Framing Public Memory

1. Public Memory in Place and Time

I Despite its monolithic resonance, “public memory” is not just one kind of thing. Different itself from other basic forms of remembering, it occurs in several distinctive ways. Let me begin by mentioning some of these ways in relation to a single fundamental trait, proceed to discuss other kinds of memory, and then return to public memory for closer analysis. The trait I have in mind is this: public memory is radically bivalent in its temporality. Where other modes of remembering deal primarily with the past—with the notable exceptions of recognition (focused on the ingression of the past into the immediate present) and reminding (which often projects us into a future event of which we wish to be reminded)— public memory is both attached to a past (typically an originating event of some sort) and acts to ensure a future of further remembering of that same event.Public monuments embody this Janusian trait:their very massiveness and solidity almost literally enforce this futurity, while inscriptions and certain easily identi¤able features (for example, the giant seated Abraham Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial) pull the same physical object toward the past it honors. In cases such as these, the perduringness of the construction itself acts to guarantee the intimate tie between past and future as if to say: just as the stone from which I’m made stems from time immemorial and will, as sheer material, last into the inde¤nite future, so the event here signi¤ed, though stemming from a quite particular past, will be remembered forever. Thus the monument does not merely em1 Public Memory in Place and Time Edward S. Casey body or represent an event (or person, or group of persons), but it strives to preserve its memory in times to come—at the limit, times beyond measure. (Or at least this is so in the case of national monuments, the avowed purpose of which is to re®ect and support the putative immortality of the state. In more modest instances, there is no such pretension to exist without temporal limit, for instance, in the memorials that mark the places where friends or family have been killed in highway accidents.) This is not to say that public memory requires the density of stone to mark and re-mark it. At another extreme, a eulogy is certainly a form of public memory—it is pronounced before others and is meant to direct their attention to the character and accomplishments of the departed— but it is constructed entirely in words. Only rarely is the text preserved; it is discarded, even as the speaker hopes to have implanted in the minds of his or her listeners a new memory that will last—if not inde¤nitely then at least for the upcoming weeks or months when grief will be most acute. In certain cases a public speech, meant for the moment, gets preserved despite its author’s intentions: several of Cicero’s state eulogies, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, FDR’s speech on the occasion of the attack on Pearl Harbor. What this points to is that public memory,though thriving on tenacious media such as stone or brick, is not dependent on them. A mere photograph , reproduced on cheap newsprint but (in the case of a major newspaper ) reaching thousands of readers, is medium enough, as we know from poignant photographs of the devastated World Trade Towers.Sometimes a single photograph (for example, that of a Vietcong suspect being shot in the head at close quarters) itself becomes an icon of public memory: what began as the record of a transient moment gains its own permanence in the annals of public memory. Paradoxically, its very ®imsiness is an asset:whereas we must travel to Washington to view the Lincoln Memorial,any copy of the Gettysburg Address or the Vietcong photo suf-¤ces to bring us immediately to its content. The crucial tie-line between past and future that is at the heart of public memory can be effected on the slenderest of reeds—so long as these reeds are at once easily reproducible and widely accessible. This is not to say that the present is of no compelling interest in public memory. Often it is: the present in the making, the present that is now, is 18 / Edward S.Casey considered to be of central signi¤cance in the future. This is the situation we designate by saying: “This event will be forever etched upon our memory.” We...