The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film eds. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty (review)

In The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty locate their methodological approach “in the concepts or processes of memory, mediation, and remediation” (26). Their approach highlights that memory is not fixed (the flashbulb memories that feature so strongly in popular discourse and film), but something that “gets constituted, legitimized, ‘naturalized,’ replicated, and reproduced through narrative or visual media forms” (26). Understanding remediation as referring to both “mediation and its repetition” (18), Kilbourn and Ty draw attention to how memory changes not just through repetition but also through the media writers’ and artists’ use. Their concept of media extends beyond contemporary forms such as multimedia and twenty-first-century cinema, for included in this collection of fifteen essays are pieces on the construction of female mourning in World War One, writing by Gertrude Stein, the fiction of W. G. Sebald, Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries, Carlos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo, life-writing about the Holocaust, and Neil M. Gunn’s autobiography The Atom of Delight.

While several contributors testify ironically to the complex terrain of memory studies when they make competing claims regarding the centrality of their area of research to these studies—for example, K. J. Keir on autobiography, Anders Bergstrom on cinema, and Kate Warren on re-enactments—what is most valuable in the collection is how individual essays challenge theoretical pieties. Exemplary here is Stefan Sereda’s reading of the cinema of simulation’s potential to challenge Jean Baudrillard’s and Fredric Jameson’s conclusions regarding the treatment of history in late capitalist film. Defining the cinema of simulation as “films that self-consciously provoke intersections among fiction, history, and media” (227), Sereda uses Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds to demonstrate how the cinema of simulation “can challenge or reinforce hegemonic political discourses in the contemporary moment” (229). Fidelity in such films operates in two ways in that films “that are unfaithful to the historical record often display an high level of fidelity to the manner in which history has been recorded” (234); that is, our memories of World War Two are inseparable from our memories of watching Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the film Casablanca. According to Sereda, the best films in this mode thus move beyond prosthetic memory (Alison Landsberg’s term for memories that are created through our experience of popular culture representations) to create “a form of post-prosthetic memory” (244).

What Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory has in common with Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory and Cathy Caruth’s transmission theory of trauma is a notion of empathy that raises issues of appropriation. Such issues are central to many of the volume’s strongest contributions. Examining the “virtues and shortcomings of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory” (52), Kathy Behrendt critiques Hirsch’s recently expanded concept of postmemory for its “intimation that the post-rememberer can herself live through anything resembling what the victims lived through” (55). She makes a good case for the ethical quagmire that results when the concept of postmemory expands beyond close family relatives of the rememberer, and even here, we might ask what kind of memory those close family relatives can possibly experience.

Focusing on Hirsch’s view of Sebald as a postmemorial writer, Behrendt rightly points out that it is “the absence of memory that is so often at the heart of [Sebald’s] stories” (65). It is precisely “by eschewing imaginative empathy” that Sebald “escapes accusations of appropriation” (56). Just as what characterizes Sebald’s Austerlitz is the character’s inability to witness and testify, the unnamed narrator of Austerlitz does not fit Hirsch’s insistence on the empathetic potential of postmemory in that he retains an external perspective in which easy empathy is deliberately avoided.

Marlene Kadar’s account of...