Sidonia Nedeianu Grama

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

sidgra@yahoo.com

 

 

The Other Side of Memory:

The Faces of Silence and Oblivion in Oral History

 

 

Abstract: Memory, as both source and object of knowledge, is characteristic of social and historical disciplines, in other words, of interpretative sciences such as cultural anthropology, history, social psychology, sociology, ethnology, etc. It is, above all, an entrenched characteristic of oral history, whether one regards this discipline as a supplement to or a specific difference within history as the proximate genus, or as a fully self-standing epistemic domain, which is nonetheless open to interdisciplinary influences. From this vantage point, what distinguishes oral history from other social disciplines devoted to the study of memory would be its propensity towards articulating a programmatically critical and problematising discourse around memory, seen both as a historical source and as a cultural phenomenon, marked by its own historicity.

Keywords: Romania; Communism; detention; oblivion; memory; oral history.

 

 

Introduction

 

From a gnoseological perspective, any scientific attempt at acquiring knowledge about man as a historical, social and cultural being can only be undertaken by attentively interrogating, or by simply scouring human memory in its widest span and most diverse forms of expression. Therein lies not only the interpretative strength, but also the vulnerability of such investigative attempts.

Such recourse to memory, as both source and object of knowledge, is characteristic of social and historical disciplines, in other words, of interpretative sciences such as cultural anthropology, history, social psychology, sociology, ethnology, etc. It is, above all, an entrenched characteristic of oral history, whether one regards this discipline as a supplement to or a specific difference within history as the proximate genus, or as a fully self-standing epistemic domain, which is nonetheless open to interdisciplinary influences. From this vantage point, what distinguishes oral history from other social disciplines devoted to the study of memory would be its propensity towards articulating a programmatically critical and problematizing discourse around memory, seen both as a historical source and as a cultural phenomenon, marked by its own historicity.

While all the social disciplines investigating memory have been confronted, from the outset, with the difficult, yet legitimate question surrounding the credibility of its sources, the answers they have provided demonstrate either extreme artfulness or helplessness at addressing this issue.

If intellectually honest, no argument advanced by the professionals or academics using such sources (be they psychologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, social psychologists, or oral historians) will claim to offer soothing or simplistic answers. As psychologists prosaically caution, human memory is fallible; it is extremely vulnerable or versatile, and yet it is ‘an elegant system’.[1] Oral sources are credible, but their credibility is of a different stock, as oral historians subtly and rhetorically emphasize.[2]

As regards the larger question of memory as a source of knowledge, what we intend to discuss here are several cultural aspects related to the persistence v. the disappearance of mnemonic traces. In these respects, we are particularly interested in finding out what kind of memories we tend to cling on to for a longer time and what it is that we tend to forget.

 

Remarkable memories

 

What stays imprinted in memory, consistently and with accuracy, are especially those relevant recollections about moments that had a powerful impact and significant consequences on our lives; such memories revolve around past events whose present relevance is not yet exhausted, since it is periodically brought up. We also keep in our memory those events which are re-enacted ritually through cultural practices of communal remembrance, such as commemorations, the erection of monuments, statues, commemorative plaques and other public inscriptions.

There are thus kinds of poignant, critical memories, which, unlike ordinary memories, outlast the passage of time and are not easily subject to dissolution or oblivion. Psychological research has divided them into several distinct types: Remarkable memories, which include vivid memories, that is memories of personal events loaded with an overwhelmingly positive emotional associations; traumatic memories, which have left a painful imprint on a person’s destiny; or flash bulb memories, which are ambivalently connoted both positively and negatively, and which relate to certain key socio-political events a person has witnessed.

Notwithstanding their internal differences, remarkable memories are distinguished by their extraordinary persistence in time, by their powerful emotional impact, by their significant consequences onto people’s lives and by their acutely intense capacity to resurface and be re-enacted.[3] They provide extremely rich and time-stable evidence about the personal context in which the originary event was received; in this sense, for instance, flash-bulb memories are especially prone to freeze multiple details within a photograph-like image.

Contrary, however, to the psychological viewpoint, which tends to stress the passive, involuntary and often unconscious incorporation of fallacious information within personal memories, via diverse strategies (discussions with friends, mass media coverage, or other forms of exposure to opinion leaders’ discourses)[4], the cultural studies of memory, and oral history, in particular, seek to highlight the voluntary, critical character of such testimonies, involved as they are in the process of social construction. Memory is thus seen as ‘an active production of meanings and interpretations, strategic in character and capable of influencing the present.’[5] Memories are ‘complex productions shaped by diverse narratives and genres and replete with absences, silences, condensations and displacements, related in complex ways, to the dialogic moment of their telling.’[6] ‘Memory, whether individual or collective, is constructed and reconstructed by the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, shaped by semantic and interpretive frames, and subject to a panoply of distortions.’[7]

We subscribe to the view whereby every testimony involves a consistent effort of conferring signification to past events, for memory, we know by now, is ‘an effort after meaning.’[8] We also see the subject as actively seeking intelligible meanings. Thus, testimonies on events belonging to the recent past do not get contaminated, in an unconscious or passive way, with influences from hegemonic discourses in the public sphere; on the contrary, they either deliberately take over such influences, or critically and, oftentimes, self-reflexively disavow them. Testimonies and, particularly, oral history interviews as distinct genres of testimonial evidence represent critical and challenging responses to other forms of public discourse. We might say that they pertain to a network of competing narratives amongst which develop inextricable power relations.[9]

It is evident therefore that oral history works specifically with remarkable memories, since episodic memory, that is the memory species that constitutes the peculiar object of study for oral history,[10] is more likely to retain the discontinuities, ruptures, or moments of change in our lives, which are often marked by communally celebrated rites of passage capable of enforcing their memorable character.

Symmetrically then, what is meant to be forgotten?

 

The forms of oblivion

 

Oblivion, it must be made clear from the very start, is a natural phenomenon; it is the other side of memory, with which it is firmly interrelated. Were it not for oblivion, it would be impossible to acquire distance from perceptions, or to subject them to synthesis and abstraction, to exit from the past and attain a perspective upon it, which allow for the meaning and intelligibility implicit in memory structuring. People who would be unable to forget anything would have some of the endearing monstrosity of Borges’s character Funes, Il memorioso.[11]

There is oblivion that occurs in an ordinary, necessary and natural manner, but there is also pathological oblivion, as well as involuntary or deliberate forgetting. We usually tend to forget the dull, routine moments of our lives, the taken-for-granted meanings of existing in a given community at certain periods of time.[12]

On the other hand, we are tempted to forget those very question marks, the contradictions or cognitive dissonances, the problematic or controversial aspects in a person’s experience, those details that do not comply with current prevalent interpretations given to past events.[13]

At the same time, significant traumatic events, or existential wounds which we do not have the power to understand and accept, which we find absurd or inexpressible,[14] are also liable to various forms of oblivion that render them partially or totally inaccessible: amnesia, repression, suppression.

As pathological forms of psychogenic memory, amnesias correspond to long-term losses of brief or more extensive sequences from one’s personal past (amnesia can affect the personal memory of lived experiences without also affecting the semantic memory, like in the spectacular case of Umberto Eco’s character in ‘Queen Luana’s Mysterious Flame’). While repression stands for voluntary self-defence mechanisms, through conscious attempts at forgetting painful memories or at not remembering anymore, suppression operates subconsciously, stifling painful memories to the point of making them inaccessible to consciousness.[15]

This leads to the symptoms of traumatic events manifesting themselves either through pathological oblivion, as a defence mechanism, or, on the contrary, through vivid, powerful, obsessive reactualizations. The possibility of one or the other of these opposed manifestations depends, apparently, on the menacing potential such memories have for the self at present.[16] Limit-experiences, encompassing both biographical and historical events, such as political persecutions, concentration-camp universes, phenomena pertaining to re-education and political psychiatry, physical and psychological violence, inevitably leave traumatic traces.

 

The wounds of collective memory: social amnesia

 

These pathological forms of memory may be extrapolated from a private, individual level to the public level of collective and social memories. In the public space one can detect social amnesia, excesses and deficits of memory and oblivion, uses and abuses.[17]

The wounds of collective memory spring from the inextricable connection between history and violence. What are celebrated as foundational events, Paul Ricœur sententiously asserts, are, in effect, “violent acts legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right. […] It is in this way that real and symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of collective memory.”[18]

Built around a psychoanalytically-inflected metaphor, the symptoms of these wounds betray the work of mourning that has not been carried out to its very end, since the French philosopher conceived that work of memory as a critical process of liberation from the losses incurred by a community in the past. Hence, on the one hand, the compulsive frenzy for commemorations in contemporary societies, which Pierre Nora has analyzed in Les Lieux de Mémoire and which would translate, in Freudian terms, as a repetition syndrome, as an excessive, non-reflexive re-enactment of an invasive past into the present; and, on the other hand, those forms of social amnesia, of forgetting or silencing gestures, which repress or suppress uncomfortable sequences from the past.

There is then, both at the individual level and at the level of an entire society, a precarious balance between too much memory (and, therefore, too little oblivion) and too little memory (and therefore, too much oblivion). The right balance, the optimum dosage, the ancient via media between these two extremes remain difficult to prescribe and are, at best, the object of a perpetual search and approximation.

How could one tell the difference between a proper use of the past and its improper, abusive uses?

For Paul Ricœur, the implicit criterion of a good, happy memory is the work of mourning itself, as an memory effort to acquire critical distance from the loss suffered, within, however, the horizon of understanding and forgiving which may, eventually, also bring about beneficent forgetfulness.[19] The distinction operated by Tzvetan Todorov between literal memory (which renders individuals or communities captive within their own past) and exemplary memory (which can overcome personal experiences and reach towards universally humanist significance and values) remains extremely relevant.

“The literal use, which renders the event impossible to go beyond, comes back in the last analysis to submitting the present to the past. Exemplary use, by contrast, allows one to use the past in light of the present, to make use of lessons of injustice undergone in the past to fight injustices taking their course today, to leave the self in order to approach the other.”[20]

Whereas literal memory is self-centred and past-oriented, exemplary memory is unselfish, alert to the present and future-oriented. It is a liberating memory, which is capable of generating social justice and humanism.

Memory’s ethical imperatives, advocated by these anti-relativist authors, derive from an awareness of the imminent danger inherent in the abuses of memory, in its vulnerability to the concerted, protean attempts at manipulating it by those who possess political power. The dangers afflicting an unhealed memory, a controversial past which has not been assumed in a critical, self-reflexive manner, come from two main directions, which are actually not unrelated.

On the one hand, the workings of memory and the oblivion it implies are latent, to such an extent that, according to the psychoanalytical paradigm, forgetting traumatic events is never definitive and the unhealed wounds of memory always tend to resurface or to break out painfully in the most unexpected of circumstances. The scars of collective memory have a cumulative and repetitive effect, erupting cyclically, in a manner similar to the recurrence of collective myths.[21]

On the other hand, the collective wounds of memory, especially the wounds of national self-pride,[22] always lend themselves to being politically instrumented, to becoming the most sensitive ingredients in the grand legitimating narratives.

The construction of hegemonic narratives foregrounds historical and political myths; at this level, the link between the social memory and the social imaginary proves to be very strong. Beyond, however, the mythical structure of foundational stories, the narrative configuration of social memory requires a careful distinction between what should and what should not be told, between those elements from the past that will form part of the plot and those that will be silenced, between what is memorable and what is meant for oblivion.

This is how the junction between memory and power takes place – a recurrent theme in cultural studies devoted to memory, whose corollary is the theme of oblivion as the effect of power.

 

Memory-Power-Oblivion

 

We know only too well that history is written by the victors. However they are also those who prescribe the silences. The silences of history and the silences of memory have their own history.

Throughout time, memory (in the sense of the remembrance-forgetfulness dialectics) has always represented a high stakes of political power. World history is marked by an unending series of power intrusions upon memory: from absolutist monopolies in totalitarian societies (in which the suppression of alternative memories with their purveyors represented radical means of erasing the physical and mnemonic traces of a past deemed to be undesirable and dangerous, and were often accompanied by gross distortions, and even landscape redesign), to strategies of reorganizing the social memory by successively changing street names, traditions, commemorations, all practiced on a large scale in pluralist societies; other, more subtle and insidious influences included omissions, silencing, or adjustments.

To the institutions of memory correspond, in a mirror image, the institutions of oblivion. Commendatio memoriae (or, in other words, from an ethical perspective, the duty of memory, the commandment to remember and not to forget) and Damnatio memoriae (the ancient practice of condemning memory by erasure from history) are the heads and tails of power onto memory.[23]

From a religious point of view, the stakes of human memory are extramundane. The religious value of man’s memory resides in the biblical covenant with God. Hence the drama of oblivion, implying man’s estrangement from this covenant, and the urgency of the biblical command, ‘Remember (Zakhor!), … thou shall not forget Yahweh, your God’.[24]

The secular power has continuously usurped this primordial role of memory, claiming, throughout history, in various ways ranging from constraint to seduction, its enormous potential to dominate man and society. It is totalitarian periods in particular that dramatically illustrate the propensity of political power to confiscate memory. It is no less true, however, that even in pluralist, democratic societies, the politics of memory are also politics of oblivion.[25]

How does this type of oblivion manifest itself as an effect of power?

 

The faces of silence

 

Under the pressure of power, of capillary power, in the Foucauldian sense, which operates at diverse social levels and in diverse institutions of social memory (school, the mass media, official commemorations, opinion leaders), protean forms of oblivion appear (silences, absences, exclusions, significant omissions, amnesias, memory voids). This is not about a passive process, about a simple, natural disappearance of traces, but essentially about an active, deliberate process: forgetfulness in the sense of forgetting something, silence in the sense of silencing something, omission, in the sense of omitting, excluding something, making traces of the past disappear, eliminating them from the dominant narratives on the past. In Silencing the Past, Michel Ralph Trouillot understands silence as ‘an active and transitive process: one silences a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun’.[26]

There are practices of silencing that interfere in all the stages of producing historical narratives: in the production of documentary evidence, in archival work, and, especially, in interpretation. Anything that is mentioned or silenced, the Caribbean author[27] maintains, forms dialectic counterparts in the synthesis that is history. [28]

Significant silences also form the subject of oral history. Luisa Passerini sees them as traces of certain scars of the past.[29] The means whereby the latter lend themselves to decipherment at the hands of a researcher pose difficult challenges for the cultural disciplines of memory. We should, however, emphasize the fact that in constructivist interpretations given to memory, the absences, the silences, the voids of memory are themselves socially constructed; it is from this premise that their deconstructive investigation should begin.

In order for such cultural or historical silences to take effect, and for oblivion to reign in the social space, the people in question must be prone to forget, must tacitly accept to do that rather than resort to strategies of resistance. The power game relies on this relationship.

On the one hand, there is a prescribed oblivion, imposed through a wide array of dissuasion technique (from threats to seduction); on the other hand, there is an accepted oblivion, gradually internalized, through attitudes ranging from total obedience to radical resistance. Both dimensions of oblivion are governed by the deliberate, active component to the detriment of the passive, involuntary one. Most of the times, a secret complicity arises between those who impose the silence and those who accept it, a complicity Paul Ricœur disavows. Social oblivion is ultimately not innocent. Behind the self-disculpating reply, ‘I did not know’ one can detect rather the real ‘I did not want to know’. This is how the French philosopher describes it: ‘as a strategy of avoidance, of evasion, of flight, it is an ambiguous form of forgetting, active as much as passive’ [30], generated by the ‘will-not-to-know’.

At the antipodes of this culpable oblivion which is triggered by a negative will, lies beneficent, healing oblivion, born out of the will to forgive. It is a happy oblivion, the sine qua non condition of a happy memory, which Ricœur sees as the horizon of an essentially personal ethical project. Between these two extremes lies an array of attitudes towards imposed oblivion and towards the dominant discourses manipulating such oblivion.

Let us also say about such silences that, paradoxically, as some authors caution us, ‘When we set out to listen to historical silences, we are forced to listen to a great deal of noise’.[31] Significant silences are draped in words, they are camouflaged in comfortable interpretations about the past, consistent with the dominant myths of a given society. Around such myths revolve both the grand historical narratives and life stories. Since the ambition of dominant discourses is ‘to totalize the world of possible utterances’[32] and to discourage alternative interpretations, one’s resistance to the dominant discourses of power manifests itself in the courage to tell the story in a different way. ‘Dare to give an account yourself’[33] would be the watchword governing the public articulation of critical and responsible memories, the counter- memories[34] as an antidote.

Although permeable by the discourses of power, memory is not their mere reflection. On a contrary, it can be quite subversive: ‘memory is inherently contestatory’[35].

It is on this assumption that oral history, as we see it, both as a scientific investigation and as a civic project, ultimately relies. Its epistemological calling would be, on the one hand, to unearth historiographic silences, foregrounding counter-memories, alternative stories, narratives as yet untold about the lived past, and, on the other hand, to examine the interferences between various genres of narratives about the past, which tensely coexist within the public space.

Translated into English by Carmen Borbely

 

 

 

Notes