars, and ecolog-
ical disasters; forced migrations and the fact of becoming a refugee or an ‘‘illegal’’; the
damage done to the self by acts of sexual violence and by torture—the medium of mem-
ory has seemed to offer the possibility not only that an element of selfhood can be recon-
stituted, but also that a public, political language can be fashioned in which these
experiences, and others like them, can be communicated to others.
Yet this mobilization of memory as politics requires critical engagement. Identities,
individual and collective, are formed and re-formed through narrative, in history, and
through adversity. No simple call to ‘‘remember’’—charged as that imperative now finds
itself, with the power to heal and to restore, or to stoke the fires of deadly conflicts—can
leapfrog over the complexities of history, of politics, and of speaking positions. Neither
can remembrance turn back the clock by inserting lost times into the present. Memory is
active, forging its pasts to serve present interests. Whether embedded within nationalist
struggles, for instance, or in the daily rituals of home-making in new lands practiced by
the migrant, memory’s activities in the present belie the apparently simple, reified, and
knowable past evoked by the call to remember.

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 S U S A N N A H R A D S T O N E A N D B I L L S C H WA R Z

Yet the politicization of memory continues apace. As a result, the coordinates of

memory are themselves in the process of transformation. Memory, from this perspective,
is defined less by its loss than by its overdetermined presence, always working in conjunc-
tion with its dialectical other—no memory without forgetfulness, no forgetfulness without
memory—such that the social relations of memory are activated in new ways in the social
landscapes of our times. Memory, in this scheme of things, is not an impossibility, but a
pre-constituted, actually-existing site of conflict, in which many contrary forces converge
and in which the interactions between memory and forgetting are contingent as much
as they are systemic. In whatever guise it is manifest, the politics of memory is always
overdetermined and unstable, the consequence of incessant human intervention.
The contemporary public prominence of memory has brought with it diverse at-
tempts to conceptualize memory beyond the realm of the personal. Readers will be famil-
iar with those terms—including ‘‘public,’’ ‘‘social,’’ ‘‘cultural,’’ and ‘‘collective’’—that
have been appended to memory in order to enhance understandings of its wider scope
and dynamics. Indeed, recently, a veritable international, cross-disciplinary industry has
emerged as scholars vie to produce the most complete, coherent, or convincing taxonom-
ies and definitions of these ‘‘types’’ of memory. Alongside this, there are those who insist
that true memory is personal memory and that the expansion of the concept of memory
beyond the personal constitutes a weak metaphor at best, and a metaphor strained to its
breaking point by the freight it is currently asked to bear.4 In our view, however, these
efforts at producing abstract definitions may miss the point. For what they fail to register
is the mutual implication of the high voltage public life of memory with the many contro-
versies concerning memory in the abstract. For us, there is no way of thinking about
memory outside its histories and politics—histories and politics that inform understand-
ings of memory inside the academy as well as outside. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates
strives to shed light on how understandings of memory are formed—and are being
formed—in circumstances that are themselves historically, intellectually, and politically
charged and, indeed, that are changing as we write.

Pedagogy

The more immediate inspiration for this book is pedagogic. We are conscious that those
who are preoccupied with the public and private aspects of memory seek to make sense
of the specialized philosophies that underpin even the most commonsense recourse to
memory. Yet as anyone coming to the study of memory for the first time will know, the
intellectual field is vast, drawing from many different specialisms. To make headway it is
necessary to be conversant with a number of disciplines and to work across different
disciplinary boundaries. Many of the field’s formative texts and theories are dispersed or
buried in particular philosophical debates whose precepts are far from immediately clear.

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 INTRODUCTION: MAPPING MEMORY

This is not an easy terrain to navigate. The purpose of this book is simply to provide a
map or a series of linked maps of intellectual debate, such that what might otherwise
appear to be a daunting morass of competing positions begins to assume overall shape.
This putatively innocent objective, however, has many ramifications. Memory: Histor-
ies, Theories, Debates is a big book, pulling together a wide range of contemporary research
of different kinds. From the beginning we found it impossible to make any formal distinc-
tion between memory and its theorizations, for the category of memory itself is notori-
ously fissile. One of the aims of the collection is to communicate the range of analysis
encompassed by the idea of memory, in different disciplines and within differing theoreti-
cal traditions. It reviews debates conducted in the humanities, in the social sciences, and
in the sciences (in cognitive psychology and in neuroscience), and provides analytical and
historical depth across a number of specialized fields of inquiry. The variety of topics
addressed, and the consequent scale of the book, are testimony to the plurality of phe-
nomena that memory signifies. Even so, this book is not comprehensive, nor could it be.
It reflects our own location, both in the wider sense of the north European provenance
of the editors and, in terms of intellectual or disciplinary affiliation, in our training in the
humanities. Thus while we have attempted to reach outward, in time and space, and in
drawing in work from the sciences that is foreign to us, the core of our concerns derives
from these locations, and bears their impress. The issues discussed here are urgent to us;
but this first person plural, we hope, has a wide embrace.
The intellectual pluralism that underwrites this volume itself represents part of a
larger argument. If the study of memory is to fulfill its promise, it must necessarily remain
an open project, whose theoretical boundaries can accommodate competing paradigms.
The present volume is a collaborative one in the deepest sense, offering a spectrum of
opinion rather than attempting to marshal a single overriding thesis. It is constituted by
many voices and in many contrasting registers which work—we hope—to dissolve ortho-
doxy and programmatic proclamation. The individual contributions, commissioned spe-
cifically for this volume, endeavor to draw out complexity and contradiction in the
theorizations of memory that they discuss, highlighting those areas where theory falters,
or reaches an impasse, such that these moments of fracture might serve as the catalyst for
new lines of inquiry. Each chapter aims to reprise a particular debate or issue while in the
same moment carrying forward the arguments by indicating where, and how, new think-
ing might happen.

Histories, Contexts, Faultlines

In planning the volume, and in briefing our contributors, one of our objectives was to
emphasize three clusters of problems: first, the histories of memory; second, the theoreti-
cal contexts, or provenance, of the dominating categories employed in the interpretation
of memory; and third, the faultlines, or points of breakdown, in current theorization.

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 S U S A N N A H R A D S T O N E A N D B I L L S C H WA R Z

The emphasis on history reminds us of the multiplicity of operations that, through

time, the idea of memory has signified. Memory in one situation may not equate to
memory in another. It allows us to link theorizations of memory to larger historical
transformations (the coming of the book, or of the moving image, for example). It alerts
us to the specificity of memory formations, and of their conjunctural conditions of exis-
tence. And it enables us to see the formation of the field of inquiry, as a process rather
than as a number of discrete, ready-made philosophical positions. After all, history, it can
be said, offers the means by which we can grasp the memory of memory, such that we
can appreciate the contingency of the theorizations that dominate our own times.
The idea of theoretical contexts refers more specifically to the conceptual representa-
tions of memory. Against too easy an eclecticism we are keen to advocate a methodologi-
cal pluralism which—while still remaining plural—at the same time respects the
theoretical integrity of the paradigms from which we draw. We might cite here, particu-
larly, the case of Walter Benjamin, regularly conscripted to the arena of memory research,
and indeed to many other strands of critical inquiry, but often without sufficient grasp of
the specificity of his concepts and of their valence within his larger epistemology. A similar
point could be made about the appropriation of many other figures too. To say this stands
as a plea, within the pedagogy of memory research, for a more self-reflective understand-
ing of the provenance of the intellectual paradigms that we employ and, too, for a measure
of caution when we endeavor to transport the concepts formed in one theoretical moment
to another. The interdisciplinarity of the study of memory, welcome and necessary though
it is, creates pitfalls as well as possibilities.
The idea of faultlines designates those ruptures or contradictions that run through
memory research, between and within disciplines, and that represent the range of conten-
tions that characterize the unfinished epistemological organization of the field of inquiry.
One such faultline, for example, we have already alluded to: the tendency of memory
research to expand its reach to a point where not only is memory ‘‘everywhere’’ but it
comes to designate well-nigh ‘‘everything.’’ While there is common accord that discrimi-
nation is called for, in order to demarcate what is, and what is not, memory, there is little
consensus on how such demarcations might be conceptualized. It’s not only that this
remains unreconciled: there is no consensus about how conceptually the issue could be-
come reconciled. Around this, as in many other of the faultlines which run through the
field, contention accumulates.
A second faultline that recurs concerns, as we’ve suggested, the question of collective
memory and its various cognates, social memory, cultural memory, and public memory.
Though it is now widely—though by no means uncontroversially—accepted that memo-
ry’s purchase extends beyond the bounds of the individual, the question of how the social
dimensions of memory are to be theorized continues to provoke debate. The extension
of concepts borrowed from psychology or psychoanalysis, though potentially very rich,
nonetheless remains problematic. Meanwhile, a focus on ‘‘mediated’’ memory—on the

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 INTRODUCTION: MAPPING MEMORY

role of media in transmitting memory beyond the individual—risks misconstruing the

media, in all their complex forms, histories, genres, and technologies, simply as ‘‘mem-
ory.’’ This blurs the distinctions, not only between individual memory and public dis-
courses, but also between specific processes of production, distribution, and reception.
How, exactly, are we to distinguish between public or social memory, on the one hand,
and other modes of public discourse, narrative, and practice on the other? These ques-
tions, too, remain unresolved.
These tensions and dislocations are there for all to see, in these and other issues, in
the field of memory research. Indeed, we might say that it is these faultlines that constitute
the evolving, dynamic field of inquiry itself.

Structure of the Volume

Much of our argument is condensed in the conceptual organization of the book, whose
structure implies that there is no singular, clear-cut phenomenon that we can designate
as ‘‘memory.’’ Memory has signified, and continues to signify, different phenomena in
different historical situations, and within different theoretical or disciplinary paradigms.
The memory that is the object of the investigations of the cognitive scientist has a concep-
tual provenance and history distinct from the memory discussed by anthropologists or
theorists of digital media. This emphasis on the multiplicity of memory practices repre-
sents a founding precept of our collection.
The volume is divided into three overall parts: ‘‘Histories,’’ ‘‘How Memory Works,’’
and ‘‘Controversies.’’ The short opening section of three chapters offers a snapshot of the
discontinuous histories of memory and demonstrates the degree to which theorizations
of memory work within a dense web of thought and speculation. We can see too, at
different historical moments, the modes in which memory itself has been differentially
valorized. The period of high modernity, particularly, witnessed a proliferation of writings
about memory—writings that still have a powerful gravitational pull on the contemporary
world and that, in some respects, we still internalize as ‘‘ours.’’ Researchers today continue
to be intrigued by themes such as amnesia, haunting, or re-remembering. At the same
time, however, it’s also the case that much that preoccupies us—the relationship between
subjectivity and space, say—was central to the theorization of memory in earlier epochs,
even if differently nuanced. This historical perspective allows us to grasp more clearly the
extent to which our own theorizations, which feel so much to be the product of our own
times, represent a beguiling combination of the new and the old.
‘‘Imagining Modern Memory,’’ the second section of this opening part, foregrounds
those thinkers who remain powerfully influential today, reconstructing a network of
theoretical genealogies and demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities between
modern and contemporary perceptions, preoccupations, and politics. We indicate, for

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 S U S A N N A H R A D S T O N E A N D B I L L S C H WA R Z

instance, that contemporary writing on memory-objects is shadowed by the musings of

earlier generations on mass commodification and fetishism, to be found in Walter Benja-
min’s reflections on the waning of the aura and of Erfahrung (lived experience) in high
modernity, for example, and in the work of Siegfried Kracauer and of the Frankfurt
School more generally.
Yet to organize discussion of modern memory genealogically, as we do here, also
highlights distinct patterns of theorization that persist to this day. If the Frankfurt tradi-
tions represent one tendency, another can be identified in the psychoanalytical traditions
of Freud and his followers, and perhaps a third in the lineage which moves from Bergson
to Deleuze. There are of course important transactions between these distinct conceptual
formations. But the incommensurabilities are as evident as the commanalities, suggesting
that the field of study represents more a congeries of competing paradigms, in which
dialogue across each paradigm is difficult to sustain.
In the second and third parts the focus of the volume shifts rather more from the
past to the present, setting out to reveal the ways in which memory—and theories about
memory—have come to permeate all levels of our understandings of contemporary expe-
rience. Part 2, ‘‘How Memory Works,’’ comprises a series of sections that take the reader
from discussion of the inner self, via subjectivity and the social, to the issue of public
memory. Each of these sections engages with the politicization of memory, both in the
formal domain of state policy and public life and in the inner regions of domesticity,
private life, sexuality, and the psyche.
In the third part of the volume, ‘‘Controversies,’’ we review some of the defining
areas of memory research where political issues are closest to the surface. Here the authors
engage with a—necessarily partial—range of historical and contemporary questions that
have been central, formative even, in the development of memory research. The chapters
focus on concrete instances, comprising different historical moments and mnemonic
practices and drawing from different conceptual paradigms. Expectations of what mem-
ory means and what it might offer are confounded at every step.
We are aware that the concept of trauma could well have provided one general or
framing theory by which to approach these issues, and readers may be surprised that it
isn’t more conspicuous in the pages that follow. The instances analyzed here—slavery,
the Holocaust, sexual abuse—have all been theorized as traumatic: indeed they have
done much to develop and bring to prominence trauma theory as a key framework
within memory studies. Yet without denying the significance of the connections between
memory and trauma, we are less sure about the viability of elevating trauma into a
general theory, applicable across time and space to very different formations of memory
activity, an uncertainty that Catherine Merridale, in particular, explores in her chapter
on memories of the Soviet epoch. At this theoretical moment it may be wiser for the
concept of trauma to be adopted critically, self-reflectively, and with an element of
caution. There are a number of reasons for this. The emphasis of trauma studies has

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 INTRODUCTION: MAPPING MEMORY

undoubtedly expanded our understanding of the unspeakable and unrepresentable reg-

isters of individual and collective suffering. Yet as Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
argue in their chapter, the focus of trauma theory on unspeakability and silence as the
manifestation of a ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘complete’’ witnessing is not without risks. For, in their
words, those silences can be ‘‘so open to interpretation and projection that . . . they
preclude therapeutic listening in favor of ascription and appropriation’’ by any external
political force. That which trauma theory posits as truth, in exceeding the bounds of
narrative sense-making, certainly carries a politics. But the scope for political discrimi-
nation from such a perspective, discrimination that could determine where such a poli-
tics might lead, remains profoundly circumscribed.
Too often the effect of starting out from an insistence on trauma has been to pit
traumatic memory against history. The emphasis of this book, on the contrary, is to
propose that memory research constitutes not a rejoinder to historical (and other) in-
quiry, but its—awkward—ally. If traumatic memory and history are polarized, this in
turn can obscure the politics of remembering. That the politics of memory, in the in-
stances we address here, extend beyond trauma theory is demonstrated here in Stephan
Palmié’s chapter on slavery, where he argues that histories of slavery, and accounts of
slave memory, ‘‘aim to fashion, authorize, and motivate specific definitions of moral com-
munity in the present.’’ Our purpose is to encourage multiperspectival, interdisciplinary
research in these most fraught of areas and to demonstrate that in the politics of mem-
ory—in academic research and in the wider public sphere, in these instances as well as
more generally—meanings remain perpetually in tension and open to question. They
acquire their power, though, when articulated to an ethics of the present.
Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates is, we believe, greater than the sum of its parts.
Its purpose is to bring together, in a single volume, as many different facets of contempo-
rary memory analysis as is practicable, in order to allow the reader to range across the
varied dimensions of current scholarship. It will be open, we imagine, to a wide range of
readings. In this way, we hope it will play a part in furthering research in the areas dis-
cussed here as well as in new fields that await investigation.

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 PA R T 1

Histories

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 I. EPOCHS

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 1. How to Make a Composition
Memory-Craft in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages

Mary Carruthers

The so-called ‘‘arts of memory,’’ artes memorandi, which were taught

commonly in the curricula of dialectic and rhetoric for roughly two
thousand years between the fourth century bce and the sixteenth century
ce, belong to a different psychological country from that of the modern
Western, post-Enlightenment ‘‘memory’’ that is the concern of most of
the rest of this volume. Of course, there are also complex medieval atti-
tudes and practices regarding history and commemoration of the dead,
but it is not with these that the artes memorandi are concerned.1 Aca-
demic redefinitions and reclassifications of the old natural and philo-
sophical sciences, especially during the seventeenth century, absorbed
much of the craft of memory into the teaching of logic and restricted the
mental activity of memory to the retrieval of experiences and previously
learned data. Issues of accuracy and completeness of retrieval, of full
iteration, became determinant in defining the role of memory: where
earlier scholars had understood positive qualities of composition and
invention, later ones understood negative ones of failure and error. Rhet-
oric (and rhetorically conceived poetic theory) was dropped from the
rational sciences altogether, answerable only to issues of style, sensibility,
and taste. In earlier times, ars memorandi was thought of primarily as a
practical instrument of rational investigation and discovery, or ‘‘inven-
tion,’’ useful for a wide variety of purposes and—by the thirteenth cen-
tury—addressed to a greatly varied audience.2
The role of memory before this modern reorientation (and concep-
tual improvishment) occurred is demonstrated in two ancient literary
moments. In Greek legend, memory, or Mnemosyne, is the mother of
the Muses. That story places memory at the beginning, as the matrix of
invention for all human arts, of all human making, including the mak-
ing of ideas; it memorably encapsulates an assumption that memory

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 MARY CARRUTHERS

and invention—what we now call creativity—if not exactly the same, are the closest thing
to it. In order to create, in order to think at all, human beings require some mental tool
or machine, and that machine lives in the intricate networks of their own memories. The
requirement of memory for making new thoughts is at the heart of this traditional story.
The other significant ancient moment links memory to prophecy. In the book of
Ezekiel, the prophet, a priest who lived in the exiled Jewish community in ancient Babylon
(early sixth century bce), has a series of visions of the nature and habitation of Divine
majesty. That habitation is the destroyed old citadel and temple of Jerusalem as described
in I Kings 6. Ezekiel’s prophecy consists in reconstructing in exact detail the precincts of
Solomon’s Temple, which no longer existed. The angel who guides him carries a rod with
which he measures off all the visionary buildings through which they walk (this angel
appears again in the Apocalypse of John, for the Heavenly City was regarded as a ‘‘remem-
bering’’—in the medieval manner—of the old Temple). Ezekiel is told that this exercise
for his recollective memory is for the sake of the future: through their activity of remem-
bering the Temple and its offices, God will forgive the sinfulness of Israel and restore the
Israelites to their home (Ezek. 43:1–12).3
The Latin word inventio has given rise to two separate words in modern English. One
is our word ‘‘invention,’’ meaning the ‘‘creation of something new’’ (or at least different).
These creations can be either ideas or material objects, including works of art, music, and
literature. We also speak of people’s having inventive minds, by which we mean that they
have many creative ideas and are generally good at making, to use the medieval English
synonym of composition. The other modern English word derived from inventio is ‘‘in-
ventory.’’ This word refers to the storage of many diverse materials, but not to random
storage: clothes thrown into a closet cannot be said to be inventoried. Inventories must
have an order. Inventoried materials are counted and placed in locations within an overall
structure that allows any item to be retrieved easily and at once. This last requirement
also excludes inventories that are too cumbersome or too indistinct to be useful; consider,
for example, the difficulty of locating one’s automobile in a vast parking lot.
Whereas we now think of memory simply as reiteration and repetition, such rote
memorization was regarded in the Middle Ages as a necessary but strictly foundational
structure laid down in childhood. The true force of memory lay in recollection or memo-
ria, which was analyzed as a variety of investigation, the invention and recreation of
knowledge—indeed the very principle whereby new understanding is created by human
minds. To achieve this power, people educated themselves by building mental libraries.
This meant mastering the basic principles of memory training: the need for divisio, the
need to make a clear, distinct location for each piece of memorized content, and the need
to mark items uniquely for secure recollection.
In the late fourth century, the Christian patriarch Jerome wrote to a correspondent
that ‘‘by means of careful reading and daily meditation, he should make himself into a
library for Christ.’’4 Two centuries later Cassiodorus (d. 590) described a blind Greek

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 MEMORY-CRAFT IN ANTIQUITY A ND IN THE M IDDLE AGES

scholar named Eusebius, who had come to Cassiodorus’s monastery at Vivarium. The
man had been blind since childhood, yet ‘‘he had hidden away in the library of his mem-
ory [in memoriae suae bibliotheca] so many authors, so many books, that he could as-
suredly tell others who were reading in what part of a codex they might find what he had
spoken of.’’5 What impresses Cassiodorus is not that Eusebius knew a great many texts
by rote but rather that he could tell someone immediately where to go in the Bible for
any citation sought. The example of the early Christian Scriptural expositor Didymus of
Alexandria was also known to Cassiodorus, a man whose commentaries were renowned
for their subtlety and comprehensiveness, yet who had been blind from birth. Comment-
ing is a skill that depends on more than rote memory, for one cannot just recite words
endlessly and identically if one is also commenting on them. One must be able to stop,
go to something else, and then take up again where one left off, to go back and forth in
the text, to bring in other matters—in short, to compose. There are examples of scholars
from the late Middle Ages as well, including Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham,
whose reading and compositional habits make clear that the goal of making a working
library of one’s memory was by no means dimmed in an age when written books were
far more plentiful, at least to scholars.
But how did they manage to do it? It is clear that, while the accomplishment of men
like Didymus and Eusebius is the occasion of near-incredulity for Cassiodorus, it is not
the fact of their having such rich and accessible memories that amazes him, but the fact
that they accomplished this feat without eyes to see the books they read. The blind Euse-
bius is able to tell a questioner precisely where to locate the text he desires. This seemingly
pointless, if wondrous, accomplishment should indicate to us in fact the key to Eusebius’s
success. His memory was designed in accordance with some basic principles of locational
memory taught in ancient and medieval schools. To provide some context for these rules,
it is helpful to know how the brain was thought to work in the dominant psychology of
the time.
In ancient theory, best described in Aristotle’s little psychology treatise De memoria
et reminiscentia, a memory was regarded as the end product of sensory perception, and
thus as a product of an animate body.6 To be useful for invention, particular memories
must be retrievable instantly and securely. To distinguish among them, to be able find
one among all the others, a uniquely marked mental ‘‘location’’ was the key.
Figure 1 shows a diagram of brain function in a mainly French-language manuscript
made in England in the late fourteenth century. The various activities involved in thinking
are drawn as cellae, compartments linked to one another by channels. It is important to
understand that this drawing is a diagrammatic representation, not an anatomical draw-
ing; it was drawn in order to make the functional relationships clear, but the first three
activities shown in this diagram as sequential were actually thought to occur nearly simul-
taneously. The sources of this psychology are medical traditions deriving from Galen,
which had located most thought-making and experiential awareness in the brain (not

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 MARY CARRUTHERS

F I G U R E 1 . Diagram of brain functions. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 1.1, fol. 490v. English, West
Midlands, c. 1330. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.)

shared with the heart, as Aristotle had said), and also medieval commentaries on Aristot-
le’s psychology, both in Arabic and in Latin, by Ibn Sinha, Ibn Rushd, Albertus Magnus,
and Thomas Aquinas. The diagram accompanies a short treatise on the brain’s physiol-
ogy, which quotes Thomas Aquinas.
First, impressions are received from the various senses in the sensus communis or
fantasia, located in the forward part of the brain. The various sense impressions are then
brought together mentally by the image-forming ability, imaginatio or vis formalis, the
ability to form an image from many sensory data. So, raw sense data were thought to be

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 MEMORY-CRAFT IN ANTIQUITY A ND IN THE M IDDLE AGES

transformed by the actions of both fantasia (fantasy) and vis formalis (the power of mak-
ing forms) into images having formal properties that are perceptible and useful to human
thought. The Aristotelian criterion of similitude, ‘‘likeness,’’ must be understood in this
context—mental images have ‘‘likeness’’ not as exact duplication, but in the way that a
schematic drawing can be said to be ‘‘like’’ the object it represents. It is equally important
to notice that the resulting mental image was considered to be composed of input from
all five of the senses. In the context of thinking, the Latin word imago at this time was not
limited solely to the visual sense, though it is also true that the visual was regarded as the
primary instrument of knowing for most people.
In the process of being perceived as a complete image, sensory experience is also
responded to, an activity known as estimation, or vis estimativa. This is a kind of judg-
ment, but pre-rational, an immediate ‘‘gut’’ reaction that accompanies the perception of
the image. The example to demonstrate estimation in ancient philosophy is how a lamb
knows to fear a wolf even though it has never seen one before. Mental images (imagines
or phantasmata) are thus constructed by the mind from all the materials of sensation,
and they have two characteristics: ‘‘likeness,’’ and also a ‘‘feeling’’ that marks them emo-
tionally. There is thus, in this psychology, no such thing as a completely neutral or objec-
tive experience, since all the images with which we think are already colored with some
feeling before we can ‘‘know’’ them.
These imagines are made present to the mind as the materials of understanding
through the activity called cogitatio, ‘‘cogitation, thinking’’; and from them, concepts,
ideas, and thoughts are constructed. All thoughts must therefore be understood in terms
of images, and the other name for cogitation in this picture is vis imaginativa, or ‘‘the
ability to imagine.’’ Notice, in this psychology, how imagination is coterminous with all
the procedures of rational thinking. Thoughts as mental images are finally stored and
recalled in the memory, vis memorativa, the final stage of this constructive process. But
the path between memory and thought-making is two-way, because memories must be
recalled as well as stored. So a sort of valve was thought to exist that would allow mental
imagines to pass into memory, and also to be recalled as needed during cogitatio. This was
called the vermis, the wormlike creature drawn in the diagram between cogitatio and
memoria. It had been observed that people often lower their heads in order to think and
raise them when trying to recollect something. This was taken as evidence for the action
of the vermis—opening as needed for recollection, and closing for concentrated thinking
once one had received from memory the materials one needed.
Memory-images were considered to be most like letters on a written surface, im-
pressed in loci, or ‘‘places,’’ in the brain. Each bit of information, encoded as a seeable
image, occupies a particular place; it can therefore be uniquely addressed and so recalled.
The various technical memory systems are basically addressing and filing schemes that
enable textual information to be recalled in a manner that frees one from the simple
reiteration of rote learning and allows one both to recall particular information instantly

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 MARY CARRUTHERS

and to manipulate, shuffle, collate, and concord it freely. In short, they provide one with
a ‘‘random-access’’ memory. The ability only to reproduce items in a series was not
thought to be recollection at all, but an adjunct ability of little intellectual value.7
The length of a particular memorized section is set by the requirements of human
working memory, which seems to be able to manage seven plus or minus two items at
any one time.8 The medieval masters recognized this limitation of human memorative
power and refer to one conspectus, or ‘‘look,’’ of the mental eye as measuring the length
of one material division stored for recollection. So, there are Seven Wonders in the ancient
world, Seven Virtues, Seven Capital Sins, six wings of the seraph diagram, each with five
feathers (Figure 2). In memorizing a long text, one was taught to divide it into segments
short enough to be easily recalled in one mental conspectus, and then to lay each segment
away together with its address in the order of the whole text. Any readily reconstructable
order will do, but the most common are numbers and alphabets. The address provides
the mnemonic hook that draws in the particular content of the segment. Quintilian de-
scribes the result: ‘‘However large the number [of these segments] our memory requires,
all are linked one to the other [in their order] like dancers hand in hand, and there can
be no mistake since they join what precedes to what follows.’’9 Because human long-term
memory is virtually limitless in its capacities, an enormous amount of information can
be stored in this fashion—indeed, one’s entire education can be laid away, readily inven-
toried in the storehouse of memory.
In Western memory training, a fundamental distinction was also made between me-
moria verborum, or verbatim word-for-word memorization, and memoria rerum, or re-
membering the chief words and ideas of a text, its substantive matters. This was also
called remembering sententialiter or summatim. Either method was considered to be a
legitimate type of memorization, leaving the choice (after elementary schooling in the
subject) up to each individual’s discretion, ability, and needs. In the curriculum of the
trivium, verbatim memorization was particularly associated with initial schooling in read-
ing—that is, with grammar. It was instilled through the common exercise of recitatio or
recitation, as indeed it is to this day. Memoria rerum was learned in the two subsequent
studies, dialectic, or the study of the ‘‘topics’’ and ‘‘seats’’ of argument and the relation-
ships of propositions, and especially, the study of rhetoric, the invention of new composi-
tions. It was especially to the investigative and inventive tasks of dialectic and rhetoric
that mnemonic techne was addressed. Thus, as grammar provided the foundation upon
which the trivium built, so memorized texts were thought to provide the exemplars and
the materials for new composition.10
Because memoria is to such an important extent the basis of an art of composition,
the primary goals when preparing material for memory are flexibility, security, and ease
of recombining matters into new patterns and forms. Basic to this are the paired tasks of
division and collection. A fourth-century Roman grammarian, Julius Victor, whose work
was especially influential in the earlier Middle Ages (and who, in turn, was most indebted

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 MEMORY-CRAFT IN ANTIQUITY A ND IN THE M IDDLE AGES

to Quintilian), wrote that memoria is ‘‘the firm mental grasp of words and things for the
purpose of invention’’ (my emphasis).11 To ensure this security, matter is first cut up and
arranged in divisiones, discretiones, or distinctiones (the terms are synonymous), segments
arranged in a readily recoverable order, such as by numbers. In this way, error is avoided,
for if the pieces are securely bound sequentially (and designated one, two, three, etc.),
none can be overlooked or forgotten. Each segment should be short (brevis), no larger
than what your mental eye can encompass in a single gaze. By building chains of such
segments in one’s memory, a very long work—such as all of the Psalms or the whole
Aeneid—can readily be retained and securely recovered, either in its original order or
rearranged and extracted to suit a new composition, simply by rehearsing various numeri-
cal sequences. Such mnemonically effective means of enumerating the ‘‘brief’’ segments
of a long work is, of course, the principle behind numbering by chapter and verse, such
as the divisional scheme imposed upon the Bible, reference to which can be found in the
commentaries of Augustine and Jerome.
Thus, to divide matter into distinctiones in order to preach is not so much a device
for objective classification as a means for easily mixing and mingling a variety of matters
and for knowing where you are in your composition. A simple, rigorous ordering scheme
is critical to the practice of oratory, for it cues the way of a speaker’s principal (or starting)
points, in a manner similar to that of any outline, but with the greater flexibility needed
for extempore delivery. It enables a speaker readily to enlarge a point, to digress, and to
make spur-of-the-moment rhetorical ‘‘side trips’’ of all sorts, because one can always be
sure of where one is in the composition—not in the manner of a parrot (which, reciting
mindlessly, never knows ‘‘where’’ it is) but in the manner of a pilot who understands his
location relative to his goal from distinctive markers in the water and on the horizon.
The complementary principle to dividing and marking is collecting into a pattern.
Each new composition can also be conceived as a place, into which culled and recollected
matters are gathered. The very concept of reading in Latin is based upon the notion of
‘‘gathering,’’ Latin legere, ‘‘to read’’ having as its root meaning ‘‘to collect up, to gather
by picking, plucking, and the like.’’ The Greek verb lego had a similar range of meaning,
from ‘‘to lay’’ something down to ‘‘to lay [things] in order,’’ hence ‘‘to gather, pick up,’’
‘‘to relate,’’ ‘‘to speak purposefully.’’12 The name of one venerable and essential type of
ancient and medieval encyclopedic literature puns upon these closely allied verbs: the
florilegium, or ‘‘flower-gathering,’’ a collection of sayings, maxims, and stories collected
from earlier works, sometimes quoted exactly (though in mnemonically ‘‘brief’’ seg-
ments), often just summarized. The best known of these through much of the Middle
Ages was Valerius Maximus’s Dicta et facta memorabilia, but there are many other exam-
ples. Indeed, the premodern encyclopedia itself is a variety of memory-book, the flowers
of one’s reading gathered up in some orderly arrangement for the purpose of quick,
secure recollection in connection with making a new composition.

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 MARY CARRUTHERS

The schemes used for organizing memory varied greatly. One could choose among
using an architecturally modeled plan and section of a large though entirely literary build-
ing (for example the Temple), the feathers on the six wings of a seraphic angel (as in
Figure 2), a five-story, five-room section of a house, a world map, a columnar diagram,
the stones in the wall of a turreted castle tower, the rungs of ladders, or the rows of seats
in an amphitheater. Gardens were also popular, the medieval sort of garden, with orderly
beds of medicinal plants and fruit trees, separated by grass and surrounded by a wall.
Undoubtedly, gardens became popular with monastic and later writers because of The
Song of Songs, a preeminent text for mystical meditation. Various other Biblical structures
were often used too: the Tabernacle described in Exodus, Noah’s Ark in Genesis, Solo-
mon’s Temple, the Temple citadel envisioned by Ezekiel, the Heavenly City of the Apoca-
lypse.13 We now would never think to organize an encyclopedia of knowledge on the plan
of Noah’s Ark, but for a clerical audience to whom this text was as familiar as the order
of the alphabet is to us—why not? It provides a simple, clearly arranged composition site,
containing many useful compartments with a straightforward route among them, and
thus can serve as a foundational map to use in arranging one’s subjects and materials,
gathering them into the location of a new composition from the networks of one’s knowl-
edge, including of course all one’s experience of books, music, and other arts. Thus, in
the course of an ideal medieval education, in addition to acquiring a great many segments
of Scriptural and classical texts, one would also acquire an extensive repertoire of picture-
schemes in which to put them, both to lay them away and to collect them in new arrange-
ments on later occasions.
I now want to look briefly at two such dispositive schemes. Figure 2 shows one
version of the seraph image (also called the Cherub, for complex exegetical reasons),
drawn in a manuscript made at the Cistercian abbey of Sawley in England in about 1190.
This figure was initially the summary picture or diagram for a famous homiletic text
called ‘‘A Tractatus upon the Six Wings’’ (De sex aliis) that was widely, but wrongly,
attributed to Alan of Lille. The work is more probably the composition, around 1170, of
Clement, Prior of a foundation of Augustinian canons at Llanthony in Gloucestershire.
The text of On the Six Wings begins with a meditation on the divine throne vision from
Isaiah 6, copied from Hugh of St. Victor’s commentary on Noah’s Ark. The second half of
the treatise concerns the seraph drawing itself. It gives a terse, at times almost notational,
exposition of the legends on the various wings and feathers of the angelic creature and
was clearly written in conjunction with the drawing.14
It is often assumed that a picture such as this was made after the composition was
completed, essentially as a help for students and unlearned audiences. But when one reads
On the Six Wings, it is clear that as a whole this text could be of little use except to
someone who already knew enough about the subject to be able to amplify its extreme
meagerness. In other words, it is useful not to a beginner but to one already adept—not
to a student but to a teacher, specifically a confessor, a chaplain, a preacher, people whose

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 F I G U R E 2 . The Seraph (or Cherub) figure, used in recollection. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 66, p.
100; English, c. 1190; from Sawley Abbey (Cistercian), but probably made in Durham. (Reproduced by permission of
the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.)

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 MARY CARRUTHERS

offices required their being able to speak ex tempore and flexibly to various audiences on
the large topic of penitence. On the Six Wings is not truly a sermon (as it is now classified)
but an ars inveniendi, in which the seraph or cherub device itself is what is essential, while
the accompanying words serve as its brief aide-memoire. Indeed, the picture was soon
separated from the treatise and often occurs alone, suggesting that the text was thought
to be unnecessary to its function.
To use such a compositional device as the Seraph/Cherub, a person would need to
internalize the picture, remembering the divisiones of the subject, as major headings of
‘‘wings’’ and sub-headings of ‘‘feathers.’’ With this figure in mind (literally) one could
readily have the gist of as many as thirty sermon-meditations, nearly a whole Lent’s worth,
on the general topic of penitence. Each preacher would readily be able to adapt the scheme
to the specific occasions of his own speaking. Adapting and amplifying an exemplary
scheme, after all, is the way most medieval sermonizing was done.
Figure 3 reproduces an opening in one of the earliest and best manuscripts of the
fully glossed Psalter, presented there with the commentary of Peter Lombard. This manu-
script was made in Paris around 1170 for Herbert of Bosham, secretary to Thomas Becket,
Archbishop of Canterbury. The pages clearly measure out the psalm texts in brief, conspec-
tus-length divisiones, each in a large script. The commentary, in a different script, sur-
rounds these pieces of text, punctuated and rubricated so that its subjects can readily be
identified. Surrounding the main commentaries are margins of yet other commentary,
and in the outermost margins, brackets indicate the sources of the texts: Augustine, Cassi-
odorus, Jerome, and Ambrose. The page is indeed an early version of hypertext, its links
and networks securely fashioned for ready reference and recollection.15
But were they so used? The evidence is largely indirect, in accounts of the reading
and composing habits of medieval scholars. For instance, in 1330 the Franciscan friar
William of Ockham, isolated from the intellectual community of Western Europe by Pope
John XXII for his teachings challenging papal power, was banished to the Franciscan
convent in Munich. There he spent the rest of his life. Having been a member of university
communities at Oxford, Paris, and in Italy, where he had access to the best libraries in
Europe, Ockham found his isolation at Munich distressing, not least because there he had
virtually no books, nor means of obtaining them, for the Pope had stipulated that nothing
was to be sent to him, nor was he to have visitors. Ockham’s situation as a scholar is an
extreme case that demonstrates quite clearly the necessary role that memorial training
and transmission continued to play in both education and scholarly dialogue throughout
the Middle Ages, even as the number of books multiplied greatly.16
While at Munich, Ockham composed a dialogue on the limits of papal power, a work
which continued the debate that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. In the first
part of this dialogue, the master (Ockham himself) tells the pupil that he needs various
books and materials he cannot get, a theme sounded frequently throughout the work. For
example, he complains in the prologue to the third part of not having the books he wants:

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 MEMORY-CRAFT IN ANTIQUITY A ND IN THE M IDDLE AGES

‘‘I can in no way introduce [my subject] beyond the preface since I am unable to come
by precisely the books I consider necessary.’’17 To which the pupil responds that he is sure
this fear will not restrain his master. And it did not.
The master counsels his disciple to extract and memorize material from a wide variety
of sources; indeed, if he himself had not done so when he had the opportunity, he would
now have no hope of access to even the most fundamental texts, the Bible and the collec-
tions of canon law. The pupil asks how one gets knowledge of subjects like imperial rights
and papal powers. Ockham replies, ‘‘Complete knowledge about them—which you recall
is to be drawn out of books of sacred theology and of both kinds of law, that is, canon
and civil, and of moral philosophy, and from the histories of the Romans, and especially
of the emperors and of the greatest pontiffs and of other peoples—should be most pa-
tiently extracted and solidly built up. By which means alone I have hope of obtaining the
Bible and the books of church law.’’18
Ockham did not educate himself with the idea that he might one day be exiled, nor
as a student was he the captive of provincial schools and, in consequence, deprived of
ready access to libraries. His whole scholarly life until 1330 was spent in the greatest of
European universities, his circle the most academic of the time. And still it is clear that
he read to memorize and that in composing he drew extensively on the resources of his
mental library. He asks those with access to a full library to complete and fill out his work.
He apologizes for only skimming the surface in his analyses and expositions of his subject,
for if he had the latest material he would be able fully to expand what he had earlier
stored in his memory. This incomplete and prefatory work composed from memory fills
five hundred and fifty-one folio-sized manuscript pages with material that is certainly not
of an elementary nature.
Ockham’s situation was by no means unique in the later Middle Ages. In 1382, the
dissident theologian John Wyclif was condemned for twenty-four of his opinions and
exiled from Oxford, where he had taught and lived for many years. He was confined to
the small parish of Lutterworth, some eighty miles to the north. Here he continued a
prolific schedule of writings, despite the fact that he had no library except perhaps for
some books brought to him by those few friends who dared to visit. His writings from
this period, which include many sermons, an extensive commentary on parts of the Gos-
pels, and a great number of polemical works, are filled with quotations from a variety of
sources, too many to possibly be accounted for by the few books he had available. As with
the exiled Ockham, Wyclif evidently was forced to consult principally the library of his
own memory.19 And it is also evident from the extent of his citations that his mental
library was of remarkable scope. Undoubtedly, the bulk of these citations appear to mod-
ern scholars to be of the length and type found in florilegia. Indeed, this fact confirms
what we know from other sources about the manner in which students were taught to
memorize their reading, as sets of extracts, marked and coded in readily recoverable men-
tal files with cross-references, each the length of a single glance of the mind’s eye. Out of

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 26

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F I G U R E 1 . 3 (opposite and above). Psalm 58, from the glossed psalter of Herbert of Bosham. Cambridge,
Trinity College MS. B. 5.4, fols. 146v–147; made in Paris, c. 1170. (Reproduced by permission
of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.)

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 MARY CARRUTHERS

the multitude of such basic divisiones and summaries in their memories, major portions of
philosophical tractati were composed by university theologians like Ockham and Wyclif.
Medieval accounts of the actual process of composing new work are scattered and
few, but they also exist, providing additional insight concerning how scholars were taught
to read and to design their minds in order to retain and recollect what they had read—
how the library of one’s memory was accessed and investigated. Most frequently invoked
is the image of a written page, rectangular in form, laid out in lines and columns, written
upon as though with a mental stylus, in the manner of a material book, complete with
rubrics and punctuation, glosses keyed to texts, and even marginal notes and markers. In
antiquity, Quintilian counseled that grammar students learning to read should always
memorize their textual passages using the same wax tablets on which they had previously
written them out, as though following the tracks (vestigia) of a hunted animal: ‘‘He thus
pursues his memory along a trail, as it were, and sees in his mind’s eye not only the pages
but almost the actual lines: and so, when he speaks, he is almost in the position of a
person reading aloud.’’20 Designed memory is thus described as most closely resembling
rectangular written pages, even (and this is most remarkable) at a time when books were
written onto scrolls, and not in codices.21
This pedagogical advice has had a long duration in the West. In the twelfth century,
the Parisian master Hugh of St. Victor counseled his novices that ‘‘it is of great value for
fixing a memory-image that when we read books, we strive to impress on our memory
through the power of forming our mental images not only the number and order of
verses or ideas, but at the same time the color, shape, position, and placement of the
letters, where we have seen [the extract] written, in what part, in what location (at the
top, the middle, or the bottom) we saw it positioned [on the page], in what color we
observed the trace of the letter or the ornamented surface of the parchment.’’22 Two and
a half centuries later, similar advice was given by another French school master, Jacques
Legrand: ‘‘One best learns by studying from illuminated books, for the different colors
secure recollection of the different lines [of text] and consequently of that matter which
one wants to learn by heart.’’23 Advice somewhat like this can be found as early as Quintil-
ian (c. 35–c. 100), who counseled that a student should always learn text from the same
wax tablet upon which he had written it, so that, in recollecting it, he will see the material
in his mind almost as though he were reading it aloud.24
The model of the page of memory was not confined, of course, to novices or grammar
students, as is shown by two accounts of the composing habits of mature scholars, two of
the greatest medieval authors of all, Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. Both accounts
emphasize that composing is itself the end product of the deliberate, concentrated, medi-
tative reading that could make one’s memory into a proper library. Thomas Aquinas is
described by his biographer, Bernardo Gui, as dictating his works to his secretaries ‘‘as if
a great torrent of truth were pouring out of him from God. Nor did he seem to be
searching for things as yet unknown to him; he seemed simply to let his memory pour

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 MEMORY-CRAFT IN ANTIQUITY A ND IN THE M IDDLE AGES

out its treasures. . . . When perplexed by a difficulty he would kneel and pray and then,
on returning to his writing or dictation, he was accustomed to find that his thought had
become so clear that it seemed to show him inwardly, as in a book, the words he needed.’’
When Thomas dictated, his words ‘‘ran so clearly that it was if the master were reading
aloud from a book under his eyes.’’25
Thus the page of memory serves also as the page on which one creates new composi-
tion. Dante’s use of the trope that the mind is a book occurs almost everywhere in his
work, but one occasion is perhaps particularly revealing. At the beginning of his Vita
nuova, he wrote that ‘‘In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be
read is found a heading in red ink that says: Incipit vita nova. Under which rubric I
discovered written the words that it is my intention to assemble in this little book, and if
not every one, at least their substance.’’26 Dante then describes words written in his mem-
ory under large paraphs (‫)ن‬. Indeed, he presents himself in this work both as the scribe
and commentator of previously existing poems that he had also composed. For Dante,
the author was also the reader, rememberer, editor, and re-author of his own ongoing
text, and in the process of composing his work Dante saw it in his mind in visual form,
written upon his memory as pages with text, rubrics, and punctuation.
Thus the ornamentation of a European manuscript book was thought to be integral
to its usefulness to readers. The drawings, the colors, the punctuation divisions, the differ-
ences in script between main text and gloss, indeed the array of the whole page was
instrumental to its reading. But not solely or even primarily as an aid to understanding
the contents. Indeed, as many historians have pointed out, the decoration of the pages in
some late medieval devotional books has nothing whatsoever to do with their content
and can even seem to quarrel with it. The page decoration of manuscript books has
instead to do with dividing and arranging the matters on the page for recollective medita-
tion; it is punctuation of a sort, providing readers with tools that answer to their needs
for thinking. And the most compelling proof that this was so is not only that several
people at the time commented exactly on this usefulness but that the most accomplished
and creative authors of the time composed their new works in their minds’ eyes by making
use of organizational schemes that imitated the decorated pages of their books.

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 2. The Reformation of Memory in Early Modern Europe

Peter Sherlock

Future and past, like hills that hid our view,

Are leveled now, and nothing still remains
Whereupon hope or memory may lean,
Their variation leading men astray,
Thinking ‘‘What have I been?’’ ‘‘What shall I be?’’
As if their lives were but an empty game.
Petrarch, The Triumph of Eternity.1

Europe witnessed a revolution in memory during the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, the ancient ‘‘arts of
memory’’ were archaic. The explosive power of print had made it possi-
ble both to archive and to multiply knowledge cheaply and efficiently
in books. Oral testimony was increasingly displaced by written records.
New bureaucratic structures designed to record information on ever-
greater numbers of individuals abounded. Scientific discoveries forced
a reappraisal of the very nature of the universe, including time as well
as space. Most potently of all, social memory was hotly contested as
polemicists sought to shape and legitimize the new identities created
by renaissance and reformation. By the time the Enlightenment spread
through Europe’s intelligentsia, accompanied by novel economic and
political formations, the European sense of the past was profoundly
different from that of medieval Christendom.
Kerwin Lee Klein has sounded a warning-note to all who use the
term ‘‘memory,’’ for it has come to encompass an impossibly wide
range of practices and experiences.2 It is worth noting how the term
memoria and its derivatives were actually used in early modern Europe.
On the one hand, the term was used to describe the mental process of
recollection, especially in pedagogical and scientific contexts. On the
other, it described the fruits of the labor of remembrance, including

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 T H E R E F O R M AT I O N O F M E M O R Y I N E A R LY M O D E R N E U R O P E

literary genres such as ricordanze and mémoires. The most common use of the word
memory revolved around the relationship of the living and the dead.3 A third use, a sur-
vival from earlier centuries, was as a way of referring to the retrievable past, embodied in
phrases such as ‘‘time out of mind’’ or ‘‘beyond the memory of man.’’ Between the fif-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, significant transformations occurred in the meaning and
function of memory in all these areas. In what follows I first trace the decline of the arts
of memory and the rise of empirical scientific method. I then turn to consider the impact
of the Reformation and Renaissance on memorial practices, especially the commemora-
tion of the dead, before examining how time itself was reconceived.
The medieval arts of memory began to wane with the rise of humanism and the
invention of moveable type. Some humanists distanced themselves from the locative mne-
monic techniques of their predecessors. In his De ratione studii of 1512, Erasmus wrote,
‘‘Though I do not deny that memory can be helped by places and images, yet the best
memory is based on three most important things, namely study, order, and care.’’4 This
reluctance to persevere with the arts of memory contrasts with the tradition exposed by
Frances Yates. Sixteenth-century Neoplatonists such as Giordano Bruno and Giulio Camil-
lo sought to unify form and content by codifying all knowledge in complex memory-
palaces, which in themselves represented and revealed the order of creation. Mnemonic
practitioners effectively possessed the power both to name and describe experience, and
to shape the conceptual frameworks in which it was interpreted. But the static and eternal
schemes proposed by the mystical followers of Hermes Trismegistus and the disciples of
Marsilio Ficino could not easily survive the disenchantment of the world. The scientific
revolution pushed away from ancient cosmologies that linked symbols used in mnemon-
ics with heavenly bodies, and its practitioners rejected the idea that there were predeter-
mined, magical correspondences throughout creation.5
The value of committing works to memory for the purposes of recollection and orga-
nization was less necessary in a world in which the exact information could be quickly
gleaned from a printed book that was cheap enough to be purchased for individual use.
Moreover, the profusion of shared knowledge engendered by printing impossibly broad-
ened the material with which scholars might engage. Some of the patterning of the old
arts of memory survived, in genres such as commonplace books, or in the division of the
Bible into chapters and verses.6 Nevertheless, by the late seventeenth century, in the wake
of the empiricist turn of philosophy, memory—the mental organization and recollection
of information—was no longer such a virtue in the world of learning.7
Francis Bacon’s groundbreaking work on scientific method displayed a new attitude
toward memory. Bacon’s theory of knowledge looked toward the discovery of the new
and unknown, rather than the reception and fuller understanding of past truths. As a
result, one’s memory no longer needed to be trained to recall and organize long-standing
theories and beliefs about the world for the purposes of invention, as had long been the
case. Instead, the memory of past discoveries was merely one—highly unreliable—link in

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 PETER SHERLOCK

the objective exercise of reason and experimentation. Bacon’s empirical method sought
to test all knowledge by inductive processes free from assumption:

And my evidences concerning the Interpretation of Nature encompass two generic

parts; first, how to draw out or raise Axioms from Experience; second, how to deduce
or derive new Experiments from Axioms. The former is also divided in three ways;
clearly in three Ministrations; the Ministration to the sense; the Ministration to the
Memory; and the Ministration to the Mind, or Reason.8

The ‘‘Ministration to the Memory’’ was a crucial stage, allowing data gleaned from experi-
ments to be recorded and re-recorded, so that reason might be exercised to discover the
underlying principles at work. Bacon, however, did not advocate the storage of such
information in what he saw as the unstable palaces of the mind. Instead, the scientist was
to create tables and graphs with the material reassurance of accuracy and that could be
consulted by others.
In this new process of interpretation, memory was displaced by reason.9 Old classifi-
cations were abandoned and new ones invented to accommodate a potentially infinite
corpus of knowledge, decentering memory. No longer was the mind the means of sorting
information, although it might preserve a record of progress from ignorance to enlighten-
ment.10 For later philosophers such as John Locke, memory was not understood as the
simple recollection of data; rather, the recollection was marked with a tag that the infor-
mation had been previously encountered and was now being re-called or even re-lived.11
Descartes and his contemporaries sought objectivity in the tabula rasa of the mind unen-
cumbered by memory, though they were fully aware that memory itself was necessary to
the unhindered exercise of reason and the free association of ideas. What distinguished
the seventeenth-century philosophers from their predecessors, however, was the active
will to forget as well as to remember, to interrogate the mind in order to ensure that all
thinking was inductive, built up from experience, rather than based upon assumptions
and preexisting universal theories. As Descartes put it, memory was ‘‘often unreliable,
and in order not to have to squander one jot of our attention on refreshing it while
engaged with other thoughts, human ingenuity has given us that happy invention—the
practice of writing.’’12
These changes to the understanding of memory were accompanied by changes in its
function and content, prompted for the most part by the trauma and division of the
Reformation. As Protestants and Catholics battled for the hearts, minds, and lands of
Europe in the sixteenth century, and as Europe descended into the Thirty Years’ War in
the seventeenth, even time itself was contested. While East and West had long been di-
vided on the question of the date of Easter, that ultimate memorial event in Christendom,
matters were considerably worsened by the confessionalization of new astronomical ob-
servations and their implementation in the calendar. Pope Gregory XIII instituted a new

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 T H E R E F O R M AT I O N O F M E M O R Y I N E A R LY M O D E R N E U R O P E

calendar in 1582 that began on January 1, not March 25, and repressed ten days to correct
the accumulated errors of the Julian calendar. Lutherans and others rejected the changes,
and in areas such as the Holy Roman Empire this caused chaos. Regime change meant a
change of date, a change in the conception of time.13 All such debate was overshadowed
by the heightened apocalyptic discourse that preoccupied many Europeans from the late
fifteenth century. The past was interrogated by those desperate to find clues about the
end of time. History was raked over and reread in the light of the Revelation of St. John.
The findings explained—or perhaps created—dramatic outbursts of possessions, exor-
cisms, witchcraft, and other signs and wonders that were taken as heralds of the last
things.14 In this turbulent world, memory provided a guide to the future.
One of the most prominent examples of the forging of a new, reformed memory was
the Elizabethan English martyrologist John Foxe, whose legendary Actes and Monumentes
went to four editions in his lifetime. Foxe constructed a new version of history, depicting
the gradual corruption of true Christianity in England by Roman influence from apostolic
times to his present and thereby demonstrating the truth and necessity of Protestant
reformation. At the same time, his narrative histories of the Marian martyrs, published
with dramatic images, helped to create a new, independent, and anti-papal English iden-
tity. Foxe’s account was based on oral and written testimony that he painstakingly col-
lected and historical research assisted by the burgeoning antiquarian movement. His work
was so effective in shaping English sentiments about the Reformation, Mary Tudor’s reign,
and Roman Catholicism because it tied a diverse set of memories down into a single,
though voluminous, text. Everything the English needed to know about their religious
history could be found, read, and seen in one place. Foxe did not simply create a record
of what happened, but found a way in the medium of the printed book to dictate precisely
how memory should be interpreted by succeeding generations.15
Protestant ideology required more than the reinterpretation of the past. It also de-
manded deliberate forgetfulness. Evangelicals rewrote history and memory as part of the
campaign to lead people into Protestant truth. This could take the form of widespread,
bureaucratic, and authorized erasures of the names and images of saints from books and
churches. Thus Thomas Becket’s feast day and very name were scraped out of hundreds
of manuscripts in Henry VIII’s England, to remove any memory that an archbishop had
once challenged a king, while his shrine at Canterbury was dismantled to forbid even the
possibility of physical pilgrimage in his honor.16 In other places, forgetting was the result
of violent, sometimes brutal protests. In Münster in 1534 the brief reign of the Anabaptists
saw the destruction of virtually all church furnishings, stained glass, and tombs, expung-
ing the perceived idolatry of the past in preparation for the expected Apocalypse.17 Read
in the best possible light, the destruction of imagery and the reshaping of the past were
designed to transfer Christians’ attention from the active memory of the dead toward
charity for the living. As Ulrich Zwingli put it, true images were not the dead, but the
poor, and money fruitlessly expended on the dead could support them instead.18

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 PETER SHERLOCK

The most profound change to memory introduced by Protestant reformers was the
declaration that Purgatory did not exist. In their eyes, nothing could be done by the living
for the salvation of the dead, whose fate rested in God’s hands alone. Martin Luther’s
attack on the corruption that so often accompanied the sale of indulgences led to a reap-
praisal of the whole relationship between the living and the dead. For centuries, the pri-
mary way of remembering the dead was to pray for their souls. The popular economy
that had been shaped around the doctrine of Purgatory rewarded the living for their
intercession on behalf of the dead. In so doing, the living themselves completed charitable
works that added to their own rewards, and kept them ever mindful of the inevitability
of death. As Jonathan Finch puts it, in late medieval culture ‘‘the living were not encour-
aged to remember the dead, but to remember to pray for the dead.’’19
From the 1520s, the first generation of reformers could agree that, whatever the fate
of the soul after death, the dead were cut off from the aid of the living and intercession
for the dead was not meaningful.20 Across the sixteenth century, wherever Protestants
held sway, such prayers were silenced, and the memory of the dead was left in limbo. The
purpose of the ars moriendi, or art of dying, was translated into the art of living well; the
once-perilous moment of death became less important in the economy of salvation.21
Consequently, preachers gave doctrinal instruction to their flocks at funerals, focusing on
the edification of the living as they prepared for death, rather than exhorting their hearers
to work for the improvement of the estate of the dead.22
The Protestant relegation of Purgatory to the dustbin of history had only limited
impact in Catholic regions of Europe. In Spain, bequests for masses for the dead actually
increased in the wake of the Council of Trent. The obligation of the living to the dead
found revived expression in the balance of memory and hope required by a belief in
Purgatory—a belief promoted by the Inquisition.23 The shock of reformation nevertheless
shook, if it did not shatter, extant ways of remembering. Perhaps the displaced energies
once directed to interceding for the dead found new life in other practices based on the
belief that supernatural bodies and effects could intervene in the natural world. Witch-
craft, demonology, and the appearance of ghosts became other ways of negotiating the
tension between life and death, this world and the next, in both Protestant and Catholic
societies. It is no surprise that witch-hunts found their most intense expression in the
Holy Roman Empire, where from the earliest days of the reformation neighbors lived
cheek by jowl with those of different religious views. Surely there had to be an outlet for
the displaced energies of the mass, intercession with the saints, and above all, the need to
remember, encounter or even reconjure the dead in the midst of the living.24
Monuments were one of the most prominent media in which shifting attitudes
toward the memory of the dead were registered. In the fifteenth century it was common-
place for epitaphs to begin with the phrase orate pro anima—‘‘pray for the soul’’—or
suchlike, and end with cujus anime propicietur deus—‘‘on whose soul may God have
mercy.’’ In northern Europe, where monumental brasses were an affordable and popular

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 T H E R E F O R M AT I O N O F M E M O R Y I N E A R LY M O D E R N E U R O P E

form of memorial, images of the dead might be surrounded by petitions that the living
too could use to aid their passage through the afterlife, such as ‘‘Jesus remember me,’’ or
‘‘Jesu mercy Lady help.’’ Across the sixteenth century, as these desires were repressed by
Protestant doctrine, English monuments turned away from prayer as the principal way of
remembering the dead. In its place, visitors were exhorted to praise God for the fruitful
lives of the dead, and learn from their example. Epitaphs transformed ‘‘pray for the souls’’
into ‘‘give thanks for the souls,’’ while ‘‘on whose souls may God have mercy’’ became
‘‘whose bodies and souls God send a joyful resurrection.’’25 Protestant memorials justified
their very existence by the use of biblical texts such as ‘‘the memorial of the just shall be
blessed, but the name of the wicked shall rot’’ (Prov. 10:7).26 A similar emphasis appeared
on Lutheran epitaph monuments in sixteenth-century German territories. Several of these
included a portrait or half-effigy of the deceased, in the case of scholars and clergy de-
picted still preaching to the congregation, which was accompanied by a scene (usually
derived from the Bible) and an inscription. The response of the monumental tourist was
no longer prayer motivated by the fear of death and Purgatory, but respect for the virtu-
ous example and didactic power of the dead in the hope of resurrection to eternal life.27
Although tombs in societies such as pre-Reformation England were largely focused
on the remembrance of the dead and their hope for the prayers of the living, this was not
always the case elsewhere in Europe. Well before Luther and his followers called for a
revision of the memory of the dead, many Italian tombs were far more concerned with
expressing social status, identifying the key characteristics of each individual’s or family’s
contribution to their social group. As Andrew Butterfield puts it when speaking of four-
teenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, monuments ‘‘are typically directed toward the
public, corporate, and social commemoration of excellence and virtue. Funerary monu-
ments are constructed to confer fame on exemplary individuals.’’28 The tombs of several
European monarchs, emperors and popes demonstrate an obsession with the declaration
of worldly power and a determination to secure an enduring presence in popular and
elite memory alike. Henry VII’s sepulchre at Westminster Abbey, built in a specially con-
structed chapel adorned with images of the brand-new Tudor dynasty, was lavishly crafted
by Pietro Torrigiano in the second decade of the sixteenth century. It presents the Tudor
king as a virtuous man and wise ruler—his effigy is not in armor, unlike those of many
of his predecessors—but no mention of God is made in the epitaphs. In 1502, the Habs-
burg emperor Maximilian commissioned what was to be Europe’s largest ever effigial
monument at the Hofkirche in Innsbruck. Although the monument was never graced
with Maximilian’s body and took some seventy years to approach a satisfactory form, it
still powerfully foregrounds the emperor’s effigy on a sarcophagus illustrated with scenes
from his life. All around are Maximilian’s ancestors, relations, and heroes, in oversized
statues. While the emperor is shown kneeling, perhaps piously, there is no question that
he is the culmination of centuries of work by Europe’s greatest families and that his own
legacy is sufficient proof of his fame. Even the papacy adopted these principles of fame at

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 PETER SHERLOCK

all costs. When Sixtus IV died in 1476, he was buried in the Vatican in a lavish bronze
tomb fashioned by Antonio Pollaiuolo. The pope lies at rest surrounded not by angels,
weepers, or intercessors, but by images of the seven virtues and the ten liberal arts.
At the turn of the sixteenth century, then, the desire for perpetual memory could
easily outweigh religious concerns, which, in the case of tombs, were no doubt expressed
elsewhere in the church buildings that housed them. By the end of the century, where
Protestants had succeeded in overthrowing the cult of the dead, the Renaissance concepts
of fame provided alternative means of remembering and honoring the dead. This new
emphasis on fame was based on ancient, pagan examples, and largely avoided explicitly
Christian notions of the afterlife, while the metaphysical understanding of death found
new expression in the popularity of ambiguous phrases such as memoriae sacrum, ‘‘sacred
to the memory.’’
Florentine humanists had begun to elaborate new forms of public memory in civic
funerals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Expressions of grief or the fear of death
were repressed beneath the decorum of solemn ritual. Petrarch criticized traditional Med-
iterranean practices such as weeping and the tearing of clothes. Coluccio Salutati advo-
cated the replacement of emotive display with the reinvention of eulogy, a verbal tribute
to honor the dead and express the values and identity of the living. Renaissance men were
to subdue private distress and the trauma of loss in the interests of public image. The
city-state warranted a broader memory that celebrated the contribution of its citizens to
its fame and thereby preserved their identity. The anguish of separation might be keenly
felt by individuals, but it found expression in personal media such as letters, poetry and
music. Grief could be overcome by public memorials.29
Petrarch and his successors sought to recast memory, not as a practice about recalling
the past, but as a way of projecting the self into the future. Renaissance writers literally
saw with their own eyes the enduring fame of the ancients, preserved in the physical ruins
of the Roman Empire, and even more in the survival of ideas and ideals through their
writings. Indeed, much of Petrarch’s inspiration was derived from his belief that he had
discovered and handled Cicero’s own manuscripts in Verona. These objects demonstrated
the veracity of Horace’s observation that through writing, one’s identity and very thoughts
could be received by future generations. Even pagan writers could achieve a kind of after-
life. Petrarch’s response was not only to remember and idolize the Classical world, but
also to seek that kind of enduring fame for himself. His success in achieving what one
might term future memory is evidenced in his influence over the revival of the ancient
idea of fame. His Trionfi, praising Fame over Death, Time over Fame, and Eternity over
all, were translated into languages as diverse as Czech, Polish, French, and English.30
The desire to recover and relive ancient ideals also involved the purification of mem-
ory. The scholarship practiced by the fifteenth century’s new breed of intellectuals focused
on removing accretions of error and obtaining the original version of documents as far
as possible. Humanists sought truth, recovering as never before an accurate rendition of

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history. The most prominent example of the renewal of memory in this vein was Lorenzo
Valla’s famous denunciation of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery on philological
grounds. Valla would go on to suggest that Cicero could not have been the author of the
rhetorical treatise Ad herennium, which incorporated one of the most famous essays on
the arts of memory.31 Yet the purity of scholarship mingled with nostalgia for ancient
glory, respect for long-held traditions that also shaped identity, and the desire to claim
links of blood, culture, and descent with the world of the Trojans, Greeks, and Romans.
On the whole, the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century historians of Florence presented a foun-
dation myth designed to emphasize its direct inheritance of the mantle of Rome, thus
making the city the modern center of ancient renewal and rewriting memory in the service
of identity. The English sustained this habit well into the seventeenth century, continuing
to believe, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the Tudor and Stuart mon-
archs were descendants of a whole series of historical and mythological figures, ranging
from King Arthur to the Emperor Constantine to the Trojans, Noah, Adam and Eve, and
through Saxons and Danes to the Nordic god Wotan.32 When Polydore Vergil pointed
out that there was no evidence for the traditional British histories, he was condemned by
later generations as a biased and heretical Roman Catholic adherent to papal deceit.33
The new emphasis on fame and the desire to find genealogical links to the past led
to an increase in the production of family histories from the fifteenth century onward.
The collection of family memory in a single place, such as commonplace books, heraldic
pedigrees, ricordanze and mémoires, was a potent way of identifying a unit to which alle-
giance was owed. The scale of this unit, and the kind of allegiance owed, could vary. In
northern Italian city-states such as Venice, patrician memory and honor was interwoven
with communal identity, and the city-state itself preserved the fame of its most celebrated
families. In Florence, however, the relatively large oligarchy, including merchants as well
as knights, made it difficult for the city to commemorate so many lineages. As a result,
ricordanze were especially popular here, and citizens were required to show allegiance to
God and the family first, rather than to the governing class as a whole.34 In England such
matters were also complex, for this kingdom included the feudal system of monarch and
nobles and an increasingly large number of ‘‘new men’’ who came to prominence through
the acquisition of wealth. By the early seventeenth century it was commonplace for fami-
lies that had effectively purchased their nobility or gentility to pay a herald to fabricate an
ancient genealogy, accompanied by supporting documents such as deeds, monuments,
and portraits. Families rewrote their histories to give themselves credibility: Catholic
grandparents became neo-Protestant, while mercantile great-grandparents were converted
into knights descended from companions of William the Conqueror in 1066. The public
face of family memory mattered if one’s identity was to be accepted in the present and
future.35
While heralds and their ilk might engage in myth-making, a new breed of historical
writing also sprung up as a result of humanist scholarly endeavors. What distinguished

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 PETER SHERLOCK

these histories from the earlier criticisms of accepted historical ‘‘facts,’’ from the ongoing
process of compiling chronicles of events, and from the attribution of historical origins
to mythic figures of symbolic importance, was the attention to the genesis of a society.
We have already encountered John Foxe’s attempts to link the Church of England with
apostolic, anti-Roman origins. In England, the flowering of historical scholarship from
the late sixteenth century saw scholars investigate the origins of central pillars of English
culture and government: John Selden and Robert Cotton pursued the legal system, Wil-
liam Somner the language (including Anglo-Saxon), and topographers such as William
Camden the division of the land itself.36 In a related development, astronomy, archaeology
and history were brought together to date the very origins of the universe itself. Thomas
Lydiat used ancient manuscripts, the physical evidence of the Arundel marbles, a Puritan
expression of Protestant doctrine, his own astronomical calculations, and protracted de-
bates with Scaliger and Kepler to divide history into brackets of 592 years (the period it
takes for the lunar and solar calendars to reconcile). Lydiat’s work allowed Archbishop
James Ussher to give an exact date to creation itself, and the result (October 28, 4004
bce) entered into popular memory through chronologies and genealogies attached to
printed editions of the Bible.37 Although Lydiat’s 592-year period never took off as a
historical division, the numerically tidy century was increasingly used as a means of divid-
ing up the past into regular portions.
As humanists revived the concept of fame and projected memory into the future,
the past was reconceived through the process of periodization. While the Renaissance
constructed the myth of the Dark Ages and invented the idea of the medieval period as a
thousand-year-long interruption between more enlightened societies, early modern Euro-
peans also began to punctuate the past with moments of significance that could be period-
ically commemorated through ritual performance. The first centenary ever celebrated in
European history, for example, occurred in 1617 when a group of German states staged a
series of rituals and lectures for the one hundredth anniversary of Luther’s publication of
his theses in Wittenberg. As Charles Zika puts it, in the early seventeenth century, Euro-
pean intellectuals, bureaucrats, and clerics discovered that ‘‘the past, re-presented as his-
tory, could become an important resource in the structuring of social discipline within
the early modern state.’’38 One purpose of the 1617 centenary was to forge unity and a
common identity amid the ideologically disparate Protestant states within the Holy
Roman Empire. Memory here was deliberately put into the service of politics and reli-
gion—and it was relatively successful. The sesquicentenary was celebrated in 1667, and
thenceforth, ‘‘Reformation Day’’ was celebrated in Saxony on October 31. Roman Catho-
lics were not to be left out; since 1300 the Papacy had instituted a Holy Year celebrated
at varying intervals, and in 1617 a special Holy Year was declared as an occasion of repen-
tance for the centenary of schism.39
In England the traditional Catholic annual cycle of holy days was largely lost, and
gradually replaced by a new calendar based on recent historical events, not the feast days

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 T H E R E F O R M AT I O N O F M E M O R Y I N E A R LY M O D E R N E U R O P E

of long-dead saints. As David Cressy has shown, three occasions were instituted by the
Elizabethan and Jacobean governments in the month of November to celebrate God’s
providence in preserving the Protestant regime from harm: the anniversary of Elizabeth’s
Accession Day in 1558, the defeat of the Armada of 1588, and the deliverance of King and
Parliament from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The celebration of the latter was provided
for by parliamentary statute in 1606, an act repealed only in 1859. Bonfire night lasted
well into the twentieth century in those nations once part of the British Empire, while the
effigy of the Pope is burned to this very day in the Sussex town of Lewes. All these officially
sanctioned events were the subject of conflicting memories during the seventeenth cen-
tury as the seismic events of British history created alternative meanings and made them
available for the expression of diverse allegiances. Memory might be manipulated by bu-
reaucrats and courtiers, yet popular culture could easily take new directions when gath-
ered around a commemorative bonfire.40 Elsewhere in Europe, the legacy of division
engendered by the Reformation was thinly papered over at the conclusion of the Thirty
Years’ War in 1648, and social memories multiplied as identities sought expression and
grief was released or repressed. Even those with the utmost power might find themselves
required to go back on earlier memorial efforts. When he came to collect together the
commemorative medals issued during his long reign, Louis XIV chose to omit an example
from 1693 that celebrated the destruction of Heidelberg, for he perhaps realized that the
incident would detract, not add to, his fame and glory.41
In the eighteenth century, the reformation of memory was played out to its logical
conclusion as it was taken up in the revolutionary projects of the Enlightenment. The
European desire to observe and catalogue all the world filled encyclopedias. These at-
tempted to abstract knowledge into alphabetical order and into schemes based on an
apparently objective view of the natural realm, while ignoring the necessary repression
of other memories and traditions in the worlds previously unknown to the European
imagination. History became increasingly secular, as providence was removed from causal
theory and as the divisiveness engendered by religious difference was blamed for war,
trauma and death. Finally, as the American and French Revolutions turned the world
upside down once more, time was reformed again, and, in the case of the French, begun
again from a new year zero.
Every society reconstructs the past in the present. In early modern Europe, these
reconstructions were directed toward the future and the afterlife as much as toward the
past. The reformation of memory was most pronounced in the changing relationship of
the living and the dead. Dante Alighieri’s Commedia divina had exquisitely mapped out
the afterlife and the three realms of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, each with its own layers
and places. This late medieval vision of the afterlife was very much a memory-theater,
arranged to aid the penitent Christian in his or her devotions on behalf of the dead and
in the preparation for death itself. Dante’s vision would, in some places, be torn asunder
by the Protestant rejection of Purgatory, and in others at least questioned. Meanwhile,

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 PETER SHERLOCK

the emergence of fame as a commodity opened up new ways of living after death, in the
hearts and minds of future generations as well as in the supernatural realm.
In identifying the early modern reformation of memory, this essay challenges the
presumption of modern memory studies that premodern societies were inhabited by a
‘‘natural,’’ living form of collective memory, expressed ritually, orally, and visually, rather
than closeted into static memorials or books. Jacques Le Goff argues that at the Enlighten-
ment the West moved from a nostalgic view of the past (in which the modern world
attempted to reflect the ancient) to a progressive one (in which the present, through
history, criticized the past). Memory is seen as an uncritical, unconscious recollection of
the past whereas history is argumentative and analytical; a history of memory should thus
highlight how memory has actually been constructed, controlled, and obliterated whether
intentionally or not.42 In pre-Enlightenment Europe, however, memory was far from nat-
ural. Seventeenth-century society was both nostalgic for and critical of the past; it em-
ployed empirical method but still conceived of the world in metaphysical terms; and
history and collective memory were often one and the same. In fact, memory and history
were intertwined, contested, and dangerous, as the past was used to legitimize the present
and shape that most uncertain of prospects, the future. Early modern Europe was replete
with deliberately created memories and invented commemorations, designed as responses
to the Reformation with its attendant loss of an established narrative for the past and to
the beginnings of the disenchantment of the world. If in our postmodern world memory
has replaced history as the dominant mode of interaction with the past, perhaps we
twenty-first century folk have returned to a seventeenth-century moment when the mod-
ernist divide between history and memory had yet to be created, and when the future was
a more hopeful place.

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 3. Memory, Temporality, Modernity
Les lieux de mémoire

Bill Schwarz

The traces left by past events never move in a straight line, but in a curve
that can be extended into the future.
Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat1

‘‘She wanted to have no past.’’ These words, with no hint of equivoca-

tion, come from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, first published in
1921. They tell us of the reveries of Ursula Brangwen, whom, at the
start of the novel, the narrator portrays as a decidedly ‘‘modern girl,’’
and who is later attired in canary-yellow stockings, thus proving the
point. Lawrence continues:

She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this
place, with Birkin, not to have rolled out of the murk of her child-
hood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory
was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree that she
should ‘‘remember’’! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth,
without any recollection or blemish of past life.2

These are striking formulations, in which memory, far from functioning

as a mental resource, is revealed to be only a ‘‘dirty trick.’’ For sure,
Lawrence was no fan of Proust. We find in the novel none of the com-
plex, lyrical evocations of lost times that could be characterized as
Proustian. Whether Ursula proves as single-minded in her quest for
oblivion as this passage suggests is not my concern here. What is of
interest, however, is the self-consciously declarative tone of the state-
ment: ‘‘She wanted to have no past.’’

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 B I L L S C H WA R Z

This passage can be read, and I assume mostly is read, as a reflection on a peculiarly
modern sensibility, in which past and present are strictly differentiated, and in which the
past functions as a burden on present and future. Ursula wishes to be free from both the
past and its memories in order to fashion herself anew and to be able to live fully in the
present. This desire to flee from the past, and to transcend the incubus of memory, has
many correlatives in the aesthetic and philosophical imaginations of high modernism. On
the other hand, though, there are many contrary manifestations in modernist thought in
which memory, in a variety of conceptualizations, comes to be located as the means for
salvation from a world in which no other access to the past exists and in which history has
become the vehicle for pain and trauma, transmuting—as some believed, Joyce among
them—into a nightmare. Writing retrospectively, this is the argument deployed by An-
dreas Huyssen whose purpose is to recuperate Baudelaire, Proust, Freud, and Benjamin
in order to subvert, as he sees it, the amnesia of the postmodern present.3 Yet if this
polarity—memory as destruction, memory as salvation—has some heuristic value, the
permutations we confront, thinker by thinker, text by text, are endlessly complex and
subtle, as the chapters that follow demonstrate, so much so that the initial polarities turn
out not to be as polarized after all.
With this in mind it may prove more fruitful, in addressing the capacities of modern
memory, to turn attention away from these functional arguments and to position memory
more specifically in terms of temporality. Put simply, my argument is that issues of tem-
porality provide a necessary context for unraveling the enigmas of modern memory. For
underwriting the great classics of modernist thought is a perception of temporal disloca-
tion, in which the connections between past and present become a source, not of succor,
but of heightened anxiety, and in which the sensation of the loss of the past predominates.
Memory, for good or ill, has become the category, peculiarly overdetermined and difficult
to disentangle, in which these anxieties meet and are condensed.
From this perspective it’s less the functions of modern memory that prove critical
than it is memory’s perpetual dysfunctions.

History

To pose the question of the relations between memory and modernity or to offer (as we
do in this volume) the familiar sequence ‘‘antiquity, medieval, early modern, modern,’’
inescapably presents modern memory not only as a conceptual issue, but as one that is
historical too. If modern memory represents a distinct formation—assuming, in other
words, that people came to remember differently from hitherto, and that the great theo-
rists of modern memory were in part reflecting on phenomena that themselves were
historically new—this would be of great interest to historians. After all, the relations
between past and present, memory, temporality itself all underwrite the processes of the

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

historical imagination. In principle, it would seem, historians have much to offer on

contemporary memory debates. This leaves open, though, the question of what kind of
historical inquiry can best reach that which we, as historical actors, experience as the
temporal dislocations of modern life, for which memory has come to function as the
synecdoche.
When we invoke history two immediate difficulties appear. First, as an intellectual
discipline history itself is a sign of the modern.4 The temporal plotting we employ—
antiquity, medieval, modern—attests to a sequential, future-driven conception of histori-
cal time that is itself a product of modernity. In its earliest theorizations, historical time
was largely teleological; if it was felt that the past was slipping away, ever more difficult
to reach, the grand narratives ordained by history promised, as recompense, a grander
future.5 The intellectual practice of history, in its emergent forms, was in part devised as
a counter to the wayward, indeterminate workings of modern memory, striving to estab-
lish the principles of historical time as the definitive component of temporality. In this
scheme of things, subjective time, the time of the everyday and of the self, memory in-
cluded, could appear only as dysfunctional, working to interrupt the clear geometrical
abstractions of the time of history. If the hope of history, as a peculiarly modern form of
reasoning, was that it might rationalize the relationship between past and present, over-
coming sentiment by recourse to science, it could only do so by excluding or trivializing
the various temporalities that appeared as dysfunctions. History itself, as well as promising
much, may also be part of the problem.
It’s also apparent that, despite the claims made for the rational properties of histories,
historians themselves were and are as much enmeshed in the temporal dislocations of
modern times as anyone else. Formal historical inquiry represents, among other things,
one way in which the imaginings of lost times are dramatized, debated and brought to
life. In the rendezvous between history and memory, history is no innocent party. Indeed
fixations with the past, obsessions with lost times and even, as a corollary, the belief that
the enchantments of the past have been destroyed in the present are all occupational
hazards for the historian. In this sense, historical knowledge can work as another means
by which the temporal dislocations of modern life are mitigated in the imagination, acting
as a kind of intellectual reparation.
Yet if in the founding grand narratives of the modern world memory can only be
grasped as dysfunctional, dislocating the given patterns of history, from a contrary view-
point it is precisely those forms that appear most dysfunctional that provide the most
fruitful means for thinking the connections between historical time and the time of the
interior life. It’s for this reason, in current debates, that the high modernist moment is
accorded a privileged role, for from the late nineteenth century a powerful motif in the
aesthetic of modernism turned on conceptions of temporality that, in many different
variations, sought to break with the teleologies of homogenized, linear time—or of
‘‘empty’’ time, as Benjamin has it—in which history was conceived simply as the means

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 B I L L S C H WA R Z

for the realization of modernity.6 In many respects the encounter between history and
memory brings us to the limit case of conceptions of historical time, and requires a
profound reappraisal of the given protocols of historical knowledge.

The End of the Past, the End of History

My aim, here, is a deal more modest: simply to plot the ways in which the problem of
temporal dislocation—and of its synecdoche, memory—have been worked through in
three historical accounts of modernity. In doing so, I draw attention to the contrary
elements that occur in these histories. On the one hand, in each, history appears as ‘‘the
sign of the modern,’’ and the impress of a sequential teleology is evident; on the other,
interwoven into each account is a sense also of emotional or psychic loss, in which attach-
ments to the past can no longer be sustained. I’ll look briefly at J. H. Plumb and Carl
Schorske, neither of whom is generally cited in the field of memory studies, and in more
detail at Pierre Nora, whose work on memory is well known. These are historians, as
readers who know their work will appreciate, of radically distinct temperaments. How-
ever, their varied intentions and politics notwithstanding, there occur unexpected formal
affinities in the means by which they imagine the relations between past and present. We
confront in each, respectively, the end of the past, the end of history, and the end of
memory. Where does such interpretation leave us?
Plumb, a historian of Hanoverian England and a figure whose life was deeply institu-
tionalized in the mores of ancient Cambridge, doesn’t usually appear in contemporary
reflections on the dispositions of the modern world. Yet in March 1968 he delivered a
series of lectures a long way from his usual locale, in New York, which were published
the following year as a book entitled The Death of the Past. The title conveys the basic
thesis with admirable economy. Plumb draws a sharp distinction between ‘‘the past’’ and
‘‘history.’’ ‘‘Man,’’ he says, employing an anthropological terminology that even then was
outmoded, ‘‘has used the past in a variety of ways.’’ Principally the past, in the past,
functioned as a daily ‘‘theatre of life,’’ in which the hopes of the present were given
sustenance by elaborate reconstructions of mythical pasts, where good and evil took on
palpable, allegorical form. ‘‘The more literate and sophisticated the society becomes,’’
Plumb contends, ‘‘the more complex and powerful becomes the uses to which the past is
put.’’ The earliest manifestations of written history and of genealogy were, he claims,
ultimately conducted for instrumental ends, in order to further specific interests in the
present.
The critical turning point in the making of a modern historiography appeared
uniquely in ‘‘Western societies,’’ as he has it, during the Renaissance, when the return to
the past first began to evolve into the rational, falsifiable explanation of human action:

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

From the Renaissance onwards there has been a growing determination to try and
understand what happened, purely in its own terms and not in the service of religion
or national destiny, or morality, or the sanctity of institutions; indeed to try and
bring to the human story both the detachment and insight and intellectual compre-
hension that natural philosophers have brought to their study of the external world.

The force of these new powers of critical reasoning served, in turn, to dissolve the power
of the past. Though this is not, in Plumb’s view, the decisive factor in the destruction of
the past—he identifies the deeper causes in the dynamics of an ‘‘industrial society’’ that
possesses ‘‘no sanction in the past and no roots in it’’—in intellectual terms these new
modes of reappropriating the past, based on reason, were critical. When the past, dis-
placed by the intellectual practice of history, comes to lose its authority it becomes, he
tells us, merely ‘‘a matter of curiosity, of nostalgia, a sentimentality.’’
As much as any modernist who preceded him Plumb, despite his antiquarian in-
stincts, was captivated by the ruins of the past, which he perceived to be all around him:

The great Christian past, with its nineteenth-century variations—for they were no
more than variations—on that old majestic theme of man’s fall and salvation, has
collapsed. Rubble, broken arches, monuments crumbling to dust, roofs open to the
sky litter this world of thought and loom forebodingly against the horizon. A strange
collection of men walk amidst the debris, some full of lamentation, calling for urgent
repairs, for an immediate restoration of the old house of the intellect; others climb
on to a prominent broken pillar and in self-confident voices explain it all away; others
are blind and stumble over the ruins not knowing what has happened. . . . Can this
litter of a dead past be cleared away?

All that can remain from this catastrophe, he concludes, is the resourcefulness of the
individual, reasoning human mind.
These were urgent issues, he insisted, because men and women need to possess a
temporal grasp of the worlds they inhabit. His privileging of a historical understanding of
the past derived most of all from his conviction that history, as critical practice, serves no
vested interests and thus carries with it, if not emancipatory possibilities, then—in his
characteristically more tempered sensibility—a notion of what it ‘‘may be imprudent to
do.’’ Despite this overly genteel justification for the study of history, the death of the past,
for Plumb, creates the conditions for a more deeply democratic civil society:

The past is always a created ideology with a purpose, designed to control individuals,
or motivate societies, or inspire classes . . . The future of history and historians is to
cleanse the story of mankind from those deceiving visions of a purposeful past. The

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 B I L L S C H WA R Z

death of the past can only do good so long as history flourishes . . . The past has only
served the few; perhaps history may serve the multitude.

It’s instructive, looking back from our vantage today, that within this theoretical
framework there is no explicit attention to memory. Yet it is evident that Plumb’s concep-
tion of the past is, in part at least, a metonym for memory itself. ‘‘And for a past that
lives,’’ he asks, ‘‘what is time?—an irrelevance.’’7 Memory in premodern times binds the
past to the present (if we can employ these terms) and is, for Plumb omnipresent, a
lived relation that requires no reflection or abstraction precisely because it is naturalized,
imbricated in the very mentalities of everyday life. It—memory—is in this reading a
function of peculiarly premodern societies, authentically organic as the modern relation-
ship between past to present can never be.
Thus when he invokes ‘‘the past’’ what Plumb refers to is not the inchoate, protean
accumulation of all that has ever happened, but more properly what Eric Hobsbawm,
following a similar line of argument, calls ‘‘the social mechanisms that link one’s contem-
porary experience to that of earlier generations.’’8 With this in mind there can be no doubt
that, following Plumb’s model, if in the pre-Enlightenment epochs memory operates as
the overriding ‘‘mechanism’’ by which ‘‘the past’’ enters the present, then memory can
only be understood as the disreputable and damaging precursor to reasoned historical
scholarship.
That Plumb’s Cambridge refinement should find itself, providentially, translated into
the universal expression of the ideal modern historian, levitating above the profanities of
everyday life, is not a happy resolution. But still, I’ve always found The Death of the Past
an unsettling polemic, whose images stay in the mind, and that anticipates—in its relaxed,
self-consciously erudite manner—many later explorations whose theory is more heavily
freighted.
Carl Schorske is a very different sort of historian: New World rather than Old, Jewish,
committed to a peculiarly U.S. tough radical populism, and profoundly knowledgeable
about the practices of high modernism, which have occupied his professional writings
over the past half century. His most famous book, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, is a wonderfully
illuminating, landmark study of the influence of modernism on the twentieth century.
But it is in modernism, for Schorske, that what he identifies as the intellectual collapse of
our own times can be located, for it was modernism that functioned as both cause and
effect of the end of history.
Since the onset of the modernist period, ‘‘modern,’’ he writes, works as a concept
that ‘‘has come to distinguish our perception of our lives and times from all that has gone
before, from history as a whole, as such. . . . The modern mind has been growing indiffer-
ent to history because history, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition, has be-
come useless to it.’’ The initial perpetrator of this repudiation of history he takes to have
been Nietzsche, to whom the world presented itself only as ‘‘ubiquitous fragmentation.’’

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

And for all Schorske’s regard for, and understanding of, the great modernist figures of
the early twentieth century, none appears to escape his censure, for the gravitational pull
away from history was, he maintains, a collective one.9
In some fine pages he connects his own political biography to this larger prohibition
to thinking historically. In the years following the Second World War, he explains, the
optimism of his generation, which had lived through the New Deal and the defeat of
fascism, fell apart. Just when faith in the historical imagination and, Schorske adds, in the
Enlightenment principles that make it possible, were most needed, they were—across the
intellectual culture as a whole—jettisoned. Liberals and radicals, ‘‘almost unconsciously
. . . adapted their world-views to a revolution of falling political expectations,’’ and we
have since been living the consequences.10 Thus in Thinking with History, effectively a
sequel to Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, he argues that the ‘‘ahistorical’’ properties of modernism
have continued to feed into the epoch of the postmodern: ‘‘Postmodernism, to be sure,
has found uses for elements in the past in its own constructions and deconstructions. But
even as it consigns modernism to the past, it reaffirms as its own modernism’s rupture
from history as a continuous process, as the platform of its own intellectual identity.’’11
The contention that we live in an ahistorical age is a common one, even though the
shape of the argument shifts from protagonist to protagonist. Like Plumb, Schorske ap-
pears to address the matter of memory indirectly. Yet it is clear that though he was con-
vinced that the intellectual authority of historical time was on the wane, this was due only
to the fact that consciousness of internal, subjective time was moving to the fore. Or as
he put this, there had occurred ‘‘the turn from Marx to Freud,’’ from a temporality that
was ‘‘public and sociological’’ to one that was ‘‘private and psychological.’’12 Modern, or
postmodern, time may have turned its back on history; but ‘‘private’’ or ‘‘psychological’’
time, the time of Freud and Proust, which today we would designate as memory, is
deemed to be dominant.
In reading Plumb and Schorske together we can see some common patterns emerge.
First, they both radically counterpoise memory to history, such that any conceivable coex-
istence between the two becomes difficult to imagine. For Plumb, when the-past-as-
memory dies, history comes to life; while for Schorske, when history dies, memory comes
to life. Neither contemplates the possibility that, for all the necessarily distinct, respective
properties of memory and history, each can work with (or live with) the other.
Second, it’s revealing the degree to which current debates on the identification of
modern memory work from an evolutionary, sequential temporal plotting. This way of
thinking is pronounced in Plumb. He conceives, for example, of the arrival of modernity
as having imposed a radical, sequential break with prior forms, and implies too that
there exists a teleology that stretches into the future, bringing with it, as he supposes,
emancipation from unreason. But in so doing he imposes a strict notion of temporality
that carries the imprint of the grand narratives of modernity, in which history, upper case,
predominates and all alternative conceptions of temporality, mnemonic time included,

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disappear from view. If Schorske provides a mirror-image of this schema, it is also a deal
more nuanced. Yet even so, the transformation he depicts is essentially an unambiguous
reversal, from history to memory. For all the craft of his concrete case studies, the more
general notion of dehistoricization operates at a high level of abstraction and works to
totalize the transformations he identifies.
For both Plumb and Schorske the specifically modern experience of temporality is
sharply distinguished from prior systems—though as both Mary Carruthers and Peter
Sherlock suggest in the previous chapters in this volume, there is no reason to think that
memory in premodern times ever existed free of mediation. For Plumb premodern sub-
jects inhabited a world that was essentially timeless, where memory was barely differenti-
ated from consciousness itself. For Schorske the coming of modernity separates humans
‘‘from history as a whole, as such,’’ while history itself is no longer conceived as ‘‘a contin-
uous nourishing tradition.’’
What is clear, however, is that whether optimistic or pessimistic, both sides in this
debate acknowledge that modern life has broken attachments to the past and that new
ways need to be invented to revivify what has been lost. How this basic theme is played
out in theoretical discussion is confusing. The same presentiment can be ascribed, as
Richard Terdiman has indicated, to there being too much memory, or too little; to there
being too much history, or too little; to there being memory rather than history; or history
rather than memory.13 Whatever the take, though, the problem has a common prove-
nance: the difficulties that prevent modern subjects from connecting with their pasts and
inhabiting time in such a way that ‘‘life’’ itself (in Nietzsche’s terms) is enhanced rather
than diminished.

The End of Memory

In these terms, Pierre Nora’s thesis on the end of memory is both important and reveal-
ing. As we shall see, his basic historical concepts are pitched at a high level of abstraction,
and they are organized within a relatively uncomplicated narrative of modernization. At
the same time he sees modernization above all else as a process of temporal dislocation,
in which the past progressively disappears from the present, moving ever further away
from human consciousness. The domain in which this occurs is what Nora categorizes as
modern memory. Indeed, it seems as if the entire plight of contemporary life comes, in
his depiction, to be signified by memory. Much of this I find unpersuasive. But Nora
is an unusually self-conscious historian epistemologically and even when his historical
conclusions are at their most extravagant he can be a nimble thinker, ducking and weav-
ing when required: as an advocate for history, he knows well enough the artifice by which
historical knowledge works.

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

Nora is perhaps the most celebrated historian of memory. Under his direction, be-
tween 1984 and 1992 there appeared, in the original French, seven volumes of his influ-
ential Les lieux de mémoire, comprising essays by a multitude of authors; when these were
reprinted in three paperback volumes in 1997, the new edition comprised nearly five
thousand pages. The planned English translation, in seven volumes (three under the title
Realms of Memory and four as Rethinking France), which conceptually recasts the original,
is still underway.14 The initial publication itself was received as an intellectual media-
event, drawing into its slipstream academics, public and political figures, and, through
the press and television, the wider public, the very ambition of the project creating its
own momentum. Nora, a man poised in the liberal-conservative center of the political
spectrum, has been a well-connected figure of authority at the heart of the Parisian intel-
lectual scene for many years: historian, publisher at Gallimard, founder and editor of Le
débat, founder, with his brother-in-law, the historian François Furet, of the Saint-Simon
Foundation, member of the Academy. Insofar as French intellectual culture has moved to
the right over the past decades, in the view of one commentator at least, Nora’s promi-
nence not only illuminates this wider shift, but has been decisive in it—a transformation
particularly evident in the national historiography, with both Nora and Furet in the van.15
It was in Nora’s role as an editor at Gallimard in the mid-1990s, for example, that he
refused to publish Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes on the grounds that French public opin-
ion had become too hostile to the traditions of Communism for the book to be well
received.16
Various commentaries to the project have appeared in the Anglophone world, seeking
to make sense of what is a vast, complex work, though there is little consensus about the
major propositions.17 More interestingly, perhaps, none has felt obliged to reflect on the
provocations of Nora’s prose: this is writing that is knowingly epistemological, delighting
in aphorism and epigram; while drawn to paradox, it is punctuated by flamboyant decla-
mation that, to the insular eye, is often as obscure as it is sweeping.18 Public historians in
the Anglophone tradition generally learn to hone their narrative skills. Nora doesn’t do
narrative, choosing instead a more analytical, synchronic approach. While its stylistic
virtuosity is impressive, its explanatory power remains open to question. It is best read as
a symptomatic text, bringing to the fore, for our own times, a modernist melancholia in
which the degradation of memory is the defining feature of modern life. Indeed, for all
the high-wire conceptual acrobatics of his work, it is the melancholia that registers most
powerfully, for it is enmeshed in his historical method. It’s not simply that the theme of
loss runs through every page of his historical interpretation, explicitly and unapologeti-
cally. His is a perception of loss that carries with it no hint of acceptance or mitigation:
whatever psychic properties this may entail, its political articulation can only be one of
reaction.
The reputation of Les lieux de mémoire rests on its analysis of memory. However, the
books are as much about the symbolic making of the French nation as they are about

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 B I L L S C H WA R Z

memory, understood more broadly. Essentially, the authors concern themselves with ex-
ploring different facets of the French past through the lens of memory. Such studies, by
their nature, present a myriad of different phenomena, all of which they take to qualify
as lieux de mémoire, which literally we can understand as the locations of memory. Along-
side the monuments and the familiar symbols of French nationhood we find chapters
devoted to historians, novelists, and painters; to songs and conversations; to forests, coast-
lines and the natural landscape; to the regions and to idea of the hexagon as an imagina-
tive means for figuring the territory of the nation; to the Tour de France; to war
memorials; to memoirs; to religion; to the concept of generation; and to much, much
more. Whether in the colossal three-volume edition, or in the seven separate volumes,
this is history in monumental mode and, notwithstanding Nora’s own stated hope that it
should be encountered as a multivocal history, the final result is far from being any kind
of open text: the tight explanatory structures of Nora’s own paratexts—his prefaces, gen-
eral introductions, introductions, conclusions that punctuate the range of case-studies—
set out to supply an uncompromisingly didactic means by which the whole project should
be read.
Les lieux de mémoire is a work of classification, in the grand Durkheimian manner,
elaborating a vast inventory of the symbolic systems that have generated the meanings of
French national life, investigating the ‘‘unconscious organization of collective memory.’’19
It relies on a method of working, tantalizingly close to variants of classical structuralism,
that endeavors to uncover the categories of ‘‘intelligibility’’ that organize the symbolic
field in the historical present.20 In so doing, Nora sought also to develop what he termed
‘‘a general concept of memory within the field of historiography.’’21 At various points
through the volumes he set out to clarify his principles of classification in order to deter-
mine why certain phenomena had been included and others excluded and to explain
the differing operations of les lieux (‘‘internal’’ to memory or ‘‘exterior,’’ ‘‘imposed’’ or
‘‘constructed,’’ ‘‘dominant’’ or ‘‘dominated,’’ material or non-material and so on). These
work to greater or lesser effect, and some—despite numerous readings—I am still baffled
by. But as Nora himself contends, the challenge that he and his collaborators faced derived
not from their initial theoretical approach but from the intervention of what he believed
to be a profound historical transformation that radically altered the very dispositions of
memory itself.
The argument is this: during the 1970s, and in the years that followed when Les lieux
de mémoire was being drafted and published, France itself, as a coherent historical entity,
began to unravel. ‘‘The dissolution of the unifying framework of the nation-state has
exploded the traditional system that was its concentrated symbolic expression.’’ The ‘‘clas-
sical model’’ of France as a given network of memories collapsed. ‘‘There is no commem-
orative superego: the canon has vanished.’’ Where once there had been ‘‘order and
hierarchy,’’ now there was simply an absence, lacking any ‘‘central organizing principle.’’

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

Memories of the nation, with no internal gravity to give them structure, had simply be-
come ‘‘infinite.’’22 In this situation memory no longer possessed the capacity to give life
to the national past, and thus the present was sharply cut adrift from all that had preceded
it. This argument is marshaled to greatest effect in Nora’s envoi, published at the end of
the final volume, where his tone becomes conspicuously more caustic.23 It was not only,
as he imagined it, that his historical method had become superseded by historical events,
his neostructuralism unable to engage with a situation in which ‘‘no central organizing
principle’’ pertained. It was also that his own magnum opus, in the moment of its public
consumption, had undergone an unwelcome transubstantiation and, subject to the thrall
of a new system of memory, had itself ceased to be received as history and had become
un lieu de mémoire. It was subsumed by what it had set out to critique. In doing so it
confirmed for Nora his conviction that in contemporary times the prospect of ever reach-
ing the past had become all but a cognitive, intellectual impossibility.
In order to understand the import of this reading, and how Nora at this point is
conceptualizing les lieux, we need to step back and review the larger thesis that his vol-
umes propose, looking particularly at the issue of temporality.
The conceptual architecture of Nora’s investigations derives from what he identifies
as a single overarching paradox. In contemporary times memory is dead. But simultane-
ously, he believes, memory is omnipresent, the phenomenon of modern memory itself
revealing the dominating episteme of the age. ‘‘Memory is constantly on our lips because
it no longer exists.’’24 How is this paradox to be explained?
In the narrative construction of a work of this scale, authored by many hands over a
long period, there inevitably occur not only important shifts in argument and nuance,
but also competing angles of vision, double-exposures, retakes and so on. There are,
equally unsurprisingly, a number of shifting, ambiguous formulations in the contribu-
tions by Nora himself. Yet notwithstanding the complexity of these many volumes, the
larger arguments depend on a relatively simple, and familiar, historical schema. Indeed,
it’s possible, without undue damage, to tabulate the basic temporal phases that underwrite
Nora’s reading of the evolution of modern memory (see Table 1). A tripartite temporal
division is evident. The least investigated appears in the table as ‘‘Premodern,’’ which, for
the most part, precedes the Revolution of 1789. The operations of memory in the premod-
ern epoch register, for Nora, as what he calls ‘‘real’’ memory: intimate and ‘‘spontaneous,’’
imbricated in lived experience such that memory itself exists free from mediation.25 It is,
precisely, immediate with experience. It is essentially collective, most commonly based on
rural custom. And it allows the past to be ‘‘inhabited’’ in the present.26 Whether premod-
ern formations of memory ever worked in this way remains in doubt, as I suggested
earlier. The critical issue, however, is that, from this point on, modern memory, whether
in actuality or in its potential, begins the process of turning inside-out the practices of
‘‘real’’ memory. Memory, real memory, dies at the outset of modernity. But in its place
emerge new institutions devoted to recovering what has been lost, creating new, ersatz

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TA B L E 1 . The temporalities of Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire

Premodern Modern Postmodern

Memory (1): ‘‘Real memory’’: ‘‘Vestiges’’ of real Memory finds ‘‘refuge’’ in an
Operations ‘‘intimate,’’ memory continue, with accumulation of specialized,
‘‘spontaneous,’’ some life. Displacement consecrated sites. ‘‘The
environmental. of memory by history. outbreak of memory,’’
‘‘Dwelling’’ in memory. Incipient collapse of the turning on signifier, but
connection between without a signified.
signifier and signified, Dissolution of memory as a
‘‘between act and social force. Lieux de
meaning.’’ Lieux de mémoire II.
mémoire I.
Memory (2): Lived, unmediated. Performed. Prosthetic/ Performed. Prosthetic/
Articulations mediated: archival, mediated: retinal, televisual.
written.
Memory (3): Community, collective Nation, nation-state, Civil society, ‘‘minorities,’’
Institutions (peasant, rural, custom). collective: particularly, the individual. Driven by the
church, school, family, mass media.
government.
Memory (4): Awareness of self Awareness of self Awareness of self through
Selfhood through community. through history. memory.
Past Simultaneity of past and Continuity of past- ‘‘Disappearance of historical
present; ‘‘inhabiting’’ the present; tradition lived time.’’ Past irretrievable;
past. and sustained. past-present discontinuous;
Acceleration of historical the past no guarantee of the
time. future; tradition as
‘‘unsettling.’’ Only possible
to ‘‘commune’’ with the
past. Past becomes only the
past.
History Collective memory Memory-history. Rise of Severing of history and
evolves into written critical history; scholarly memory; democratization of
record of the past. construction of memory. history. Emptying of
History itself a means for historical knowledge.
the mediation of Historian becomes a lieu de
memory, and for the mémoire. Memory prevails
disenchantment of the over history.
world (Annales school).
History prevails over
memory.
Nation Slow evolution of La ‘‘Memory-nation’’: Disintegration of ‘‘memory-
France profonde. equilibrium between nation’’: from national to
memory–history–nation. ‘‘patrimonial’’ memory. The
‘‘Classical’’ end of the French
commemoration. Revolution. Globalization;
internal and external
decolonization.

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

memory-forms—performed rather than lived, mediated rather than unmediated—that

replicate, at varying removes, what had once been vital and replete.
It is these emergent institutions, in which modern memory accretes and crystallizes,
that Nora dubs les lieux de mémoire. When I first came to read Nora I was, I expect like
many readers, unsure about his evaluation of les lieux. Did these function only as simula-
tions of prior forms that had been properly organic, representing the pains of loss and
inducing the characteristic reflexes of disenchantment with the modern world? Or did
they possess a more positive social role, enabling new relations of social solidarity to be
created? The answer, for a time at least, was both.
Nora endeavors to convey the doubleness of modern memory, caught between life
and death, in the following passage:

Lieux de mémoire arise out of a sense that there is no such thing as spontaneous
memory, hence that we must create archives, mark anniversaries, organize celebra-
tions, pronounce eulogies, and authenticate documents because such things no
longer happen as a matter of course. When certain minorities create protected en-
claves as preserves of memory to be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what is true of
all lieux de mémoire: that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon
sweep them away. These bastions buttress our identities, but if what they defended
were not threatened, there would be no need for them. If the remembrances they
protect were truly living presences in our lives, they would be useless. Conversely, if
history did not seize upon memories in order to distort and transform them, to mold
them or turn them to stone, they would not turn into lieux de mémoire, which emerge
in two stages: moments of history are plucked out of the flow of history, then re-
turned to it—no longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells left on the
shore when the sea of living memory has receded.

Or as he continues: ‘‘The lieux of which I speak are hybrid places, mutants in a sense,
compounded of life and death, of the temporal and the eternal.’’27
Yet looking back from his own standpoint of the late twentieth century, the systems
of memory inaugurated by the French Revolution, and consolidated during the Third
Republic, attain for Nora—compared at least to the poverty of the present—a measure of
authentic grandeur. When Bastille Day was declared a national holiday in 1890, for exam-
ple, Nora claims that it became ‘‘an official’’ lieu de mémoire. But in terms of the everyday
practices of memory it also represented what he calls ‘‘a genuine return to the source,’’
reproducing something akin to a living memory.28 The early years of the Third Republic
occupy a key location in his larger analysis. During this period the memory of the nation’s
history became ‘‘the nerve of the social and political bond,’’ generating an epic ‘‘grand
narrative’’ that took on life as ‘‘an absorbing family saga starting with Vercingetorix.’’
Indeed, the national story assumed a status he regards as ‘‘sacred.’’29 This symbolized

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 B I L L S C H WA R Z

what he defines as ‘‘the classical model of national commemoration.’’30 In sum, in a

characteristically Norian construct, nineteenth-century France exemplifies the idea of the
‘‘memory-nation,’’ in which the relation between past and present, though attenuated,
could still be felt in the experiences of everyday life.31 Following closely from Halbwachs
at this point, he argues that the collective sense of the French past, reproduced in church,
school, and family, operated as a unitary field-force in which social and political divi-
sions—clerical and anticlerical, conservative and radical—were contained:

At one time, the Third Republic seemed to draw together and crystallize, through
history and around the concept of ‘‘the nation,’’ one tradition of French memory. . . .
Throughout this period, history, memory, and the nation enjoyed an unusually inti-
mate communion, a symbiotic complementarity at every level—scientific and peda-
gogical, theoretical and practical.32

It’s apparent that the memory that haunts the pages of Les lieux de mémoire, and that
which the book mourns above all else, is that of old, centralized France, later evoked
through those emblematic figures of provincial life, the postman and the schoolteacher,
each indicative of the reach of the state into private life.
Behind these memories of the ‘‘memory-nation’’ lies too the sociological reality of an
extensive peasant-rural sector that remained dominant well into the twentieth century,
and that in turn functioned as the source for the strategic power of the idea of the longue
durée in the imagining of the French nation and in the makings of its memories. ‘‘Think
. . . of the irrevocable breach,’’ Nora instructs his readers, ‘‘marked by the disappearance
of peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective memory.’’33 That ‘‘irrevoca-
ble breach’’ represents in Nora’s theorization of memory the foundational historical event
from which all else follows.
In this depiction, the memory formations of nineteenth-century France simultane-
ously were rich in affect and contained as well the forces that were to bring about their
undoing. The mediations by which modern memory was articulated—the dependence on
the written word and its archives—worked to deepen the gap between memory and
human experience: in consequence, he claims, memory was always in danger of losing
any real connection to the past, driven instead exclusively by the concerns of the present.
For Nora, memory in this period hovered on the brink of the collapse of the connection
between signifier and signified, ‘‘between act and meaning,’’ such that the past becomes
only the past, with no effectivity on the present. In modern life the past was slipping away
from the present.34
This is how Nora describes les lieux in formal terms. Alongside this he also supplies
a more diachronic argument. In the modern epoch he indicates that these locations of
memory were essentially contradictory, combining vestiges of ‘‘real’’ memory with simu-
lacra that represented nothing more than themselves. Although generally implicit, there

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 MEMORY, TEMPORALITY, MODERNITY

is evidence to suggest that his conception of modern France opens—following conven-

tion—with the Revolution and (less conventionally) comes to an end in the 1970s.
Through these years, he argues, there existed a number of forces that worked to counter
the components of ‘‘real’’ memory within each lieu de mémoire and to abet the dominance
of their simulacra. In Nora’s portrayal incremental, evolutionary, quantitative change
turns into a transformation decidedly qualitative, in which les lieux lose any semblance of
existing as institutions that carry even the remnants of spontaneous memory. They be-
come merely instigators of what he names as ‘‘patrimonial’’ memory or, to use the com-
mon English equivalent, heritage. These quantitative shifts, he indicates, accumulated in
particular moments: in the last third of the nineteenth century, in the 1930s and finally
in the 1970s. For this reason, in Table 1, it’s necessary not only to be aware of the contra-
dictions internal to each lieu, but also of the fact that Nora proposes that there exists too
a tendential historical process by which les lieux de mémoire become progressively emptied
of ‘‘real’’ memory altogether. In Table 1, I’ve indicated this schematically by distinguishing
between lieux I and lieux II. Thus the closer we come to the contemporary period the
more that Nora is adamant that les lieux exist only in this second, degraded, meaning.
Nora doesn’t choose to use the term postmodern. I’ve adopted this in the table only
as a convenient tag. He is precise enough, though, to insist that 1975 marks the critical,
defining moment when ‘‘real’’ memory finally dies and when a new ‘‘outbreak’’ of patri-
monial memories was unleashed on the French nation, bringing its very existence into
question.35 He identifies three elements that composed this conjunctural transformation.
The first was the oil crisis of 1974, which put an end to the thirty years of accelerated
growth that France had undergone, but which signaled too the coup de grâce for the
traditions of the rural nation. In 1945, he points out, some half of the population had still
been engaged in agriculture; thirty years later, this fell for the first time to below ten
per cent, ‘‘a fateful threshold,’’ finally breaking the inherited components of ‘‘collective
memory.’’ This element in the conjuncture represented, as Nora sees it, the historic end-
ing of the longue durée of peasant France.36 Second, he views the arrival of Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing at the Élysée Palace in 1974 as marking the termination of the Gaullist era—by
which he means the period dominated by both the Gaullists themselves and the Commu-
nists—and also (due to Giscard’s divorce from the imperatives of the ‘‘old France’’) as
reinforcing what Nora chooses to call ‘‘the implantation of the imaginary.’’37 And third,
following closely in the footsteps of François Furet, he cites as critical the exhaustion
of the revolutionary idea that required of the French that they remodel their collective
relationship to the national past.38
These might not seem to be exactly commensurable historical events. But by braiding
them together Nora creates a narrative in which the moment of the 1970s is truly overde-
termined, a condensation of distinct historical times that, in their combination, produces
a cataclysm within the nation. The vision is apocalyptic. Everything becomes unhinged.

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 B I L L S C H WA R Z

Behind the conjuncture of the mid-seventies lie deeper, tectonic shifts. The consequences
of decolonization had, he insists, undermined the rationality of the West, and spelled the
end of European hegemony. The processes of ‘‘internal decolonization’’ had given voice
to new social groups: to ‘‘minorities,’’ whom, in a Borgesian summation, Nora names as
‘‘Jews, royalists, Bretons, Corsicans, women.’’39 Led in the first instance by the ethnic
minorities, each determined to press for recognition and to discover its own—
particular—past, and as they did so, the universal authority of the nation corroded. Nora
implies that much of what occurred in the seventies had been anticipated in 1968—even
though he asserts that in ’68 ‘‘nothing tangible or palpable occurred at all,’’ that it was
only ‘‘a mere symbolic resumé,’’ celebrating nothing more than the end of revolution.40
But since then the cataclysm has gathered pace. Everything now appears to be on the
point of death: memory, history (both historical time and the practice of writing history),
the past, the nation, Europe, revolution, politics, literature. The unexamined first person
plural—denoting, I can only assume, an abstract collective of Frenchmen—have come to
experience their past as ‘‘other’’: indeed, in this scenario they themselves—this abstract
‘‘us’’—have been rendered ‘‘other.’’41 As he concludes, the bitterness apparent, ‘‘we
know’’ that the past ‘‘is no longer ours.’’42
The sign of this epistemic collapse is memory. It is in memory that the destruction
of the cultural authority of France and Europe is to be located. From this point on all the
deathly, ersatz qualities that had haunted les lieux de mémoire from the start come fully
into their own. The properties of French nationhood, once there for all to see, have
become dispersed, infinite and uncontrollable. Memory invades the social formation, dis-
solving the inherited structures of social solidarity; this memory is atomized, civic in
provenance rather than that stipulated by the nation-state, and individual rather than
collective. Precisely because the past has no hold on the present the compulsion to com-
memorate is everywhere. Memory itself generates only a vortex of empty signifiers in
which nothing can be signified. The ‘‘fetishism of signs’’ is complete, and all are ‘‘enslaved
to memory.’’43
In such extreme circumstances Nora invests great intellectual and moral value in a
revamped historical practice that can counter the depredations of contemporary memory.
This has to be a history that recognizes—he is explicit in his deference to Proust at this
point—that modern life is formed by a ‘‘sense of loss, of tearing apart, and of permanent
separation,’’ and must work to create in the imagination a restorative harmony of a soci-
ety otherwise ravaged by its disconnection to the past.44 And as history is brought ‘‘back
to life’’ so too—tenuously—is France, as a ‘‘nation without nationalism,’’ and defined as
a ‘‘reality that is entirely symbolic,’’ thereby rejecting ‘‘any definition that would reduce
it to phenomena of another order.’’45
‘‘Phenomena of another order’’: this might seem an opaque formulation. Yet I read
this as meaning a France that cannot be understood as an expression of a ‘‘partisan’’
politics, allied to either the historic Gaullist or Communist traditions. Undoubtedly,

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Nora’s history is explicitly nationalist, envisaged as a means to resurrect the idea of French
nationhood. But he is determined to represent the politics of his historiography as if it’s
entirely devoid of political investments and as if it’s no longer encumbered by the detritus
of past political battles. Paradoxically, the destruction of the old France that Nora pro-
poses took place in the 1970s also brought with it, in his terms, an opportunity. Les lieux
de mémoire is written on the back of Furet’s maxim that ‘‘The French Revolution is over,’’
and in the conviction that the political traditions of right and left have become extinct.46
Politics, in this scheme of things, is—among much else—effectively dead. Nora’s vision
of a France resurrected, abetted by a suitably knowing history, is one in which affiliation
to the nation transcends every conceivable social division. La France est morte! Vive la
France!
Many readers will not be as exercised by the fate of the traditional nation-state as
Nora; and many more, I imagine, will hardly be persuaded by a nationalist politics that
masquerades as being no politics at all. But the principal issue lies less in his stated com-
mitments than in the matter of location and perspective. What looks like a calamity from
Nora’s location, at the apex of the French cultural system where many privileges accrue,
may elsewhere be welcomed. The weakening of European hegemony, internal decoloniza-
tion and the increased political authority of those dubbed ‘‘minorities,’’ the erosion of the
centralizing powers of the French state, the democratization of history: to believe these
signal a new nihilism is evidence only of a deep conservatism. Nora feels that his erstwhile
possession of the past (his past) has been appropriated by others, and in the process he
experiences himself as ‘‘other’’—as ‘‘other,’’ that is, from his old French self.
Nora tells a powerful story. His is the grandest of grand narratives—grander than
any of the reflections to be found in Plumb or Schorske—in which an entire mental
universe implodes in 1975, or thereabouts, when everything that he valued began to die.
For all his coquetting with conjunctural explanation, his entire analytical procedure works
at a high level of abstraction. In essence the triptych premodern–modern–postmodern,
does the bulk of his theoretical work for him. In this schema modernity functions as a
long interregnum, between the premodern (when past and present were lived as one) and
the postmodern (when the relations between past and present are finally broken). His
only hope, in the postmodern present, rests on a revivified historical practice that takes
as its premise the disconnection between past and present and seeks to assemble a new
national story capable of operating effectively in public life.
In the end, though, while Les lieux de mémoire is an analytical history it represents at
the same time a compulsive, extended enactment of a familiar set of anxieties about
the temporal dislocations of modern life. Even while Nora berates deracinated historical
explanation, his own narrative relies on a one-dimensional, teleological account of mod-
ernization, which culminates in what was destined to occur long ago: the end of memory.
His recourse to Proust, in the hope of fashioning a historical narrative that can repair the
pains of loss and separation, is no more than gestural. Any sense of determinate levels of

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abstraction is abandoned in favor of the grandiose epigram, exemplifying not so much

historical explanation as the author’s irrepressible melancholia. Everything becomes
memory, everything a lieu de mémoire, with no possibility for historical discrimination.
The collapse of memory brings all else in its train. The misfortunes of France, as Nora
believes them to be, become identified with the misfortunes of memory, tout court. It is
in this sense that Les lieux de mémoire is indeed a symptom, demonstrating the degree to
which memory still has to carry the burden of a historical practice incapable of engaging
with what historians should be most qualified to understand: temporality itself.

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 II. IMAGINING MODERN MEMORY

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 4. Bergson on Memory

Keith Ansell-Pearson

Memory. Term used for a variety of systems in the brain with different
characteristics. In all cases, however, it implies the ability to reinvoke or
repeat a specific mental image or a physical act. It is a system property that
depends on changes in synaptic strengths.
Gerald Edelman, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness

In this chapter on Bergson and memory I shall focus on two key ques-
tions that Henri Bergson sought to establish as the foundation for a
philosophical treatment of memory. First, what is the relation between
past and present? Is it merely a difference in degree, or it possible to
locate the difference between them as one of kind? If we can do the
latter, what will this reveal about memory? Second, what is the status of
the past? Is it something merely psychological, or might it be possible
to ascribe an ontological status to it? In other words, what is the reality
of the past?
Matter and Memory (first published in 1896) is widely recognized
as Bergson’s major work. William James, a great admirer of Bergson’s
work, described it as effecting a revolution in thought comparable in
significance to Kant’s Copernican revolution in the Critique of Pure
Reason. Although the text fell into neglect in the second half of the
twentieth century, it exercised a tremendous influence on several gen-
erations of French philosophers, including Emmanuel Levinas, Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur, and Gilles Deleuze.
In addition, there have been important engagements with the text, and
with the phenomenon of Bergsonism, in the writings of critical theo-
rists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Hork-
heimer. If Bergson’s texts are being rediscovered today this is largely
as a result of the influence of Deleuze’s writings on current intellectual
work. The current interest being shown in Bergson is not, however,

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

confined to fashionable developments in continental philosophy. Bergson is gaining a

renewed presence in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I shall devote most of this
chapter to an explication of the main ideas we encounter in Bergson’s text. In the final
section I shall say something on the reception of Bergson’s ideas in some key strands of
twentieth-century thought.
Bergson’s approach to memory was highly innovative. He was one of the first thinkers
to show the importance of paying attention to different types of memory (episodic, se-
mantic, procedural), and he sought to provide a sustained demonstration of why memory
cannot be regarded as merely a diluted or weakened form of perception. Bergson is close
to Freud insofar as both are committed to the view that a radical division must be made
between memory and perception if we are to respect the radical alterity of the uncon-
scious. Bergson calls memory ‘‘a privileged problem’’ precisely because an adequate con-
ception of it will enable us to speak seriously of unconscious psychical states. In this
respect Bergson anticipates the arguments Freud put forward four years later in The Inter-
pretation of Dreams.1 In his text of 1966, Bergsonism, Deleuze contends that Bergson intro-
duces an ontological unconscious over and above the psychological one and that is this
that enables us to speak of the being of the past and to grant the past a genuine existence.
The past is not simply reducible to the status of a former present, and neither can it be
solely identified with the phenomenon of psychological recollection.2 However, as one
commentator has rightly noted, Bergson’s conception of the unconscious does not con-
cern itself with the problems of psychological explanation that so occupied the attention
of Freud.3
Bergson always sought to think time in terms of duration (durée), the preservation
or prolongation of the past, entailing the coexistence of past and present. He insists that
a ‘‘special meaning’’ is to be given to the word memory.4 In one of the finest essays ever
written on Bergson’s text, Jean Hyppolite notes that the new sense memory comes to have
in Bergson consists in conceiving its operation in terms of a synthesis of past and present
and with a view to the future.5 This goes against the prevailing conception that conceives
memory as a faculty of repetition or reproduction, in which the past is repeated or repro-
duced in the present and is opposed to invention and creation. For Bergson memory is
linked to creative duration and to sense. As Bergson notes, if matter does not remember
the past since it repeats it constantly and is subject to a law of necessity, a being that
evolves creates something new at every moment.6
But just how are we to draw this distinction between past and present? Following
Bergson we can note that nothing is less than the present moment, if we understand by
this the indivisible limit that separates or divides the past from the future. This, however,
is only an ‘‘ideal’’ present; the real, concrete, ‘‘live’’ present is different and necessarily
occupies a tension of duration. If the essence of time is that it goes by, that time gone by
is the past, then the present is the instant in which it goes by. However, we cannot capture
this present by conceiving it in terms of a mathematical instant (as a point in time).

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 BERGSON ON MEMORY

Bergson’s thinking is focused on the problem of how to draw a distinction between

past and present while recognizing the indivisible continuity of durational time. He claims
that while the distinction we make between our present and our past is not arbitrary, it is
‘‘relative to the expanse of the field that our attention to life can embrace.’’7 If memory is
a form of duration, then it is one with the impetus of consciousness itself (understood in
the broad sense that Bergson gives to it as that which is bound up with discernment),8
and what in fact needs explaining is forgetting. Bergson’s problem, then, is how to account
for the distinction between past and present in the context of our recognition of the
indivisibility of duration. Later philosophies of temporality, including the work of Martin
Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard, criticized Bergson for conceiving duration as cohesion
and so failing to develop an account of the separations and ruptures of time, including
the ecstasies of past, present, and future. However, as Jean Hyppolite points out, Bergson’s
second major work, Matter and Memory, was precisely an attempt to raise this problem
and to resolve it.9 In his Huxley lecture of 1911 on life and consciousness Bergson makes
it clear that consciousness is both memory (the conservation and accumulation of the
past in the present) and anticipation of the future.10
Bergson’s treatment of memory is not without difficulties or problems. But it is a
valuable resource for mapping memory, and in this chapter I wish to explicate its novel
and distinctive features. As we shall see, Bergson’s presentation contains some highly
unusual and unorthodox aspects, at least when one first encounters them and struggles
to give them a sense.

Matter and Memory

In Matter and Memory Bergson seeks to establish the ground for a new rapport between
the observations of psychology and the rigors of metaphysics (by metaphysics Bergson
means that thinking that endeavors to go beyond the acquired and sedimented habits of
the human mind, which for him are essentially mechanistic and geometrical in character).
His argument on memory is not advanced in abstraction from consideration of work
done on mental diseases, brain lesions, studies of the failures of recognition, insanity, and
the whole pathology of memory. He poses a fundamental challenge to psychology in
seeking to show that memories are not conserved in the brain. We have to hear him
carefully on this point. In not wishing to privilege the brain as the progenitor of our
representations of the world Bergson shows that he has an affinity with phenomenological
approaches. He conceives perception and memory, for example, in the context of the
lived body, conceives of cognition as fundamentally vital, not speculative, and grants
primacy to action or praxis in our relation to the world.
Bergson’s argument rests on two hypotheses being put to work: pure perception and
pure memory. Imagine a perception without the interlacing of memory (impossible but

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

helpful). Imagine a memory that is not actualized in concrete and specific memory-images
and thus not reducible to our present recollection: less impossible perhaps but equally
helpful. The central claim of the book is that while the difference between matter and
perception is one of degree, the difference between perception and memory is one of
kind. Regarding the first: unless we see it in this way the emergence of perception out of
matter becomes inexplicable and mysterious. Regarding the second: unless we see it this
way then memory is deprived of any unique and autonomous character and becomes
simply a weakened form of perception (indeed Locke called it a ‘‘secondary perception’’).
Bergson’s argument for the autonomy of memory is twofold. It is, first, a thesis on the
active character of perception, the interest of which is vital and not speculative. In cases
of failed recognition it is not that memories have been destroyed but rather that they can
no longer be actualized because of a breakdown in the chain that links perception, action,
and memory. Second, Bergson’s argument is an argument from the perspective of time
conceived as duration: Bergson posits that independent recollections cannot be preserved
in the brain, which only stores motor contrivances, since memories are in time, not in
the brain, which is seated in the present. Since memories concern the past (which always
persists and exists in multiple modes), an adequate thinking of memory must take the
being of memory seriously.
It is as if Bergson is saying: Memory is not in the brain but rather in time, but time
is not a thing, it is duration, hence nothing can be in anything. Hence his argument,
curious at first, that when there takes place a lesion to the brain it is not that memories
are lost, simply that they can no longer be actualized and translated into movement or
action in time. Memory and psychological recollection are not the same. As Edward Casey
has noted, the language of containment has taken a deep hold over our thinking on
memory, whether it is the brain or the computer that provides the container that cribs
and confines memory;11 but it is this language that Bergson attempted to expose as funda-
mentally flawed and to move beyond.
Bergson is concerned with the relation between the mental and the cerebral and is
keen to make such a distinction, simply because our psychical life, while bound to its
motor accompaniment, is not governed by it. Rather, he argues that there are diverse
tones, rhythms, and intensities of mental life. Our psychic life is lived at different tensions
relative to the degree of our attention to life. Thus the relation of the mental to the
cerebral is neither a simple nor a constant one. A psychical disturbance is to be explained
on the basis of this conception of life: a disease of the personality can be understood
in terms of an unloosening or breaking of the tie that binds psychic life to its motor
accompaniment, which involves an impairing of attention to outward life. Bergson thus
resists interpretations of disorders like aphasia in terms of a localization of the memory-
images of words. Bergson is not, of course, denying that there exists a close connection
between a state of consciousness and the brain. His argument is directed against any
reified treatment of the brain in separation from the world it is a part of and from ‘‘life’’

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 BERGSON ON MEMORY

treated as a sphere of praxis or activity. He thus argues against the idea that if we could
penetrate into the inside of the brain and see at work the dance of the atoms that make
up the cortex we would then know every detail of what is taking place in consciousness.
The brain is in the world, not in the head, and it’s only a small part of the life of the
organism, the part that is limited to the present.
Bergson’s starting point is to criticize the notion of some detached, isolated object,
such as the brain, as the progenitor of our representation of the world. The brain is part
of the material world. Thus, if we eliminate the image that is the material world we at the
same time destroy the brain and its cerebral disturbances. The body is in the aggregate of
the material world, an image that acts like all other images, receiving and giving back
movement. The body is a center of action and not a house of representation. It exists as
privileged image in the universe of images in that it can select, within limits, the manner
in which it shall restore what it receives.12 The nervous system, Bergson argues, is not an
apparatus that serves to fabricate or even prepare representations of the world. Its func-
tion, rather, is to receive stimulation, to provide motor apparatus, and to present the
largest possible number of such apparatuses to a given stimulus. The brain is thus to be
regarded as an instrument of analysis with regard to a received movement or an executed
movement. Its office is to transmit and divide movement. Let us posit the material world
as a system of closely-linked images and then imagine within it centers of action repre-
sented by living matter—that is, matter that is contractile and irritable. Around these,
there will be images that are subordinated to each center’s position and variable with it.
This is how we can understand the relation between matter and its perception and the
emergence of conscious perception. Matter, therefore, can be approached in terms of the
aggregate of images; the perception of matter is these same images but referred to the
eventual (possible or virtual) action of one particular image, my body. It is not, therefore,
a question of saying simply that our perceptions depend upon the molecular movements
of the cerebral mass; rather, we have to say that they vary with them, and that these
movements remain inseparably bound up with the rest of the material world. We cannot
conceive of a nervous system living apart from the organism that nourishes it, from the
atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere enve-
lopes, and so on.
Bergson insists: ‘‘There is no perception which is not full of memories.’’13 With the
immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past
experience. Why does he use the hypothesis of an ideal perception? He comes up with the
idea of an impersonal perception to show that it is this perception onto which are grafted
individual accidents and which give an individual ‘‘sense’’ to life; owing to our ignorance
of it, and because we have not distinguished from it memory, we are led to conceive of
perception mistakenly as a kind of interior, subjective vision that then differs from mem-
ory simply in terms of its greater intensity. At the end of chapter 1, Bergson turns his
attention to memory and insists that the difference between perception and memory

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

needs to be made as a difference in kind. He fully acknowledges that the two acts, percep-
tion and recollection, always interpenetrate each other and are always exchanging some-
thing of their substance as by a process of endosmosis. So, why does he insist on drawing
the difference as one of kind? He has a number of reasons: first and foremost, to make
the difference between past and present intelligible and to ascribe a genuine ontological
character to the past (the past is real in its pastness); to develop an adequate understand-
ing of the phenomenon of recognition (in what situations does my body recognize past
images?); and finally, to explain the mechanism of the unconscious.
So, what is Bergson going to claim about memory? First, that in actuality memory is
inseparable from perception; it imports the past into the present and contracts into a
single intuition many moments of duration, ‘‘and thus by a twofold operation compels
us, de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves, whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within
matter.’’14 Second, while the cerebral mechanism conditions memories, it is not sufficient
to ensure their survival or persistence.

The Types of Memory

In the opening argument of chapter 2, Bergson addresses what he regards as the two main
types of memory. Only the second, what he calls independent recollection, can be called
memory proper.
The essential dimension of the body is activity, specifically adaptation in the present
(solving a problem, overcoming an obstacle in the environment). It is only in the form
of motor contrivances that the action of the past can be stored up. Past images are pre-
served in a different manner. The past survives, then, under two distinct forms: in motor
mechanisms and in independent recollections. Both serve the requirements of the present.
The usual or normal function of memory is to utilize a past experience for present action
(recognition), either through the automatic setting into motion of mechanism adapted to
circumstances, or through an effort of the mind that seeks in the past conceptions best
able to enter into the present situation. Here the role of the brain is crucial: it will allow
only those past images to come into being or become actualized that are deemed relevant
to the needs of the present. A lived body is one embedded in a flux of time, but one
whose constant movement within the dimension of the past and along the horizon of the
future is informed by the requirements of the present. If the link with reality is severed,
in this case the field of action in which a lived body is immersed, then it is not so much
the past images that are destroyed but the possibility of their actualization, since they can
no longer act on the real: ‘‘It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that an injury to the
brain can abolish any part of memory.’’15
Let’s consider in a little more detail how Bergson conceives the contraction of the
past taking place as a way of addressing the present. Here I draw on the helpful account

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 BERGSON ON MEMORY

provided by Patrick McNamara. When a level of the past gets contracted the contraction
is experienced by present consciousness as an expansion, simply because its repertoire of
images and moments of duration are increased and intensified.16 Memory enables us to
contract in a single intuition multiple moments of time. In this way it frees us from the
movement of the flow of things and from the rhythm of mechanical necessity. The activa-
tion of memory involves a series of phases. First, there is a relaxation of the inhibitory
powers of the brain; this is followed by a proliferation of memory-images that can flood
the cognitive system; and then, finally, there takes place a selection phase in which the
inhibitory processes are once again called upon. The proliferation of images opens up a
plurality of possible states of affairs and possible worlds; the process of actualization,
however, requires that contraction take place in order to contextualize a cue and provide
an adequate response to the problem in the environment that has been encountered.
What is selected may not, however, be the ‘‘best match or the most optimal solution to a
current perception.’’17 Bergson does not subscribe to a straightforwardly Darwinian model
of the selection process at work in memory.
Bergson’s theory of memory rests on understanding these contractions and expan-
sions in relation to the syntheses of past and present. However, our grasp of this theory
remains inadequate so long as we do not appreciate its addition of a third term, that of
pure memory. Bergson provides in fact a tripartite theory with a ‘‘pure memory’’ ad-
vanced alongside those of habit- and representational-memory. How do we arrive at this
third term of memory?
When we learn something a kind of natural division takes place between the contrac-
tions of habit and the independent recollection of events that involve dating. If I wish to
learn a poem by heart I have to repeat again and again through an effort of learning, in
which I decompose and recompose a whole. In the case of specific bodily actions and
movements habitual learning is stored in a mechanism that is set in motion by some
initial impulse and that involves releasing automatic movements within a closed system
of succession and duration. The operations of independent recollection are altogether
different. In the formation of memory-images the events of our daily life are recorded as
they take place in a unique time and providing each gesture with a place and a date. This
past is retained regardless of its utility and practical application. The past is preserved in
itself and, at the same time, contracted in various states by the needs of action that are
always seated in an actual present. This repetition of memory-images through action
merits the ascription of the word memory not because it is involved in the conservation
of past images but rather because it prolongs their utility into a present moment. The
task of this kind of memory is to ensure that the accumulation of memory-images is
rendered subservient to praxis, making sure that only those past images come into opera-
tion that can be coordinated with a present perception, and so enabling a useful combina-
tion to emerge between past and present images: ‘‘Thus is ensured the appropriate

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

reaction, the correspondence to environment—adaptation, in a word—which is the gen-

eral aim of life.’’18 Without this coordination of memory-images by the adaptive con-
sciousness the practical character of life would be distorted and the plane of dreams
would mingle with the plane of action (in fact, as Bergson fully concedes, the planes do
communicate and cannot be treated as isolable dimensions of consciousness and uncon-
sciousness; the issue is rather to be approached in terms of different tensions and situa-
tions of lived time).
The pure past—by which is simply meant the preservation of the past independent
of its actualization in a present—is inhibited from freely expressing itself by the practical
bent of our bodily comportment, ‘‘by the sensory-motor equilibrium of a nervous system
connecting perception with action.’’19 Not only is there more than one kind of memory,
but memory-images enjoy more than the one kind of existence, being actualized in multi-
ple ways: ‘‘Memory thus creates anew the present perception, or rather it doubles this
perception by reflecting upon it either its own image or some other memory-image of the
same kind.’’20 Our life moves—contracts, expands, and relaxes—in terms of circuits and
it is the whole of memory that passes over into each of these circuits, always in a specific
form or state of contraction and in terms of certain variable dominant recollections: ‘‘The
whole of our past psychical life conditions our present state, without being its necessary
determinant.’’21 We shift between virtual and actual states all of the time, never completely
virtual or completely actual.
Bergson holds that perception and memory interlace and that all memories must
become actualized in order to become effectively real.22 Personal recollections make up
the largest enclosure of our memory. He writes: ‘‘Essentially fugitive, they become only
materialized by chance, either when an accidentally precise determination of our bodily
attitude attracts them or when the very indetermination of that attitude leaves a clear field
to the caprices of their manifestation.’’23 The pathology of memory has its basis in an
appreciation of the vitality of memory. Memory, Bergson argues, has ‘‘distinct degrees of
tension or of vitality.’’ Pathology confirms this insight: ‘‘In the ‘systematized amnesias’ of
hysterical patients,’’ he writes, ‘‘the recollections which appear to be abolished are really
present, but they are probably all bound up with a certain determined tone of intellectual
vitality in which the subject can no longer place himself.’’24 He further notes that there
are always dominant memories for us, which exist as ‘‘shining points round which the
others form a vague nebulosity.’’25 These shining points get multiplied to the extent to
which our memory is capable of expansion. The process of localizing a recollection in the
past does not consist in simply plunging into the mass of our memories as into a bag in
order to draw out memories closer and closer to each other and between which the
memory to be localized may find its place. Again, he finds helpful the pathology of
memory:

In retrogressive amnesia, the recollections which disappear from consciousness are

probably preserved in remote planes of memory, and the patient can find them by

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 BERGSON ON MEMORY

an exceptional effort like that which is effected in the hypnotic state. But, on the
lower planes, these memories await, so to speak, the dominant image to which they
may be fastened. A sharp shock, a violent emotion, forms the decisive event to which
they cling; if this event, by reason of its sudden character, is cut off from the rest of
our history, they follow it into oblivion.26

In short, Bergson has posited an assemblage made up of three components: pure memory,
memory-images, and perception. The latter is never simply a contact of the mind with a
present object but is impregnated with memory-images; in turn these images partake of
a pure memory that they materialize or actualize and are bound up with the perceptions
that provide it with an actual embodiment.

Perception and Memory

It is necessary to dispel a number of illusions that shape and govern our thinking about
memory, a key one being that memory only comes into existence once an actual percep-
tion has taken place. This illusion is generated by the requirements of perception itself,
which is always focused on the needs of a present. While the mind or consciousness is
attending to things, it has no need of pure memory, which it holds to be useless. More-
over, although each new perception requires the powers afforded by memory, a reani-
mated memory appears to us as the effect of perception. This leads us to suppose that the
difference between perception and memory is simply one of intensity or degree, in which
the remembrance of a perception is held to be nothing other than the same perception in
a weakened state, resulting in the illegitimate inference that the remembrance of a percep-
tion cannot be created while the perception itself is being created or be developed at the
same time.27
It is by recognizing the virtual character of pure memory that we can perhaps better
appreciate that the difference between perception and memory is one of kind and not
merely degree. Memory is made up of memory-images but the recollection of an image
is not itself an image (it is closer to a concentrated act of intellectual effort). Bergson
insists that ‘‘To picture is not to remember’’ (Imaginer n’est pas se souvenir).28 As a recol-
lection becomes actual it comes to live in an image, ‘‘but the converse is not true, and the
image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past
that I sought it.’’29
Bergson’s claim is that at every moment of our lives we are presented with two
aspects, even though the virtual aspect may be imperceptible owing to the very nature of
the operations of perception:

Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with
a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each
moment is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very split-
ting, for the present moment, always going forward, fleeting limit between the imme-
diate past which is now no more and the immediate future which is not yet, would
be a mere abstraction were it not the moving mirror which continually reflects per-
ception as a memory.30

It is because the past does not simply follow the present but coexists with it that we can
develop an explanation of paramnesia or the illusion of déjà vu, in which there is a
recollection of the present contemporaneous with the present itself. The illusion is gener-
ated from thinking that we are actually undergoing an experience we have already lived
through when in fact what is taking place is the perception of the duplication we do not
normally perceive, namely, of time into the two aspects of actual and virtual. There is a
memory of the present in the actual moment itself. I cannot actually predict what is going
to happen but I feel as if I can: what I foresee is that I am going to have known it—I
experience a ‘‘recognition to come,’’ I gain insight into the formation of a memory of the
present (if we could stall the movement of time into the future, this experience would be
much more common for us; we can note that current empirical research on the phenome-
non of déjà vu focuses on the regions of the brain involved in producing it and explains
it in terms of gaps in our attentive system).
This difference between past and present can be explained in the following terms:
our present is the ‘‘very materiality of our existence’’ in the specific sense that it is ‘‘a
system of sensations and movements and nothing else.’’31 This system is unique for each
moment of duration ‘‘just because sensations and movements occupy space, and because
there cannot be in the same place several things at the same time.’’32 One’s present at any
moment of time is sensory-motor, again in the specific sense that the present comes from
the consciousness of my body: actual sensations occupy definite portions of the surface
of my body. The concern of my body, manifest in the consciousness I have of it, is
with an immediate future and impending actions. By contrast, one’s past is ‘‘essentially
powerless’’ in the specific sense that it interests no part of my body conceived as a center
of action or praxis. No doubt, Bergson notes, it begets sensations as it materializes, but
when it does so it ceases to be a memory and becomes something actually lived by passing
into the condition of a present thing. In order for such a memory to become materialized
as an actual present I have to carry myself back into the process by which I called it up,
‘‘as it was virtual, from the depths of my past.’’33 Bergson insists that this pure memory is
neither merely a weakened perception nor simply an assembly of nascent sensations.
When conceived in terms of the latter, memory becomes little more than the form of an
image contained in already embodied nascent sensations. Let us once again clarify the
difference between the present and the past: it is because they are two opposed degrees
that it is possible to distinguish them in nature or kind.

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Bergson’s innovation, then, is to suggest that a recollection is created alongside an

actual perception and is contemporaneous with it: ‘‘Either the present leaves no trace in
memory, or it is twofold at every moment, its very up-rush being in two jets exactly
symmetrical, one of which falls back towards the past whilst the other springs forward
towards the future.’’34 The illusion that memory comes after perception arises from the
nature of practical consciousness, namely, the fact that it is only the forward-springing jet
that interests it. Memory becomes superfluous and without actual interest: ‘‘In a general
way, or by right, the past only reappears to consciousness in the measure in which it can
aid us to understand the present and to foresee the future. It is the forerunner of action.’’35
Because consciousness is bound up with an attentiveness to life, to action, it ‘‘only admits,
legally’’ those recollections that provide assistance to the present action.36 This explains
Bergson’s interest in the anomalies (illegalities) of the life of ésprit, such as deliriums,
dreams, hallucinations, etc., which, Bergson insists, are ‘‘positive facts’’ that consist in the
presence, and not in the mere absence, of something: ‘‘They seem to introduce into the
mind certain new ways of feeling and thinking.’’37
The past can never be recomposed with a series of presents since this would be to
negate its specific mode of being. To elaborate an adequate thinking of time, including
the time of the present, requires that we make the move to an ontological appreciation of
the past. Psychological consciousness is born and emerges into being only when it has
found its proper ontological conditions. On this movement Bergson writes:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our

history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from
the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain
region of the past—a work of adjustment like the focusing of a camera. But our
recollection still remains virtual.38

In short, we cannot reconstitute the past from the present but must make the move into
the past itself as a specific region of being. The past will never be comprehended as
something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a
present image, and this movement by definition is something virtual: ‘‘In vain do we seek
its trace in anything actual and already realized; we might as well look for darkness be-
neath the light.’’39 Bergson contends that this is, in fact, one of the chief errors of the
school of associationism, which dominated the study of memory in the second half of the
nineteenth century: ‘‘placed in the actual, it exhausts itself in vain attempts to discover in
a realized and present state the mark of its past origin, to distinguish memory from
perception, and to erect into a difference in kind that which it condemned in advance to
be but a difference of magnitude.’’40 What is in need of explanation is not so much the
cohesion of internal mental states but rather ‘‘the double movement of contraction and
expansion by which consciousness narrows or enlarges the development of its content.’’41

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

Associationism conceives the mechanism of linkage in terms of a perception remaining

identical with itself; it is a ‘‘psychical atom which gathers to itself others just as these
happen to be passing by.’’42 In Bergson’s model of recollection, however, the linkages and
connections forged by the mind are not simply the result of a discrete series of mechanical
operations. This is because within any actual perception it is the totality of recollections
that are present in an undivided, intensive state. If in turn this perception evokes different
memories,

it is not by a mechanical adjunction of more and more numerous elements which,

while remaining unmoved, it attracts round it, but rather by an expansion of the
entire consciousness which, spreading out over a larger area, discovers the fuller de-
tails of its wealth. So a nebulous mass, seen through more and more powerful tele-
scopes, resolves itself into an ever greater number of stars.43

The first hypothesis, which rests on a physical atomism, has the virtue of simplicity.
However, the simplicity is only apparent and it soon locks us into an untenable account
of perception and memory in terms of fixed and independent states. It cannot allow for
movement within perception and memory except in artificially mechanical terms, with
memory traces jostling each other at random and exerting mysterious forces to produce
the desired contiguity and resemblance.44 Bergson’s theory of memory in terms of pure
memory, memory-images, and actual perception, is designed to provide a more coherent
account of how associations actually take place and form in the mind.
We find ourselves, largely out of force of habit, compelled to determine or ascertain
the place or space of memory: Where is it? How can the past, which has ceased to be,
preserve itself if not in the brain? Bergson is not denying that parts of the brain play a
crucial role in our capacity for memory and in the actualization of memory. But memories
cannot be in the brain (except habit-memory), because the brain occupies only a small
slice or section of becoming, namely, the present: ‘‘The brain, insofar as it is an image
extended in space, never occupies more than the present moment: it constitutes, with all
the rest of the material universe, an ever-renewed section of universal becoming.’’45 More-
over, the difficulty we have in conceiving the survival of the past—which has ceased to be
useful but not ceased to be—comes from the fact that

we extend to the series of memories, in time, that obligation of containing and being
contained which applies only to the collection of bodies instantaneously perceived
in space. The fundamental illusion consists in transferring to duration itself, in its
continuous flow, the form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it.46

Our reluctance to admit the integral survival of the past has its origin in the very bent of
our psychical life—‘‘an unfolding of states wherein our interest prompts us to look at

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 BERGSON ON MEMORY

that which is unrolling, and not at that which is entirely unrolled.’’47 As Deleuze points
out in Bergsonism, the question ‘‘Where are recollections preserved?’’ involves a false
problem by supposing a badly analyzed composite.48 Why suppose that memories have to
be preserved somewhere? Furthermore, a fundamental feature of Bergson’s novel empiri-
cism is to insist on their being different ‘‘lines of fact’’; as Deleuze insists, whereas the
brain is situated on the line of ‘‘objectivity,’’ recollection is part of the line of ‘‘subjectiv-
ity.’’ It is thus ‘‘absurd to mix the two lines by conceiving of the brain as the reservoir or
the substratum of recollections.’’49 For Bergson memory is primarily affective, and as soon
as we attempt to isolate the affects of memory, setting out time in space and confusing
the different lines of fact, they become lifeless.

Reception and Influence

As Deleuze has noted, Bergson’s principal philosophical themes, such as intuition as a

method and philosophy as a rigorous science, are echoed in phenomenology, and he was
read by several leading figures in this influential school of thought.50 Although there are
no references to Bergson in the work of Husserl he was aware of Bergson’s contributions
and, in spite of their differences in method and ultimate theoretical commitments, there
are parallels between the two thinkers in how they conceptualize time and memory.51
Important engagements with Bergson’s thinking on time and memory can be found in
the work of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre,52 each one of whom made a seminal
contribution to phenomenology. The main criticism made of Bergson by the likes of
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre is that he is unable to adequately account for the intentional
structure of consciousness and, as a result slides back into a pre-phenomenological real-
ism.53 In his study of 1953 a young Jean-François Lyotard argued that phenomenology
separates itself from Bergsonism on the question of time by replacing a flowing time in
consciousness with a consciousness that positively constitutes time for itself.54 This cri-
tique of Bergson has been challenged in recent theoretical work, in which he is seen as
having closer affinities with post-phenomenological notions of agency and subjectivity to
be found, for example, in the work of poststructuralist figures such as Derrida and De-
leuze.55 Bergson’s work, especially Matter and Memory, is seen as containing valuable
resources for calling into question the primacy of the ‘‘For-Itself’’ and its idealistic stress
on the unitary and transparent character of self-consciousness (this move is prefigured in
the work of Levinas; Sartre’s reading of Bergson was effectively challenged by Hyppolite
in his essay of 1949).56 On this point Levinas wishes to go as far as underlining the impor-
tance of Bergsonism ‘‘for the entire problematic of contemporary philosophy’’ on account
of the fact that it is no longer a thought of a ‘‘rationality revealing a reality which keeps
to the very measure of a thought.’’ In effecting a reversal of traditional philosophy by

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

contending the priority of duration over permanence, Bergson has provided thought with
‘‘access to novelty, an access independent of the ontology of the same.’’57
Walter Benjamin is one thinker to have appreciated the rich character of Bergson’s
treatment of memory and its significance for our understanding of certain critical aspects
of modernity. In his essay ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ first published in 1939 in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, in which he develops a wide-ranging treatment of Proust,
Freud, Baudelaire, Poe, the disintegration of the aura, and the shock experience, he situ-
ates Bergson’s text in the context of attempts within philosophy to lay hold of the ‘‘ ‘true’
experience’’ in opposition to the manufactured kind that manifests itself in the ‘‘standard-
ized, denatured life of the civilized masses.’’ For Benjamin, Bergson’s ‘‘early monumental
work,’’ as he describes it, towers above the body of work associated with the philosophy
of life of the late nineteenth century—he mentions the work of Wilhelm Dilthey—on
account of its links with empirical research and the richness of its account of the structure
of memorial experience.58 Bergson’s text needs to be taken to task, however, on account
of its failure to understand its own historical conditions of possibility and reflect on its
historical determinations. On this issue Benjamin goes on to note some important differ-
ences in the figuration of the experience of memory we find in Bergson’s text and in
Proust’s great modern novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. Benjamin contends that Berg-
son’s conception of durée is estranged from history,59 and this point informs Horkheim-
er’s critical engagement with Bergson. Horkheimer acknowledges that he owes ‘‘decisive
elements’’ to Bergson’s philosophy for his own thinking, but argues that Bergson offers a
metaphysics of time that privileges an interior spiritual world, rests on a disavowal of
human history, and suffers from a ‘‘biological realism.’’60
It is interesting to note that the critical reception of Bergson we find in the work of
critical theorists such as Horkheimer is similar to that we find in phenomenology, namely,
that his thinking on memory is seen to grant too much importance to its contemplative
aspects over its critical and intentional ones. For phenomenologists this manifests itself
in an alleged failure to account for the synthesizing powers of an intentional subject
(Bergson grants intention to memory itself over and above the subject; the subject is
implicated in memory; ‘‘subjectivity is never ours, it is time . . . the virtual,’’ as Deleuze
puts it61). For critical theorists, by contrast, it reveals itself in the failure to provide a
constructivist, and activist, account of history and historical agency (Bergson is oblivious,
Horkheimer says, to the meaning of theory for historical struggle). To what extent these
criticisms are fair, and to what extent they have been called into question by more recent
intellectual developments, are questions that cannot be treated here. I would simply point
out that Bergson set himself a specific task in Matter and Memory: taking the psychology
of his day to task on account of what he regarded as its inadequate and impoverished
approach to the life of memory, a task that, to a large extent, he fulfilled, and admirably
so, and it is necessary to respect the integrity of his project (which is not to say that all
kinds of critical questions cannot, and should not, be asked of it). It is quite clear that

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 BERGSON ON MEMORY

Bergson’s heart lies not with contemplation but with creative action. His complaint is
there is too much contemplation in philosophy. In his prescient final text, The Two Sources
of Morality and Religion, published in 1932, Bergson pays homage to those great spiritual
and ethical leaders, from Christian saints to social revolutionaries, who have brought
something dynamically new into existence and helped to push humanity forward.
In terms of recent work in psychology and the philosophy of mind, Bergson’s work
has been positively received in some quarters and is seen to provide a set of rich resources
for thinking memory beyond simple-minded mechanical models of mind and memory.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks often cites Bergson’s ideas in support of his call for a neurol-
ogy of identity, which would move away from a rigid physicalist paradigm, centered on
notions of algorithm and template, that supposes notions of rigid cerebral localization
and a rigidly programmed cerebral machine, toward a neurology able to match the ‘‘rich-
ness and density of experience,’’ what he calls its sense of scene and music, its ‘‘ever-
changing flow of experience, of history, of becoming.’’62 More substantially, Patrick Mc-
Namara puts Bergson’s ideas on mind and memory to instructive and productive use in
his important study Mind and Variability: Mental Darwinism, Memory, and Self (1999),
while the attempt by Israel Rosenfield in his The Invention of Memory (1988) to expose
the view that we can remember because we have fixed memory images permanently stored
in our brains for what it is—a myth (that of localization)—continues the work Bergson
began over a century ago. This is echoed in NcNamara’s more recent study, as when he
writes for example: ‘‘The representational-instructionist view of memory is still what I
would call the modern standard view of the nature of memory. It and its related ‘trace
theory’ of how the brain ‘stores’ memory constitute the background assumptions of much
of modern research into memory.’’63 In his book Memory, History, Forgetting, one of the
most important studies of memory in recent years, Paul Ricoeur acknowledges the origi-
nal and innovative character of Bergson’s thinking on memory. For Ricoeur, Bergson is
the philosopher who best understood the close connection between the ‘‘survival of im-
ages’’ and the phenomenon of recognition.64 Furthermore, with this insight into the sur-
vival of images, which require that we acknowledge that memory has the character of
endurance, Ricoeur believes that Bergson’s thinking holds the resources required for un-
derstanding the working of forgetting, even if Bergson himself was only able to think this
in terms of effacement. It is the self-survival of images that can be considered as a figure
of fundamental forgetting. Ricoeur poses the question, ‘‘On what basis, then, would the
survival of memories be equivalent to forgetting?’’65 His answer is to propose that forget-
ting be conceived not simply in terms of the effacement of traces, but rather in terms
of a reserve or a resource: ‘‘Forgetting then designates the unperceived character of the
perseverance of memories, their removal from the vigilance of consciousness.’’66 On this
conception forgetting can be understood not simply as an inexorable destruction, but as
an immemorial resource.

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 KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

Bergson’s great text is significant for a number of reasons, including its attempts to
demonstrate the ontological status of the past, to provide a genuinely dynamical model
of memory’s operations, to show the virtual character of (pure) memory, and, finally, its
advancement of the argument that memory is not simply the mechanical reproduction of
the past but sense. Without memory life is, quite literally, devoid of meaning. Matter and
Memory is a text we are still catching up with.

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 5. Halbwachs and the Social Properties of Memory

Erika Apfelbaum

In 1924, the French social scientist Maurice Halbwachs published Les

cadres sociaux de la mémoire (On Collective Memory).1 Its publication
was immediately seen by his contemporaries as a major event, its im-
portance acknowledged even by those who did not fully share his theo-
retical views. Prophetically, the historian Marc Bloch saw the analyses
presented by Halbwachs in this book as a major contribution to the
developing discipline of social science. Halbwachs, in delineating the
social and collective dimensions of individual memory, tracing their
dialectical links in the process of elaboration and transformation, in
addition to analyzing the mechanisms and modes of dissemination of
collective memory, laid the theoretical foundations for a comprehensive
approach to the study of the social sciences, providing an integrated
perspective from which to conceptualize the historical, social, and indi-
vidual components of human behavior. In his later writings, too—his
posthumous volume on collective memory particularly—Halbwachs
elaborates on these early themes.2 In particular, he expands the scope of
history beyond its traditionally narrow focus on facts and the feats of
individuals. In placing collective memory at the very core of the histori-
cal development of humanity, Halbwachs brings an innovative ap-
proach to historical research, initiating a true paradigm shift in the
dominant conception of the discipline.
Only two decades after their publication, however, his writings, de-
spite their importance, had fallen into oblivion, their theoretical orien-
tations and approaches ignored and unexplored for almost half a
century, even within the social science community. Social psychologists,
in particular, ignored the fundamental and seminal value of Halb-
wachs’s analyses, even during the ‘‘crisis of social psychology’’ that pro-
foundly unsettled the discipline in the 1970s,3 rendering the quest for
alternative formulations especially urgent. Despite Halbwachs’s analyses

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 ERIKA APFELBAUM

offering the basis for such an alternative and facilitating the reorientation of the discipline
toward a more integrated, complex, sociohistorical view, social psychologists have never
made a genuine effort to revisit them. In sociology, a slowly developing interest in Halb-
wachs is limited by a view of his work that sees it as a simple and direct offspring of the
Durkheimian tradition,4 when, in reality, his intellectual and personal bonds with the
Durkheimian group notwithstanding, Halbwachs always had certain theoretical reserva-
tions about that tradition, seeing it from a somewhat unorthodox angle.
Today, among social scientists, it is the historians who have reestablished the strong-
est links with Halbwachs, acknowledging his seminal importance, so that he is currently
regarded as a major inspiration. Yet even as late as the 1970s, when Pierre Nora first
launched the history of mentalities,5 Nora was convinced that this new historical orienta-
tion sprang directly from contemporary intellectual preoccupations, and it is only rela-
tively recently that he has been able to recognize and acknowledge the theoretical debts
his own work owes to Halbwachs’s conceptions of history as a historian of memory.

Halbwachs: A Scholar Shaped by Three Wars

Halbwachs was born in 1877 in Reims, into an unstable world undergoing deep social
and political change. His Alsatian family had found refuge in the area when the Franco-
Prussian war ended in 1871 and Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by Germany, obliging its
inhabitants to choose between French and German citizenship. Halbwachs’s family opted
to retain its French citizenship, although remaining deeply committed to Germanic cul-
ture—his father, indeed, taught German—and, given the importance attributed at the
time to patriotism and nationalistic sentiment, this must have led to the family feeling
like expatriates in their own country, and to Halbwachs himself gaining early experience
of geographical and cultural uprooting. This in turn sensitized him to the way one’s
personal life and sense of social integrity are influenced by changing geopolitical configu-
rations, and affected his approach to the issue of memory. This was particularly so in
regard to his insistence that the development of subjective memory carries the impression
of external social relations.
After Halbwachs’s family moved to Paris, where they settled in the cosmopolitan
Montparnasse area, he spent his high school years at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV,
studying literature and winning a place, in 1898, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS),
coming in third in his group in the competitive entry examination. For the next three
years he was exposed to the school’s uniquely rich intellectual atmosphere; ENS remains
to this day an exclusive educational institution, producing many members of the French
intelligentsia and political elite, bonded for life by their experiences at the school. In
Halbwachs’s day, the school was predominantly socialist, strongly influenced by the char-
ismatic Lucien Herr, the institution’s librarian and a steadfast defender of Dreyfus. Halb-
wachs was an active member of the socialist students’ group.

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Another early influence on Halbwachs was the philosopher Henri Bergson. In the
preface to Halbwachs’s posthumous volume La mémoire collective, his brother-in-law,
Jean-Michel Alexandre, recalls that Halbwachs was ‘‘subjugated by Bergson’s teachings,’’6
but in 1901, after graduating in philosophy, Halbwachs abandoned both it and metaphys-
ics in favor of a more positivist orientation to social issues. This shift toward a social
science perspective was determined in part by his encounter with the Durkheimian group,
to whose journal, L’Année Sociologique, he became a regular contributor.
Students (normaliens) received a salary during the three years they spent at ENS; in
return, they owed the state ten years’ work as civil servants in public education. Halb-
wachs settled this debt by teaching in various lycées while preparing his doctoral disserta-
tion to be presented as a thèse d’état, at the time an essential step, consisting of two pieces
of original work, toward appointment as a full professor at a French university. The first
of these theses concerned the expropriation and cost of land in Paris at the end of the
nineteenth century, and it attracted the attention of the socialist politician Jean Jaurès.
His second thesis was a study of social statistics, a kind of ethnographic essay on the
standards of living of the working class. Both these topics—his concern with statistics and
his ethnographic perspective—are clearly at odds with Durkheimian orthodoxy; despite
his strong affinities with the Durkheimian group, he remained aloof from them philo-
sophically, and his writings reflect this. The most recent generation of Durkheimians,
revisiting Halbwachs’s writings, tends to ignore this lack of orthodoxy and hence to deny
the originality of Halbwachs’s positions and their divergence from Durkheim’s epistemo-
logical choices. In reality, however, Halbwachs’s analyses are much closer to the social-
psychological perspective strongly advocated by certain members of Durkheim’s own
group, such as Celéstin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, and Paul Lapie, but because Durk-
heim was strictly opposed to the development of an independent social psychology, these
dissident scholars remained almost clandestine within the group;7 Halbwachs himself kept
his distance.
In 1913, having successfully submitted his thèse d’état, Halbwachs became eligible for
a university chair, but the outbreak of the First World War—even though he was exempt
from military service because of weak eyesight—meant that his nomination was delayed.
Accordingly, during the war years, he continued teaching in Nancy’s high school and at
the university there. His daily correspondence with his wife, Yvonne Basch—daughter of
Victor Basch, the president of la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme—details his guilt at living
such a sheltered life while so many of his acquaintances and colleagues faced the hardships
of the front. Nancy was so close to the war’s battlefields that Halbwachs was able to
observe these conditions rather like an entomologist, although he never referred to these
events in his writings. It is, nevertheless, difficult to escape the conclusion that these years
played their part in the elaboration of his theoretical system and in the conceptions of
memory and memorialization he was later to produce. Indeed the lack of direct reference

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 ERIKA APFELBAUM

to the events he witnessed during these war years can perhaps be interpreted as attribut-
able to his adherence to the values of rigorous, positively oriented scholarship.
At the end of the war, Halbwachs finally won his appointment—to the University of
Strasbourg. France, having won the war, reclaimed Alsace and, German scholars having
been obliged to surrender their chairs there, Alsatian scholars were encouraged to apply
to fill the resulting vacancies in order that the repatriation process should be facilitated
and that a certain sociohistorical continuity should be promoted in the region. In the
attempt to ensure that French scholars were not overrepresented in this process (which
could easily have been perceived as colonization), Alsatian scholars, Halbwachs and Marc
Bloch among them, were favored. One consequence of the process was the removal of
many old habits and paralyzing traditions; the university became open to fresh ideas
and provided a stimulating intellectual environment from which a truly collective spirit
emerged.8 Halbwachs was thus enabled to engage in pan-Germanic activities consistent
with the profound beliefs he had inherited from his family.
While Halbwachs was appointed to the chair of sociology and pedagogy left vacant
by the German social scientist Georg Simmel, Charles Blondel was nominated for Stras-
bourg’s chair of psychology. It is instructive to examine the theoretical development of
these two scholars, juxtaposed in this manner, because throughout their respective aca-
demic careers they were both deeply involved in theorizing the articulation between indi-
vidual and collective behavior. The two men had been fellow students at the ENS,
studying under and influenced by Bergson and subsequently redirected toward a more
positivist perspective by Durkheim. Young, ambitious, and brilliant scholars, they were
both naturally attracted to the newly emerging social sciences, particularly those questions
of collective behavior that lay at the heart of contemporary social issues. Unlike their
predecessors in this field, such as the criminologist Gabriel Tarde or the essayist Gustave
Le Bon,9 Halbwachs and Blondel began to elaborate a fresh theoretical framework for
understanding the underlying motives and sociological determinants of human social
activity, with the aim of breaking away from the then dominant nature-oriented explana-
tory models. Each thus directly challenged current scientific orthodoxy and authority,
which viewed these matters largely from a medical perspective.10
Over the years, however, the epistemological positions of these two men diverged, to
the point where, eventually, they took up almost opposing stances. While Halbwachs
consistently explored the dialectical relations between individual activity and sociohistori-
cal dimensions, Blondel—while acknowledging the impact of society on human activity—
paid only lip service to its influence, ultimately falling back into a more traditional
explanation of human behavior based on innate disposition rather than social forces.
The divergent positions taken up by the two men on the question of suicide provide
an illustration of this difference. Halbwachs set out to show how, given particular circum-
stances, external sociological factors—political upheavals, changes in social policy, and so
on—can disrupt people’s lives so profoundly that the resultant personal disturbance can

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lead to suicide. Blondel recognised that such circumstances may indeed produce some
personal imbalance, but, according to him, ‘‘normal’’ people resist such influence, and it
is only when there is some kind of preexisting pathological disposition that people are
driven to suicide. Deviant conduct, therefore, for him, is inherent in certain personalities.
This more traditional explanation proffered by Blondel may be consequent upon his
proximity, both ideological and strategic, to the mainstream, more conservative theoreti-
cal position held by the medical community. Halbwachs, given his more overtly socialist
orientation, was more easily persuaded to adopt an explanation that emphasized the social
rather than the personal, though his own experiences of uprooting may also have in-
formed his emphasis on the sociohistorical.
While the two men’s theoretical and epistemological divergences increased over the
years, however, their academic careers continued along parallel tracks, unfolding in simi-
lar ways: Halbwachs replaced the Durkheimian Célestin Bouglé in the chair of social
economics in 1935; Blondel was given the chair of experimental psychology in 1937. In
1939 Halbwachs was granted the chair of epistemology, a year after Blondel had inherited
the chair of psychopathology from Georges Dumas, and while Halbwachs was working
on collective memory, Blondel published La psychologie collective. In addition, when, in
the late 1930s, Halbwachs applied for an unoccupied chair at the prestigious Collège de
France, he was in direct competition with both Blondel and the French sociologist and
nephew of Durkheim, Marcel Mauss. This race involved competition between three re-
lated yet divergent conceptions of the social sciences. Blondel, the most conservative of
the three, defended the biological model favored by the medical community; Mauss was
regarded as the direct inheritor of Durkheim’s position; Halbwachs defended the social
determinist viewpoint and proposed the adoption of an unorthodox social-psychological
perspective. The outcome of this competition would thus have provided an interesting
indicator of the epistemological preferences of the scientific community of the time; un-
fortunately, when the election took place, Blondel had just died and Mauss was prevented
from remaining in the academic world by the Vichy anti-Jewish laws. Halbwachs was
consequently left as the only contender for the chair; he was appointed but never occupied
the post. Taken as a hostage as a result of his son’s Resistance activities, he was arrested,
deported to Buchenwald, and died of exhaustion there in 1945. The writer Jorge Semprún,
a former Spanish minister of culture who had been a student of Halbwachs at the Sor-
bonne, was himself an inmate of Buchenwald, and in his novel L’ecriture ou la vie, he
recalls the Sunday meetings of Halbwachs, the French sinologist Henri Maspero, and
other intellectual inmates, and describes the last few hours of Halbwachs’s life.11 Halb-
wachs therefore never taught at the Collège de France, nor did he have the opportunity
to train students who might have taken up and expanded his propositions and analyses;
his ideas, as a result, were never disseminated to a wide audience and rapidly fell into
oblivion.

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 ERIKA APFELBAUM

When, shortly after the Second World War, the social sciences, which had been slowly
gestating throughout the first half of the twentieth century, finally gained recognition in
academia,12 Halbwachs was no longer alive and thus unable to defend his conception of
them. Furthermore, the social sciences, directly reflecting the changing concerns of post-
war society, took an altogether different theoretical turn: the race for progress that charac-
terized the second half of the twentieth century implied a radical break from the traditions
of the past. The words of the revolutionary song ‘‘The International,’’ which involved
making the past a tabula rasa, became the rallying cry for a majority in the postwar
generation, and the epistemological choices of the social sciences reflected this trend,
conceptualizing a society unencumbered by the complexities of history, as if subjects
evolved in a vacuum with no significant historical and genealogical inscription in the
world.13 This new vision was less accommodating to the cultivation of the past implied
by Halbwachs’s concerns with memory and sociohistorical perspective, and with no intel-
lectual followers to investigate his theories and carry on his analyses, his ideas were quickly
forgotten.
Now that memorializing is once more in vogue and has become an important part
of the ethos of our times (for reasons that are outside the scope of this study),14 Halb-
wachs’s work is more relevant than ever, providing a theoretical framework able to make
sense of phenomena that might otherwise challenge the capacities of the social sciences.

Contextualizing Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire

Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire was published in 1924 and was thus conceived, elabo-
rated, and written in the wake of the First World War. Even though Halbwachs never
explicitly mentions this major historical event in the book, we know from his correspon-
dence with his wife how much thought he was devoting to it. He had witnessed its damag-
ing repercussions and seen its physical casualties.
As he observed the difficulties experienced by war veterans on their return from the
front—their struggle to restore ‘‘normal’’ social bonds, their problems in reestablishing
communication in their home environments, their reluctance to recount their traumatic
wartime experiences—Halbwachs could not fail to notice the long-term disruptive psy-
chological effects of trauma on communication and hence to question the complex rela-
tions between uprooting, interpersonal exchanges, and the processes of memorization.
Similarly, the state’s provision of various forms of commemoration, and their contribu-
tion to the establishment of official history, must have inspired Halbwachs to examine
the way collective memory shapes the content of memory while safeguarding the integrity
of each individual memory. Indeed much of Halbwachs’s analysis is devoted to the way
in which memory as well as interpersonal bonds are constructed, mediated, and shaped
in the context of broader, external sociohistorical factors. The geographical and cultural

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uprooting he had personally undergone (and experienced vicariously, courtesy of his in-
laws’ immigration from Hungary), contributed to his understanding of the complexities
involved in the process of memorialization and the dialectical relations existing between
individual and collective memory:

The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the framework of social mem-
ory. In other words, the various groups that compose society are capable at every
moment of reconstructing their past. But, as we have seen, they most frequently
distort that past in the act of reconstructing it. There are surely many facts, and many
details of certain facts, that the individual would forget if others did not keep their
memory alive for him. But, on the other hand, society can live only if there is suffi-
cient unity of outlooks among the individuals and groups comprising it.15

The necessity by which people must enclose themselves in limited groups (families,
religious groups, and social classes, to mention just these) . . . , is opposed to the
social need for unity. . . . This is why society tends to erase from its memory all that
might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each other. It is also
why society, in each period, rearranges its recollections in such a way as to adjust
them to the various conditions of its equilibrium.16

His experiences were certainly important enough for Halbwachs to use them as a
framework in presenting his analysis of memory. In introducing the problematics of
memory, Halbwachs recounted the following anecdote: A century and a half before, a
ten-year-old girl was found wandering through the woods near a small town in France.
She could speak, but was unable to give any clear account of who she was and what had
happened to her. She vaguely recalled having traveled across a wide expanse of water, and
her story was eventually pieced together: she must have been a slave somewhere in the
Caribbean colonies in the service of a woman whose husband later threw the girl out of
the household. At an age when she would normally have had quite clear recollections of
past events, this uprooted child was unable to remember distinctly her earlier life experi-
ences. Halbwachs raises the following question—and as he does so, shifts attention from
the Antillean girl to what he takes to be a more generic ‘‘he’’: ‘‘What will this child be
able to retain if he is abruptly separated from his family, transported to a country where
his language is not spoken, where neither the appearance of people and places, nor their
customs, resemble in any way that which was familiar to him up to this moment?’’17 In
other words, here he quite clearly indicates the heuristic importance he attributes to ab-
normal and extreme situations, such as enforced uprooting, as a means of unraveling and
analyzing the normal processes of memory and memorialization as well as those of the
construction of identity: ‘‘In order to retrieve . . . uncertain and incomplete memories it
is necessary that the child, in the new society of which he is part, at least be shown images
reconstructing for a moment the group and milieu from which the child had been torn.’’18

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So far, this examination has restricted itself to the extent to which Halbwachs’s con-
ceptions of memory were influenced by events that he himself had witnessed, or that he
himself had directly experienced. They are also to be viewed, however, in relation to
the newly developing social sciences, which themselves have been shaped by the wider
sociopolitical French milieu and the ongoing epistemological debates concerning nature
and nurture and their respective effects on human activity. In other words, the social
science issues are located at a meeting point of two contemporary preoccupations: on the
one hand, the need to account for the ‘‘social disorders’’ disrupting French society; on
the other, the concern of the medical community to find a relevant theoretical explanation
for individual disorders and, more particularly, for the perplexing affliction of hysteria, a
malady diagnosed mainly in women that had attracted the attention, in the mid-nine-
teenth century, of the French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology at the
Salpêtrière Hospital Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) and, a little later, of the Austrian
neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).19
Large migrations of populations from rural to urban settings, the consequence of
industrialization, disrupted traditional social networks and limited their control over their
members; in other words, as people moved away and were cut off from their communities
and their territorial, cultural, and social roots, they began to exist as individuals, as sepa-
rate autonomous entities. It therefore became increasingly urgent to study the changing
relations between subjects and their environment.20 Moreover, these ongoing social up-
heavals threatened the stability of society itself; finding new ways to manage socially up-
rooted individuals and controlling their behavior as they became erratic and formed
‘‘crowds’’ became the urgent social question of the late nineteenth century. Early social
scientists such as Gustave Le Bon and the criminologist Gabriel Tarde began to address
these issues.21 Halbwachs and Blondel inherited these concerns as they explored the social
and collective determinants of individual activity. Halbwachs’s systematic approach to
these issues led to the modern formulation of the (social) psychological mechanisms of
collective behavior.
Simultaneously, the scientific community was divided over the origins of hysteria:
Was it attributable to innate disposition or was it socially induced? Heated debates took
place between the ‘‘alienists’’—a word used to designate the psychiatrists of the time—of
the two major psychiatric schools: Charcot and the French physician and neurologist of
the Nancy school, Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919). The medical community was, at this
time, the major scientific authority, a body to whom early social scientists turned to find
their explanatory models; the outcome of these debates was thus important to them as
they tried to account for the unstable behavior of individuals when in a crowd. Le Bon,
for instance, describes the activity of an individual in a crowd in terms of suggestibility,
contagion, hypnosis, and irrationality, even though, in the alienists’ debate, it was the
social explanation of hysteria that eventually prevailed.

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When Halbwachs and Blondel undertook to explore collective behavior, they both
tried, initially, to break away from the view that reduces the individual to his personal
determinants and attempted to trace the sociological determinants of human activity.
Over time, however, Blondel grew to favor the idea that the individual was, in the main,
responsible for his or her behavior, while Halbwachs continued to explore, in increasing
depth and detail, the multilayered sociological, historical, and environmental determi-
nants of human behavior.

The Social Conceptions of Halbwachs

At the heart of Halbwachs’s thought is the idea that no one human being ever lives in
total isolation; all human activity is socially determined or—to use contemporary termi-
nology—socially constructed. For Halbwachs, social interchanges are existentially vital to
who we are and to who we become, to the way in which we process our past and remem-
ber and evaluate our experiences. He would no doubt have agreed with the position of
psychologist Guy Saunders, who claims that communication is so vital to sustaining one’s
sanity that to be deprived of a narrative context for the self can be even more harmful
than sensory deprivation.22
For Halbwachs, recollections (les souvenirs)—what we retain in memory of our past
experiences—are not just simple imprints; they are truly active selections and reconstruc-
tions of this past. Individual experiences, even of the most private, personal, and intimate
nature, are the result of an ongoing dynamic social process; they are inscribed in a given
physical, sociohistorical environment, stored in memory and recollected through contin-
uous interchanges with significant others or significant groups. Among these groups, the
first with whom we are in contact are the members of our immediate family—‘‘the great-
est number of our memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other
persons recall them to us’’—but as we grow up, as we go to school, to church or to the
workplace, we associate with other groups and take part in various friendships or partici-
pate in public life: ‘‘Yet it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is
also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories.’’23 In general, we
are affiliated with several groups simultaneously, but the pattern of these affiliations
changes over time.
Each of these groups has its own set of codes and customs, and its own history; in
other words, it has its own particular collective memory, which serves as a reference to
define what is important and meaningful for this particular group. This collective memory
provides the frame within which (or against which) individuals try to make sense of their
own personal experiences. Individual and collective memory are thus dialectically related;
our experiences and private recollections are continuously evaluated and shaped by con-
frontations with collective memory, which confer legitimacy on our memory: ‘‘I have

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shown that memory is a collective function. . . . If recollections reappear, this is because

at each moment society possesses the necessary means to reproduce them.’’24 What is
important in one group may well be unimportant in another, so that individual memory
must, to a certain extent, adjust to the sometimes contradictory demands of the various
groups to which the subject is affiliated. Memory is, consequently, flexible and multilay-
ered, a shifting terrain in which recollections’ relative importance and position depend
on changing group affiliations. This means that, in order to be kept alive, individual
recollections must be shared at an interpersonal level:

All memories, however personal they may be and even if witnessed by only one
person . . . are linked to ideas we share with many others, to people, groups, places,
dates, words and linguistic forms, theories and ideas, that is, with the whole material
and moral framework of the society of which we are part. A memory occurs to us . . .
because we are surrounded by other memories that link to it. . . . These memories
are reference points in space and time; they may be historical, geographical, biblio-
graphic, or political notions or everyday experiences and familiar ways of seeing.
These references enable us to determine with increasing precision the contours of a
previously isolated past event.25

This in turn implies that there cannot be too large a discrepancy between the conceptual
background of one who tells the story and the one who listens to it; they must share a
common background in order for the story to resonate for the listener.
A case in point is the attitude of political exiles from various countries of South
America interviewed by my colleague Ana Vasquez. They hardly ever mentioned the tor-
ture and humiliations to which they had been subjected in Chilean or Argentinean jails.26
When I later extended my work and explored the realities of dislocation of people caught
in various forms of political disruption, who had faced massive violence or genocide such
as the Holocaust, the Armenian massacres at the hands of the Turks in 1917, or the
more recent Rwandan killings, I encountered the same reluctance—or, more properly,
the inability—to recount these dreadful experiences unless there was some kind of state
discourse that allowed people to couch their personal experiences within a collective nar-
rative of events. For instance, it was only after it seemed possible that Chile’s president,
Augusto Pinochet, might be indicted for crimes against humanity that a number of Chil-
ean exiles started to speak about their torture. Luis Vargas, a Chilean exile who escaped
to France from Pinochet’s jails in 1973, commented, after Pinochet’s indictment: ‘‘It
wasn’t that I wanted to forget, but I didn’t have the words to say this, neither in Spanish
nor in French, to recount the torture to my kids. It is difficult to explain, in France, that
one has been tortured.’’27
Halbwachs claimed that if we were haunted by past events or by memories that
cannot be shared because they are meaningless to others, we risk being thought to be

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hallucinating: ‘‘Affective memories, which seemed the most important, were in reality
only recovered and given value through a series of reflections that drew on shared points
of reference (in space and time).’’28 There is, then, no alternative to forgetting, or—if this
is impossible—to becoming silent and alienated from one’s own experience and environ-
ment. This claim, which Halbwachs develops in On Collective Memory (1925), is today
more topical and accurate than ever. It perfectly captures the sense of alienation reported
by survivors of mass violence and genocide, as well as by the victims of torture or sexual
abuse each time they confront the reluctance or inability of people from ‘‘outside’’ to
listen to what they have experienced; they are forced to bury the memory of their experi-
ences, to exist in a no-man’s-land of silence characterized by a deep sense of dissociation
between the individual’s private and public persona. A few years ago, Simone Weil, com-
menting on her experience in the death camps, said: ‘‘I have always been willing to speak,
to bear witness, but no one was willing to listen. . . . And the foolishness of some of the
questions, the doubt which sometimes met our narrations . . . led us to choose carefully
our interlocutors.’’29 The legal theorist Martha Minow similarly observed that the clandes-
tine nature of torture and abuses by repressive governments ‘‘doubles the pain of those
experiences with the disbelief of the community and even jeopardy to the victim’s own
memory and sanity.’’30
The rapport that must exist between narrator and audience in order to establish
communication is further assessed and explored in Halbwachs’s posthumous volume La
mémoire collective.31 Narrator and listener must share a common interest, and possibly
even belong to the same space and time; in short, they must share the same social, physi-
cal, and historical frame of reference. Halbwachs goes even one step further than this
when he insists on the necessity of an ‘‘emotional community’’ for successful communica-
tion to take place. The psychiatrist Dori Laub takes up this notion, considering it a neces-
sary condition to ensure a meaningful exchange. Having collected narratives from
Holocaust survivors, he stresses the importance of creating a proper relation between
interviewer and interviewee, a climate that makes possible for the interviewee ‘‘something
like a repossession of the act of witnessing.’’ ‘‘A dialogical process of exploration’’ is
necessary in order to repossess one’s life story and to ‘‘reconcile two worlds . . . that are
different and will always remain so.’’32
Communication cannot exist without language:

People living in society use words that they find intelligible: this is the precondition
for collective thought. But each word [that is understood] is accompanied by recol-
lections. There are no recollections to which words cannot be made to correspond.
We speak of our recollections before calling them to mind. It is language, and the
whole system of social conventions attached to it, that allows us at every moment to
reconstruct our past.33

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Halbwachs stresses the determining role that must be given to language in his social
interactive constructivist view of memory and identity. Language serves as the vehicle
connecting collective memory to individual memory, but it is itself limited in what it can
express to the extent that it is socially constructed, shaped by the collectivity, its norms
and representations. He goes as far as to say that what cannot be expressed through
language cannot be recalled. Remember the comment ‘‘I didn’t have the words to say
this’’ of the Chilean exile Luis Vargas. Words, and the common frameworks ‘‘from the
world of freedom’’ (to quote an expression from Primo Levi), are obviously inadequate
to grasp and convey the full impact of those encounters with human behavior that are
radically alien to our common beliefs about human conduct, ethics, and morality. And
yet the act of fixing the facts in words, of naming them with precise images, is a first
attempt to make sense of the illogic of a violence unassimilable by any normal human
cognitive capacity.
Survivors of mass violence, such as Primo Levi or Jorge Semprún, convinced that it
is their duty to bear witness to their experience of the death camps, or the African writer
Boubacar Diop, writing about the Rwanda massacres,34 have all come up against the same
question: how to bear such witness, how to tell? Even the most rigorously documented
narratives of historians ‘‘miss the essential truth of the experience,’’ according to Sem-
prún.35 On the other hand, a number of scholars, such as the specialist in comparative
literature Cathy Caruth, claim that the existential pathos of such experiences can be con-
veyed only through a sophisticated form of literary elaboration that may, in surprising
and indirect ways, help stimulate the imagination of an unimaginable reality.36
To sum up: interpersonal proximity, in particular emotional proximity, is a necessary
condition at the interpersonal level to make communication possible, to establish mean-
ingful dialogue, one that helps subjects to process their experiences into living memory
and facilitates the storage and retrieval, rather than the repression and forgetting, of their
memories. When, in situations of uprooting, for example, there is a major gap between
two cultural backgrounds, it is often difficult to communicate successfully across cultural
divides and grasp the full meaning of personal experiences deeply rooted in one of those
cultures. Take, for instance, the following passage from Romain Gary’s autobiographical
novel Promise at Dawn (Promesse de l’aube): ‘‘I have known in my life . . . great moments
of happiness. Ever since childhood . . . I have loved cucumbers, either the Russian, the
Polish or the Jewish kosher type, which we call in France cucumbers à la russe. I often
buy a pound at a time, then settle down somewhere in the sun, preferably on the ocean
shore, or on the pavement, no matter where, and munch my cucumbers. Those are my
only moments of bliss.’’37 Unless one belongs to an Eastern European background, or has
been raised by a Polish grandmother whose kitchen shelves are full of homemade ogurkis
(dill pickles, Gary’s cucumbers à la russe), it is difficult to grasp the moments of bliss
experienced by the author as he eats; in Polish culture the word ogurki has a suggestive
power similar to that conveyed by the madeleine in French culture.

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Listening and hearing can take place only if certain conditions are met. First, the
adequate language to convey experiences and recollections must be available: Hannah
Arendt and Eva Hoffman convincingly illustrate the potentially destructive consequences
of language’s incommunicability.38 Second, the content of that language must be consis-
tent with society’s accepted frames of reference. A narrative that runs counter to dominant
politics or ideology will prove hard to communicate.
The historical memory of a society, to use Halbwachs’s terminology, shapes its mem-
bers’ autobiographical memory. For him, as I’ve written elsewhere, ‘‘personal experience
and private recollections need to be couched in, or voiced within a collective, public
chronicle’’ to be heard in a context of broad social meaning.39 In other words, our per-
sonal experiences gain their full meaning only within a broader social, cultural, or histori-
cal context. Public chronicles concerning the history of a given society and its official
memorialization procedures determine what constitutes the legitimate content of tradi-
tions and social customs—the norms and limits within which the processing of memory
and the construction of individual identity can most harmoniously take place. These offi-
cial narratives, however, fluctuate over time as the result of what we call today the politics
of memory.40

We preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and these are continually repro-
duced; through them, as by a continual relationship, a sense of identity is perpetu-
ated. But precisely because these memories are repetitions, because they are
successively engaged in very different systems of notions, at different periods of our lives,
they have lost the form and appearance they once had. . . . Any such reconstruction of
the past can only be approximative. The more written or oral accounts we have avail-
able the more this will be the case. [My italics.]41

Some examples may serve to illustrate these points. For many years, the official ‘‘si-
lence’’ that prevailed in many countries about the fate of the Jews during the Second
World War or about the Armenian massacres made it almost impossible for the survivors
of these events to find a public forum in which to relate their experiences and to elicit the
proper ‘‘echo’’ to help them work though the pain of their disrupted lives.42 The recent
changes in France’s politics of memory concerning the Holocaust, such as the recognition
in 1995, by President Chirac, of France’s responsibility for the deportation of its Jewish
population, or the decision of Prime Minister Jospin in 2000 to give the official status of
orphelin de déportation to the children of Jews who perished in the deportation from
France, have been major steps toward restoring the personal integrity of those affected
and raising their status from the demeaning category of ‘‘victim.’’ The struggle of a part
of the black population in the United States to provide legal status to those who suffered
as a consequence of slavery shares the same goal. Helping the second and third genera-
tions of North African immigrants to find their place in French society is at the heart of

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the recent debate that has polarized Parliament concerning the way French colonial his-
tory is presented in schoolbooks. The consequences of France’s legal neglect of the Harkis
population, the Algerians who fought alongside the French army, are superbly delineated
by Zahia Rahmani in her recent novel Musulman, in which she describes how her own
Algerian father ultimately committed suicide after being ignored and ostracized when he
sought refuge in France at the end of the Algerian war.43
What is at stake here are the functions that a politics of memory can perform at the
individual level, the way in which it may allow or prevent the reinscription of one’s
personal experiences in the larger flow of history and, consequently, facilitate or hinder a
person’s shedding of the anonymity of victimhood and regain a sense of historicity.44

Every time we situate a new impression in relation to the framework structuring our
existing ideas the framework transforms the impression but the impression also in
turn alters the framework. This creates a new moment, a new place, modifying our
sense of time and space; it adds a new dimension to our group, which we now see in
a different light. Hence the continual work of adaptation.45

It is no accident that an increasing number of states emerging from terrorist or dictatorial

regimes have found it necessary to address their past in order to lay the foundations of
true democracy. The responses to the near-continuous chain of genocide, mass violence
and gross violations of human rights—what Ruti Teitel calls transitional justice46 —have
taken various legal forms. They may be geared primarily toward justice (as in the case of
the Nuremberg trial or the Papon trial in France), or toward establishing truth (as in the
various practices of the Truth and Reconciliation commissions); or they may, rather, aim
at providing reparation or apology. Be that as it may, each of these various legal responses
to collective violence provides an official narrative and a framework to account for past
events. Public recognition of the facts legitimizes the social existence of victims; it provides
the historical framework within which they feel entitled to speak up and to make their
stories heard. What are today common legal practices at the highest international level,
Halbwachs had already tackled, analyzed, and acknowledged as being factors decisive in
the retrieval of a person’s integrity.
To return to the anecdote that opens Halbwachs’s explorations of memory in Les
cadres sociaux de la mémoire: What exactly is he trying to demonstrate in depicting the
amnesia of this ten-year-old Caribbean child, forcibly uprooted and separated from her
physical environment? As he recounts her story, he makes sure that we are informed that
the child is not mentally retarded, nor too young to accumulate memories. Her amnesia,
her inability to recall what happened to her and where she comes from, Halbwachs sug-
gests, is due not to a biological deficiency but rather to the child’s sudden separation from
her habitus and geographical environment, to the deprivation of familiar landmarks, to
the disorientation consequent upon uprooting. The broader theoretical implication is

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that the collective memory in which our personality is rooted has also, in part, physical
foundations.
By means of this case, Halbwachs introduces yet another key concept, the notion of
historical memory, to be named and developed in his posthumous work La mémoire
collective, as well as in La topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre sainte: Étude de
mémoire collective.47 In both of these books, Halbwachs deals with the long-lasting traces
remaining deeply and permanently engraved, often without our realizing it, in traditions,
institutions, and cultural heritage, as well as in the physical environment itself. While
the collective memory of a given community refers mainly to its traditions, customs,
idiosyncratic modes of functioning—in short to its common cultural background—
historical memory deals with the long-term foundations of memory; it introduces the
notion of duration and continuity in the cultural components themselves. Traces of the
past are omnipresent, pervading every aspect of our environment; they can be found in
the institutions that rule our society as well as in our daily physical environment. In the
chapter devoted to religious institutions, Halbwachs stresses how much religious rituals
are based on past events and therefore bring, so to speak, the past permanently into our
present. An example is the celebration of the Epiphany, which, we tend to forget, is taken
from an earlier pagan celebration, in which a king was chosen from among the poor
population for one day, during which he could use his power ad libitum. Or to take
another example, it is interesting to highlight how many of the public holidays in France
commemorate religious events, and how often we are thus reminded of the Catholic past
of a country that claims to be a secular state, a state, moreover, where the separation
between church and state in 1905 remains to this day a major historical landmark defining
the nation’s political and social practices.
History is traceable not only in our various institutions; it is equally deeply inscribed
in space: in La mémoire collective Halbwachs devotes a chapter to the examination in the
natural environment of the traces of a long-term collective past. He emphasizes the way
in which, for example, the spatial disposition of cities carries the memory of successive
periods of history.
For Halbwachs, each subject’s autobiographical memory is dialectically related not
only to the collective memories of the various groups to which he or she is affiliated, but
also to the broader historical memory of the society in which he or she lives. The traces
of this past constitute the background foundation of the construction of one’s identity:
they carry the notion of duration, stability, permanence, and a sense of rootedness vital
to the maintenance of memory and identity. But the idea of permanence and duration
contained in the notion of historical memory leads to a view of history different from
that prevailing in Halbwachs’s time. Opposing a strictly chronological approach to his-
tory, focused mainly on facts and dates, he argues in favor of a different conception of
the discipline: Looking at the historical memory inscribed in landscapes, in stones, in a
myriad of various indices of our environment, demonstrates the continuing importance

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of the historical legacy in the present-day functioning of society. Halbwachs links history
and geography, opening up new areas for historical investigation. As Marc Bloch empha-
sized in his reviews of Halbwachs’s works, no society can develop without a historical
consciousness, a collective memory of the past. In proposing this notion of historical
memory, Halbwachs has pioneered a new method of studying history’s objects; historians
of memory are all in his debt for his groundbreaking vision.

䡠 䡠 䡠

Halbwachs’s legacy reaches far beyond the mere issue of memory. His scrupulous and
extensive exploration of the interpersonal dynamics of individual memory, as well as of
its connections with the changing social and historical environment, is a plea for the social
determination of human conduct. Human beings do not live in a social or environmental
vacuum; they are subjected to broader social and historical constraints, such as traditions,
rules, norms, as well as changing political imperatives. Loaded with long-term accumu-
lated historical reminiscences—stones and landscapes retain the memory of historical
pasts and ways of living—the physical environment itself contributes to the construction
of each subject’s identity as well as to their constructions of memory. Halbwachs provides
us with the theoretical tools to comprehend the complexities and fluctuations of the social
conduct of individuals:

We can remember the past only on condition of retrieving the position of past events
that interest us from the frameworks of collective memory. A recollection is the richer
when it reappears at the junction of a greater number of these frameworks, which in
effect intersect each other and overlap in part. Forgetting is explained by the disap-
pearance of these frameworks or of a part of them. . . . But forgetting, or the deforma-
tion of certain recollections, is also explained by the fact that these frameworks
change from one period to another. Depending on its circumstances and point in
time, society represents the past to itself in different ways.48

As he proceeds with his systematic investigation he transcends sterile disciplinary divi-

sions, paving the way toward an integrative view of the social sciences.

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 6. Memory in Freud

Richard Terdiman

When Freud set out to understand how memory worked in the psyche,
he wasn’t thinking about whether his ideas harmonized with the histori-
cal and cultural complex we know as ‘‘modernity.’’ But the theory of
memory that Freud developed puts his conception of memory at mo-
dernity’s heart.
In the modern period, memory seems caught in a distinctive form
of crisis. We could think of modernity’s ‘‘memory’’ as involving two
contrary mismatches between recollection and its object. Memory is
either frustrated by insufficiency, or it is cursed with exaggeration: too
little memory, or too much. Modernity is either haunted by the near-
impossibility of determining a reliable past, or it is burdened by the
compulsion to repeat a past we cannot shake off. Freud’s theory of
memory lives in these twin, uncomfortable misfits between the recol-
lecting faculty and the material it makes available to consciousness. This
unhappy dialectic might be the dilemma upon whose horns modernity
hangs us.

How does memory work in Freud? To begin with, it would be impossi-

ble to conceive the psyche if it did not incorporate a faculty for conserv-
ing and conceiving the past. From the beginning of his work Freud
insisted that the therapy he theorized and the theory he practiced sought
to understand memory. ‘‘A psychological theory deserving of any con-
sideration,’’ he wrote in 1895, early in his career, ‘‘must furnish an ex-
planation of ‘memory.’ ’’1 And he recognized that such an explanation
had been missing in psychology: ‘‘If anyone should feel inclined to over-
estimate the state of our present knowledge of mental life, a reminder
of the function of memory is all that would be needed to force him to
be more modest. No psychological theory has yet succeeded in giving a
connected account of the fundamental phenomenon of remembering
and forgetting.’’ (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901]; SE 6:134).

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

Freud’s preoccupation with memory proliferated and pervaded his psychological the-
ory, to the point where the individual almost seemed to have been reconceived as a cluster
of memory operations and transformations. Freud represented desire, instinct, dream, as-
sociation, neurosis, repression, repetition, the unconscious—all the central notions of psy-
choanalysis—as memory functions or dysfunctions. In his theory, the exercise of memory
seeks to heal the same traumas whose capacity for disrupting our existence memory itself
perversely sustains. This is memory’s paradox in Freud, and it may be irresolvable.
So memory came to stand both as the problem Freud sought to crack and as the key
to his solution to it. In his attempt to unravel memory’s complications, he magnified its
field, its centrality—and its ambivalence—more insistently and more powerfully than any
other theorist in the modern period. In psychoanalysis the density and intensity of atten-
tion to the phenomena of memory, forgetting, false memories, and the like, are evidence
of the power of the past. Memory names the mechanism by which our present is inden-
tured to the past; or, to turn the structure around, by which a past we never chose domi-
nates the present that seems to be the only place given us to live.
Yet the past is gone. It is always absent—this would seem its very definition. When we
try to narrate our past, most often we either get it wrong or we lie. The past may deter-
mine the present. But the problem for cultural or psychological theory is to understand
how in its absence and its impalpability it manages to do so. In Freudian terms, the
constraints imposed upon us by the past seem ‘‘uncanny.’’ Freud’s objective could then
be put this way: to discover how our past, despite being irretrievably absent, maintains
the power of its presence; and, to the extent possible, to devise means for undoing this
power.
Most of the time, the determinations of our past appear invisible. They constitute
our reality while remaining mostly transparent. This can lead us to ignore them. But in
those moments where some disturbance of this transparency becomes perceptible, then
suddenly the past no longer ‘‘goes without saying.’’ As he developed the theory of psycho-
analysis, these were the moments Freud’s attention detected and seized upon. In dreams,
in ‘‘slips’’ or what he termed ‘‘parapraxes,’’ in hysteria, and in the other transference
neuroses, the present unexpectedly stopped making sense and became inexplicable. To
explain such anomalies Freud discovered he could invoke a covert persistence of the past
and the determinations of a memory whose extent and intensity no one before him had
conceived as so ubiquitous or so imperious.
Where, then, is this past? How can we gain access to it? And how can its power be
managed? Early in Freud’s therapeutic work he decided to ‘‘start from the assumption
that my patients knew everything that was of any pathogenic significance and that it was
only a question of obliging them to communicate it’’ (Studies on Hysteria [1895]; SE
2:110). To achieve such communication, Freud’s method based itself upon dialogue. Con-
sequently in psychoanalysis, recollection is not just individual; it involves a system of two
people working together. But why should a memory that everything suggests is personal

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

require the midwifery of a psychoanalytic interlocutor to bring it to light? The answer

begins with Freud’s assertion that forgetting is not a random result of erosion or entropy,
but is purposeful conduct. But for Freud forgetting is a conduct performed without the
knowledge of its actor. Freud conceives of forgetting as something we’ve learned to do in
the service of some need. Thus it is a lived memory of a forgotten forgetting. Then the
analyst’s intervention is necessary in order to bring this forgetting back to light, and make
such troubling recollections accessible again.
How is this possible? Freud believed that such dialogic recollection could work be-
cause the therapist has a different memory and a different past from the patient’s and
hence is not bound to the reproduction of the patient’s blockage, nor to the recollected
forgetting that has determined it. Anamnesis, recollection, is dialogic because undoing
the pattern of failure to remember, subverting the false stability of mnemonic blockage,
requires the dynamism and the intervention of somebody else. Transference—to put the
point in Freudian terms—can only make sense within a relation of difference.2
Freud’s own memory was excellent. ‘‘I am not in general inclined to forget things,’’
he wrote in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (SE 6:135). Yet Freud’s memory was
subject to the same failures and mix-ups that everyone experiences. For example, the
phenomenon he termed ‘‘cryptomnesia’’—what we might translate as ‘‘forgetting with
advantage.’’ With his customary candor, Freud recounted his own commissions of this
lapse. For example he described how he had been brought by his friend Fliess to realize
that he had completely blotted out the memory that Fliess had introduced him to the
theory of ‘‘original bisexuality,’’ a theory that he then later played back to Fliess as if Freud
had devised it himself.3 For most of us, lapses such as these function only as annoyances or
embarrassments. But Freud hypothesized that they could be made intelligible.
The first significant result of his inquiry into ordinary experiences of memory loss
and degradation was his essay on ‘‘The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness’’ (1898),
which became the opening chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud took
many of the analyses of mnemonic lapses in this study from his own experience, including
the classic case of his inability to recall the name of the painter of the Orvieto Last Judg-
ment frescoes.4 The result of his investigations strengthened Freud’s conviction that such
mental errors are always purposeful. So when Freud interpreted experiences of ‘‘forget-
ting,’’ he analyzed them not as simple memory drop-outs, but as blockages of recollection
determined by the psyche’s need to not remember something troubling. We could say
that these blockages then became memory-substitutes for unwanted recollections.
Memory lapses like the ones Freud analyzed in his work around the turn of the
century gave a microcosmic but crucial glimpse of the general mechanism by which mem-
ory, seemingly a benign and neutral ‘‘archive’’ of our experience (SE 3:296), could turn
pathological. Freud was explicit: ‘‘The example elucidated here [he is talking about his
own inability to recall Signorelli’s name] receives an immensely added interest when we

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

learn that it may serve as nothing more or less than a model for the pathological processes
to which the psychical symptoms of the psychoneuroses . . . owe their origin’’ (SE 3:295).
This hypothesis has proven remarkably productive. Through its varied manifesta-
tions, psychoanalysis, along with a series of diverse interpretive systems inspired by it, has
been able to theorize entire areas of human phenomena that had seemed meaningless as
meaningful. Elements of behavior previously thought to be random or negative (for exam-
ple, the seemingly entropic disappearance of a memory trace) have been reconceived as
motivated, hence as comprehensible. This doctrine transforms forgetting from a flat ab-
sence into a rich positivity—into a version of remembrance. And it insists on the intimate
connection between the two, on their systematicity (see Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
SE 6:134). Before Freud, forgetting had seemed an event without a narrative, an inarticu-
late blank. But Freud insisted that in the psyche there could be no results without causes,
hence no denouements without stories. If forgetting resulted, there was a tale behind it.
At the same time, his theory offered an explanation of why the pertinent story about our
forgetting hadn’t been known to us all along—why it had, in effect, been forgotten.
To put his theory in motion, Freud projected a protagonist and a plot for the account
he was generating about forgetting. In effect he created a new narrative genre about the
process of the mind. The main protagonist in this narrative had emerged as early as 1895
in Studies on Hysteria, in Freud’s discussion of the analytic technique he had developed
in his work with hysterics. There, concerning the phenomenon of ‘‘pathogenic’’ forget-
ting, he wrote that such forgotten material ‘‘nevertheless in some fashion lies ready to
hand and in correct and proper order. . . . The pathogenic psychical material appears to
be the property of an intelligence which is not necessarily inferior to that of the normal
ego’’ (SE 2:287).
This new character was the unconscious, and the new story it wrote was the result of
what Freud termed repression. In the narrative of the psyche that Freud was composing,
these new entities functioned to withdraw from the ego’s possession important facts about
its perceptions, recollections, and behavior. In this new conception, the process of recol-
lection was crucially redefined, both in its necessity and its possibility. For while it now
appeared absolutely indispensable to recover the memories that the unconscious had
withdrawn from the accessible archive of memory, simultaneously and for the same rea-
son, this task of recovery emerged as profoundly problematic. For once we have an un-
conscious, where is our past? The paradox of Freudian construction of memory is that it
defined for this constitutive instance of our psyche—of our self—both an irreducible
presence and an infinite distance.
This paradoxical—we might say paralogistic—combination of presence and absence
frames a new situation for thinking. The modern world, many have argued, is constituted
by the ever-increasing mobility of everything that makes it up—not only material objects,

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

but language itself. Indeed in modernity, language’s lability comes to seem the most char-
acteristic condition of our existence; the sign becomes the model of everything that occu-
pies our attention and furnishes our world. But once signs begin to float and flow, things
become hard to restabilize. Where now is the ‘‘real’’? This semiotic puzzle—for example,
the deceptive verisimilitude, the apparent reality of our reference to or memories of the
nonexistent—had occupied Freud as early as the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology.
There he asked how we can tell the difference between a presence and an absence. How
can we tell a memory of the past from an experience in the present? He wrote that we
need ‘‘an external criterion in order to distinguish between perception [Wahrnehmung]
and idea [Vorstellung]’’ or between ‘‘perception and memory’’ (SE 1:325; translation
modified).
Freud might have solved the problem of how we distinguish these two types of expe-
riences by collapsing objective and subjective reality into each other in some version of
Idealism. Then all psychic representations would become equivalent to all others, and the
materiality of the real object of perception—present in perception, absent in memory—
would have been bleached out. But Freud was an uncompromising materialist—
something that more recent Freudians, particularly of Lacanian stripe, have themselves
sometimes repressed. In the face of his encounter with the mind-body problem, Freud
concluded that not everything can be absorbed into the subjective paradigms of the psy-
che. Entities crucial for psychology nonetheless exist external to the psyche itself. These
entities are things.
The consequences of Freud’s epistemological choice are considerable. ‘‘What we call
things,’’ he wrote, ‘‘are externalities which resist thought’’ (Project for a Scientific Psychol-
ogy; SE 1:334; translation mine) [Was wir Dinge nennen, sind Reste, die sich der Beurteilung
entziehen]. The concept of such resistance is striking. As I suggested just above, it contrasts
with familiar positions in our own period, characterized by the relative dominance of
linguistic and semiotic paradigms, and—in the absence of extra-semiotic hors-texte—by
the idea that the world somehow collapses into such paradigms. Freud’s stance is differ-
ent. For him, ideas, memory traces, word- and thing-presentations, the imagined objects
of instinctual drives, fantasies, hallucinations—such psychic phenomena can imitate,
stand for, refer to, represent, even deny the world external to the self and independent of
its mental presentations. But unlike what would be the case in some of the most familiar
semiotic models of postmodernity, Freud was not willing to equate these representations
with the world outside the psyche. He insisted upon confirming the irreducibility of the
material objects that the psyche’s desires could evoke or react to, but not replace or
control. This ‘‘resistance’’ of things is critical in unexpected regions of Freudian theory,
as I will argue below.
But Freud’s refusal to blot the problem out by collapsing reality into the neurological
presentations available within the psyche only deepened the psychological puzzle he was

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

setting for himself and for us. For in our experience—and particularly in the experience
of the hysteric and neurasthenic patients Freud was working with throughout this pe-
riod—the power of psychical presentations seemed to sweep away the reality of the mate-
rial world. Neurotics do behave as if their memories were real, as if material reality were
just an appearance and the mind’s phantoms and phantasms entirely determinant.
How could the difference between psychical and material reality be conceived in a
way that granted each of these registers its requisite independence while still managing to
leave conceptual room for the interactions and substitutions by which their distinction
seemed constantly subverted? And in particular, how could we understand—and how
alter—the spectral power of certain memory traces within the psyche, traces so powerful
that they appear so fully to displace the products of immediate perception that, as we say,
people under their influence ‘‘lose touch with reality’’?
We could restate Freud’s perplexity this way: Where does the ‘‘reality’’ of our memory
stop? When does recollection end and experience begin? In these questions lurks the prob-
lem of memory’s strange power. Psychoanalysis depends upon the subject’s memory for
the cure. But as Freud’s therapeutic experiences began to suggest, subjects’ memories most
often subjected them. The pertinence of this reversal of agency had arisen dramatically in
Freud and Breuer’s early attempts to treat hysteria. Their diagnosis in the ‘‘Preliminary
Communication’’ (1893) of the Studies on Hysteria concerning the etiology of this illness
is justly celebrated: ‘‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’’ (emphasis theirs; SE 2:7).
Memory was their illness.5
In this construction, the seemingly secure materiality of a world of the here-and-now
has been replaced by memory symbols whose power seems ineradicable and able to sup-
plant even the most intense experiences in the present. The memory of what cannot be
spoken still speaks, and it does so irresistibly. It imposes somatic avowal; the mind writes
it upon the body.6 The idea here, that ‘‘truth will out,’’ may be familiar. Freud’s originality
was to specify the source and the mechanism by which such involuntary re-materializa-
tions of the hidden occur. This source was the unconscious; the mechanism, the return
of the repressed. In order to understand the extraordinary expansion of the memory
function in psychoanalysis, we need to understand how, for Freud, these psychic agencies
preserve and, at crucial moments, ‘‘betray’’ the past.
Conceptualizing this process and the consequences of this conservation and re-mate-
rialization of the past drove the mature theory of psychoanalysis toward a reconception
of the nature of psychological ‘‘evidence’’ and of the paradigms necessary for its interpre-
tation. Freud had to credit the seeming sovereignty of representations such as those which
involuntarily ‘‘ooze out’’ in neuroses or are acted out in hysteria—and he had to credit
these behaviors not as unintelligible aberrations, but as products of the regular function-
ing of psychic processes. ‘‘What is suppressed continues to exist in normal people as well as
abnormal, and remains capable of psychical functioning’’ (Freud’s emphasis; Interpretation
of Dreams [1900]; SE 5:608).

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

To the naı̈ve observer, the memories that irrupt from we know not where to overturn
our present seem intolerable. Their re-materializations violate the canons by which our
world is supposed to be ordered and call out for normalization. Indeed, the psychoana-
lytic patient has entered treatment precisely to eliminate them. But Freud made it a princi-
ple to forestall taking the perspective of the treatment’s end—the suppression of
pathological recurrence of these memory contents—in conceiving its material and its
course. Epistemologically speaking, it was as if achieving control over these archaic con-
tents required abandoning our everyday realist bias, and adopting the point of view of
memory itself.
But what was the character of this ‘‘memory’’? To understand Freud’s perspective, it
is essential to abandon any ‘‘realist’’ notion of the memory that we can access as some
form of reliable ‘‘storage’’—memory as checked baggage which could be reclaimed at any
time.7 Such a notion carries the implication that what went into the brain is stored some-
place specific within it, and can be retrieved unchanged. Freud’s vision was contrary to
such a notion. As he put it early in his career, ‘‘There is in general no guarantee of the
data produced by our memory’’ (‘‘Screen Memories’’ [1899]; SE 3:315).8
For Freud the stakes in the tension between what we might term on the one hand
literalist and on the other interpretive representations of the past were critical. And they
arose at a crucial moment in the development of his paradigm—one that evokes a contro-
versy still burning within Freudianism: the problem of ‘‘seduction theory.’’ Early in his
career, in one of his most startling hypotheses, Freud speculated that what he was then
calling ‘‘neurasthenia’’ (neurosis) resulted from an experience of childhood sexual moles-
tation. In the course of therapy, his patients had regularly produced recollections of such
experiences.
But in 1897 he began to be convinced that these accounts were likely to have arisen
instead from what he termed ‘‘phantasies’’—imaginary constructions, into whose forma-
tion the proportions of projection, invention, recollection, misrecollection, and retroflex-
ive reconstruction were simply undecidable. But if this was true, there was no master
memory. In the revision of the theory entailed by Freud’s renunciation of belief in his
patients’ remembrance of early molestation, the entire field of the diagnostic data of
psychoanalysis was sweepingly reinterpreted; the very notion of ‘‘data’’ was radically
transformed.9 The transformation that disbelieved the reality of early seduction of the
child but credited the effect of the patient’s conviction concerning it unlinked the mne-
monic representations elicited in treatment from literal reproduction of past experiences.
This move created the interpretive field in which mature psychoanalysis functions.
Such reconception of the status of the issues and the evidence to which the analyst must
attend—now no longer concerned with establishing the factual accuracy of the memories
produced by his patients, but rather seeking interpretation of the representations they
offered—is crucial to the vision of psychoanalysis that underlies Freud’s radical resitua-
tion of the memory problem.

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

We can’t remember the future. Only our past can be invoked in recollection. But if
we can’t represent the directionality of memory’s determinations, there can be no possi-
bility of understanding how the past it carries forward with it has come to dominate our
present. Making sense of memory requires that this directionality be central within any
representation of memory’s activity. But then the theory of psychoanalysis runs into a
serious difficulty. When we come to psychology from the side of memory, it is memory’s
persistence, the seeming inertia of its traces, that calls out for explanation.
The locus of memory in Freud’s topography of the psyche attempts to understand
this refractory fixity. He conceived the unconscious as the timeless and immutable portion
of the psyche. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is memory’s fundamental repository.10
The memories to which psychoanalysis attends, the memories that define its theoretical
originality, are those that reside in this archive but have been subjected to repression.
Hence we have no direct access to them. They are recorded in the unconscious, but only
their derivatives, the ‘‘screen memories’’ and so on, are available to consciousness as part
of the tactics by which repression protects itself. So functionally, what psychoanalysis
means by memory—the traces of the past determinant for the pathologies that psychoan-
alytic therapy seeks to alleviate—is unconscious memory strictly defined, the memory of
the mysterious, timeless system Ucs.11 And despite the paradoxical counterintuitiveness of
the position, Freud was undeviating in his doctrine that system Ucs. conserves the past
literally, timelessly, and permanently.
There can be no doubt that Freud believed firmly in these characteristics of the un-
conscious, however difficult it may be for us to imagine how such a position could make
sense. He asserted his credo on the timelessness and permanence of the unconscious and
its memories from one end of his career to the other. From his essay ‘‘The Unconscious’’
(1915): ‘‘The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally,
are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all’’ (SE 14:187).12
The repressed contents whose traces occupy system Ucs. then appear as the source of the
pathologies that preoccupy psychoanalysis. The memories that are crucial for understand-
ing Freud’s conception of pathology become available only when they somehow pierce
through the boundary surrounding system Ucs., where their ineradicable traces are lo-
cated. He understood their frustrating persistence in consciousness and in behavior as a
direct result of their permanence in the psyche. That is why it is so hard to change the
behaviors that they determine, why the psychoanalytic cure is so protracted.
This brings us to a fundamental and perhaps intractable problem in Freudian theory.
It arises in his unprecedented and counterintuitive insistence on the permanence and
ineradicability of memories in the unconscious. Many have argued that Freud’s concep-
tion of psychic contents turns from a model based upon the literalism of data to one
deploying the more supple practices of interpretation. But the timeless and immutable
inscriptions of the unconscious, the unchanging memory registrations of system Ucs.,
create a tension within this understanding of Freud. How can we reconcile the paradigm

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

of protean interpretive mobility that is usually thought to define Freudian psychoanalysis

with the quasi-positivist concept of the unconscious’s unchangeable register of every fact
that has ever occurred in an individual’s experience?
In the past few decades, with Lacan particularly, structuralist and semiotic models
have increasingly dominated conceptions of Freudian psychoanalysis. But Freud’s con-
ception of an immutable unconscious memory, the refractory registrations of system Ucs.
upon which he insisted, create a problem for such models. The almost effortless and
mobile transfers of meaning that characterize semiotic systems don’t fit comfortably
within the logic of memory as Freud conceived it, don’t cohere with Freud’s timeless
and unchanging unconscious. For at the heart of a paradigm of luxuriant and seemingly
boundless interpretation, the unconscious is a realm of facts. This projection of psychic
fixity discomfits semiotic theories of the mind and memory.
So despite Lacan’s resonant assertion, the Freudian unconscious isn’t structured pre-
cisely like a language. Indeed, it rather functions as something like language’s contrary.
For in the memory registrations of the timeless unconscious as Freud hypothesizes it, no
content ever stands for any other. Instead, each stands uniquely and immutably for itself.
This produces a puzzling result. In the unconscious, because there can be no change, there
can be no signs. How can we make sense of this?
The tension here lies between two irreconcilable modes of being. Language and semi-
otics model the first of these modes. In it, existence is characterized by the mutability
with which language accommodates transformations of the meaning-system in which it
is embedded. Language can stand indifferently for whatever you like. And this compliance
of the linguistic material, this unfixity defines the sign: it can be anything, and substitute
for anything. But this description of the wanton lability of the semiotic—‘‘compliance
of the linguistic material’’—is in fact Freud’s own characterization for the contents of
consciousness (Psychopathology of Everyday Life; SE 6:222). And it invites confrontation
with his directly contrasting evocation of the thought-resistant materiality of things (SE
1:334) that I mentioned earlier.
Here then is the principle that defines the tension in the Freudian model of memory
and interpretation: Language is compliant; but things are resistant. By his own unvarying
account, the contents of the Freudian unconscious resist change as if they were ‘‘things.’’
In the face of modernist and postmodern constructions of reality as a projection of
language, Freud asserts a different understanding. At the heart of his model, the timeless
unconscious hides a resistant materialist foundation that nothing seems able to alter.
The contents of the unconscious cannot have the character of a sign because they do
not have its mobility. It is not that the traces that occupy the unimaginable space of
Freud’s system Ucs. can replace nothing else. It is rather that nothing can replace them.
They cannot be signified; they are a memory that never forgets and thus is never altered.
The past they carry is not past at all. This is what makes the issue of the cure so arduous
for psychoanalysis.

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

The unconscious conserves everything. The problem lies in what happens to those inerad-
icable contents. In his essay ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915), Freud asked what occurs when
an unconscious memory becomes conscious (see SE 14:174 and n. 29). The question is,
how are unconscious traces transmuted into conscious signs? This metamorphosis is cru-
cial. For clearly the remainder of the psyche manipulates its contents as if they were
indeed semiotic elements. But this means that the contents of consciousness exist in a
different ontological mode from those of the unconscious. If we can’t understand this
passage from one mode of memory to another, the role and character of the unconscious
becomes unfathomable. Then system Ucs., which Freud considered the ‘‘true psychical
reality’’ (Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5:613), the heart of his model of the psyche and his
most original contribution to our understanding of it, risks absolute incomprehensibility.
The split in the psyche is a chasm between the semiotic and its other. The question
of this border is the question of psychotherapy itself. Freud himself was deeply troubled
by it. Early in his career he evoked it thus: ‘‘It is . . . as though we were standing before a
wall which shuts out every prospect and prevents us from having any idea whether there
is anything behind it, and if so, what’’ (‘‘Psychotherapy of Hysteria’’ [1895], SE 2:293).
This is only an early member of a long series of images through whose figures Freud
sought to describe what the mind was like behind this wall, to understand the unimagin-
able parallel universe of the unconscious, and to discover how this ‘‘internal foreign terri-
tory’’ of which he spoke in 1933 in the New Introductory Lectures could be understood
(SE 22:57).
The paradox of the psychoanalytic cure now becomes apparent. The power of uncon-
scious memories arises in the fact that we are not free not to live them. Clearly the uncon-
scious memory traces at the source of a neurotic symptom produce ‘‘output’’ to the rest
of the psyche. The problem is that they may produce only this. In the state in which they
were laid down, they may be inaccessible to input, moderation, modulation, or diminu-
tion. Or if not, how could these modifications of unconscious contents happen? How can
the unconscious be both changeless and changeable? To cure neurosis necessarily means
acting upon the archaic registrations lying at its source, which the unconscious has inte-
grally conserved. The problem is to imagine how this could occur. For if the unconscious
is timeless and immutable, if memories are inexorably fixed, it would seem difficult to
conceive how any activity taking place outside it could interrupt or modify them.
This puzzlement—indeed, this apparent contradiction in the model of unconscious
memory that Freud devised and remained committed to—is at the origin of the growing
pessimism he expressed toward the end of his career concerning the therapeutic ambitions
of psychoanalysis itself. His theory itself entailed this reserve. It is particularly visible in
‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937). The editors of the Standard Edition take
note of the gloom Freud expressed in the essay concerning the possibility of the cure (see
SE 23:211). What is striking in the analysis offered in the essay is a convergence between
the sources of Freud’s hesitations concerning its possibility, and an unconscious whose

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

difference from the other portions of the psyche is so radical that its contents exist in an
alternate ontological mode.
Analysis can only cure by some form of memory displacement or substitution. Patho-
logical memory determinations must be replaced by healthy ones. The formula in which
Freud made this point is famous: ‘‘Where id was,’’ he wrote, ‘‘there ego shall be’’ (New
Introductory Lectures [1933]; SE 22:80) [Wo Es war, soll Ich werden]. But when I asked
earlier whether the contents of the unconscious (or the ‘‘id’’) could be the object of
replacement, could be substituted for and thus fulfill the function of signs, the response
from within Freud’s system was disconcerting. Such a substitution appeared impossible if
the timeless character of unconscious contents upon which Freud never ceased insisting
was not to be fatally compromised.
The origin of neurosis in the changeless unconscious then appeared hermetically
sealed off from any access to or treatment by the talking cure. In its struggle to overcome
the source of pathology, psychoanalysis in effect attempts to oppose the force of matter
with words, to set signs against materiality. It is not surprising that in the face of such a
mismatch, in ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ Freud substantially lowered the
ambitions of the cure. In particular, with regard to the source of the symptom (what he
called the ‘‘instinctual demand’’), he made it clear that there was little prospect of the
treatment’s eliminating it. ‘‘This,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is in general impossible.’’ Rather, he contin-
ued, ‘‘we mean something else, something which may be roughly described as a ‘taming’
[Bändigung] of the instinct. That is to say, the instinct is brought completely into the
harmony of the ego’’ (SE 23:225).
But despite this substitute version of how the talking cure might cure, the problem
may remain irreducible within Freud’s structure of the psyche. The cure projects some-
thing that psychoanalysis suggests may be impossible: replacement or extinction of an
unconscious trace. The theoretical energy Freud devoted, from one end of his career to
the other, to establishing the timelessness and the stability of the memories in the uncon-
scious then rebounded at the moment of the cure to subvert any coherent account of its
possibility.
In this way, the photographic, ‘‘eidetic’’ memory that Freud attributed to the uncon-
scious and by which it achieves total preservation of the past mutates into memory’s
nightmare. For what is repressed in the unconscious, what is denied entry into conscious-
ness and cut off from development, nonetheless remains banefully active. In the uncon-
scious, such memories become exempt from extinction. The unconscious is the unerring
repository of our past; but its disheartening privilege is to conserve those contents most
harmful to us (or at least to our conscious selves) in a place where their toxicity cannot
diminish.

Such a conundrum embraces the extremes of Freud’s construction of memory, which

span a range unprecedented in modernity. The conflict between memory as the absolute

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

reproduction of unchanging contents and memory as the mobile representation of contents

transformed stresses and might really be said to construct Freudian analytic theory. On
the one hand Freud’s insistence upon the absence of loss in the mnemonic world of the
unconscious can be interpreted as a paroxysm of the reproductive model of memory—too
much memory, to reproduce the first side of the modernist memory dialectic that I evoked
at the opening of this essay. The totalizing retention and recovery of the past has never
been conceived more radically than Freud did in his conception of the unconscious. On
the other hand, we can’t recall these memories—too little memory, the other side of the
dialectic with which I began.
To put this in the terms that Freud’s model constructs for us, Freud interprets the
vertiginously changing manifestations and transformations of psychic contents as a form
of continuous and uninterrupted recollection. This theory provides us with the most
sophisticated paradigm of mnemonic representation yet devised. But we never get back
to the real registration of our past. The extremes to which Freud felt it necessary to go in
order to embrace the protean diversity and power of memory’s presence in our lives seem
to have led him to a structure so internally stressed that it appears capable of no resolution
at all. If so, psychoanalysis preserves the enigma of memory as tenaciously as any trace in
the timeless and immutable unconscious that it conceives as the repository of memory to
begin with.
In Freud memory thus lives in a contradiction framed by psychoanalytic topography.
In ‘‘The Unconscious’’ (1915), he sought to understand how a relation between the two
memory systems he had projected might be modeled (see particularly SE 14:188–89). The
problem is not that such a relationship across the border between the unconscious and
consciousness is impossible, since such passages must happen—they are the experience of
every minute of our lives. The problem is that Freud was unable to give a coherent ac-
count of how this relationship occurs.
Existence does not depend upon our ability to theorize it in order to happen. But for
Freud’s theory the difficulty remains. Whatever the eerie fixity of the registrations pre-
served in unconscious memory, in consciousness recollection exhibits a positively wanton
disjunction from the veridical. There seems no seduction before which its representations
will not yield. If the unconscious theorized by Freud contains an absolute, uncannily inert
and stable record of the past, on its side consciousness exhibits a vertiginous representa-
tional mobility in the memories of which we are permitted awareness. The problem of
characterizing memory mutates from fixity to fluidity, from absolute and inaccessible fact
to ever-shifting fiction. I want to conclude this essay by examining these uncontainable
and unpredictable remembrances of a memory we cannot remember.
In its protean volatility, conscious memory proliferates and diffuses extravagantly.
The theory of memory thus reaches a critical pass. The psychic life we experience or can
observe directly is a perpetual movement of transformations and substitutions—ordered,
determined perhaps, but potentially interminable. As Freud put it in ‘‘The Dynamics of

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

Transference’’ (1912), ‘‘Unconscious impulses do not want to be remembered in the way

the treatment desires them to be, but endeavor to reproduce themselves in accordance
with the timelessness of the unconscious and its capacity for hallucination’’ (SE 12:108).
But once we are willing to allow hallucination as a mode of meaning, then psychoanalysis
has committed itself to resolving heroic problems in interpretation.
The untrammeled play of exchanges and transformations of meaning that psycho-
analysis projects as the business of conscious memory subverts the coherence through
time and the reality-check that memory was long supposed to provide. Recollection in-
stead appears as a hypocritical counterfeiter. Henceforth, in a vision that has had great
influence since Freud’s own period, remembering means changing. ‘‘Like the physical, the
psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be’’ (‘‘The Unconscious’’;
SE 14:171). Thus in the psyche, everything moves. Derrida emphasized this point: ‘‘The
substitution of signifiers seems to be the essential activity of psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion.’’13 In psychic material, things keep changing into other things. A readiness to per-
ceive this constitutive lability and plasticity, to consider it as the zero-degree reality in
the psyche, is fundamental to Freudian hermeneutics, to the scheme of psychoanalytic
interpretation.
As I already suggested in mentioning Lacan above, reinterpretations of Freud along
semiotic or Saussurian lines have preoccupied important strands of critical theory for
decades.14 We have become familiar with the notion that the Freudian model of a seem-
ingly uncontainable displacement of significations bears a persuasive similarity to the
structures of sign generation and interpretation as they became conceptualized in the
period when Freud’s own theory was being systematized (Saussure’s celebrated lectures
took place between 1906 and 1911). It almost seems as if semiotics was dreaming up
psychoanalysis at the same time as Freud himself.
The investigation of memory in Freud thus seems to swerve away from the character
and practices of memory itself toward an account of the nature of Freudian interpretation.
But this apparent inflection from the realm of memory to the realm of interpretation is
not an inflection at all. The problems of memory and of interpretation in Freud are
inseparable. Indeed, this coincidence may well be one of the most important characteris-
tics of conceptions of memory in modernity, in which the subjective character of recollec-
tion underlines and foregrounds the subjectivity of all human beings and doings.
Still, how do these two registers—the mnemonic and the hermeneutic—unfold and
intertwine in Freud’s theory? Freudian interpretation is fundamentally genealogical. It
means excavating the successive strata of the psyche. And it believes that the contents
thus brought to light can be made sense of. However arduous in practice, Freud thus
conceives interpretation as a realist act. It then becomes simple to say how the problem
of memory relates to the problem of interpretation. We need hermeneutics when memory
in the mode of faithful reproduction fails: when the transparency of our access to the

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

meanings transmitted to us from the past (‘‘memory as checked baggage’’) is troubled

or interrupted.
Psychoanalysis then must reconstruct the meaning of an entity, the psyche, whose
meanings are not given on the surface of its own recollection. But as Freud made clear in
‘‘Constructions in Analysis,’’ psychoanalysis can only do this as a reconstruction. It per-
forms the interpretive equivalent of ‘‘reverse engineering’’: given a product (the symp-
tom), it seeks to understand how the product came to be, how it was made. It walks back
up the chain of memories, of relations and transformations that in their accumulated
effects produced the psyche it strives to understand.
The axiom of the interpretive system deployed in psychoanalysis is that some content
is always remembered—retained, transferred, disguised—across even the most vertigi-
nous mutations undergone by representations within the psyche. These transfers inevita-
bly center in memory, instantiate its processes, and convey its materials. As for the
interpretive activity of psychoanalysis, of course it has no other content than memories
to work with. ‘‘We have to do our therapeutic work on [the present state of the patient’s
illness], which consists in large measure in tracing it back to the past’’ (‘‘Remembering,
Repeating, and Working-Through’’ [1914], SE 12:152). This hermeneutic exercise is a
fundamental process of anamnesis, of recollection.
In this sense Freud’s attitude lies at the heart of modernity’s vision of the world as a
deeply coded message awaiting decipherment. The disciplines that have arisen since the
nineteenth century for understanding human behavior in its multiform aspects (among
them sociology, anthropology, and—most consequential for us here—psychology) have
all sought interpretation of mysteries in modern existence that refuse to give up their
meanings to naı̈ve inspection. These emergent disciplines speculated upon hidden barriers
to understanding. In effect each projected the same second-guessing of subjectivity or
dethroning of consciousness that Freudian psychoanalysis practices.15
But here a problem arises. For once the rewriting of the object of interpretation
begins, once transfer, transposition, what Freud termed Umsetzung (New Introductory
Lectures [1933], SE 22:100–101) are accepted as legitimate for understanding the object’s
real meaning, then it becomes difficult to see how to limit such revisions. The hermeneu-
tics of suspicion maintains that things do not mean what they say. But then the difficulty
becomes knowing whether they might not mean anything at all. The problem is that once
you say that some meaning is transformed into some other meaning, the question arises
of how you know where to stop.16
This problem underlies reflection throughout Freud’s career. He acknowledged it in
a forthright and crucial passage in The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘‘The dream-thoughts to
which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite
endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of
our world of thought’’ (SE 5:525). In one of his last essays, the difficulty that this bound-
lessness poses appears in the form of a deceptively simple question. Freud asked how we

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 MEMORY IN FREUD

could know when an analysis is finished. From the point of view of the theory and practice
of psychoanalytic interpretation, the puzzlement implicit in the title of this celebrated
paper—‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’ (1937, SE 23:216–53) [Die endliche und
die unendliche Analyse]—identifies a problem that may be incapable of solution within
the hermeneutic system Freud devised. Indeed, no hermeneutics of suspicion may be able
to resolve it.
Psychoanalysis combats the anguish of memory’s fallibility by offering the security of
interpretation. Interpretation settles the seeming limitlessness of association; it claims to
make sense of memories and make memory sensible. The uncontrollable exchange of
everything that comes up in recollection finds its antidote in the projection of some specific
thing that arrests the vertigo and aims to reestablish the present as a site of memory-
stability. But what founds such restabilization itself? The chain of logic underlying the
Freudian interpretive enterprise rests upon two principles whose function is to insure
intelligibility and interpretive boundedness: that chance is not to be credited in psychic
life, and that the unconscious memory is eternal. The first of these principles warrants
the interpretive chain offered by the analyst; the second provides the ground legitimizing
such chains. The past is thus recaptured for the present. And it is managed in such a way
that its impenetrability for this present is resolved or at least diminished.
The problem is to find a foundation that could limit the slippage of significations in
order to locate a point where meaning stabilizes, instead of simply repeating its protean
referral to yet another substitute signifier in the chain of interpretive rewritings. If it is
not to risk incoherence, every interpretive system must appeal to such a foundation.
Freud concentrated upon three touchstones that might stabilize the profusion of memo-
ries-turning-into-other-memories that the patient’s associations present in psychoanalytic
treatment: (1) the projection of an ultimate ground upon which all interpretations must
be based; (2) the hypothesis of a general lexicon of psychic symbolism that could poten-
tially make interpretation a version of ‘‘translation,’’ and provide an objective control
upon it; (3) the hypothesis that interpretation can be verified by the patient’s reaction to
it. Each of these principles or heuristics poses problems of its own, and Freud never settled
on one to the exclusion of the others.17
This fundamental uncertainty concerning how to end interpretation—how to decide
which memory in the seemingly endless chain of transformed recollections from the pa-
tient’s past is to be privileged above the others in determining that past’s meaning—turns
the question of psychoanalytic interpretation into an endless argument. ‘‘Is there such a
thing as a natural end to an analysis—is there any possibility at all of bringing an analysis
to such an end?’’ Freud framed the question in ‘‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’’
(1937; SE 23:219). His investigation found analysis stressed between postulates of absolute
meaningfulness on the one hand, and absolute mobility of meaning on the other. Stated
thus, the problem seems to take the form of a logical antinomy. Freud is forthright in
declaring that the theoretical ideal of complete understanding cannot be achieved.18

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 RICHARD TERDIMAN

The problem of memory might appear to have been forgotten in this discussion. But
here it resurfaces strategically. Why does psychoanalysis take so long? This protraction in
time is one of the aspects of Freudian psychology that everyone knows about. How can
we—how does Freud—explain why this laborious process of analysis can last over many
years? It is memory that foregrounds the crucial factor of time that might seem to have
gone missing in this last portion of my discussion.
Memory is how the mind knows time and registers change. In a tantalizing note in
‘‘On Narcissism’’ (1914) Freud speculated that the two faculties—remembering the past
and perceiving time—developed together in the psyche. He considered the faculty of self-
observation that arises in consciousness as their common source: ‘‘I should like to add to
this . . . , that the developing and strengthening of this observing agency might contain
within it the subsequent genesis of (subjective) memory and the time-factor’’ (SE 14:96
n. 1). Memory is why psychoanalysis takes time.
Yet for all this apparent centering of psychoanalytic meaning in memory, memory’s
contradiction subsists. Indeed it has only grown more anxious as psychoanalysis has
forced our understanding of the presence of the past further and deeper than ever before.
In psychoanalysis memory, while everywhere, is lost forever in an unconscious we can
neither access nor change. And understanding, whose ambiguous but intimate links to
the contents of the past conserved in memory this essay has sought to suggest, has become
the most persistent puzzle of modernity. In Freud, memory has entirely filled the psyche.
Yet it has disappeared within us. Psychoanalysis then seems a catastrophization of the
mnemonic anxieties that preoccupy our age, a paroxysm of the crisis we experience in
our vexed and unsettled relationship with the past.

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 7. Proust: The Music of Memory

Michael Wood

Memory is not inventive.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive1

‘‘And no one will ever know, not even oneself, the melody that had
been pursuing one with its elusive and delectable rhythm.’’2 Underneath
these words, probably written in 1909 and certainly part of a draft of
what was to become À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust wrote ‘‘Finish
there.’’3 The melody is a missing memory; and memory itself, in Proust,
repeatedly appears as a melody. The analogy helps us, I believe, to bring
together the more obvious and the more elusive elements of Proust’s
view of this subject, so central to his thought and writing, and especially
to understand his sense of the role of memory in relation to chance,
intelligence, and the power or impotence of the will.
What is the nature of the melody, and under what conditions do
we fail to know it? In the quoted sentence the melody is a simile for
‘‘the beautiful things’’ we may one day write. They are already ‘‘inside
us,’’ and whether or not we find an external shape for them is up to us.
Gifted people remember such melodies vaguely, they are ‘‘obsessed by
this blurred memory of truths they have never known,’’ but if they fail
to act on their obsession they are only gifted, ‘‘they do not have talent.’’
‘‘Talent,’’ Proust says, ‘‘is like a sort of memory which will enable them
finally to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to
note it down, to reproduce it, to sing it.’’ He adds that talent, like mem-
ory, weakens with time and that there comes a moment ‘‘when the
mental muscle which brings both internal and external memories closer
no longer has any strength left. In some this age lasts a whole life, from
lack of exercise or a too quick self-satisfaction. And no one will ever
know . . .’’4

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 MICHAEL WOOD

What ‘‘finish there’’ means, perhaps, is that the book will be done by the time these
words find their final place, the melody recovered and reproduced in full, but the story
will end not on a note of triumph but on a reminder of how easily it could all have come
to nothing, to less than the memory of a vanished tune. Proust was hoping, justifiably as
it happened, that his talent would serve him long enough, but he was afraid of his frivolity,
or what he called his mondanity, his worldliness. And characteristically, he wanted to
turn this doubt itself into his material. ‘‘I need to show,’’ he wrote in a note that appears
just above the long simile of the melody, ‘‘that when I am worldly I attach too much
importance to the danger of worldliness, when my memory grows weak too much impor-
tance to the act of reconstruction.’’ The world is a danger and memory is endangered,
but both are what we might call contextual fictions, enhanced by immediate pressures
and preoccupations.
Proust uses two words for memory—souvenir to mean what is remembered and mé-
moire the capacity to remember—and the most difficult and interesting ideas in the pas-
sage about the melody are those of permanent forgetting, for the duration of ‘‘a whole
life,’’ and of remembering what we never knew in the first place. The lost tune is lost time
and talent is the long labor of putting together what we didn’t know we knew. Much of
Proust’s mature theory of memory is here, but a famous key element appears to be miss-
ing. What about the concept of involuntary memory? Doesn’t Proust believe that con-
scious and willed attempts at remembering are precisely a form of losing life and time
rather than finding them?
In a famous passage of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s narrator says the
flowers he now sees for the first time do not seem to him to be real flowers (de vraies
fleurs). This may be, he speculates, because ‘‘reality is formed only in the memory’’ or
because ‘‘the faith which creates’’ has dried up in him.5 The language and the logic suggest
a radical subjectivity, a version of the philosophical skepticism that doubts the existence
of the world outside the mind, and indeed the narrator courts these associations because
of the coloring they provide and because the element of subjectivity is essential to him.
But his claim is not a skeptical one.
He is not saying the flowers are not real in the accepted sense. He is saying they don’t
feel real to him, that they do not provoke the full range of perceptual and imaginative
experience that is supposed to result from the encounter of an actual person with an
actual world, something that goes far beyond the intellectual acknowledgement that the
realm of phenomena exists. This form of reality, he suggests, is mostly lost for the modern
self, preserved if at all only in memory, and was probably always dependent on the mind’s
ability to collaborate with the world, to imagine for itself what is already there. This is the
implication of his use of the term faith.
What the narrator calls involuntary memory is always a recovery of reality in this
sense. He argues that this rescue produces a vivid, initially inexplicable happiness, a deliv-
ery from time that is also a revelation of the essence of time; but he also offers details of

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 PROUST: THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

powerful instances where the rescue causes intense or protracted pain or a helpless,
scarcely nameable distress. The difference between the argued cases and the unargued
ones is left for us to resolve, and this is why Proust can insist on the absolute centrality
of involuntary memory to his novel while one of his most subtle and distinguished critics
can say the work ‘‘finally depends on a memory that is in no way the involuntary mem-
ory.’’6 Or rather, this is why they can both be right. This essay seeks to place Proust’s
theory of memory at the meeting point of these apparently conflicting assertions.

Beyond Recall

Most readers and critics have taken Proust’s word for the nature of involuntary memory,
and the role it plays in his work,7 but there have been interesting and sympathetic resist-
ances to his claims: chiefly because the claims are thought to undervalue the elements of
will, choice, and work in Proust’s achievement,8 but also because the phenomenon of
involuntary memory itself, while familiar and observable enough, is ‘‘oddly inert and
unhelpful’’ as a guiding idea,9 is more like forgetting than remembering,10 or is not really
a phenomenon of memory at all.11
Proust certainly came to feel that involuntary memory was the key theoretical ele-
ment in his novel, and his chief claim to conceptual originality. In a 1913 letter he asserts
very firmly that Bergson doesn’t distinguish between the two modes of memory, although
it has been suggested Proust was wrong about this.12 For Proust, involuntary memory ‘‘is
the only true one, since voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence and the eyes,
yields us only imprecise facsimiles of the past.’’13 We don’t recall the past, he says, until
we stumble into a sensation, catch an old scent or the sight of an old glove. The old scent
reminds us that life is beautiful, and we are enchanted; the old glove reminds us that we
still love those who are dead, and we burst into tears. In both cases we have regained a
reality we thought we had lost. Proust uses much the same terms in an interview from
the same year, and adds that he believes ‘‘an artist should scarcely turn to anything except
involuntary memories for his or her basic material.’’14 It’s hard to tell how large a reserva-
tion lurks in that ‘‘scarcely,’’ what other forms of memory may be useful, or what else
apart from memory. The artist should behave in this way first because the involuntary
nature of such experiences is a proof of their authenticity, and second because these
instants of resurrection ‘‘bring things back in an exact dose of memory and forgetting.’’15
They bring back, we might say, forgottenness as well as what was forgotten.
In what is perhaps his earliest attempt at an evocation of an involuntary memory, in
a draft fragment intended for his novel Jean Santeuil, Proust writes literally of the melody
that later becomes figurative. His hero, listening to a pianist playing a waltz, feels a mem-
ory stirring inside him, probably ‘‘some forgotten melody’’ that contained the same musi-
cal phrase or the same chord. The melody struggles ‘‘in the depths of forgetfulness,’’ seeks

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 MICHAEL WOOD

to ‘‘return to life, to be heard and recognized,’’ but Jean can’t revive it. Then he realizes
that it is not the phrase or the chord, not the music at all, that has half-caught his con-
sciousness, it is the sound of the piano itself, which recalls that of his grandfather, who
long ago used to play every evening when the boy dined with him. Jean has never thought
of the sound since, the narrator says, and never would have thought of it without the
accident of the recent pianist’s touch. ‘‘And the photograph of all that had taken its place
in the archives of his memory, archives so vast that he would never look at most of them,
unless a chance event were to open them again.’’16
The metaphor of the photograph of sound is curious, as if to be remembered is to be
seen, and the vast archives already suggest that memory itself is a form of forgetting. But
there is no suggestion yet that the archives can’t be opened, that there is any impediment
in them apart from their size, and certainly no suggestion that conscious attempts at
storage will destroy the stored material. However, the narrator of the novel does speak
elsewhere of ‘‘disinterested memory,’’ that is, a memory unengaged in the practical busi-
ness of getting through the day. We do not perceive reality as we live it, the narrator says,
but we find it again as long as we do not look for it, ‘‘in the sudden recall of a gust of
wind, of a smell of fire, of a low, flat, sunny sky, close to rain, above the roofs.’’17
The intervention of chance, or the slackening of the concentrated will, is essential in
both passages. ‘‘Disinterested’’ actually means ‘‘involuntary’’ in this lexicon. What gets in
the way of memory is trying or needing to remember, just as what blots out life and
reality is living itself, the daily pragmatism of survival.
There is a curious passage in À la recherche du temps perdu where the narrator reports
a supposed opinion of Bergson’s, represented by an equally supposed Norwegian philoso-
pher. The question is the influence of drugs on memory. Very slight, the fictional Bergson
says, at least as far the ‘‘solid memory of our everyday lives’’ is concerned. He does have
a friend, though, a professor of ancient history, who finds it hard to remember Greek
quotations if he has taken a sleeping pill the night before. The narrator thinks the effect
of drugs on memory is exactly the reverse. He doesn’t lose his grasp of Baudelaire’s poetry,
he says, or of the philosophy of Porphyry or Plotinus, he loses precisely his sense of
everyday life, his ‘‘capacity to act in minor matters, in everything that calls for action if
we are to repossess it just in time.’’18
It’s hard to know what’s at stake in this (imaginary) argument, but it is clearly con-
nected to Proust’s investment in the idea of involuntary memory and to his claim that
Bergson doesn’t sufficiently distinguish it from memory in its other forms. Drugs, like
chance, invade and alter the world of practical intentions. They inhibit, in the view of
Proust’s narrator, only what is immediately useful, leaving everything else as it was. So the
implied reproach to Bergson rests on his presumed acceptance of the undivided solidity of
memory, as if the virtue of memory lay in what it makes available to us rather than what
it hides, as if were not obvious that the most interesting regions of those vast archives
conjured up in Jean Santeuil are those we can never plan to visit.

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 PROUST: THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

The Norwegian philosopher is further reported as saying that Bergson believes ‘‘we
possess all our memories, if not the faculty of recalling them.’’ ‘‘But what is a memory
that we cannot recall?’’ the narrator pretends to ask. ‘‘We do not recall our memories of
the last thirty years,’’ he goes on to answer, ‘‘but we are totally steeped in them.’’ And
from here he moves into a mischievous fantasy, a comic critique of his own theory as
much as of Bergson’s. If I have within me such a mass of my own memories I can’t
summon up, the narrator argues, who is to say this invisible fund doesn’t contain other
lives I can’t remember either, my life as another man, for example, or even on another
planet? ‘‘The same oblivion effaces everything.’’19
We don’t need to pursue this entertaining game any further, but it’s worth pausing
over Proust’s narrator’s use of the words call and recall: appeler and rappeler. These are
very ordinary terms, and in Jean Santeuil Proust uses rappel simply to mean memory. But
we can see a particular precision in the language of the later novel and in the letter I
quoted, where Proust speaks of our failure to register how beautiful life is or how much
we love our cherished dead. It’s not that we don’t remember, it’s that we can’t recall.
Significant memories don’t come when they are called, and we couldn’t call them anyway,
because we don’t know of their existence until they suddenly arrive. We happen on them;
they happen to us.

Against Intelligence

Proust’s arguments about memory are never fully separable from his quarrel with the
intelligence, by which he seems to mean the whole range of intentional, functional
thought. ‘‘Every day I attach less value to the intelligence,’’ the projected preface to Contre
Sainte-Beuve begins. And in other drafts, ‘‘Every day I grant less value to the intelligence,’’
and ‘‘Although every day I attach less value to criticism, and even, if I must say it, to the
intelligence.’’20
And yet only the intelligence can help us to understand what it is failing to do: ‘‘It is
to the intelligence that we must look all the same to establish the inferiority of the intelli-
gence . . . It may hold only second place in the hierarchy of values but only it is capable
of proclaiming that instinct has to occupy the first.’’21 The same argument is developed
more subtly and more fully in the later pages of À la recherche du temps perdu. The
narrator is entertaining two hypotheses about Albertine’s having left him: one nightmar-
ish and true (she has gone for good), the other plausible, consolatory, and wrong (she is
only pretending, she will come back if he offers to marry her, or buy her a yacht or a
Rolls Royce). The second hypothesis is that of the ingenious intelligence.

But . . . the fact that the intelligence is not the most subtle, powerful and appropriate
instrument for grasping the truth is only one more reason in favour of starting with

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 MICHAEL WOOD

the intelligence rather than with the intuitions of the unconscious or with unques-
tioning faith in our premonitions. It is life which little by little, case by case, allows
us to realize that what is most important for our hearts or our minds is taught us not
by reason but by other powers. And then it is the intelligence itself, which, recogniz-
ing their superiority, uses its reasoning in order to abdicate in their favour, and
accepts the role of collaborator and servant. Experimental faith.22

This is a very curious passage, pointing in several directions at once. It lacks the program-
matic hostility to the intelligence of the preface to Contre Sainte-Beuve, and it certainly
makes no easy plea for instinct—‘‘intuitions’’ and ‘‘premonitions’’ seem the riskiest or
most disreputable recourse of all. There is a deep pragmatism in the concepts of ‘‘life,’’
‘‘case’’ and the ‘‘experimental.’’ We learn as we go, and we ‘‘realize’’ what we have learned.
But ‘‘other powers,’’ ‘‘servant,’’ ‘‘faith,’’ and above all ‘‘abdicate’’ suggest a quite different,
almost groveling relationship to the irrational. ‘‘Collaborator’’ is strangely placed too,
even if we succeed in ridding it of all its later French nuances. Is it possible to be a
collaborator and a servant? Couldn’t the master always crack the whip, and wouldn’t a
commanded collaboration just be another form of service? More positively, Proust’s nar-
rator can be read as saying that those other powers are still powers of our own mind, and
perhaps not purely irrational; that learning to distrust the intelligence is the beginning of
wisdom, since the intelligence so often thinks its mission is to keep the truth from us,
and ingenuity is a proof not of strength but of helplessness. Abdication still seems to take
us too far, though.
Intelligence for Proust is the daily life of the mind and at the same time, and for the
same reason, the death of memory. And in Contre Sainte-Beuve memory and its resurrec-
tions (Proust’s term) become the whole case against the intelligence. ‘‘What intelligence
gives us back under the name of memory is not it.’’23 Our past lives are ‘‘dead for the
intelligence.’’24 Proust’s evidence for these deaths is a series of memory-experiences in
which the intelligence supposedly had no part. All but one of these experiences find their
way into À la recherche du temps perdu, carefully distributed into different areas of the
text.
The experience that doesn’t survive into the novel concerns the sensation provoked
by a piece of green cloth stopping up part of a broken window. Fragments of old percep-
tions return—‘‘wasps in a shaft of sunlight, a smell of cherries on a table’’—but nothing
more; not enough for Proust to place the past occasion. ‘‘Soon I could no longer see
anything, my memory had gone to sleep for good.’’ The failed invitation does however
produce in the writer a simile that later taken quite literally becomes the opening scene
of his novel, where a man wakes up in the night to wonder where he is: ‘‘For a moment
I was like one of those sleepers who awake in the night not knowing where they are, and
try to orientate their bodies so as to become aware of the place they are in, not knowing

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 PROUST: THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

in what bed, in what house, in what corner of the earth or in what year of their lives they
are.’’25
The other experiences evoked in Contre Sainte-Beuve are provoked by a piece of toast,
later to become a famous madeleine, dipped in a cup of tea; by some slippery and uneven
paving stones; by the sound of a spoon knocking against a plate; and by a line of trees in
the countryside. The first experience is placed near the beginning of the novel; the second
two, with additions (the texture of a napkin, the noise of a water pipe), close to its climax,
at the moment when the narrator is finally able to link his life’s ‘‘loveliest and saddest
night’’ with its ‘‘most glorious day.’’26 The fourth experience, the only full account of a
failure of involuntary memory, that is, of a vivid, even haunting solicitation by a memory
that the narrator cannot identify, appears in Proust’s second volume, À l’ombre des jeunes
filles en fleurs. It’s worth pausing over this episode before we look in more detail at memo-
ry’s triumphs, because failure in this realm, as I have already noted, is the rule rather than
the exception, and Proust wants us to remember this.
‘‘I recognized their shape and their formation,’’ Proust says of the trees in Contre
Sainte-Beuve, ‘‘and the line they made seemed traced from some mysterious and beloved
pattern that trembled in my heart. But more I could not tell.’’27 In À la recherche the trees,
now specifically a cluster of three, appear during a drive the narrator takes with Mme de
Villeparisis, a friend of his grandmother’s, in the countryside around Balbec. They are
close to a village called Hudimesnil. The narrator wonders, as his author-predecessor did,
only rather more elaborately, where he has seen the trees before. Not near Combray, he
thinks; and not near the German spa he once visited with his grandmother. Perhaps in
some place in his past of which no other trace remains. Perhaps in an old dream, or even
a very recent one, ‘‘a dream of only the night before, but already so faded that it seemed
to derive from much longer ago.’’ Perhaps he has never seen them, perhaps their hidden
meaning only feels like a memory. Perhaps it’s just an effect of déjà vu.

I could not tell. Still coming towards me, they might have been some mythological
apparition, a coven of witches, a group of Norns propounding oracles. But I saw
them as ghosts from my past, beloved companions from childhood, sometime friends
reminding me of shared moments. Like risen shades they seemed to be asking me to
take them with me, to bring them back to the realm of the living . . . I watched the
trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, ‘‘Whatever
you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside
where we stood striving to reach you, a whole part of your self which we brought for
you will return for ever to nothing.’’ And it is true that, though the same mode of
pleasure and disquiet which I had just experienced once more was to come back to
me in later years, though I did attend to it at last one evening—too late, but for
ever—I never did find out what it was these particular trees had attempted to convey
to me, or where it was that I had once seen them. When the carriage went round a

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 MICHAEL WOOD

corner, I lost sight of them somewhere behind me; and when Mme de Villeparisis
asked me why I looked so forlorn, I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or
felt something in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed
to recognize a god.28

Of course more than memory is at stake here. Hence the extraordinary note of loss and
betrayal and squandered chance. What the missed memory stands for, what it is part of,
is the whole world of vivid sensation the intelligence cannot hold or store for us. It is the
opposite of daily, practical life, it is lived life itself, what Proust’s narrator calls ‘‘our true
life, our reality as we have experienced it, which is often so different from what we believe
it to be that we are filled with happiness when some chance event brings the real memory
to us.’’29 ‘‘Experienced’’ means lived but forgotten; preserved in one form of memory
because forgotten in the other. And of course the complicated poignancy of ‘‘too late, but
for ever’’ should not escape us.

Immortality

When Proust’s narrator dips his madeleine into some warm tea, he experiences a ‘‘deli-
cious pleasure,’’ a ‘‘powerful joy.’’ The ‘‘vicissitudes of life’’ now seem unimportant to
him, ‘‘its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.’’ ‘‘I had ceased to feel I was mediocre,
contingent, mortal.’’ What has happened? He doesn’t know, and indeed says he ‘‘had to
put off to much later discovering why this memory made me so happy.’’ But he does
finally recognize the particular memory. He can ‘‘feel the resistance and . . . hear the
murmur of the distances travelled.’’ What is stirring in his mind is ‘‘the visual memory
which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me.’’ ‘‘And suddenly the memory
appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday morn-
ings at Combray . . . my Aunt Leonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of
tea or lime-blossom.’’30
The novel doesn’t tell us how much later ‘‘much later’’ is in narrative time, but the
gap matters because it subtly alters even the initial claim for involuntary memory. ‘‘There
is a great deal of chance in all this,’’ the narrator says, ‘‘and a second sort of chance, that
of our death, often does not let us wait very long for the favours of the first.’’31 ‘‘All the
exertions of our intelligence are useless,’’ he tells us; we can do nothing without the
accidental cue that sets the memory in motion. But then understanding the event is some-
thing else. We can be inexplicably happy through our luck, but we need the help of the
scorned intelligence to know what that happiness means.
And whatever the lapse of story time, we must wait until the last volume of the novel
for the narrator to arrive at this knowledge. He has a sequence of new memory experi-
ences, and now pauses over them and puts together his theory about them. His response

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 PROUST: THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

to each new event repeats the pattern established with the tea and madeleine—baffled,
delighted sensation, patient search for the elusive source, final finding of the connection—
but he quickly becomes more expert, because the experience is so swiftly repeated: ‘‘three
times in a few minutes,’’ as the narrator himself remarks, with another one following not
long after that. ‘‘One would have said,’’ he writes, ‘‘that the signs which were, on this day,
to bring me out of my despondency and renew my faith in literature, were intent on
multiplying themselves.’’32 One would. They were. He steps on some uneven paving
stones in a Paris courtyard and is transported to St. Mark’s Square in Venice; hears the
ring of a spoon against a plate and identifies it with the work of a wheeltapper on a
stopped train, a sound not consciously heard at the time of the journey; brushes his lips
with a napkin and finds himself back in the hotel by the sea in Balbec, where the texture
of the towels was similar; and hears the noise of a water-pipe, which also transports him
back to Balbec, this time because the sound evokes that of the horns of passing pleasure
boats. The narrator’s key phrase, the fairy godmother of his syntax, is ‘‘at the moment
when’’ (au moment où): ‘‘at the moment’’ when he steps on the stones, ‘‘at the moment’’
when he tastes the madeleine, ‘‘at the very moment’’ when the second memory-event
occurs. The ‘‘moment’’ is always the last possible moment, the moment the magic was
waiting for:

But sometimes it is at the moment when everything seems to be lost that the indica-
tion arrives that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere,
and then, unwittingly, one pushes against the only one through which one may enter
and for which one would have searched in vain for a hundred years, and it opens.33

Of course the fairy-tale result is not inevitable, we have seen that Proust insists on the
risks of failure. The person trying the doors cannot know that one of them will open. But
the person who has found an open door cannot return to the exact condition of the
potential failure. ‘‘There is a great deal of chance in all this,’’ but not now, not when the
story is over and ready to be told.
And of course the exploration of the memory experience, the complex redemptive
theory the narrator develops, has very little chance about it. ‘‘The only way to continue
to appreciate [the experiences] was to try to understand them more completely.’’34 We
don’t need to follow his argument in great detail, since it soon leaves the question of
memory behind, but it is worth noting that Proust’s narrator insists that the cases are all
the same (‘‘The happiness that I had just experienced was indeed just like that I had felt
when eating the madeleine’’35) and that he picks up the image of ‘‘beautiful ideas’’ as
‘‘tunes in music which come back to us without our ever having heard them, and which
we do our best to listen to and to transcribe.’’36 His solution to ‘‘the riddle of happiness’’
is that the collision of times, the meeting of past and present in a sensation that belongs
to both, reveal the continuing existence of an extra-temporal self, a creature who is fully

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 MICHAEL WOOD

alive both now and then. ‘‘One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us,
in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.’’37 This is why he no longer feels
‘‘mediocre, contingent, mortal.’’ But a minute freed from time is itself still a minute, still
countable as time, and Proust doesn’t fail to notice this. ‘‘Fragments of existence’’ may
escape temporality, but only briefly: ‘‘the contemplation of them, while a contemplation
of eternity, was itself fugitive.’’38 And the narrator’s long meditation on time and the self
and the novel he is about to write ends with a startling reappearance of the historical
world in which no one is recognizable because everyone has aged so much. He calls this
‘‘a dramatic turn of events . . . which seemed to raise the gravest of objections to my
undertaking,’’39 and in this sense À la recherche ends precisely as the early draft did, by
floating the chance of failure. The narrator is not sure that he will have continuing
strength to keep the past ‘‘attached’’ to him.40 Time regained in one dimension may
always run out in another.

Time and Sorrow

The narrator of À la recherche has one more memory experience to report to us before he
ends his meditations and returns to the party. It is rather different from the others, and
he recognizes this fact, but only to devise a brilliant denial of this difference. There is no
flood of happiness in this case, only a sense of disturbance and intrusion, a ‘‘painful
impression’’ that strikes him ‘‘unpleasantly.’’41 He is in his host’s library and has opened
a book, the novel François le Champi, by George Sand, the very book, as it happens, that
his mother read to him on the night he describes as the loveliest and saddest of his life,
when after many refusals to come and kiss him goodnight she relented, with his father’s
encouragement, and stayed with him into the bargain. This book is not a trivial if magic-
working trigger like the others, but an instance that has alternately been brooded on and
repressed. Like the other cues, it resurrects a former self, but that self is a stranger:

For a moment I had angrily wondered who the stranger was who had just upset me.
But the stranger was myself, it was the child I was then, whom the book had just
brought back to life within me, knowing nothing of me except this child.42

It is true that here, as in the other instances, a vivid reality is restored, but it’s hard to
imagine that pain and happiness are equally welcome, and more importantly, the narra-
tor’s whole argument about the authenticity of first impressions now goes out the win-
dow, since this first impression has to be corrected if it is to carry the meaning he wants.
It’s not just that the intelligence has to go to work on the impression, which is the general
argument in this context. The intelligence now has to correct the impression, invert its
meaning. The narrator’s logical agility is extraordinary—the impression caused by the

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 PROUST: THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

book ‘‘seemed to have too little in common with my current thoughts, until I realized a
moment later, with an emotion that brought tears to my eyes, how much in accord with
them this impression actually was’’—and he invents a wonderful analogy.

In a room where somebody had died, the undertaker’s men are getting ready to bring
down the coffin, while the son of a man who has done his country some service
shakes hands with the last friends as they file out; if a fanfare suddenly sounds be-
neath the windows, he is horrified and thinks that some mockery is being made of
his grief. At this, although he has until then remained in control of himself, he can
suddenly no longer restrain his tears; because he has just realized that what he is
hearing is the band of a regiment that is sharing his mourning and paying its last
respects to his father’s mortal remains.43

The narrator is right, of course: resurrection, like respect, can take many forms. But not
right enough for his own case: noise can’t sound like silence.
The narrator seems happy enough with his sleight of mind here, but I think Proust
the novelist expects us to remember other involuntary memory experiences in the narra-
tive, other instances where the past came rushing back in a flood of pain, and indeed
bringing far more pain than this easily convertible unpleasantness. The most significant
of these events is so central to the novel—it appears in a section called ‘‘intermittences of
the heart,’’ which at one point was Proust’s title for the whole work—that I think we have
to believe that the narrator is unconsciously willing himself not to remember it as he
celebrates his final epiphanies and assimilates the new encounter with François le Champi
to them. Perhaps involuntary forgetting is just as important as involuntary memory.
Returning to Balbec a year or so after his grandmother’s death, the narrator bends
down to take off his shoes, and is abruptly ‘‘filled with an unknown, divine presence.’’ ‘‘I
was shaken by sobs, tears streamed from my eyes.’’44 He is suddenly, fully remembering
his grandmother, as distinct from intentionally seeking to recall her, and in doing so he
becomes the self he was when they visited Balbec together. ‘‘It was only at this instant,’’
the narrator writes, ‘‘that I learned that she was dead.’’ Really dead because magically alive
again. He had spoken and thought of her often since her passing, he says, ‘‘but beneath
the words and thoughts . . . there had never been anything that might resemble my
grandmother.’’ ‘‘For to the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the
heart.’’ And if our old joys and sorrows live within us,

it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us
and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different
order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness.45

We are back in the archives Proust mapped out for us in Jean Santeuil. But now the size
of the archive is less important than our erratic access to it, and than the uncertainty of

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 MICHAEL WOOD

the resurrection’s result. Involuntary memory returns a lost past to us, and in the narra-
tor’s most optimistic reading must produce joy—precisely because the lost is found, and
independently of the affective content of what was lost. But it may also return the lost
past to us as lost, and this is what happens with the narrator’s grandmother. He struggles
vainly with what he describes as both a ‘‘strange contradiction’’ and a ‘‘painful synthesis’’
between ‘‘survival and nothingness’’: ‘‘On meeting her again, I realized I had lost her for
ever.’’46 His grandmother is more alive than she was a moment ago, as alive as she had
ever been; and by the same token deader than she had been too, given over to ‘‘a nothing-
ness that had . . . made of my grandmother, at the moment when I had found her again
as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had led to spend a few years with me. . . . I
clung to these sorrows . . . with all my strength. . . . I felt that I truly remembered her
only through sorrow.’’47
Can we reconcile these memory-stories, telling of irrefutable joy and undiluted sor-
row? In part we can. If loss of reality, the failure of all experience, is the worst thing in
the world, then the return of reality, even the most painful, will be some kind of victory,
a come-back from death-in-life. And in part we shouldn’t try too hard, because the hesita-
tion between contradiction and synthesis is important, and because we are after all read-
ing a novel. In that novel both character and author need (and find) a resolution in the
triumphant sequence of memory experiences near the end. The narrator certainly recog-
nizes, as we have seen, that he might not have stumbled on these experiences; cannot
afford to remember, it seems, how difficult such experiences are when turned toward loss
of a loved one rather than finding of a self—or more precisely, toward finding of a self
full of loss. And the novel stylizes this story by separating its elements. The story of the
madeleine and the story of the grandmother look as if they are in distant dialogue: each
is what the other forgets. But beyond the needs of the novel and in the larger argument
about memory, the stories don’t need to belong to the same register. They can be differ-
ent, but not opposed. It would be enough, in such a perspective, for the pain of the living
past to be real but not the only possibility for that past’s return to reality. In the ‘‘strong’’
philosophy of the novel the powerful joy of involuntary memory becomes a not wholly
successful denial of time and sorrow. More modestly we could take it as the perceptible
proof that time and sorrow, while undeniable, are not everything.

Noise

Of course the celebrations of involuntary memory, in whatever form and with whatever
emotional results, remain part of the narrator’s, and indeed Proust’s own, war on the
intelligence. It’s not just that the intelligence can’t resurrect memories for us, it’s that
memories reside ‘‘only in objects in which the intelligence has not sought to embody
them.’’

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 PROUST: THE MUSIC OF MEMORY

The moment you have been living will not find asylum in the objects to which you
have sought consciously to connect it. What is more, if some other thing is able to
resurrect them, when they are resurrected with it, they will have been stripped of all
their poetry.48

This is quite categorical, and very extreme. We cannot remember anything, in the ordi-
nary sense of ‘‘remember.’’ To seek to remember the past is totally to destroy it—or if
you prefer, to make it purely the past, nothing but the past, no longer a candidate for
anything but the most abstract and unfelt of resurrections.
What Proust is doing here and what he makes his narrator consistently do in À la
recherche is to remove everything that matters from the realm of reason and mastery and
to deliver it to pure chance. The resurrection of his lost summers—which were not those
summers, he says, when he merely thought of them—‘‘depended, like all resurrections,
on simple chance.’’49 Like all resurrections. In the novel the repetition of the thought of
death as a form of chance that can always arrive too soon sends us back to the notional
ending found in the draft: ‘‘And no one will ever know, not even oneself . . .’’ I think the
idea of the abdication of reason also hovers here, and makes a new kind of sense in this
context. Proust is insisting on the role of chance as a way of magically flattering chance
itself, as if he were making an offering to a capricious Greek god. He is underselling
intelligence and overselling fortune. Or rather, since no one can know the proper price of
either, he is trying to avoid all risk of intellectual hubris.
But there is another form of remembering in À la recherche, and I should like to
evoke it as an epilogue, because it is different both from voluntary and from involuntary
memory, or perhaps partakes of each. This is the remembering that in one sense informs
the whole novel, gives it much of its page-by-page substance while the rescues of involun-
tary memory provide its ultimate plot. In Du côté de chez Swann, the narrator inserts a
later reflection into the story of the goodnight kiss. Of course the whole narrative, as
distinct from what is narrated, belongs to this later time, but this passage makes the time
lag clear, indeed is about the time lag, and about how time has passed and not passed.
The reflection appears just after the father has suggested the mother spend the night with
the boy, and just before the mother offers her ‘‘official’’ recognition that the child’s prob-
lem is ‘‘regarded no longer as a punishable offence but as an involuntary ailment.’’

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his
candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed
that I thought were bound to last forever . . . It was a very long time ago, too, that
my father ceased to be able to say to Mama: ‘‘Go with the boy.’’ The possibility of
such hours will never be reborn for me. But for a little while now, I have begun to
hear again very clearly, if I take care to listen, the sobs I was strong enough to contain
in front of my father and that did not burst out until I found myself alone again with

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 MICHAEL WOOD

Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is quieting down
around me more and more now that I can hear them again, like those convent bells
covered so well by the clamour of the town during the day that one would think they
had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.50

The house is gone, the parents are gone, much of the inner life of narrator has been
destroyed, but the sobs have never stopped. This claim is hyperbolic and metaphorical,
but clearly and movingly suggests the persistence of memory. In this view our memories
are much closer to us than Bergson’s permanent but elusive possessions or Proust’s own
dramatically buried treasures. What conceals the past from us is neither the vastness of the
archive nor the workings of chance, neither the mischievous intelligence nor the eagerly
misapplied will, but daily distraction, ‘‘the clamour of the town,’’ the sheer noise of get-
ting on with life.

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 8. Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin
Memory from Weimar to Hitler

Esther Leslie

Siegfried Kracauer and Memory Loss

In mid-December 1932 Siegfried Kracauer wrote a short newspaper ar-

ticle entitled ‘‘Street without Memory.’’ Here he describes Berlin’s fash-
ionable shopping street, the Kurfürstendamm, as a place voided of
memory: ‘‘the embodiment of empty flowing time, where nothing per-
sists.’’1 He relates how on visiting a café where he often ate, and where
he was sure he had peeked in the night before, he found it closed, its
interior emptied. A year later he found that the café’s replacement, a
patisserie, had suffered the same fate. Having disappeared, these spaces
do not become part of memory, for ‘‘constant change purges mem-
ory.’’2 Reflecting on the lost café, he finds it difficult to recall its décor
or its clientele. The patisserie that replaced it obliterated the earlier
memories. ‘‘That which once was is never to be seen again, and that
which is current occupies the present one hundred percent.’’3 Kra-
cauer’s city sketch is a lament for vanished memory, not just a specific
memory, but also the possibility of having any memories at all.
Where Kracauer diagnosed memory-loss, Walter Benjamin ob-
served a sudden flooding of memory. Memory is flooded by memoirs—
Benjamin points to a rash of biographical accounts of war appearing
some ten years after the end of the 1914–18 conflict. Resentful soldiers
on the losing side made efforts to reshape the meaning of what had
occurred.4 The flood of memoirs as much as Kracauer’s fixation on the
forgotten and overridden are both elements of a wider fascination with
memory and its processes in Weimar Germany, at a moment of crisis.
Both Kracauer and Benjamin assess memory darkly, perceiving it as
under threat or fugitive, an arena of social, technological, economic,
and political conflict, while ‘‘genuine’’ memory is a possession of only

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 ESTHER LESLIE

those who are or may one day be fully, unalienated post-capitalist humans. In Kracauer’s
diagnosis, something has happened to memory historically. Rapid change and the over-
whelming presence of the current mean that memory is actively expunged in the name of
‘‘now.’’ Kracauer, a trained architect, perceives a complement to this in building design.
In earlier days ornamentation appeared as a bridge to yesterday and so indicated a sort of
memory preserved by buildings, an index of the persistence of the past. The new struc-
tures on the Kurfürstendamm have no ornamental twiddles on their facades. Their front-
ages are sleek and glassy, repelling associations. Ornament is out of fashion, just as are
the cluttered and decorative interiors of the late nineteenth century, no longer favored in
the super-modern and slick times of the 1920s and 1930s. Modern times are seemingly
without sentiment, without ties that bind to days gone. Modern days are rational, objective,
progressive, and forward-looking. That is the ideology of the modern, its self-justification
and its advertising copy. But Kracauer discerns another motivation, an underlying drive,
that concretely undermines the physical traces of the past, forcing them out of the present.
At the end of 1932 Germany is in the grip of a worldwide depression unleashed by the
Wall Street crash of 1929. In the new Berlin of crisis, businesses can but be improvised,
temporary. Structures are fleeting, everyone bivouacs for a moment. That the buildings
change their function, their décor, their clientele so rapidly, Kracauer notes, is a sign of
economic failure. Kracauer links memory and economy. Modernity’s rapid flux is a prod-
uct of financial instability experienced by individuals as contingency. The flux keeps peo-
ple running on the spot, overwriting old memories with constantly new situations.
Modernity is experienced as a form of amnesia induced by economic conditions.
Kracauer’s diagnosis of the modern condition is bleak. The memoryless are without
a home because they lack a past. They have lost essentially human capacities, which are
related to duration and continuity. Kracauer mentions some dancers he spies in a private
club. They move like marionettes amid leather sofas and carpets that substitute for their
‘‘vanished inner architecture.’’5 ‘‘Inner architecture’’ is Kracauer’s name for all that would
constitute their human existence: the internal axis of past, present, and future, as ex-
pressed in memories, dreams, emotions, desires, wishes. One word for memory in Ger-
man is Erinnerung, which includes within itself the idea of the ‘‘inner,’’ or internalization.
Without innerness, people have become pure surface. It is not only people who lack
depth. The world and all its effects appear to him to be only superficial.6 Objects, such as
sofas or carpets, persist for a while, only then to be discarded, along with the traces of use
that mark them. Ernst Bloch gave a name to the environments that Kracauer charted. In
his review of Kracauer’s 1930 study Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) Bloch called
them the ‘‘artificial middle’’ (künstliche Mitte).7 As Bloch puts it, Kracauer penetrates this
center of modernity, which others only observe. It is the zone of ghostly white-collar
workers scuttling around in the empty everyday, haunting their locales and rooms. Bloch
calls this the ‘‘hollow space’’ (Hohlraum), a cavernous space chock-full with distractions
and fads. The hollow space makes its inhabitants dizzy and susceptible to hedonistic

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gratification among the bedazzlement of fleeting impressions on the streets and in the
entertainment extravaganzas. The task of the critic is to find ways to delve beneath this
smooth and fluxy surface of humans and objects to discover a ‘‘deeper meaning’’ that
must surely still inhere (just as memory is not abolished but fugitive). This quest for
meaning is what Kracauer undertook in his analyses of seemingly forgettable movies or
sudden and contingent configurations of bodies on city streets.
Kracauer’s analyses appeared weekly in a Frankfurt newspaper. The regular columns
for the Frankfurter Zeitung grapple with modernity’s dissolution of contemporary mem-
ory. In Kracauer’s rescue operation, the unpredictable and the unmemorable become the
sites where memory is reinforced after all, by him. However, his regular writings are
subject to the same process of forgetting. The newspaper that contains them is thrown
away at the end of each day. The writings continue to exist only as memory traces, which
means more likely they are forgotten.

Kracauer, Memory, and Technology

In Kracauer’s writing memory is multiply under threat. It is not simply the pace of change
and economic instability that menace memory. Memory is also challenged technologically
by modern inventions that counter memory, even as they appear to aid it. Photography
is the most notable example. Kracauer compares images that come to mind in memory
and images produced by the camera. For him, the brief moment caught in the camera’s
viewfinder when a person stands before the lens conveys only a very reduced part of the
scene. The photograph is tied to one contingent moment, or rather the external, spacial-
ized look of a single moment. When, in Kracauer’s example, a grandmother placed herself
before the camera’s lens as a twenty-four-year-old, ‘‘she was present for one second in
the spatial continuum that presented itself to the lens. But it was this aspect and not the
grandmother that was eternalized.’’8 Photography shows only the surface of a person, the
outer skin at one moment in time. In this respect, perhaps, it is coincident with the
modern person type, who is, in Kracauer’s depiction, just a shell, without ‘‘innerness.’’
This is unlike the memory-image, which portrays a concentrated and enhanced image of
a person. The image that flashes into memory is a whole image of the person. The mem-
ory-image conjures up a condensed version of the person that sums up and summons up
his or her totality, even if it is selective. Unlike the indiscriminate camera lens, memory,
deliberately or not, picks the images it draws into its purview. In time, the grandmother
as a young girl becomes anyone, an exemplar of any figure of that age from that year. The
old photograph of the grandmother cannot relate to memory because no living memory
still retains an image of the grandmother as a girl. No living memory can determine how
accurate or inaccurate the likeness is. Her arrested smile ‘‘no longer refers to the life from
which it has been taken. Likeness has ceased to be of any help. The smiles of mannequins

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in beauty parlors are just as rigid and perpetual.’’9 The memory image cheats time because
it finds a niche in living memory and so is loosened from any single moment of remem-
bering. Photography, by contrast, fixes one moment and makes it permanent. In doing
this it apparently excerpts it from history and memory. Because memory has vacated it
entirely, the image of the grandmother is appropriated by time, which makes an image of
itself.10
All photographs are subsumed by time. Contemporary photographs are also swal-
lowed up by time, but differently. Kracauer comments on the photograph of a current
film actress. The photographic evocation of a star, who is a living human being, a ‘‘corpo-
real reality,’’11 functions as a reminder of the figure known originally—if only in mediated
form—as the star of a successful film. This photograph has little to do with memory in
its full intimate sense. The star is not known by her public. Her public possess only this
one moment of her. The photograph fits into the continuum that constitutes our experi-
ence of the present. Her image smoothes into the now, presumably to be overwritten by
the next image, the next star, tomorrow. Unlike photography, memory-images are not
instants from a continuous linear narrative,12 but are rather suddenly flashed up moments
that are freighted with significance. Memory is ‘‘full of gaps,’’ consisting of impressions
from other times, which make sense only because of their subjective resonance.13 Memory
is composite and personal.
The culture of Weimar Germany was distinctly photographic. Illustrated magazines
chock-full of photos snapped up anything and everything in the world.14 Exhibitions
devoted to photographs were fashionable and fully at one with the rhetoric of modernity.
Photography and film were the media for mediating the modernity of which they also
formed a definitive part. For Kracauer, this accumulated photographic data, reveling in
its newness and its ability to communicate the new, is effective at repressing the fact
of death: ‘‘What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the
recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image.’’15 Memory is
intimate with death, and the passing of all things and states, until the time when death
engulfs it too. In contrast, the flood of photographs wards off death. But, of course, one
day all this most modern photography, this tracing of Weimar’s surface, would become
just so many images of outdatedness, of passé fashions, the forgotten and the despised
elements from a world that has adopted a ‘‘photographic face.’’16 In time photographs
lose meaning, reduced to a heap of details. At the point of their collapse, Kracauer sees
the possibility that they might gain another type of meaning, existing as an emblem of
our grim existential condition. The recorded passage of time shows how fragile and condi-
tional our objects and our lives are: ‘‘photography gathers fragments around a nothing.’’17
Despite its repulsion of death, in Kracauer’s eye, photography reveals the deadly empti-
ness that nestles the heart of life. Photography’s expulsion of the essence of a person, a
person’s subjective resonance, becomes an advantage when it is used as a document of

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history. Once a photograph’s personal significance is quite shriveled, the stockpiled ele-
ments that it blatantly displays yield information, details, data that had been overlooked
or unnoticed until now. Kracauer observes: ‘‘For the first time in history, photography
brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, the inert world presents itself
in its independence from human beings.’’18 The estrangement that the photograph deliv-
ers as it slips from memory and falls out of kilter with present time—an alienation from
human and historical thinking in a personal context—becomes its advantage later when
social histories are to be examined. Photography, in its independence, its distance from
personal memory, becomes significant for detailing social histories. Kracauer redeems
photography and makes its serve the memory of the collective.
Kracauer compares memory to photography precisely because the technology of pho-
tography appears to replicate some of the tasks of memory. But his conclusion warns
against any true affinity. Walter Benjamin, his contemporary, also made a link between
photography and memory, but his analysis of the extent to which humans have been
remolded by their technologies encourages him to surmise more of a resemblance than
Kracauer might allow.

Walter Benjamin, Memory, and Image Technologies

On several occasions Walter Benjamin considers memory in relation to the new technolo-
gies of vision. It is as if in modernity memory cannot be thought without recourse to the
technologies that usurp its role as archivist. But Benjamin’s is not a dismal view of how
celluloid partners memory. For him the new technologies of image-making have entered
into modern lives—meeting viewers halfway, in a situation determined not by tradition
but by the viewer—and have made themselves indispensable. Photographs and film have
seized our imaginations, which is to say they have made themselves part of our internal
worlds. One of the starkest examples of this is offered by Benjamin’s memoirs, which
appear under two titles, A Berlin Chronicle (1932) and Berlin Childhood around 1900
(1938). Photography and memory mesh at various points in these writings, in which, as
in that work that he partly translated, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the material
form of memories is of equal significance to the act of reminiscence.
An early version of one of the thirty-odd vignettes in Berlin Childhood around 1900,
‘‘The Little Hunchback,’’ mentions the cliché of the rapid film of a ‘‘whole life’’ streaming
past the mind’s eye at the moment of death.19 It is like a thumb-cinema, Benjamin notes.
So too should his book of memoirs seem: a rapid succession of images, comprising short
scenes that have impressed themselves into memory. Likewise he employs photographic
metaphors in A Berlin Chronicle. In this collection of autobiographical fragments he re-
flects on the irruption of the forgotten past into the present. The first reflection describes
those peculiar moments when something akin to a magnesium flare indelibly sears onto

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memory an image or circumstance—in Benjamin’s example, a room—as if memory were

a photographic plate. Some time later that same image flashes once again into conscious-
ness’s view in order to be decoded.20 Benjamin’s reflection on ‘‘temporal removal,’’ which
is arguably the mechanism of photography, involves déjà vu. A wayward segue of past
and present produces a ‘‘shock’’ and so, for example, a ‘‘forgotten glove or reticule’’ is
stumbled upon, and it causes a word or gesture to suddenly return. Benjamin illustrates
his point through an anecdote involving the return of repressed knowledge in the present.
He reveals how, one night, when he was five or six, his father entered his bedroom to
wish him goodnight, but lingered to report a relative’s death. The little boy was indifferent
to the news concerning his older relation. Unable to assimilate the facts his father relayed
about heart attacks, instead, as his father spoke, he imprinted onto his memory all the
details of his room—because he felt ‘‘dimly’’ that he would one day have to return to
search for something ‘‘forgotten’’ there. This he does, some years later, when he finds out
the repressed (because scandalous) truth: the real cause of his relative’s death was, in fact,
syphilis.21
Memory, for Benjamin, is not just recall of events that are buried in the past. It
involves a quest for knowledge or truth about a situation. To this extent, memory is
envisaged in much the same way as Benjamin imagines photography and film. Like mem-
ory, cameras operate with an unconscious.22 The camera’s undiscriminating eye absorbs
more than is consciously perceived and records it all for later examination. In similar
fashion, memory develops belatedly into understanding, just as a photograph snatches an
image from time and presents it to the world again only after a process of development.
Memory deposits are shocked belatedly into knowledge, blasted, as Benjamin says else-
where, into ‘‘the now of recognizability’’—‘‘in which things adopt their true—
surrealistic—face.’’23 Echoes of the future are deposited in the past like time bombs, and
in his memoirs, Benjamin is hunting out the detonated and detonatable mines of the fin
de siècle.
Benjamin has occasion to return to the death room again when he writes his memoirs
of childhood. For this he conjures up in his mind’s eye memories of spaces, textures,
patterns, atmospheres, and relationships. Memory is annexed, in a Proustian way, to
sensuous experience. If not the visual, then perhaps the smelled, the tasted, or the heard:
Benjamin speaks at one point not of ‘‘déjà vu’’ but of the ‘‘already heard,’’ noting how
some events seem to reach us like an echo awakened by a call from the past.

It is a word, a tapping, or a rustling that is endowed with the magic power to trans-
port us into the cool tomb of long ago, from the vault of which the present seems to
return only as an echo.24

Scuttling back to ‘‘the cool tomb of long ago,’’ Benjamin records the accoutrements of
life in Berlin in 1900: the patterns on family dinnerware, the organic forms of garden

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chairs on balconies, the intricacies of Aunt Lehmann’s miniaturized quarry ornament, the
swirls of falling snow as tracked through the window of a warm parlor by a bookish
bourgeois boy who is prone to illness. Recalling objects and places allows for the adum-
bration of past experience, of what it was like to be and to feel in the earliest days of the
twentieth century. But the memoirs are not an occasion for nostalgic recall of a completed
past. This past is incomplete, which is to say that it has repercussions in the present, and
from the perspective of redemption, the perspective Benjamin favors, could be otherwise
cashed out. If studied closely that which will come into being or could have come into
being may already be spotted lurking in it. Memory is not just of the past, but juts into
the future too, though this can only be discerned retrospectively. In the frames of the
scenes recounted, snared details register the inventory of a future that will yet come into
being, and that might have already been anticipated under an attentive enough glare.
In the present the act of remembering comes into its own, for true meaning like
photographs, develops later, and then it is memory’s work to reveal a truth at first ob-
scured. This future that lurks in Benjamin’s memories is a grim and violent one, disas-
trous for the many, but also reflected individually in Benjamin’s various ‘‘failures’’—his
adult illnesses, his lack of success at earning money, his general out-of-placeness.25 Por-
tents of the fiascoes to come can already be read in the culture of Wilhelmine Germany,
even in the most intimate locations, such as the balcony of a bourgeois apartment. For
example, disaster is apparent in the vignette ‘‘Loggias,’’ in Berlin Childhood around 1900,
which speaks of cradles that become mausoleums. Such a balcony-tomb houses Benjamin,
for its uninhabitability seems to him an appropriate domicile for one whose destiny is to
be stateless and uprooted. He nestles among the abandoned clutter that has been exiled
from the home. These loggias are the crib of the first recollections of the city. As these
memories and their nourishing fantasies fade or are disabused, the loggias become the
tomb of an entire bourgeois class, condemned, ‘‘in panicked horror,’’ according to
Adorno’s afterword, to witness its ‘‘disintegrating aura,’’ and to come to ‘‘awareness of
itself: as illusion.’’26 Memory registers catastrophe. In the autobiographical snapshots of
A Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin finds in his memory of school

rigidly fixed words, expressions, verses that, like a malleable mass, which has later
cooled and hardened, preserve in me the imprint of the collision between a larger
collective and myself. Just as, when you awake, a certain kind of significant dream
survives in the form of words though all the rest of the dream content has vanished,
here isolated words have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters.27

School, which Benjamin hated, has converted itself into a few remembered words, slogans
and clichés that exemplify the inflexibility of his educational experience. In remembering
this time Benjamin is able to make it historically significant in a wider sense. This stiffness
and inertness is an indicator of the wider decadent Wilhelmine culture that will outpour

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into war. It is also the prequel to the further catastrophic encounters, such as those that
make Benjamin take leave of his home city.
When Theodor and Gretel Adorno collated a selection of Benjamin’s writings for
Suhrkamp in 1955 they lodged Berlin Childhood around 1900 in a section called ‘‘Picture-
Puzzles and Miniatures’’ (Vexierbilder und Miniaturen). Benjamin cherished these two
things—rebuses, because they demanded to be solved and the clues were contained in the
image, and miniatures because they condensed the world into handleable, studyable form.
Photography—an art of coincidence, when the photographer and camera coincides with
the fraction of a moment, an instant of objective arrangement—makes portable picture-
puzzles, sometime miniaturizing, occasionally magnifying. Benjamin hoped to parallel
this trickery verbally in his memoirs. Unlike in Kracauer’s pessimistic critique of photog-
raphy, memory finds an analogue in photography. Adorno recognizes this aspect of Ben-
jamin’s memoirs in his afterword to the first German edition of Berlin Childhood around
1900 in 1950:

These fairy-photographs of a Berlin childhood are not only the ruins of a long-de-
parted life seen from an aerial perspective, but also shots of the airy state, snapped
by an astronaut who persuaded his models to kindly hold still for a moment.28

Benjamin: Memory and Mementos

Benjamin began writing his memoirs in 1932. In that same year he wrote to his friend
Gershom Scholem that he wanted to spend his birthday in Nice with ‘‘a quite droll fellow’’
whom he had often met in his life. It seems that he was referring to death and that he
planned to kill himself in his hotel room.29 Instead he chose to write about memory and
imagining the past in a lecture on Marcel Proust. Benjamin’s lecture touches on mortality.
He writes of dying and again evokes the cliché of the proto-photographic strip of images
of a life whirring through a dying person’s head. The operation of this proto-cinematic
device is once more aligned to the process of memory. Memories burst up at a moment
of crisis. They are involuntarily summoned strips of montage, flashing past in rapid suc-
cession. The notion of the ‘‘involuntary memory’’ is taken from Proust. Involuntary
memory does not indicate consciously dredged up recollections, but rather overcomes an