By Pradip Phanjoubam
The following paragraphs are an (abridged) extract from another discursive chapter of my project at the IIAS on the antagonism between history and memory.
The discussion on the difficulty of deciding primacy of either the objective or subjective account of history would also quite logically lead to a related and important debate on the conflict between history and memory. A good place to begin a scan of this debate is a provocative statement by Pierre Nora in Between History and Memory about how ‘history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it’. He qualifies this statement saying, ‘memory, insofar as it is magical, only accommodates those facts that suits it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic – responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it binds – which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority.
Is memory then not reliable and therefore unworthy as records of the past? Robert R. Archibald disagrees in A Personal History of Memory where he argues memory represents another dimension of the understanding of any given event. Ignoring it therefore would be at the cost of an incomplete representation of the past. He argues that while memory is a living phenomenon and therefore belongs to the realm of poetry, history by its very certainty cannot but belong to the prosaic world. The two represents very different aspects of the same reality. Archibald illustrates this by the analogy of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. For the near and dear ones of soldiers who are commemorated by this monument, the wall represents the site where chronological time and space collapse, and the past becomes the present. It is a sacred site where they can meet and speak to their lost near ones – a metaphysical experience. To the historian the wall would represents an altogether different reality. I quote Archibald here at some length.
`The Vietnam Veteran War Memorial in Washington D.C., is not a historical site as usually defined, but it is surely a memory place…..Here, memories conjoin those who are commemorated on the wall and all those relatives and friends and comrades for whom the wall is a place of remembrance. There is a sense of closeness to both the living and the dead as memories come in torrents and the past becomes contemporary, so much so that the dead are addressed as the living. It is as if this place, sanctified by the memories of all who visit, is somehow a nexus between the living and the dead….. Yet a historian could only evaluate the wall as a symbol, describe how the wall was built, count the hordes of visitors, and speculate about the power of the place. The metaphysical qualities of the place, which are really the source of its power, are not the topics of history and in fact are antithetical to the whole notion of history as a rational inquiry subject to specialised rules of evidence. History can describe what happens here but cannot travel inside of it… the place is hallowed not by the physicality but by the tears shed, the mementos left, the emotions experienced, the words exchanged… It is also a place to recall passion, love, intimacy, lost lovers, and to remember in the most elemental and most powerful way possible – emotionally. Our emotions remember in ways that our intellects never will.`
Memory therefore has an important place in understanding the past, though unlike history, it is a variable and there will always be ‘as many memories as there are groups’.
Because memories are so widely different and sometimes incredible, another kind of gap in representation often results because of silence of survivors. Within the same survivor community these memories will circulate freely as their shared experience will ensure they do not appear incredulous. But it is in the dissemination of these stories outside the community where the inhibition would be. Saul Friedlander writes in Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the “Shoah” that ‘The silence did not exist within the survivor community. It was maintained in relation to the outside world and was often imposed by shame, the shame of telling a story that must appear unbelievable and was, in any case entirely out of tune with surrounding society.’
James E. Young in Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor compliments Friedlander and writes that despite the contention of how unreliable memory was as a guide to realities of the past, Friedlander shows in his integrated history that the realities themselves, as they actually unfolded, owe an essential debt to those who lived and remembered them. The challenge of history writing then according to Young is to realise the ‘need to find a middle road by which the living memory of the eye-witness might be assimilated to the historical record without using it only rhetorically to authenticate any given narrative, without allowing it to endow the surrounding narrative with the seeming naturalness of the survivor’s voice.’
Dominick LaCapra has a caution for those looking to work through trauma in this manner. ‘Those traumatized by extreme events, as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it. Part of this feeling may be the melancholic sentiment that, in working through the past in a manner that enables survival or a reengagement in life, one is betraying those who were overwhelmed and consumed by that traumatic past. One’s bond with the dead, especially with dead intimates, may invest trauma with value and make its reliving a painful but necessary commemoration or memorial to which one remains dedicated or at least bound. This situation may create a more or less unconscious desire to remain within trauma.’
This fidelity to trauma is close to what Caruth calls the guilt of trauma history telling referred to earlier in this chapter. This is also a guilt or trauma fidelity which shows up in different ways in any closer look at societies ravaged by insurgency and violence in the Northeast. It can reduce to a sense of victimhood or else an unexplained, often irrational fidelity to the past and those who were did not survive – a martyrdom complex of sort.
This idea also recalls Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. In mourning one’s effort is to come to terms with the loss. One pledges loyalty to the memory of the loss and that one would never betray that memory, but one also distinguishes oneself from the loss and acquires a critical perspective, precisely because one has to continue to live and thus move on to reinvest in life. This idea corresponds to LaCapra’s ‘working through’ trauma. In Melancholia, which again roughly corresponds to LaCapra’s ‘acting out’, on the other hand is a narcissistic engagement in which the victim begins to take perverse pleasure in the idea of being a victim, thus perpetuating the condition. From this understanding, victim and victimhood are worlds apart.
There are other more direct challenges to the proposition of elevating memory as authoritative historical evidence. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub co-authored book on Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, is often cited in the debate over the reliability, or unreliability as it were, of memory. The book gives a good summary of the typical response of historians to survivor’s testimony and challenges it. In a particularly famous case, the survivor, a woman then in her sixties, was recalling details of the short-lived Sonderkommando uprising at Austchwitz of which independent video footage of the actual event was available. The difference in what she narrated and what the video said was the issue. Here is the account in the book by Dori Laub:
`A woman in her late sixties was narrating her Auschwitz experience to interviewers from the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale…. She was relating her memories as an eyewitness of the Auschwitz uprising; a sudden intensity, passion and colour were infused into the narrative. She was fully there. ‘All of a sudden,’ she said, ‘we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.’ There was a silence in the room, a fixed silence against which the woman’s words reverberated loudly, as though carrying along an echo of the jubilant sounds exploding from behind barbed wires, a stampede of people breaking lose, screams, shots, battle cries, explosions.`
The historical fact was as Laub, notes, ‘only one chimney was blown up, not all four.’ Since this was known from actual record, historians jumped to the conclusion that ‘the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible, one could not accept – nor give credence to – her whole account of events.’
Laub, who as a psychoanalyst is disconcerted at this response of the historians and explains that ‘the woman was testifying not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.
James E. Young pitches to observe that ‘such historians ignore the value of these mistaken perceptions for understanding how this knowledge – as fallible as it was – may have woven itself into the very course of events as they unfolded.’ This is to say that these ‘mistaken’ perceptions may have had profound influence in the course of tangible actions which fall on the historian’s cognitive map. If so, how is it justified to treat these supposedly mistaken perceptions as inconsequential factors in the making of history? Subjective visions, if not for any other reason, then for the bearings they have on the course of events in the objective world, must also be given empirical values.
