Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again by Bradford Vivian (review)

Forgetting is of significance to oral historians. However, many oral historians and memory studies scholars tend to see forgetting as “bad” and remembering as “good.” This book is a challenge to the conception of forgetting in purely nega­ tive terms and to the splitting of remembering/forgetting into a binary. In fact, neurologically and psychologically, people must both remember and forget in order to function. Bradford Vivian argues that the relationship between remem­ bering and forgetting is “reciprocal” and that “in healthier forms forgetting can be used productively to maintain, replenish, or inaugurate vital cultures of memory writ large. In what circumstances, then, can one differentiate between productive and destructive manifestations of forgetting in public affairs?” (9). In answering this central question, the author focuses less on individuals and instead sets out to demonstrate that public forgetting can be socially and politi­ cally productive; this novel argument runs against the grain of memory studies. Vivian argues that contemporary appeals for remembrance have been over­ invested with significance and that it is not necessarily those who forget who will repeat past mistakes; rather, victims who remember past atrocities are more likely to transmit the desire for vengeance or justice across generations.

This is not an oral history book—the author is a scholar of rhetoric—and at times, the writing is overwrought. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why oral historians should read this book. At the very least, it compels us to think more deeply about the way publics navigate remembering and forgetting. To the book’s credit, it is clearly structured, with the argument carefully built up across chapters, and the author draws on various memory scholars such as Paul Connerton and James Young. But Vivian seems entirely ignorant of contribu­ tions to memory questions by pioneering oral history figures such as Alessandro Portelli, Luisa Passerini, Michael Frisch, Alistair Thomson, and others. These oral historians have all demonstrated that memory is a selective, imaginative process framed through power relations within and across private­public distinctions. There is value, however, in Vivian’s argument that “Conceiving of memory as a repetition of difference rather than a repetition of the same enables one to value the productive capacities of forgetting and mutation elemental to even the most apparently monumental forms of public memory” (128). But difference and sameness are reciprocal, and oral historians know full well that holding both in mind is crucial to interpreting patterns of shared and unshared memories that are central to constituting identities. The importance of forgetting to cultural identities is demonstrated in Vivian’s fascinating chapter on Roma communities and how they encourage forgetting in various contexts of their marginalization and discrimination across Europe. Drawing from these Roma experiences and memory patterns, Vivian argues that memories are like nomadic travelers:

Memories subsist in a state of dispersion but do not exist in the form of a unified or stable preserve … We activate the fickle and nomadic charac­ ter of memory whenever we discuss our memories with others, whenever we preserve them in writing, images or sound, thereby ensuring that our memories subsist in more than one place or form, in multiple “inherit­ ances” or “forms of enactment” at once (126).

There is nothing new in this conception of memory, but it is one that I wish more oral historians used and interrogated. It is in the latter part of the book, though, that I begin to differ with Vivian. Like many other rhetoric scholars, his empirical focus is on political speeches. He assesses the reading of canoni­ cal American political speeches for the first memorial events for 9/11 made on September 11, 2002. He rightly critiques the proclaimed depoliticization motive of reading Lincoln’s speeches, especially the Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses, as a strategy to reimagine the post­9/11 nation upon “sacred texts” that enshrine American, not universal, conceptions of freedom. In his final chapter, Vivian interprets Lincoln’s speeches in...