Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History
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Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History Edric Caldicott Anne Fuchs Editors PETER LANG Cultural Memory This page intentionally left blank Edric Caldicott & Anne Fuchs (eds) Cultural Memory Essays on European Literature and History PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbi- bliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA Cover design:Thomas Jaberg, Peter Lang AG ISBN 3-03910-053-X US-ISBN 0-8204-6294-2 © Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com,www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law,without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany Contents Acknowledgements 9 Edric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs Introduction 11 Part 1: Memory as Counter-History 33 Jeanne Riou Historiography and the Critique of Culture in Schiller, Nietzsche and Benjamin 35 Carol Baxter Communal Memory as a Response to Crisis: The Community of Port-Royal, 1661–1711 53 Síofra Pierse A Sceptic Witness: Voltaire’s Vision of Historiography 69 Angela Reinicke Authenticity, Truth and the Other in B. Wilkormirski’s Bruchstücke and W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten 85 Sabine Egger Deconstructing Marxist-Leninist Historiography: Memories of National Socialism in East German Poetry 99 6 Contents Part 2: Narrative and Remembering 115 David Rock Creating Memories in the Search for Identity: The Holocaust Fiction of Jurek Becker 117 Eamonn Jordan The Meta-Theatricalization of Memory in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa 129 Deirdre Byrnes Exposing the Gaps in Memory: Forgetting and Remembering in Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe 147 Patrick Crowley Figuring the Past: Cultural Memory in Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules 161 Part 3: Locating Memory 173 Douglas Smith Without Walls: ‘World Art’ and Malraux’s Imaginary Museum 175 Guy Beiner Mapping the ‘Year of the French’: The Vernacular Landscape of Folk Memory 191 Christian J. Emden ‘Nachleben’: Cultural Memory in Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin 209 Contents 7 Phyllis Gaffney Aughrim, Flanders, Ladysmith and Other Sites of Memory in Beckett’s Mercier et Camier 225 Gillian Pye Haunting the Self: Herbert Achternbusch’s Ella 241 Part 4: Remembering and Renewal 259 Edric Caldicott Anniversaries: Republican Collectivization of Memory, from Molière to Dreyfus 261 Deirdre O’Grady Deformity and Dualism: Arrigo Boito and the Crisis of Italian Romanticism 277 Susan Bassnett Translation as Re-Membering 293 Patrick O’Donovan Common Culture and Creativity: Forgetting and Remembering in the Cultural Theory of Michel de Certeau 311 Alison Ribeiro De Menezes Purloined Letters: Juan Goytisolo, José María Blanco White, and the Cultural Construction of Marginal Identity 327 8 Contents Part 5: Remembering as Trauma 341 Tom Quinn Rewriting Memory: The Great War in Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit 343 Carmel Finnan Contested Memories: Autobiographical Challenges to the Collective Memory of the Shoah 361 Catherine O’Leary History and Remembering in the Post-Franco Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo 377 Silvia Ross Remembering Betrayal: The Roman Ghetto’s Pantera Nera in Elena Gianini Belotti and Giuseppe Pederiali 391 Notes on Contributors 407 Index of Names 413 Acknowledgements When the studies published in this volume were originally solicited, the millenial year was ending and Armistice Day was approaching. They were presented at the twenty-seventh an- nual Modern Languages Research Symposium of the Royal Irish Academy, held in Dublin in early November 2000 to study the theme of cultural memory. The editors would therefore like to record a warm debt of gratitude to the Royal Irish Academy which provided the administrative framework and financial support required to bring together in conference the twenty- two eventual contributors to this book; in particular, we would like to thank Ms Aiveen Kemp for her sterling work as the secretary to our organizing committee. The material passage from conference to book could not have been accomplished without the assistance of the funding agencies of University College Dublin and its mother institution in the federal system, the National University of Ireland, viz. the Academic Publications Committee at UCD, and the Publications Committee of the National University. In addition, the generous intellectual and moral support of our colleagues and their respective departments transformed a potentially arduous task into an exciting collaborative venture, and we would like to record our profound gratitude not only to our contributors, but to our unpaid overworked external readers, Professors Gratton (then of UCD), Kinsella (Maynooth), and O’Donovan (Cork), with Dr Jürgen Barkhoff (Trinity College), Dr Angela Bourke (UCD), Dr Gilbert Carr (Trinity College), Dr Anne Fogarty (UCD), Dr Florian Krobb (Maynooth), and Dr Cormac O’Cuilleanain (Trinity College). This page intentionally left blank Edric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs Introduction ‘Memory’ and ‘culture’ are terms which have reached a state of high fashion, if not over-use, but they need careful handling. This introduction attempts to track their use in contemporary critical discourse, and then to relate their significance to literary and historical output; every essay in this volume shares this preoccupation, but addresses it within the specific brief of a ‘local’ context. Our concern here is to map the surrounding theoretical terrain. Over the past twenty years cultural memory has become the object of intense scientific, philosophical, social, and cultural enquiry. The proliferation of theories of cultural memory in particular has been fuelled by the perception that digital technology heralds the arrival of new storage systems; at the same time, and more significantly, the new technology has also created a shift of paradigm which affects the negotiation and articulation of our cultural identities. The recognition that memory should neither be conflated with storage systems of any kind nor with the neuro-physiological processes that allow us to recall past events is an insight that has guided nearly all debates in this area since the posthumous publication of Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal studies under the title On Collect- ive Memory.1 Halbwachs decisively dismissed the biological theories of memory that had dominated research in this area around the turn of the last century in favour of a cultural framework of interpretation, arguing that our memories are socially constructed. While certain neuro-physiological pro- 1 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser (ed. and trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Page references are henceforth cited in brackets in the text. 12 Edric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs cesses are undoubtedly the sine qua non for our capacity to conserve and retrieve information, analysis of these processes alone does not suffice to explain the formation of certain fields of knowledge and memory. The importance of Halbwachs’s work cannot be stressed sufficiently: by turning to the social frameworks that shape our memories, he showed that memory must not be understood as quintessentially an individual attribute. He writes, ‘it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’ (Halbwachs: 38). This means that, although the individual’s memories of his or her own past have a unique reference point in the self as a ‘locative system’,2 these memories are always forged vis-à-vis available social and cultural frameworks. Or as Jeffrey Prager argues, although memories are ‘embodied’ in a particular person, they are at the same time socially ‘embedded’.3 This dual aspect of memory, its embodiedness and embed- dedness, points to another important characteristic: its present- mindedness. Since we always remember the past from the perspective of our contemporary world, our memories are located in the in-between of the present and the past. Memory as a relationship to a meaningful past can therefore change according to the emerging needs of an individual or a group. Its time-horizon spans the past, the present, and the future: the past is retrieved in the present with a view to providing some orientation for the future. This goes some way towards explaining why we forget, rediscover, and revise aspects of our personal and collective pasts. Thus memories are not static representations of past events but ‘advancing stories’ through which individuals and communities forge their sense of iden- 2 See Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of the Self. Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London, New York: Routledge, 2001). 3 Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past. Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 70. Introduction 13 tity. Or, to put it differently: