The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

2. Monuments of Memory

C hapt e r T w o ................................... monuments of memory It is better to form one’s memory loci in a deserted and solitary place for crowds of passing people tend to weaken the impressions. Therefore the student intent on acquiring a sharp and well-defined set of loci will choose an unfrequented building in which to memorize places. —Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory We move through places and in the process gain a wealth of memories, some of which return to haunt us while others fall by the wayside. Yet our memories do not begin and end with the idea of a center, less even of a “home.” Nor, for that matter, is our own experience the sole province of remembering . As we move beyond the close-knit world of our own remembered past, so we expose ourselves to a temporally jagged world, in which the present sits alongside the depth of the past. This disjuncture between the past and the present sets in place a responsibility peculiar to place and memory: How do we commemorate events outside our experience without modifying the structure and content of that event? Such is the question we will be asking in the current chapter. The question emerges from a tension conceived in the previous chapter. There, we were led from an analysis of place and memory to an understanding of memory as being both present and absent concurrently. What resulted from this tension between absence and presence was the broader involvement of the imagination, a trait we discerned, above all, in Bachelard. Through bringing imagination into the scene of memory, the identity of what is being remembered comes under question. We remember a thing from the past, but augment that memory in order to preserve its presence. In doing so, the relation between the original experience and the preserved version of that experience draws an increasing distance. In time, we may adjust ourselves to the 72 from place to memory distance and lose sight of the original experience altogether. Indeed, on an individual level, the experience of this distance may amount to nothing more than a vague estrangement from one’s own past. Publicly, however, a different set of problems is at stake. This gap between experience and recollection is embodied publicly when, as in one example, the past becomes articulated through the figure of a monument . On the surface, the monument offers no simple clues for how it embodies the past. How can a chunk of materiality deposited into the ground claim to speak on behalf of another person’s memory? Moreover, how can such a block of mass assume a role in the public’s imagination, such that the construction of a “public memory” is inaugurated? These are complex questions and will require a careful negotiation between the lived experience of a monument and the hermeneutic attention to interpret what the monument embodies. In this chapter, just as we will move from a concern with individual to public experience, so a broader shift will occur from memory to history. from memory to history Let me begin with a methodological problem. Until now, we have focused solely on the phenomenology of individual experience of place and memory. This has been taken up through a consideration of the structural emergence of place memory, and enforced through the role imagination plays in preserving the past. The blending of memory and imagination marks a broader tension between memory and history, whereby the past becomes articulated indirectly. In the previous chapter, we considered how the ambiguity of a preserved memory was partly resolved by the rediscovery of memory as being different from that of the pregiven experience. Within this context, the account of memory and place as an event in the world occupies a narrative verifiable (to varying degrees) by the remembering subject. Such a narrative attests to the gradual formation of memory, and so to an underlying temporal unity. Where history and memory are concerned, however, this phenomenological foundation seems to reach a limit. To get right to the point, the problem can be phrased as a question: How can we phenomenologically observe the past in the built environment insofar as that past is external to our lived experience? To be sure, in the face of the built past, the distance is both spatial and temporal. Not only does the past come to articulate something detached from my own experience, but often [3.17.165.16] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 00...