On a Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory

On a Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory Wolfgang Müller-Funk The past. . . cannot be recalled; but it behoves us to think the future: perhaps you may again see the object you regret. —William Beckford, Vathek This essay connects two discourses that have not always been linked, especially in the German speaking context: narratology and the concept of cultural memory.1 It argues that all forms of memory are explicitly or implicitly based on retrospective narratives that seek to cross the unbridgeable gap between the time of narrating and the time of the events that will be narrated. If memory and reminding are key issues for understanding the concept of the self, every identity produces the impossible: bridging the gap between the act of reminding and the reminded events, feelings and impressions. Thus all traditional concepts of memory and reminding try to forget this principal difference in reminding. In contrast to political questions susceptible to rational decision-making, we have not the choice between reminding and forgetting. Both are parts of one and the same process.2 Traditional cultures prefer the idea of the eternity of symbols and signs whereas intellectual avant-gardes in modem societies (and modem and post-modem subjectivity as a whole) prefer to extinguish signs and symbols and start at a virtual zero-point (Lachmann). The traditional concept of monumentalized memory, however, denies the open and uncertain JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 207-227. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 208 JNT process of reminding/recollecting that no longer includes the permanent storage of fixed items as happens in a library or a mega-computer or God, who never forget. These metaphors can be understood as protection from the uncanny, from Freud's notion of the "Unheimlichen." They suggest a solid and fixed existence for a reminding subject that may feel its identity to be safe and secure across time. The concept of a more or less perfect memory and the idea of a constant, reliable and complete subject, who is his or her own master, presuppose each other. If one gives up the concept of memory as storage, in which nothing gets lost, you also have to relinquish the idea of a strong and stable subject. The uncanny is the clear effect of that process and modem people have tried, at least since the times of Goya and Hoffmann, to confront themselves with their broken identities and the monstrous features which are the companions of modem subjectivity . Thus, the constructive character and the discontinuity that is written into the structure of reminding are the strongest arguments in favor of the idea of a fragmented subject. In her critique of Assmann's concept of cultural memory, Vittoria Borsô (following Derrida's concept of dijférance) has defined the medium of memory as a space of possibility, which is actualized only by some form of reminding (Borsô, Krummeich, Witte 23-53). So, time is always in-written in the medium of cultural memory which can be described as a constant, but non-continual process of actualization . It always starts from the moment of narrating and re-narrating. Narration and reminding are two aspects of one and the same complex: culture. Media can be understood as the variety of forms which do not simply represent the content of the narratives but also serve to construct them in different ways. The difference between Libeskind's museum and Eisenmann's traditional monument creates a different rhetorical structure of reception and a different idea of reminding. Culture, the realm of identity- and difference-making, can be described as a dynamic cluster of more or less hierarchical, manifest or latent narratives , which have not only a retrospective but also a prospective or teleological aspect. Narratives describe the way of building a world of "symbolic forms."3 Giambattista Vico has already described these symbolic forms of culture on two levels, a diachronic and a synchronic one: the former is exemplified by the symbolic ritualization of funerals and the latter by the symbolic reutilization of marriages (Kittler 19-43).4 Every culture can be interpreted as a symbolic and narrative community that includes Om a Narratology of...