Historians and Social Values

Journal of European Studies Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory ANN RIGNEY Utrecht University An argument is made for the need to conceptualize cultural memory, not as merely derivative of individual psychology, but in terms of a ‘working memory’ (Assmann) that is constructed and reconstructed in public acts of remembrance and evolves according to distinctly cultural mechanisms. Foucault’s ‘scarcity principle’ is used to show the role of media in generating shared memories through processes of selection, convergence, recursivity and transfer. This media-based approach, emphasizing the way memories are communicated, circulated and exchanged, allows us to see how collective identities may be (re)defined through memorial practices, and not merely reflected in them. Keywords: memorial media, memory frameworks, memory transfer, recursive remembrance, sites of memory Iwriter n a story called the ‘Encyclopedia of the Dead’ the Serbo-Croatian Danilo Kis evokes a magical library of ‘memories’. For every v person who visits that library, a book called The Encyclopedia of the Dead is waiting, and when it is opened, all the memories of every moment in that individual’s life come back. In the world of the story, nothing whatever has to be lost, since with the help of a magical book, everyone’s past in all its distinctive detail can be resurrected: For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings. That is why it records every action, every thought, every creative breath, every spot height in the Journal of European Studies 35(1): 011–028 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com [200506] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244105051158 12 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) survey, every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a brick from v the ruins. (Kis, 1997 [1983]: 56) So that everyone will be able to find not only his fellow men but also – and more important – his own forgotten past. When the time comes this compendium will serve as a great treasury of memories and a v unique proof of resurrection. (Kis, 1997 [1983]: 43) Kis̆’ Utopian archive exemplifies a certain tradition of thinking about memory which I will call here the ‘original plenitude and subsequent loss’ model. This involves looking at memory as something that is fully formed in the past (it was once ‘all there’ in the plenitude of experience, as it were) and as something that is subsequently a matter of preserving and keeping alive. Memory is thus seen as working at its best when a maximum number of original experiences are preserved for as long as possible. In practice, however, memories constantly disappear as they are transmitted from generation to generation: like water transported in a leaky bucket which slowly runs dry, they are continuously being lost along the way. Following this ‘plenitude and loss’ model, then, memory is conceptualized on the one hand in terms of an original ‘storehouse’ and, on the other hand, as something that is always imperfect and diminishing, a matter of chronic frustration because always falling short of total recall. Now this ‘original plenitude and subsequent loss’ of memory is a widespread one, informing the work of Maurice Halbwachs among others. In his La Mémoire collective (1950), for instance, Halbwachs presents memory in terms of an original ‘lived memory’ (‘mémoire vécue’) that is carried and hence kept alive by the participants in some original experience. This ‘lived memory’ is constantly on the brink of extinction or erosion with the passage of time as the richness of experience fades and those who did the experiencing die out. At a certain point, the only way for the memory to survive is for it to be written down: When the memory of a series of events is no longer sustained by the group involved and affected by them, who witnessed them or heard about them from the actual participants; when a memory has become a matter only for disparate individuals immersed in new social settings where the events have no relevance and seem foreign [‘extérieurs’], then the only way to save such memories is to fix them in writing and in a sustained narrative; whereas words and thoughts die out, writings remain. (Halbwachs, 1997 [1950]: 130; translation mine) Standing firmly within a longstanding tradition that privileges the RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 13 ‘authenticity’ of oral communication over the derivativeness of writing (Derrida, 1967), Halbwachs saw texts as second best to the ‘living’ and ‘internal’ memory carried by speech and supported by face-to-face communities. Sources of information beyond the individuals and groups remembering their own experiences are seen from this perspective in a reductive way as artificial and hence inauthentic ‘props’. At best, they are a matter of salvaging memories when all other possibility of preserving them is lost. The written medium allows things to survive, then, but in doing so it aggravates the loss of original plenitude by carrying ‘lived’ or ‘internal’ memory into what Halbwachs calls the ‘external’ sphere of history. Discussions of memory in the humanities in recent years have been largely based on one version or another of this ‘plenitude and loss’ model. As is well known, the concept of memory entered into contemporary discussions by way of its opposition to history, and the opposition has been a tenacious one – witness, for example, such titles as ‘Entre mémoire et histoire’ (the introduction to Nora, 1997 [1984–92]), History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past (the title of the journal founded in 1989) and La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (the title of Ricoeur, 2000). The relevance of the distinction is understandable since the current interest in memory has largely been driven by a desire to explore the various ways in which people remember the past and the many versions of the past that have fallen outside the purview of professional historians. As a result, ‘memory’ has tended in practice to become synonymous with ‘counter-memory’, defined in opposition to hegemonic views of the past and associated with groups who have been ‘left out’, as it were, of mainstream history. The study of such memories has been based on a belief in the importance and possibility of ‘recovering’ memories which were once there and which have since been ‘lost’ or ‘hidden’. This recovery project is itself linked in complex ways to contemporary identity politics and to the desire of particular groups to profile their common identity by claiming distinct roots in a particular historical experience: to every group its own memory, as it were, an idea that seems to call for a Kis˘-like encyclopedia where ‘everyone will be able to find not only his fellow men but also – and more important – his own forgotten past’. The ‘plenitude and loss’ model described briefly above has certainly led to an explosion of insight into the variety of ways in which societies deal with their pasts, and it has also led to the recovery of many marginal traditions in the historical culture. So the link between collective memories and identity politics remains an extremely important issue. But, as I shall argue here, understanding 14 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) this link may be better served by a different model of memory: a socialconstructivist model that takes as its starting point the idea that memories of a shared past are collectively constructed and reconstructed in the present rather than resurrected from the past. What if uses of ‘external’ sources of information are no longer seen as regrettable manifestations of memory loss, but as the order of the day? Vicarious recollection The way towards a social-constructivist approach has been opened by the recent emergence of ‘cultural memory’ as a concept, designating something different from ‘memory’ tout court, ‘social memory’ (as used by Peter Burke) or ‘collective memory’ (as used by Halbwachs and others). The work of Jan Assmann (1997) and Aleida Assmann (1999) has been extremely important in working out the concept of ‘cultural memory,’ though it should be noted that attempts to conceptualize the relations between the various aspects of collective remembering are still in full swing. While the Assmanns are indebted in important ways to Halbwachs, they have helped put his insights into a new framework in which collective memory is seen as a thoroughly ‘cultural’ matter that is played out within the various social frameworks described by the French sociologist. In what follows, I elaborate on some of their insights in order to describe the evolution of collective memory in terms of cultural processes. The term ‘cultural memory’ highlights the extent to which shared memories of the past are the product of mediation, textualization and acts of communication. These are not just regrettable deviations from some spontaneously produced memory on the part of participants, but rather a precondition for the operation of memories across generations, for the production of collective memories in the long term (Halbwachs’s notion of collective memory is effectively limited to a couple of generations).1 Jan Assmann distinguishes usefully between two phases of collective memory: communicative memory or living memory, corresponding to the earliest phase when multiple narratives by participants and eyewitnesses circulate and compete with each other, and cultural memory proper, corresponding to the much longer phase when all eyewitnesses and participants have died out, and a society has only relics and stories left as a reminder of past experience (Assmann, 1997: 48–66). Thus it is that, at a distance of almost a century, our shared memories of the First World War are RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 15 above all the product of books, films, commemorative ceremonies and various other forms of representation. Cultural memory, in the way it is used here, is always ‘external’ in Halbwachs’s sense, in that it pertains by definition to other people’s experiences as these have been relayed to us through various public media and multiple acts of communication. When it comes to the formation of cultural memory in the modern age, moreover, the role of mass media and the new digital media (including local internet sites) is undeniable and, however one may judge the quality of the information conveyed, these modern media need to be taken into account as an integral factor in the production of cultural memory today. It is worth noting en passant that Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire provides many fascinating examples of the ways in which local memorial traditions are reproduced and transformed in a variety of media, but that the editor himself seems to argue that this is not ‘true’ memory but merely some modern derivative.2 Derivative it may be, but no less deserving attention in its own right. To the extent that cultural memory is the product of representations and not of direct experience, it is by definition a matter of vicarious recollection. The role of texts and other media and hence the degree of vicariousness obviously increases as the events recollected recede further in time. This suggests that it makes more sense to take mediated, vicarious recollection as our model for collective memory rather than stick to some ideal form of face-to-face communication in which participants are deemed to share experience in some direct, unmediated way. Indeed, Halbwachs himself seemed to point to the inevitability of mediation when he suggested that individuals seek to express the memory of their own experience in terms that are understandable by others, and that they may end up identifying with someone else’s recollection even if this does not correspond in all respects with their own experience (Halbwachs, 1997 [1950]: 53; also Assmann, 1997: 35–7). Communality, in other words, is based on the exchange of memories. The price of communality is a loss of literal accuracy, and hence of the plenitude and highly personalized memory that was celebrated in Danilo Kis̆’ fantasy. This is not the place to go into detail regarding the interaction between individual and communal memories. Suffice it to point out that, from the word go, ‘cultural memory’ – as the name says – is the result of distinctly cultural, rather than psychological or socio-psychological mechanisms (a point also made in Kansteiner, 2002 and in Olick and Robbins, 2000). People may have undergone comparable experiences, but the cultural memory of those experiences 16 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) is the ongoing result of public communication and of the circulation of memories in mediated form. The latter may circulate, moreover, among individuals and groups who have no actual connection in any biological sense with the events in question but who may learn to identify with certain vicarious recollections – thanks to various media. All of this suggests the need to focus more clearly on memorial practices, mnemonic technologies and on the cultural processes by which shared memories are produced. In describing these processes, it is useful to recall an idea developed by Michel Foucault in his L’Archéologie du savoir (1969) to the effect that culture works, not according to the principle of plenitude, but according to the principle of ‘scarcity’– what he calls, the ‘loi de rareté’. By this he means the fact that everything that in theory might be written or said about the world does not actually get to be said in practice. Culture is always in limited supply, and necessarily so, since it involves producing meaning in an ongoing way through selection, representation and interpretation. Accordingly, the limited number of things that are actually said about the world do not have any absolute value. Instead, they acquire a value that is relative to their usefulness in given situations and, faute de mieux, to the lack of immediate alternatives: The scarcity of utterances, the scrappy and incomplete character of the discursive field, the fact that in the end few things can be said, explains why utterances are not infinitely transparent, like the air we breathe; instead, they are transmitted and preserved; they are invested with value and people try to appropriate them; they are repeated, reproduced, transformed, and replicated, not just through copying and translation, but also through interpretation, commentary, and an internal proliferation of meaning. (Foucault, 1969: 156–7 translation mine) Although Foucault’s concerns were different, his idea of culture as characterized by ‘scarcity’, and hence also by conservation, repetition and duplication, has implications for our thinking about cultural memory. The principle of scarcity, as I shall argue in the rest of this paper, affects the workings of cultural memory in at least five ways: the selectivity of recall, the convergence of memories, the recursivity in remembrance, the recycling of models of remembrance and memory transfers. 1. Selection Recollection begins not in the plenitude of experience but in the absence or pastness of the moment or period being recalled. Indeed, RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 17 ‘memory’ is in fact a less appropriate term than ‘recollection’ or ‘remembrance’, since the latter rightly suggests an activity, a performance, taking place in the here and now of those doing the recalling. This is something that psychological studies of memory have made abundantly clear (Schacter, 1996, 2001), but that studies of collective memory have been less quick to take up. Whether a private or a collective matter, recollection is not a matter of stable ‘memories’ that can be retrieved like wine bottles from a cellar or, alternatively, that can be lost in transit. Instead, it is an active and constantly shifting relationship to the past, in which the past is changed retrospectively in the sense that its meaning is changed. Indeed, anamnesis may be even better than either remembrance or ‘memory’, since it emphasizes the fact that recollection involves overcoming oblivion (an-amnesis), and that forgetting precedes remembering rather than vice versa.3 Whether ‘remembrance’ or anamnesis proves the more useful term, the point is that memories are always ‘scarce’ in relation to everything that theoretically might have been remembered, but is now forgotten. This is painfully obvious when it comes to individual memories, but it also applies, mutatis mutandis, to cultural memory especially when one takes into account Aleida Assmann’s distinction between ‘archival memory’ (Speichergedächtnis) and ‘working memory’ (Funktions-gedächtnis) (Assmann, 1999: 18–22). Archival memory is merely a latent form of memory, as Assmann describes it, in that it constitutes a virtual storehouse of information about the past that may or may not be used as a source for remembrance (this archival ‘memory’ is itself a selection with respect to all those things that have been definitively and irrevocably forgotten and are no longer retrievable). But being stored in an archive, be this an actual or a virtual one, is not the same thing as being remembered as part of ‘working memory’, and many potential memories remain perpetually unnoticed and unrecalled in the archive. (Alternatively, some things are ‘remembered’ for which there is no basis in the archive.) As the name suggests, ‘working memory’ is the result of all those selective acts of recollection that are actually performed in a society, and that together provide a common frame of reference for its members. Cultural memory can thus be described as a ‘working memory’ which is continuously performed by individuals and groups as they recollect the past selectively through various media and become involved in various forms of memorial activity, from narrating and reading to attending commemorative ceremonies or going on pilgrimages. In the very act of recollecting in public we consciously or unconsciously select those things, from the totality of everything which might have 18 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) been said, that are somehow relevant to the present. As Iwona IrwinZarecka argues in Frames of Remembrance (1994), the cultural recall of the past is governed by a system of relevance that gives priorities to certain aspects of the past and sidelines (effectively, ‘forgets’) others. The partiality of remembrance is not merely a shortcoming, then, but also one of the preconditions of its being meaningful for particular groups of people. 2. Convergence Not only do cultural memories represent a scarce commodity in the sense outlined above, but they also tend to converge and to coalesce. Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘lieux de mémoire’, or ‘sites of memory’, remains useful here in describing the process whereby places, texts and artefacts become the focus of collective remembrance and of historical meaning. As Nora put it, ‘sites of memory’, both actual and virtual locations, provide ‘a maximum amount of meaning in a minimum number of signs’ (‘Un maximum de sens dans le minimum de signes’; Nora, 1997 [1984–92]: I, 38). As a result, sites of memory are constantly being reinvested with new meaning. Whether they take the material form of actual places and objects, or the immaterial form of stories and pieces of music, ‘sites of memory’ are defined by the fact that they elicit intense attention on the part of those doing the remembering and thereby become a self-perpetuating vortex of symbolic investment (this process recalls Foucault’s reference to an ‘internal proliferation of meaning’). Seen in this way, sites of memory can be said to function as a principle of economy in cultural memory, helping to reduce the proliferation of disparate memories and providing common frame-works for appropriating the past. Extending Halbwachs’s notion of a ‘social framework’ (Halbwachs, 1994 [1925]), sites of memory might usefully be called ‘cultural frameworks’ for remembrance on the part of different groups. The way in which historical meaning becomes focused on particular lieux can be illustrated, literally, by the case of Oradour-surGlane, site of one of the worst massacres of civilians by the Nazis in France. As Sarah Farmer shows in her book Martyred Village (1999), Oradour was symbolically and also physically ‘cut off’ from the surrounding countryside in the years following the war, surrounded by virtual museum walls. In the process, the devastated town took on a pre-eminent status in the national commemoration of the victims of Nazi violence and became the scene of government-organized commemorations, sometimes to the dismay of the local community of RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 19 survivors who wanted to mourn the loss of their fellow villagers in their own way, rather than have their memorials hijacked by the authorities. Even more significant for the purposes of my argument here is the fact that, with the consolidation of Oradour as a national memory site, other towns where atrocities had also been carried out but on a smaller scale ended up sidelined within the national arena (Farmer, 1999: 50). All roads seem to lead to the one lieu de mémoire at Oradour, as it were, symbol par excellence of Nazi injustice. Once a site has emerged as a focus for remembrance, it may go on to attract geographically unrelated memories which then become concentrated in that single place. The end result is ‘a maximum of meaning in a minimum of signs’, as Nora put it. Thus the inhabitants of Oradour themselves contributed to this concentration of memories by naming streets in their new town after Lidice in Bohemia, where a comparable wholesale massacre of the population had been carried out, and after two other towns in France where civilian massacres had taken place (Farmer 1999: 133). Through the use of the placenames in the streetscape, these other massacres are virtually transposed to the site of Oradour and virtually displayed there.4 The conflation of memories is not just something that happens to actual locations, but also to ‘sites’ of a less material and more symbolic kind. The stories told about certain events also provide a cultural framework for remembering them, and just as actual locations serve to attract topographically unrelated memories, so too certain narratives provide a cultural framework for other stories. Later events are superimposed on earlier ones to form memorial layers as it were. Thus the annual celebration of 11 November in Great Britain has by now become an occasion not just for commemorating the end of World War I in its specificity, but more generally an occasion for commemorating British casualties in various wars. To take another example: Philippe Joutard shows how the memory of the Huguenot persecution in the Cevennes in the sixteenth century has changed in the light of intervening events such as World War II, so as to become effectively conflated with other acts of resistance to intolerance (Joutard, 1997). The various narratives tend to synergize into a repeating, indeed mythical structure for which the Huguenot struggle is taken as paradigmatic. In this sort of superimposition of one narrative on another, we can see how new frames of relevance help revitalize earlier memories and infuse them with renewed cultural significance. At the same time, the fact that the story of the Huguenots is already a heavily invested site of memory, albeit only among certain groups, helps ensure that it will also be recycled as a cultural frame in dealing with new events. 20 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) 3. Recursivity ‘They are repeated, reproduced, transformed, and replicated, not just through copying and translation, but also through interpretation [and] commentary’. Foucault was writing about utterances, but again his remarks can be applied to the realm of cultural memory. For it is through recursivity – visiting the same places, repeating the same stories – that a cultural memory is constructed as such. When acts of remembrance are repeatedly performed they can become part of a shared frame of reference. Arguably, texts and images play a particularly important role in this process, both because they themselves are infinitely reproducible and because they are tied down neither to any particular time nor to any particular place. Unlike material monuments, texts and images circulate and, in the process, they connect up people who, although they themselves never meet face-to-face, may nevertheless, thanks to stories and the media that carry them, come to share memories as members of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991 [1983]). Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that particular stories in the form of novels or films enjoy such a high public profile because of their aesthetic properties and manner of distribution that they play a role as catalysts in the emergence of topics in public remembrance.5 While acknowledging the importance of the ‘mobile media’ (text, image) in the formation of cultural memory, it is equally important to recognize the intersections between different memorial forms. In an ongoing re-mediation of memories, stories are translated into monuments or into (annual) ceremonies, and vice versa. Repetition in different media is something that bears emphasizing here since most discussions of cultural memory have focused on isolated acts of remembrance rather than on the processes by which one type of remembrance feeds into another. As is well known, public remembrance manifests itself in many forms – as historiography, commemorative ceremony, legal process, artistic representation, monument – and uses in the process a variety of media (place, word, image, stone, gesture, ritual).6 The ‘working memory’ of a particular community seems more often than not the result of various cultural activities that feed into, repeat and reinforce each other. The way in which different memorial media may take over and repeat certain memories can be illustrated with reference to the official rehabilitation of the French and British soldiers executed for desertion or insubordination during World War I. As Nicolas Offenstadt shows in a recent RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 21 study (1999), the official rehabilitation was the final stage in a series of different representations of the fusillés’ cause, which included several novels and films alongside other manifestations. With the importance of transmedial recursivity in mind, it is interesting to revisit Maurice Halbwachs’s suggestion that memories tend to find spatial expression, in the sense that they seek to attach themselves to particular locations which can be visited in the here and now (Halbwachs, 1997 [1950]: 234). It is evident that monuments reflect a communal desire to hold onto the memory of some person or event, and to give tangible expression to this desire in a particular location. But it can be argued that particular places, and the monuments located there, function as repositories of cultural memories only by virtue of the stories that are told about them or by the rituals that are carried out there. Thus monuments can be seen as the outcome of a whole series of other acts of remembrance using other media, including text and image, that lead people to converge on that particular place. Although setting up a monument may seem like the culmination of public remembrance, it is in fact only the beginning of a new memorial phase. For monuments retain their value as agents of ‘working’ memory only as long as their significance is kept alive by the recycling of stories and commemorative events. As Reinhard Koselleck warned, building a monument may seem like the ultimate expression of a desire to remember, but it may also mark the first stage in the forgetting of an event if other forms of remembrance are not subsequently brought into play in an ongoing symbolic reinvestment of the site in question (Koselleck, 1979: 274). 4. Modelling The extensive discussion of traumatic memory and forgetting in recent years has revealed the difficulties involved in finding an appropriate form in which to talk about painful experiences to third parties. But the problem is a general one and, in many ways, trauma and the relative inability to give expression to memories can be taken as paradigmatic for all our dealings with the past.7 Indeed, collective remembrance in practice is the end product of tensions between limitations of various sorts: (a) The degree to which certain episodes are retrievable from archival memory: some events were never ‘registered’ and are irrevocably lost; in other cases we only know that something occurred, but can never know the details. 22 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) (b) The degree to which one wants to recall, or alternatively to forget, certain episodes: recent discussions of trauma have emphasized the complexity of remembrance in the case of painful events that are remembered in great detail but that we would rather forget; while recent identity politics have demonstrated that the formation of new social groups is often linked to the recollection of events that, because of their past marginalization, are now difficult to retrieve. (c) The repertoire of memorial forms available for giving public expression to remembrance: as suggested above, acts of remembrance are channelled through the various memorial forms that have evolved, and continue to evolve, with the emergence of different media. Models for remembrance are ‘scarce’ in Foucault’s sense. When these different parameters are taken into account, it becomes obvious that the desire to recall, the availability of information, and the availability of suitable models of remembrance do not always coincide, and the fact that they do not may be one of the reasons why new forms of remembrance are developed along the way. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the emergence and continued importance of historical fiction as a memorial form can be linked to the difficulties of using the historiographical genre in cases where the desire to recollect certain marginalized aspects of the past is not met by the availability of archival evidence (Rigney, 2001). Given these multiple constraints, collective remembrance needs to be conceptualized as an agenda or project, rather than as something that is always fully achieved in practice. Indeed, commemorative ceremonies can better be described in terms of a memorial gesture, a pious desire to remember on the part of those who survived or on the part of later generations, than as a matter of detailed recollection as such. In various ways, the desire to remember may fail to coincide with their ‘memorability’ or, to put this another way, with our ability to remember them in a cultural form. The fact that certain topics are socially relevant in principle, then, does not guarantee that they will be remembered or, if they are remembered, that the memorial forms used are suitable in any absolute sense. The lack of an automatic fit between relevance and memorability means that cultural memory evolves, not just through the emergence of new memorial languages, but also through the recycling and adaptation of old forms in new situations (indeed, new languages are themselves arguably just a more productive result of the same RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 23 processes of recycling and bricolage). The point can be illustrated with reference to World War I whose horrors led on the one hand to experimentation with forms of representation (the argument of Fussell, 1975) and, on the other hand, to the recycling and bricolage of more traditional forms of remembrance that had been developed in the first instance with reference to different sorts of events (the argument of Winter, 1995). The principle of recycling can also be illustrated by reference to the bloody crusade against the Cathars and Albigensians, as this became a focus of interest in the nineteenth century and was incorporated into various national and regional frames (see Martel, 2002; McCaffrey, 2001). Thus Henri Martin, who incorporated the story of the medieval heretics into a national narrative based on the idea of a struggle between two races, the Northerners and Southerners (Martin, 1834), adapted this model from Augustin Thierry, who had used ‘racial opposition’ in writing his history of the Conquest of England (1824) (Martel, 2002: 36) and who had in turn been inspired by the work of Walter Scott (Rigney, 2001: 85). Similarly, modern recollections of the Huguenot resistance in the Cevennes were in large part shaped by Eugène Sue’s novel Jean Cavalier ou les fanatiques des Cévennes (1840), that in turn was inspired by Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality (1816).8 Models of remembrance, like Foucault’s utterances, are repeated, transformed and appropriated in new situations with the help of ‘mobile’ media. This means that one act of remembrance can stimulate comparable acts in other situations and within different social frameworks. The language in which memories are articulated is recycled, providing an intellectual hook with which relics of the past can be ‘fished’ out of the archive and brought into working memory. 5. Translation and transfer Implicit in the foregoing discussion is the idea that public remembrance changes in line with the shifting social frameworks within which historical identity is conceived: one of the ways in which emergent groups (women, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities) confirm their identity as group is by celebrating and reinforcing their sense of a common past. Indeed, the sense of sharing memories, of having a past in common, is arguably a precondition for the emergence of such groups in the first place. Whatever the chicken and whatever the egg, the identification of new groups seems to go hand in glove with the production of a ‘counter-memory’ that challenges dominant views on the past, points to lacunae in the cultural memory and, wherever 24 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) possible, attempts to bring new ‘working memories’ out of the archive and into circulation. The ‘restoration’ or ‘emancipation’ of minority memory communities is often presented as a matter of ‘recovering’ an original autonomous tradition or as a matter of rediscovering an ongoing ‘undercurrent’ in collective memory. But following what has just been said about public remembrance needing cultural models, I want to highlight here the extent to which such memories, even as they build on distinctive experience, are nevertheless constructed with the help of whatever mnemonic technologies and memorial forms are available. This means among other things that the pasts of particular groups are given cultural shape and expression in relation to each other, and that models of remembrance may be exchanged among groups with a similarly marginalized position within the public sphere. The point can be illustrated by reference to cultural activists within minority cultures in the nineteenth century who, while often protesting their particularism, nevertheless borrowed strategies from each other. Joep Leerssen’s work on comparative nationalisms in early nineteenth-century Europe provides many striking examples of the ways in which cultural activists emulated each other (discovering and editing popular epics, for example, was a memorial activity that spread across Europe from Ireland, to Brittany, to the Languedoc, and far beyond).9 Closer to our own time, the popularity of street ‘carnivals’ as a way of celebrating immigrant cultures throughout Europe or the tendency to re-write literary classics as a way of introducing postcolonial perspectives on mainstream traditions (like Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique [1967] and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe [1986]) illustrates this copy-cat dimension to memorial culture. That people copy from each other and imitate each other is perhaps not in itself surprising – it is indeed a defining feature of culture – but it is something that has received insufficient attention in studies of collective memory. As cultural memory, forms of remembrance spread and converge like other trends. That Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire gave rise to equivalents in various other European countries is just one more case in point. The circulation of memories When it first began to crop up in academic discussions, the concept of ‘memory’ seemed to invite considerations of the experience of the past from within particular communities – witness the emphasis on the ‘internal’ quality of memory as opposed to the ‘external’ character RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 25 of history in the passage quoted earlier from Halbwachs. Moreover, the concept of ‘memory’ has often been deployed as a framework within which attention can be drawn to ‘hidden’ or ‘lost’ aspects of the past, which are deemed of special importance to the identity of particular communities. This has led David Lowenthal (1996) among others to warn of a new sort of foundationalism where every group, every family, every individual is deemed to possess a unique, incommensurable and unalienable store of memories (as in the world of Danilo Kis̆’ Encyclopedia of the Dead). Lowenthal’s warning makes sense in face of the sometimes simplistic way that the concept of ‘memory’ has been used to designate a purportedly more ‘authentic’ alternative to historiography, because closer to past experience ‘as it really was’. But if the concept of ‘cultural memory’ continues to be elaborated in the direction outlined here – as the result of ongoing cultural processes – then it becomes possible to conceive of the relation between memorial practices and the formation of collective identities in new ways. Once cultural memory is seen as something dynamic, as a result of recursive acts of remembrance, rather than as something like an unchanging and pregiven inheritance, then the way is opened to thinking about what could be called ‘memory transfer’. As presented here, cultural memory is always a form of vicarious memory. It is always ‘external’, to recall Halbwachs’s term for one last time. With the help of various media and memorial forms later generations recall things other people experienced, and do so from the conviction that those past experiences have something to do with the sense of ‘our history’. Representations of the past facilitate sympathy with respect to ‘other’ people whom we do not know in any direct way, even if we think of them as our ancestors, and even with respect to people who do not belong in any straightforward way to the ‘imagined community’ with which we usually identify. In other words, the act of remembrance itself may arouse interest in other people’s experiences and sympathy for them. This suggests that the social frameworks, that Halbwachs saw as a precondition for sharing memories, may in fact be drawn, re-drawn and expanded as a product of memorial practices. In this context, it is interesting to consider specifically the role played by artistic media in crossing and helping to re-define the borders of imagined memory communities. By virtue of their aesthetic and fictional properties they are more ‘mobile’ and ‘exportable’ than other forms of representation, whether in translation or the original, and are certainly more mobile than actual memory sites such as 26 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) Oradour. Certain stories travel and, increasingly within the modern world, they do so beyond the boundaries of the immediate community and beyond national boundaries. As such they may be instruments par excellence in the ‘transfer’ of memories from one community to another, and hence as mediators between memory communities. The key issue then is no longer the fact that in this postmodern age memory communities seem to be proliferating, that the time when things could be reduced to a single grand narrative is over. Having recognized that there are multiple memory communities and that the national framework is but one frame among others, the key theoretical challenge is now to come to terms with the different types of connections and transfers possible between these communities. By replacing the plenitude–loss–restoration model of memory with the thoroughly ‘cultural’ view of memory, as I have been proposing here, we might hopefully gain more insight into the ways in which social frameworks are renegotiated and memories appropriated and transferred across groups through the mediation of specific memorial forms and particular texts. Notes 1. Halbwachs (1997 [1950]: 115), for example, thematizes the finiteness of intergenerational memory. 2. Nora (1997 [1984–92]: 1, 23): ‘On ne parle tant de mémoire que parce qu’il n’y en a plus’. 3. On the importance of forgetting to remembrance: Weinrich (1997); Ricoeur (2000). 4. On the relation between display and dislocation: Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998). 5. Rigney (2004) offers more on the role of literature as catalyst. 6. For an extensive discussion of various memorial media: Assmann (1999: 149–339). 7. Spiegel (1997) argues that ‘trauma’ has become paradigmatic in current conceptualizations of history (34–43). 8. For details on the influence of Sue and Scott, see Philippe Joutard’s introduction to Sue (1978). 9. Leerssen (2004); also Leerssen’s project on ‘Philology and National Learning’: http://cf.hum.uva.nl/natlearn. References Anderson, Benedict (1991 [1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. RIGNEY: PLENITUDE, SCARCITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY 27 Assmann, Aleida (1999) Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck. Assmann, Jan (1997) Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in Frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck. Burke, Peter (1989) ‘History as Social Memory’, in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, pp. 97–113. Oxford: Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques (1967) L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil. Farmer, Sarah (1999) Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel (1969) L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Fussell, Paul (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice (1994 [1925]) Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel. Halbwachs, Maurice. (1997 [1950]) La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona (1994) Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Joutard, Philippe (1997 [1984–92]) ‘Le Musée du désert: la minorité réformée’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire (3 vols), vol. 2, pp. 2653–77. Paris: Gallimard. Kansteiner, Wulf (2002) ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory 41: 179–97. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kis̆, Danilo (1997 [1983]) The Encylopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart (1979) ‘Kriegerdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der Überlebenden’, in Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (eds), Identität, Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 8, pp. 255–76. Munich: Fink. Leerssen, Joep (2004) ‘Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past’, Modern Language Quarterly, 65: 221–43. Lowenthal, David (1996) Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press. Martel, Philippe (2002) Les Cathares et l’Histoire: la drame cathare devant des historiens (1820–1992). Toulouse: Éditions Privat. McCaffrey, Emily (2001) ‘Memory and Collective Identity in Occitanie: The Cathars in History and Popular Culture’, History and Memory 13(1): 114–38. Nora, Pierre, ed. (1997 [1984–92]) Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Offenstadt, Nicolas (1999) Les Fusillés de la Grande Guerre et la mémoire collective (1914–1999). Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999. Olick, Jeffrey K. and Robbins, Joyce (2000) ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40. Ricoeur, Paul (2000) La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Rigney, Ann (2001) Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rigney, Ann (2004) ‘Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans’, Poetics Today 25(2): 361–96. 28 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 35(1) Schacter, Daniel L. (1996) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books. Schacter, Daniel L. (2001) The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Spiegel, Gabrielle (1997) The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sue, Eugène (1978 [1840]) Jean Cavalier ou les fanatiques des Cévennes. Présentation de Philippe Joutard. Geneva: Slatkine. Weinrich, Harald (1997) Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens. Munich: Beck. Winter, Jay (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Address for correspondence: Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, Netherlands [email: Ann.Rigney@let.uu.nl] 

Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans Ann Rigney Comparative Literature, Utrecht Abstract This article seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions on the workings of cultural memory and examines in particular the way in which literary texts can function as a social framework for memory. Through a detailed study of the genesis, composition, and long-term reception of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1982 [1818]), I argue that literary texts play a variety of roles in the formation of cultural memory and that these roles are linked to their status as public discourse, to their fictional and poetical qualities, and to their longevity. This analysis of the multiple roles of literary texts in what I call ‘‘memorial dynamics’’ sheds light on the complex communicative processes by which images of the past are formed and transformed over time. It indicates the need to consider discontinuity as a feature of memorial dynamics and to recognize, for better or for worse, that fictionality and poeticity are an integral and not merely ‘‘inauthentic’’ feature of cultural memory. 1. Introduction 1.1. Varieties of History A four-masted sailing ship that arrived in Quebec in 1843; a hybrid rose with a crimson color; an Australian class of potato; a lounge bar; the steam locomotive which pulled the daily express train from London to Edinburgh in 1900; one of the paddle steamers plying the Clyde in the 1930s; the geriatric unit in Helensburgh Victoria Infirmary, Dumbartonshire as it is this evening. Poetics Today 25:2 (Summer 2004). Copyright © 2004 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. 362 Poetics Today 25:2 Listing all these items side by side may read like a bizarre exercise worthy of a Borgesian encyclopedia: for what can possibly connect these plants, purveyors, and places? The answer is literature. For all these things do have something in common, and that is the fact that they have all been called ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ after the heroine of Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian (1982 [1818]): Jeanie Deans the four-master; Jeanie Deans the rose; Jeanie Deans the tuber (aka Abundance); Jeanie Deans the lounge bar; Jeanie Deans the locomotive of the Teutonic class, the PS Jeanie Deans, Jeanie Deans the hospital ward.1 In what follows, I examine how and why this proliferation of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ in so many domains of everyday life occurred, and I do so in order to address a more fundamental issue: what role do literary texts play in the formation of cultural memory? A quarter of a century ago, this question would not have made much sense. To be sure, questions were regularly being asked about the relationship between ‘‘literature’’ (or ‘‘fiction’’) and something called ‘‘history.’’ But since both partners in the relationship tended to be defined in rather monolithic and mutually exclusive terms, the discussion did not get very far. The fact that Harry Shaw’s book The Forms of Historical Fiction (1983) should focus on what he calls ‘‘the problem with historical fiction’’ is symptomatic of the fact that, for both literary scholars and historians, ‘‘historical fiction’’ was something of an embarrassment. Neither fish nor fowl, neither ‘‘pure history’’ nor ‘‘pure fiction’’ (whatever those might be), historical fiction was a hybrid genre that was less to be explained than explained away. Things have changed considerably since then. To begin with, historical themes have become widespread in contemporary literary practice in response to the traumatic events and rapid change that characterized the history of the twentieth century. Not only has the historical novel emerged as one of the dominant genres in postmodernism, but historical themes are also being treated extensively in a wide range of textual forms that defy traditional generic categorization. (A work like Ismail Kadare’s Three Elegies for Kosovo [2000], for example, is difficult to classify and will as often be found in the ‘‘history’’ as in the ‘‘literary’’ sections of bookstores.)2 In short: Whether literary theorists like it or not (and in the 1. The Internet has proved a valuable resource in locating all of these Jeanie Deans; for the four-master ship, go to ist.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/genealogy/ships/ships1843.html; for the potato, go to members.ozemail.com.au/~hsca/Potato Inv A to E.htm; for the rose, cultivated by Lord Penzance in 1895, go to www.rosegathering.com/penzance.html; for the hospital unit, opened as recently as 1998, go to www.argyllnhs.org.uk/hospitals/helensburghs. html. There is extensive literature on Jeanie Deans the paddle steamer and Jeanie Deans the locomotive; e.g., MacHaffie 1977 and Nock 1988. Jeanie Deans the lounge bar figured onboard the paddle steamer Waverley; see MacHaffie 1982. 2. Contemporary forms of historical fiction are discussed in Hutcheon 1988; Wesseling 1991; Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 363 postmodern nowadays they usually do), recent literary practice has forced us to rethink the limits of fiction and the limits of history and to find new ways of talking about the relationship between the two. These developments within the field of literary studies are part of a larger trend, moreover: a broad-based reconsideration of the nature of ‘‘history’’ that is currently taking place among theorists of history and analysts of what may be called the ‘‘historical culture.’’ Since the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), there has been widespread recognition that historiography is, among other things, a literary practice in that it uses verbal art and discursive procedures to make sense of the past. As a number of more recent studies have pointed out, moreover, academic historiography—the history written by professional historians on the basis of systematic research—is but one of the many ways in which people deal with the past. If, as Johan Huizinga (1929: 166) put it, history is the symbolic form in which a society takes account of its past, then it has become more and more evident in an increasingly museum-filled world that this ‘‘accounting for’’ takes place not only through historiography, but also through a wide range of other activities: commemorative ceremonies, museum visits, apologies on behalf of states, meetings of reenactment societies, watching historical films and reading historical fiction, family gatherings and genealogical research (in recent years, the national archives in Paris are consulted more often by private persons doing family history than by professional historians).3 This intense preoccupation with the past in all its forms is often explained as an ongoing affect of the traumas of twentieth-century history that we are still trying to come to terms with. Certainly, many of the historical activities mentioned are linked to representations of World War II, and a vast literature now exists on this subject. But it also extends beyond this working through of traumas into a more generalized ‘‘musealization’’ of culture (Zacharias 1990) and to nostalgic tendencies (a ‘‘junk-Proustian Schwärmerei,’’ as Dominick LaCapra [1998: 8] calls it), which have been linked to a sense of loss permeating postmodern culture.4 Whatever its exact cause, the increasing visibility of nonacademic historical activities has inevitably been met by changes in the conceptualization of ‘‘history.’’ Simplifying greatly, these changes can best be summed up as Elias 2002. Many of the contributions to the recently established Rethinking History (1997–), a journal primarily written by and for historians, reflect this growing interest in exploring new types of relations between fictional and other modes of representation. 3. See Nora 1989: 15. The multiple forms of historical culture at the present time are discussed by, among others, Lowenthal (1985, 1996); Samuel (1994); Füssmann and Grütter (1994); Perry (1999); and Rosenzweig and Thelen (1998). 4. Postmodern nostalgia is discussed by, among others, Huyssen (1995); Hutcheon and Valdés (2000). 364 Poetics Today 25:2 the growing recognition of ‘‘variety’’ in our dealings with the past. By now, there is a general consensus among theorists of history (even among those who would be most reluctant to describe themselves as ‘‘postmodernist’’) that there is no eternally ‘‘proper’’ way of doing history; that neither the subject of history nor its form is predestined. This argument applies both to work within the historical profession (in recent years there has been a rapid expansion in the range of ‘‘historical’’ subjects treated by academic historians and in the ways of writing about them) and to the many historical activities referred to above. Indeed, the historical culture is itself a blossoming new field of academic research.5 Acknowledging this variety, however, does not mean being logically committed to the idea that all varieties of history are equal and mutually exchangeable. This is a point that needs to be stressed, since the common use of the term history with regard to all these activities has tended to confuse the issue. Although they may both represent a form of ‘‘history,’’ an academic work of historiography and a historical film from Hollywood clearly differ both in terms of institutional prestige (the academic work is stronger) and in terms of popularity (the film wins hands down). With the recognition of such pragmatic differences has come renewed debate among historians as to their particular role within the historical culture at large, the usual answer being some version or other of the idea that historians offer a critical perspective on ethnocentric views of the past and, in doing so, are committed to certain standards of evidence and argumentation.6 The debates are ongoing. One thing, however, has already become clear: a society’s dealings with the past can no longer be happily divided into ‘‘history proper,’’ identified with the work of professional historians, and ‘‘nonhistory’’ or ‘‘improper history,’’ identified with all the rest. But having recognized the existence of ‘‘improper history’’ in this way, what should we now call it? And even more importantly, how can we analyze it in terms that do justice to its cultural importance? It is in the light of the need to find terms to describe the ubiquitous ‘‘improper history’’ that the popularity of the concept of ‘‘memory’’ in recent years can be understood. 1.2. The Communication of Memories As is evident from what has been said here so far, ‘‘memory’’ came into discussions of history through the oppositional door as an alternative to his5. On the differences within the profession, see Novick 1988. 6. For various perspectives on the role of contemporary historians, see Leerssen and Rigney 2001. The idea that historians counter received ideas is expressed by, among others, Lowenthal (‘‘whereas memory is seldom consciously revised, historians deliberately reinterpret the past through the lenses of subsequent events and ideas’’ [1985: 214]); Megill (1999: 233); and Mommsen (2001). Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 365 tory ‘‘proper’’ (the title of the journal History and Memory is a reminder of these origins). To a certain extent, this basic opposition still plagues discussions. Most egregiously perhaps, Pierre Nora’s introduction to the multivolume Lieux de mémoire (1997 [1984–1992]) distinguished between ‘‘memory’’—presented as originary, spontaneous, authentic, and characteristic of premodern communitarian societies—and ‘‘history,’’ presented as derivative, analytic, official, and hence alienated from popular feelings (Nora 1989). In short, ‘‘memory,’’ in Nora’s presentation, becomes the locus of everything that is missing in history proper. It is by definition always a form of ‘‘countermemory’’ that is somehow deemed closer to the past experience of ‘‘ordinary people.’’ Following this sort of oppositional logic, the early enthusiasm for ‘‘memory’’ could ironically tend toward a new foundationalism whereby forms of recall outside academic history—in literature, for example—are somehow deemed ‘‘more authentic’’ and ‘‘natural’’ by virtue of their difference from history ‘‘proper’’ or, ironically, even by virtue of some quasi-mystical connection with the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. In all of this enthusiasm for ‘‘memory,’’ the fact was sometimes overlooked that memory, as psychologists well know, is always a constructive process which involves amnesia and distortion as well as acts of recall (Schacter 1996, 2001). Memory, of course, refers in the first instance to the ways in which individuals recall their own experience, and as such it cannot be automatically or easily transferred to the social domain.7 Now that the dust thrown up in the first oppositional wave has begun to settle, however, a more nuanced and usable concept of cultural memory is beginning to emerge, one which is better able to account for the variety of memorial forms and for the transformations of experience which all forms of remembrance entail. Let me note in passing that I use the term cultural memory in preference to its close relative collective memory because it avoids the suggestion that there is some unified collective entity or superindividual which does the remembering. I also use cultural memory in preference to social memory (Burke 1989) because it foregrounds what Paul Connerton (1989: 39) has called ‘‘those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible’’ and thus opens the way for an analysis of the artifacts and cultural processes through which shared memories are shaped and disseminated in the modern age.8 The concept of cultural memory, as it has emerged in recent years in the work of Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, among others, marks a clear 7. For an account of the pitfalls and possibilities involved in applying concepts of memory to describe collective views of the past, see Fritzsche 2001 and Kansteiner 2002. 8. Olick and Robbins (1998) have also proposed putting ‘‘mnemonic practices’’ at the center of memory studies. 366 Poetics Today 25:2 shift away from the idea of ‘‘memory’’ as the spontaneous recall of past experiences as these have been passed on unsullied and intact from one generation to the next. It focuses attention instead on the multiple ways in which images of the past are communicated and shared among members of a community through public acts of remembrance and through publicly accessible media which are sometimes commercially driven (see especially Assmann 1997; Assmann 1999; and Kansteiner 2002). Against the background of this ‘‘social-constructivist’’ approach to cultural memory, which looks at the mediation of memories in various public spheres, the pioneering work of Maurice Halbwachs (1950, 1994 [1925]) has taken on renewed significance.9 Seen from a social-constructivist perspective, cultural memory is not so much a reservoir in which images of the past are gradually deposited by some ongoing spontaneous process. Instead, it is the historical product of cultural mnemotechniques and mnemotechnologies, from commemorative rituals to historiography, through which shared images of the past are actively produced and circulated. The way has thus been opened toward the study of the role of communication in the shaping and in the transfer of memories between individuals and groups: what semiotic processes are involved when memories are shared among contemporaries and across generations? And to what extent does this ‘‘sharing’’ also always involve the loss and transformation of information? As Halbwachs had already shown and the recent work of Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann confirms, the memories of individuals tend to look for confirmation and interpretation within a ‘‘social framework.’’ Through repeated acts of communication, individual memories of particular events tend to converge with those of other people as these circulate and spread in the public sphere. This means, among other things, that the memories which individuals have of events in which they themselves participated become mediated by other people’s memories of the same events as these are expressed, and thus stabilized, in different fora.10 While the mediation of personal experience through ‘‘social frameworks’’ is of interest in understanding the workings of individual memory, of even greater interest is the way in which the public expression of memories enables these to be ‘‘transferred’’ to nonparticipants. Through hearing or reading about other people’s experiences in other ages or in other places, 9. The idea of a ‘‘social-constructivist’’ approach to memory is formulated by Jan Assmann (1997: 47). The emphasis on the communal construction of shared memories is also reflected in the title of Daniel J. Sherman’s recent The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (1999). 10. In his novel Vertigo, Sebald (1999 [1990]: 7–8) describes how the personal memory of a landscape can be replaced by someone else’s drawing of it; for a similar case, see Lowenthal 1985: 196. Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 367 we remember their lives and experiences vicariously, as it were. Such memory transfers occur within the contemporary world as newspapers and other media send out the daily news; but they are of particular importance when it comes to communication between generations. Indeed, Jan Assmann distinguishes in this regard between ‘‘communicative memory,’’ based on the firsthand recall of experience on the part of participants and witnesses, and cultural memory proper, where the past is recalled primarily through texts and other forms of representation (as eyewitnesses die out in the century following the events in question, communicative memory is gradually replaced by cultural memory).11 Cultural memory, then, is arguably always vicarious in the sense that it involves memories of other people’s lives that have been mediated by texts and images: inherited.The point becomes obvious if we consider how many of our images of the past, and even of the world in which we ourselves live, are the product not of our own experience but of secondhand accounts as these are made available in word-of-mouth reports and in the modern mass media. Obviously, the more time has elapsed between events and those who recall them, the greater the degree of mediation in the transfer of memories and, following what was said earlier about ‘‘social frameworks,’’ the greater the degree of convergence between them. Thus we all have some image of what it was like to be in the trenches of World War I, but since presumably none of us was actually there ourselves, our ideas about the trenches must be a product of various public discourses ranging from family stories to historiographical works and school textbooks to literary works such as Im Westen nichts Neues or the film version of the same. (In the case of World War II, we are still dealing in large, if diminishing, part with firsthand accounts.) There is presumably less divergence in our views of World War I, given our reliance on a limited repertoire of texts, than there would be among all the individuals who actually fought in the trenches, each with his own story to tell his children. As these last examples already indicate, the recognition that cultural memories are the product of specific acts of communication also leads to the recognition that cultural memories have their own histories and continue to evolve in the course of time. Since ‘‘memories’’ are not flies in amber, which are passed on in pristine state from one person or generation to another like the baton in a relay race, we can expect that, in the course of time, the content of what is remembered will also change; that new images will be acquired and past images revised or abandoned in the light of subse11. On the transition between ‘‘communicative’’ and ‘‘cultural’’ memory, see Assmann 1997: 48–56. Marianne Hirsch (1997) uses the term post-memory to designate the transition from firsthand accounts to inherited memories. 368 Poetics Today 25:2 quent events.12 And indeed, recent years have also seen increasing interest in the various forms of memory loss and cultural amnesia as the inevitable correlative of cultural memory.13 Behind this view of memorial dynamics is the idea that ‘‘being remembered’’ is more than a matter of being recorded in some archive—what is stored in an archive is merely a ‘‘latent’’ form of memory, and as long as no one pays any attention to an account of the past, it is effectively forgotten.14 Instead, memories are dependent on their being recalled in various media by later generations who find them meaningful for the nonce, who may even find it their duty to keep them alive, but whose descendants may, nevertheless, proceed to forget them again. Against the background of this view of cultural memory as an ongoing elaboration of a collective relationship to the past through the mediation of discourse, the question arises as to the possible role of literary texts in this process. I use the words literature and literary here in a general way to refer to display texts which are valued because of the way they are written or because of the way they are conceived (literature in this sense includes a whole range of texts, most but not all of which are written in recognizable literary genres). Much has been written in recent years by literary scholars on the thematization of personal and cultural memory in particular works of fiction (unfortunately, there has been strikingly little attention paid to literature by analysts of historical culture, who have concentrated on museums and material forms of heritage).15 By and large, however, literary scholars have been concerned with individual texts, considered in isolation from the broader cultural context and from other forms of nonartistic remembrance. They have also tended to approach these texts as storehouses of individual memories and as repositories of certain types of experience, especially traumatic experiences that would otherwise have disappeared into 12. Forms of remembrance and even the commitment to commemorate things in public are also historically variable; see Ariès 1977; Hutton 1993: 91–105; Assmann 1999: 47. 13. Haverkamp and Lachmann 1993; Weinrich 1997; Ricoeur 2000; Ankersmit 2001. 14. On the distinction between ‘‘latent’’ and ‘‘working’’ memory, see Assmann 1999: 128ff. Weinrich (1997: 257) equates being ‘‘stored’’ (abgespeichert) with being effectively forgotten. Echoing the link made by Weinrich between ‘‘storing’’ and ‘‘forgetting,’’ Koselleck (1979: 257) has argued that public memorials, while ostensibly a stimulant to remembrance, can, in fact, initiate amnesia. 15. Pierre Nora’s massive Les lieux de mémoire (1997 [1984–1992]) does pay some attention to literature in the broad sense, but this is effectively limited to a chapter on folktales and proverbs (3: 3555–81), a section on historiographical classics (1: 739–952), a chapter on the children’s book Le tour de France par deux enfants (1: 277–301), and a chapter on Proust (3: 3835–69). Texts as a memorial medium, or indeed art of any kind with the incidental exception of cinema, is notably absent from the more general works on historical culture cited in note 3 above. The extent of interest in ‘‘memory’’ among literary scholars is indicated by the proceedings of the 1997 International Comparative Literature Association conference (D’haen 2000). Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 369 oblivion with those who suffered them.16 Voices have even been raised suggesting a sort of hotline between literary expression and ‘‘authentic’’ memory (as distinct from ‘‘inauthentic’’ official accounts of the past; see, for example, Hartman 1995). I shall get back to this point later. Suffice it here to point out that literary scholars have tended to view individual texts as the terminus or outcome of remembrance rather than as active ingredients in an ongoing cultural process. In what follows, I want to broaden the terms of the discussion by approaching the role of literature in terms of the social-constructivist model of cultural memory outlined above. This leads us beyond the study of the thematic content of particular works to a consideration of the way in which literary texts work alongside other memorial forms. The question is no longer how does a particular text view the past but how do literary texts operate mnemotechnically? That is, what particular role do they play, if any, in fixing, transmitting, and transforming memories across time? In order to answer this question, I shall focus on a single case. By adopting a diachronic perspective, which includes the genesis and reception of a given work, I hope to show how a literary artifact relates to other memorial media and what its long-term role is in what I call ‘‘memorial dynamics.’’ As our many Jeanie Deans have indicated, the case in point is Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818). 2. The Case of The Heart of Midlothian 2.1. Remembering Helen Walker Walter Scott (1771–1832) is perhaps now best known as the author of costume dramas, like Ivanhoe, or as one of the earliest businessmen-writers with a keen instinct for what would sell well. He was certainly all of that. But Walter Scott should also be remembered (and here I myself am carrying out a public act of recall) as someone who was active in exploring many forms of historical activity: from collecting and editing literary texts, assembling a private archive, building a neo-Gothic castle, writing a life of Napoleon and a history of witchcraft, and of course, writing a series of historical novels relating to the history of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These novels were experimental explorations in the border between ‘‘living’’ memory or ‘‘communicative’’ memory, as preserved in oral tradition by those associated with the events described, and cultural memory, as set out in texts accessible to those who are not directly associated with the 16. Langer (1975); Felman and Laub (1982); and Caruth (1996), among many others, discuss literature as a medium for the expression of personal memories of collective events. 370 Poetics Today 25:2 events in question (hence the subtitle to the first novel Waverley; or, ’ s Sixty Years Since). That Scott’s writings were bound up with his many other historical activities is borne out by his erection of a gravestone in 1830 to the memory of Helen Walker, the woman who had provided the prototype for the heroine of his Heart of Midlothian. The monument, which Scott paid for and for which he wrote the inscription, reads as follows: this stone was erected b the author of waverle to the memor of HELEN WALKER who died in the ear of god 1791 this humble individual practised in real life the virtues with which fiction has invested the imaginar character of JEANIE DEANS: refusing the slightest departure from veracit, even to save the life of a sister, she nevertheless showed her kindness and fortitude, in rescuing her from the severit of the law, at the expense of personal exertions which the time rendered as difficult as the motive was laudable. respect the grave of povert when combined with love of truth and dear affection Who was Helen Walker, whose bones lie under this rather prolix stone? She was the pious daughter of a strict Presbyterian in southern Scotland, whose younger sister Isobel Walker was put on trial in 1737 for infanticide, having concealed a pregnancy out of wedlock and probably having killed her child. When Helen refused from principle to perjure herself to save Isobel, the latter was condemned to death according to the extremely harsh laws of the time. Big sister Helen then took it upon herself to walk the whole way to London in search of a royal pardon, which she did actually succeed in get- Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 371 ting. Isobel was saved and went on to marry her original lover, while Helen went back to her old life and remained single. Or so the story goes. Such was the outline of Helen Walker’s life that had been narrated to Scott by an anonymous correspondent (later revealed to be a Mrs. Goldie). In a nice illustration of the workings of communicative memory, Mrs. Goldie had run into Helen Walker as an old lady and, impressed by her demeanor, had inquired about her from neighbors and heard her story from them. When Helen Walker died shortly afterward, Mrs. Goldie initially planned to erect a gravestone to her but instead sent the story to Scott on the grounds that he might be interested in using it for a novel ‘‘so as to perpetuate her memory in a more durable manner’’ (quoted in Scott 1982 [1818]: 5). While the existence of Helen Walker is well documented by those who actually knew her, as is the court case involving the condemnation and subsequent pardoning of her sister, the only source for the story of Helen’s refusing to commit perjury and walking the whole way to London to obtain a pardon is in effect Mrs. Goldie and the local gossip which she had picked up. In fact, Helen Walker does not seem to have made it into any of the official archives from the eighteenth century. In a later account provided by John M’Diarmid—a journalist at the Scotsman and an acquaintance of Mrs. Goldie who had interviewed different neighbors—it is ironically the novel which is invoked as a source for the story about the trip to London. (In a postscript which Scott added to his introduction in the 1830 edition, he in turn quotes John M’Diarmid as a source for supplementary details of Helen Walker’s life.)17 The search for the original source thus turns into a sort of textual Möbius strip whereby ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘literature’’ are inextricably mixed up with each other, with one ‘‘source’’ leading into another and being in turn supported by it. A recent study by Peter Garside (1999) has suggested, moreover, that the topos of a ‘‘heroic walk in the cause of virtue’’ originated in a popular novel from 1807; this does not mean that Helen’s walk was necessarily invented but that the existence of a novel on such a subject might have attracted Mrs. Goldie and, later, Scott to the story of Helen Walker.18 Whatever the actual facts of the matter were, and they are 17. According to M’Diarmid (1830: 385): ‘‘Her sister was tried, condemned, and sentenced to be executed at the termination of the usual period of six weeks. The result is well known, and is truly as well as powerfully set forth in the novel.’’ More information relating to the novel’s sources can be found in Crockett 1912: 227–40 and Lascelles 1980: 88–102. The most recent account of Helen Walker’s life is by Deborah Symonds (1997: 199), who comes up with the rather implausible suggestion that the old woman whom Mrs. Goldie had met was Isobel rather than Helen. 18. On the possible influence of Sophie Cottin’s Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia (English trans- 372 Poetics Today 25:2 by now impossible to trace, we can note that Scott treated Mrs. Goldie’s information as a piece of oral history and turned the story of the two sisters into the centerpiece of a five-hundred-page novel. The Heart of Midlothian was well received when it was first published, despite some complaints about the last volume, and has since then never lost its place in the core canon of Scott’s works: the Victorian novelists found it inspiring; Georg Lukács sung its praises as a portrayal of how ordinary individuals could become heroes if history demanded it; a recent poll among Scott scholars identified it as the current favorite among his works.19 While the appreciation of the novel has remained consistently high over almost two centuries, critical interpretations of it have shifted along with the times. Where early critics were above all concerned with the accuracy of the work as a portrayal of Scottish manners and with the moral characteristics of Jeanie, the attention has recently shifted, under the influence of feminism, to the fate of her hapless infanticidal sister and, under the influence of postcolonial theory, to the background of the novel in the Highland clearances and the mass emigration that followed.20 Clearly the novel has cultural staying power in the sense that it has been able to generate new interpretations in successive generations of critics and readers. My concern here, however, is not with giving yet another interpretation of the work but in examining the novel, its genesis, and its reception as a case study in the workings of cultural memory. Three aspects of the novel are important to my argument: (1) its public character as a literary work, (2) its literary form, (3) its afterlife as a textual monument. lation, 1807), see Garside 1999. Certainly the link between the two stories was already made by Charlotte Yonge in her Book of Golden Deeds (1864), when she narrates as parallel acts of heroism the story of Helen Walker (again, her account is closely modeled on Scott’s Jeanie Deans) and the story of Prascovia Lopouloff, the prototype for Cottin’s novel. In turn, Scott’s novel seems to have inspired other ‘‘recollections’’ of heroines going in quest of royal pardons, from Alexander Pushkin’s (1999 [1836]) fictional ‘‘Captain’s Daughter’’ to the historical Mrs. Campbell, whose unsuccessful attempts to gain a pardon for her husband in 1808 were remembered in a recent issue of the Scott Newsletter (28 [1996]: 18–19) under the title ‘‘Another Jeanie.’’ 19. For contemporary assessments, see note 20 below; for the influence of the novel on Victorian writers, see Clayton 1991; for his influential comments on the novel see Lukács 1962 [1936–1937]: 55–57; regarding the current popularity of the novel among critics, see Weinstein 1999. 20. For recent studies of the sister’s plight, see Clayton 1991 and Symonds 1997. A highly original interpretation of the last section of the novel in the light of the mass emigration from Scotland in the eighteenth century ( Jeanie’s virtue is rewarded by a new home in the apparently empty lands of the duke of Argyll) is offered by Sussman (2002). Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 373 2.2. The Novel as Public Forum Mrs. Goldie’s initiative in sending the Walker story to Scott is itself remarkable, as it indicates a belief that certain life histories are somehow worthy of public remembrance; her initial impulse to put up a gravestone seems to have arisen from the same belief. But why choose a novel rather than a funerary monument as the means to make that story public? To a certain extent, the answer to this question must be speculative, since not much can be reconstructed about Mrs. Goldie herself. The belief which she expressed in writing to Scott, that a text might somehow be ‘‘more durable’’ than a stone monument, is something I shall come back to when talking about the cultural afterlife of The Heart of Midlothian. But in order to explain why she chose a novel rather than any other sort of text, we have to consider the public role of that medium at the beginning of the nineteenth century. That Mrs. Goldie should have written to Scott and not to some other writer is indicative of his status—or rather the status of the ‘‘author of Waverley’’ (his identity was not yet firmly established)—as the means through which a ‘‘deserving’’ story might be circulated more widely. The success of Waverley in 1814 and of his subsequent novels had broken all records; and it is widely believed this success was due, among other things, to Scott’s canny combination of ‘‘respectable’’ historical themes with elements from the popular, but hitherto relatively low-prestige, novelistic tradition.21 Nor was Mrs. Goldie being idiosyncratic in looking to Scott as a public figure: from the publication of Waverley onward, the ‘‘author of Waverley’’ was at the receiving end of a lively correspondence with readers all over Scotland, particularly from interested parties who thought he might have use for certain details of family or local history.These reactions, which I have examined in detail elsewhere,22 suggest that Scott’s work provided a virtual public sphere where private persons, through family or local connections, sought and found representation in the collective history of Scotland. Through his public role as ‘‘author of Waverley,’’ then, Scott’s work can be said to have worked as a channel for local memories, both living and inherited, whereby various accounts of the past could converge into a common frame of reference, or what Halbwachs (1994 [1925]) called a ‘‘social framework’’ of memory. This convergence of memories on the public medium of the novel adds another dimension to the by now familiar thesis that the modern media played a role in the formation of ‘‘imagined 21. Scott’s ambivalent relationship to popular novel forms is well described in Ferris 1991 and Robertson 1994. 22. In my Imperfect Histories (Rigney 2001: 31–58), I give a detailed analysis of the correspondence between Scott and his readers, particularly with reference to his novel Old Mortality (1816). 374 Poetics Today 25:2 communities,’’ as distinct from communities based on face-to-face communication. Whereas Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]) and, more recently, Jonathan Culler (1999) have pointed out the ways in which the very form of fictional narrative meant that novels could create the sense of a shared social space and a shared historical time, the case of Scott suggests that novels at this period also played a more specific role as a public medium for channeling and framing disparate local memories.23 But the public character of the novelistic medium is not itself sufficient to explain why a novel like The Heart of Midlothian should have been the vehicle for certain types of memories rather than for others: in this case, for the story of an obscure Presbyterian woman called Helen Walker, whose actions were never recorded in any official archive.Without the intervention of the novel, her life would almost certainly have disappeared into oblivion along with the passing of those who personally remembered her and could talk about her. Nor is Scott’s interest in ‘‘unsung heroes’’ unique: there would seem to be a significant connection between the writing of historical novels and an interest in persons and incidents who did not make it into the archives because they were socially too ‘‘unimportant’’ or because they were the victims of events and hence not in positions to tell their own stories. In introducing an obscure individual into public memory, someone who was neither politically nor socially important, Scott can be said to have initiated a whole novelistic tradition of ‘‘counterhistory,’’ which is perhaps best summed up by Victor Hugo’s claim in Les misérables (n.d. [1862], 3:282) to be writing the ‘‘internal’’ history which had been missed by historians, ‘‘the history of the inside, of ordinary people, as they work, suffer and wait.’’ 24 More recently, Geoffrey Hartman (1995: 80) suggested a similar affinity between literature and what Hugo called the ‘‘history of the inside,’’ arguing that literature is a ‘‘counterforce’’ which provides a means for recording details and complexities left out of ‘‘public history,’’ that is to say, out of both official accounts of the past and the inauthentic versions of the past circulated through the mass media.25 23. Approaching the role of the novel in community building from a different perspective, Patricia Meyer Spacks (1985) has linked the genre to that most traditional of social networking: gossip. 24. ‘‘L’historien des moeurs et des idées n’a pas une mission moins austère que l’historien des événements. Celui-ci a la surface de la civilisation, les luttes des couronnes, les naissances des princes, les mariages des rois, les batailles, les assemblées, les grands hommes publics, les révolutions au soleil, tout le dehors; l’autre historien a l’intérieur, le fond, le peuple, qui travaille, qui souffre et qui attend, la femme accablée, l’enfant qui agonise, les guerres sourdes d’homme à homme . . . toutes les larves qui errent dans l’obscurité.’’ For more on the influence of novelists on the agenda of historians, see Rigney 2001: 59–98. 25. ‘‘When art remains accessible, it provides a counterforce to manufactured and monolithic Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 375 This affinity between literature and the history ‘‘of the inside’’ might seem to suggest that novelists are somehow more sensitive than others to the sufferings of the downtrodden and to the importance of the marginal. Without denying that this may sometimes be the case, it seems more plausible to look for a general explanation by comparing novelistic representation with its alternatives: where else might such marginalized and scarcely documented memories be registered in public? If we accept that culture is always affected by what Michel Foucault (1969: 156) called the ‘‘principle of scarcity,’’ then it follows that, at any given moment, there is only a limited number of forms of expression available for use and every preference entails the neglect of something else. In the light of the priorities traditionally set by historians, the novel can be seen to offer an alternative forum for recording memories of the past which were left out of the institutionalized discourses of the time and which, given their generic conventions, could not easily be accommodated within them. The relatively unregulated character of novelistic discourse means that it has traditionally been able to accommodate a wider spectrum of stories than could specialized and disciplined discourses like that of the legal system or historiography (especially since the latter became institutionalized in the course of the nineteenth century). Still a relatively parvenu genre in 1818, the novel offered Scott an experimental space for including cases which might otherwise have been forgotten. Since then, of course, not only has the novel changed status and the film emerged as a new medium, but historians have been changing their priorities in ways which inevitably have a knock-on effect on what is ‘‘left over’’ for novelists and filmmakers and for the way in which they define their own role.26 All of this implies that the role of literature as a public forum is historically linked to the nature and availability of alternative media and that it needs to be studied in relation to them. Concerning the novel as public medium, finally, it should be noted that there is a price to be paid for representation in the public sphere and, more specifically, in the social framework of a novel. For it would be incorrect to suppose that, because Scott wrote a counterhistory recalling the life of memory. . . . Scientific historical research, however essential it is for its negative virtues of rectifying error and denouncing falsification, has no positive resources to lessen grief, endow calamity with meaning, foster a new vision of the world, or legitimate new groups’’ (Hartman 1995: 80). 26. Moreover, as we shall see later, the novel also provided an important forum for ‘‘rehearsing’’ criminal trials in a new setting.This retelling of criminal trials reinforces Bakhtin’s (1981) argument regarding the role of novels in echoing other institutionalized discourses. In the playful preface to The Heart of Midlothian, Scott (1982 [1818]: 19–23) has one of his characters sing the praises of the Scottish judiciary as a source of novelistic stories. More generally, on the connection between public trials and novels in the eighteenth century, see Maza 1993. 376 Poetics Today 25:2 Helen Walker, the result was the ‘‘authentic’’ or unadulterated memory of things as they were (supposing that memory can ever be pure). To be sure, Helen Walker was commemorated in public, in an extensive narrative which holds the attention of the reader for hours. But as her very gravestone indicates, she was transformed in the process into the first of many ‘‘Jeanie Deans.’’ She goes down in history, then, but under another name; she gains a place in the public memory, but at the cost of losing her identity. Her life is literally transformed into literature. The irony of this public transformation becomes complete when we consider the title of M’Diarmid’s supplementary account of her life, mentioned earlier. For when M’Diarmid brought out his expanded account of the life of Helen Walker in 1830, he called it ‘‘The Real History of Jeanie Deans,’’ a title which highlights the fact that, from the publication of the novel onward, all ‘‘real’’ histories of Helen Walker can only be reconstructed through her better-known novelistic counterpart ‘‘Jeanie Deans.’’ Which brings me to the second feature of the work: its character as a literary text. 2.3. The Novel as Literary Composition In order to represent Helen Walker’s particular story at any length, Scott had to have recourse to his imagination for the details—after all, his source was no more than a hundred lines long. But since he was working within the conventions of the novel, he was also in principle free to invent within the borders of what was historically plausible.27 Calling upon his huge store of knowledge concerning the history and mores of Scotland in the eighteenth century, he generously applied his freedom to invent in order to flesh out the character and life of Helen Walker. Even more interestingly, he used this freedom to tie up the real story of Helen Walker with another historical episode from the same period in Scottish history: the Porteous affair. In contrast to the story of Walker, which was known only in a restricted circle, this affair was already well known at the time Scott wrote his novel. As one reviewer put it, it was a ‘‘traditionary fact,’’ ‘‘a story deeply registered in the Memory of many now living.’’ 28 The Porteous affair, as it was called, had taken place in Scotland in 1737, more or less concurrently with the Walker trial, though in Edinburgh rather than Roxburgh. The rather complicated facts run as follows: a captain of the Edinburgh city guard, a man called Porteous, was put on trial for having been instrumental in the cold-blooded killing of a number of demonstra27. For a more detailed account of Scott’s freedom to invent and the limits of that freedom, see Rigney 2001: 31–58. 28. Review of The Heart of Midlothian, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, August 1818, 564–74; see p. 568. Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 377 tors in the city. Although he was found guilty and condemned to death, an unexpected royal pardon saved him from execution; this so angered the citizens of Edinburgh that, in the middle of the night, a group of them, disguised as women, broke into the prison where Porteous was being held and carried out their own highly ceremonious execution of the oppressor. London reacted with extreme punitive measures against the city, but those responsible for the midnight execution were never brought to trial, and the whole episode had remained in folk memory as an example of the power of Scottish tenacity and sense of justice in face of arbitrary English rule. (We need to realize that all of this was happening just a few decades after the parliamentary union between Scotland and England, which had taken place in 1707, and that Scott himself was writing just some fifty years after the last great attempt in 1745 to break that union—the subject of Waverley.)29 The Heart of Midlothian begins with an extremely graphic account of the dramatic lynching of Porteous in nocturnal Edinburgh and the lead-up to it, deviating little from the very extensive documentation of that event that had been published in 1737 and then republished to coincide with the publication of the novel. Indeed, the page opposite the title page of the first edition carried an advertisement for the anonymous Criminal Trials, Illustrative of the Tale Entitled ‘‘The Heart of Midlothian,’’ Published from the Original Record (1818). Thanks to the novel, then, the original records of the case are recirculated and brought back into the culture, but they do so now as ‘‘illustrations’’ of the fiction from which they appear to derive. Just as the publication of the novel meant that Helen Walker took on a new identity as ‘‘the real Jeanie Deans,’’ so too did the original record of the Porteous case become an illustration to the novel (a reprint from 1909 again appeals to the reader’s familiarity with Scott’s account).30 In reality, the two historical cases—the Porteous affair and the affair of Helen Walker and her sister—had nothing to do with each other except the fact that they roughly coincided in time and place (if you take Scotland as a single location, that is). Scott brings them together by treating them within the pages of the same book, which thus again provides a framework whereby disparate memories are brought together. It is worth considering the par29. Scott came back to the Porteous affair in his Tales of a Grandfather (1828–1831), where he described it as ‘‘a strong and powerful display of the cool, stern, and resolved manner in which the Scottish, even of the lower classes, can concert and execute a vindictive purpose’’ (quoted in Scott 1982 [1818]: 10). 30. ‘‘Between the eventful years of 1715 and 1745 the affair of the Porteous Mob forms a memorable and striking chapter in the history of Scotland. That few incidents of that history are more familiar to modern readers is due to the genius of Sir Walter Scott, who, with an artist’s appreciation of its romantic value, has made it the basis of one of his happiest tales’’ (Roughead 1909: 1). 378 Poetics Today 25:2 allels between the novel—which provides a fictional framework where different stories can be linked—and a museum collection: like a museum collection (but unlike historical narratives as traditionally conceived of ), the novel is free to ‘‘dislocate’’ certain memories from their originary context and transpose them into a new setting where they occur side by side.31 And in being brought side by side, the symmetries and differences between them become foregrounded as in a poetic composition (both are about legal processes in Scotland, the granting of pardons by London, and the intervention by Scottish citizens). In this way, the reduction of disparate memories to certain common patterns is facilitated by their artificial (in the sense of nonspontaneous and contrived) representation in a fictional novel.The two episodes are historical in the sense that they are documented, but it is the framework of the novel which brings them together for the first time and allows them to play off each other. To stretch the analogy with a museum collection even further: the episodes can be said to be exhibited side by side within the framework of the fiction. This is a point worth emphasizing, since it brings to light a principle of discursive organization different from those which have hitherto figured in discussions of historical representation and its literary dimensions. As the currency of the term narrativism indicates, these discussions have concentrated above all on narrativity—conceived as the emplotment of events into beginning-middle-end configurations. The case of The Heart of Midlothian suggests that memories may also be reorganized according to the eminently poetic principle of equivalence as described by Roman Jakobson (1960). It is the repetition of comparable events in the narrative syntagma, rather than the logic of the story, which endows otherwise disparate events with a mutually reinforcing meaning.32 That is not to say, of course, that narrativity is irrelevant to the relationship between the two episodes in Scott’s novel. As behooves a novelist, Scott used his freedom to invent not just to bring the episodes together but also to weave them together as part of the same story. As importantly, he used his poetic license to flesh out both of their stories in a very tendentious way. A detailed discussion of the very incident-rich plot would take me too far 31. On the importance of ‘‘dislocation’’ in the composition of museum collections, see Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998. 32. For surveys of discussions regarding the role of narrative in historical interpretation, see Kellner 1987; Ricoeur 1983–1985. In his early work, particularly Metahistory (1973), Hayden White had argued that meaning was produced in historical texts through a variety of means, including both emplotment and the application of ‘‘tropes’’ to the organization of information. It was his discussion of emplotment, however, which was taken up in later discussions rather than his somewhat baroque typology of tropes. Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 379 from my subject here. Suffice it to point out three crucial deviations from the historical record. To begin with, Effie Deans is transferred to the ‘‘Heart of Midlothian,’’ as the Edinburgh prison was called, so as to be there at the same time as Porteous.33 Second, the leader of the nocturnal lynching party who assassinated Porteous is turned into the man who had made Jeanie Deans’s sister pregnant, a double involvement which suggests an intimate, personal connection between the two affairs. Finally, whereas the historical Isobel Walker went on to marry the man who had made her pregnant and presumably lived ‘‘happily ever after’’ (at least nothing more is known of her since her pardon), her fictional counterpart Effie Deans marries the nocturnal rioter, but the marriage is left childless and ends in violence: the original child, whose alleged murder was behind the whole drama, turns out to be alive after all and has matured into a good-for-nothing criminal who ends up murdering his own father. The many twists of the plot are highly contrived (a number of early reviewers found them implausible 34), but its basic significance is clear: those who do not respect the rule of law will come to a sorry end. The significance is all the clearer when the fate of the unfortunate Effie is compared with that of her virtuous sister Jeanie: whereas the historical Helen Walker remained unmarried, Scott deviates widely from his sources by allowing her fictional counterpart Jeanie Deans to ‘‘inherit the land,’’ as it were, rewarding her with a husband, multiple children, prosperity, and a new home on the estates of the duke of Argyll; her sister Effie, in contrast, fails in the novel to have any children within wedlock, is widowed by her illegitimate child, and ends up going into exile in a French convent while her good-for-nothing son is packed off to the wilds of North America. In this way, Scott uses his freedom to invent not just to weave two separate historical cases into a communal story but, even more importantly, to turn composite memories into a story with a moral to it. As an inventor of plot, he operates a bit like an immigration officer of the symbolic realm, allowing the virtuous to stay while deporting undesirables to for33. The Edinburgh prison known as the ‘‘Heart of Midlothian’’ had actually been demolished in 1817. The title of the novel suggests a desire on Scott’s part to commemorate the passing of this institution. Presumably from a similar impulse, he also made a point of recycling some of the wood from the old building in constructing bookshelves in the library at Abbotsford; see [Macvicar] 1833. 34. Criticism of the plot was voiced by anonymous reviewers in, for example, the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register 10 (July–December 1818): 250; the Monthly Review 87 (December 1818): 356–70 (see p. 367); the British Critic, n.s., 10 (July–December 1818): 246–60 (see p. 254); and the Edinburgh Review 1 (1820): 1–54 (see p. 3). 380 Poetics Today 25:2 eign fields or to the next world. This way of proceeding shows how generic conventions may work as a filter through which memories are passed and shaped. Fictionality and moralizing are linked, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895): ‘‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.That is what fiction means’’ (Wilde 1982: 340). Echoing Wilde, Hayden White (1987) has argued that there is a structural affinity between ‘‘narrativizing’’ events (turning them into a story, with or without the use of invention) and moralizing them (reconstructing events as a struggle between moral forces). Scott’s weaving together of various historical sources with the help of fiction provides a clear illustration of White’s point. And as we shall see, it is the exemplary character of Jeanie, rather than her (in)authenticity as a derivative of the historical Helen Walker, which seems to have stuck in the minds of reviewers. There is much that might be said about The Heart of Midlothian as a piece of narrative art.35 Suffice it here to point to the role of verbal art as such in the formation of cultural memory. A key to understanding this role, I argue here, is ‘‘memorability,’’ by which I mean in the first instance the power of something to fix itself in the mind in such a vivid way that it is not easily forgotten. By writing about Jeanie Deans and by expanding the brief story about Helen Walker which he had inherited from Mrs. Goldie into a full-scale novel, Scott made a character who is memorable. He created a figure whose life we are made interested in following for an extended period of time, and this is borne out by many critics: Lady Louisa Stewart, for example, praised Scott for having succeeded where everyone else had failed, namely, in making the perfectly good character the most interesting (quoted in Lockhardt 1906 [1836]: 336); more recently, Patricia Meyer Spacks (1998) has described her as a ‘‘memorable heroine of fiction,’’ who after almost two centuries ‘‘remains a splendid imaginative creation.’’ Within the framework of the novel, Jeanie Deans, also known as Helen Walker, is not just briefly commemorated, as she is later on the gravestone, but represented at length by a highly skilled storyteller in such a way that she is transformed into a character in whose struggles readers become imaginatively involved. Without the benefit of verbal art, in other words, there would have been little to remember about the life of Helen Walker. Like so many other flowers, she would have been born to blush unseen. All of this suggests that literary expressiveness and narrative skills have a role to play in the creation of memories, that is, of stories that are memorable: why do certain images of the past stay alive, and to what extent can this longevity be attributed to the way in which they have been expressed in 35. See Marshall 1961; Lascelles 1980; Millgate 1984. Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 381 writing? The contrast between Mrs. Goldie’s brief account of Helen Walker with Scott’s narrative of Jeanie Deans indicates that, with cultural memory as with jokes, it may not just be a matter of what the outline of the story is, but how you tell them. The case of The Heart of Midlothian shows that texts help stabilize and fix memories in a certain shape (a point made by Aleida Assmann [1999: 249–64]). At the same time, it suggests that the manner in which stories are told—what I have been calling here the expressiveness of the text—may also contribute to making those stories ‘‘stick’’ in the minds of third parties: they are not merely recorded but actually remembered. In this case, the capacity to tell a rattling good tale was facilitated by Scott’s freedom as a novelist to flesh out Helen’s story and shape it at will; but the basic point about the memorability of a well-told story that catches the imagination of readers presumably also holds in principle for works of nonfiction.36 The second aspect of memorability that is relevant here has to do with the matter of value, the idea that some things are memorable in the sense of ‘‘worthy of being remembered’’ whereas other things may happily be forgotten. As has already been noted, Scott transforms his raw materials in such a way as to moralize events: in terms of the moral economy of the plot, the upright woman who trusted to English justice and walked to London to get a pardon for her sister is privileged above the rioters who took the law into their own hands. In other words, she is made ‘‘memorable’’ not just in the sense that she gets prolonged attention from the narrator but also in the sense that her achievements are celebrated and symbolically rewarded in the development of the plot. The way in which the novel foregrounds certain figures in the past as worthy of being remembered suggests that discussions regarding cultural memory need to be extended beyond questions of authenticity and origins, where they are usually concentrated, to include other functions and values, such as exemplariness. It is important to recognize that certain things are remembered not because they are actually true of the past (which may or may not be the case), but because they are somehow meaningful in the present. In other words, ‘‘authenticity’’ may not always be relevant to memorial dynamics, and certain things may be recalled because they are meaningful to those doing the recalling rather than because, from the historian’s perspective, they are actually true. In this context, it is worth noting Frank Ankersmit’s recent argument about history and extending it to discussions of cultural memory. History, as Ankersmit (1994: 179) points out, has more functions than have been recognized in dis36. For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between fictionality and narrativity, see Rigney 2001: 16–31. 382 Poetics Today 25:2 cussions among professional historians: in practice its value may lie not just in its ‘‘telling it as it was,’’ but in its offering images of the past for ethical and aesthetic contemplation. The same principle already seems to apply to The Heart of Midlothian: irrespective of its authenticity, the story of Jeanie Deans is more memorable than that of Helen Walker. (For proof of its being remembered, see below.) Finally, the case of The Heart of Midlothian exemplifies the fact that ‘‘making memorable’’ in the ways I have just been describing is inseparable from ‘‘forgetting.’’ As mentioned earlier, theorists have been pointing out with increasing frequency in recent years that remembering goes hand in glove with putting other things behind one. This Ernest Renan (1887) was already aware of in his famous essay ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ when he argued that national identity is based on collectively remembering certain things and on being able to forget other, more divisive events.37 ‘‘Forgetting’’ in this paradoxically active sense is not just a matter of simply ignoring certain things but of being able to ignore them despite their troubling character. Scott’s combination of the Porteous and Walker affairs may be explained in part in the light of this dialectic of remembering and forgetting. Although the novel begins with the detailed recollection of the carnivalesque execution of Porteous, the narrative in effect goes on to sideline the memory of this event in favor of remembering Jeanie Deans. The Porteous affair is recalled pro memorie, as it were, recalled for the record but then effectively pushed aside as a once-off anomaly as it becomes upstaged by the story of the determined but law-abiding Jeanie. Recalling a disquieting memory and then going on to temper its affective power was typical for Scott. Old Mortality (1816), for example, portrays the bitter religious conflict of the seventeenth century but in such a way that it also attempts to resolve the bitterness, so that bygones may be bygones.38 In the case of The Heart of Midlothian, the logic of the narrative points to a desire to overwrite Porteous with Jeanie Deans, but the very power of Scott’s description of the midnight execution makes for a certain unresolved tension in the work. Indeed, the impression that the book actually says more than Scott himself intended is perhaps one of the reasons for its continued appeal in an age where tensions and unfinished businesses are aesthetically more de rigueur than virtuous solutions. To conclude this discussion of the novel as literary composition: the way 37. ‘‘L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation’’ (Renan 1887: 284–85). In Rigney 1990 (esp. 90–101), I show, with respect to nineteenth-century narrative historians, how the foregrounding of certain events goes together with playing down the significance of—in effect forgetting—other ones. 38. On this point, see further Rigney 2001: 30–31. Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 383 in which Scott foregrounds certain memories, while marginalizing others, indicates that the role of novels is not just a matter of recalling, recording, and ‘‘stabilizing’’ but also of selecting certain memories and preparing them for future cultural life as stories. As his work demonstrates, moreover, poetic and narrative forms have an important role to play in this process of ‘‘making memorable’’ and forgetting. 2.4. The Novel as Textual Monument The idea that texts resemble monuments is very old. Like statues or gravestones, textual artifacts have a fixed character which allows them to play a role in recalling some person or event of yore and in bearing witness to them. Indeed, as Horace and many others after him pointed out, textual artifacts may be even more durable than stone or bronze (aere perennius), since they are not susceptible to the wear and tear of erosion and lichen but can be reproduced in pristine condition at later moments in time. There is a crucial difference between texts and other sorts of memorials, however, regarding location: whereas stone monuments are fixed in a particular site (which becomes literally a lieu de mémoire), texts are not, and hence they may be recycled among various groups of readers living in different parts of the globe and at different historical moments. In this sense, texts are ‘‘portable’’ monuments, which can be carried over into new situations. Or as Heine once put it, a book can be a ‘‘portable Fatherland’’ (‘‘portatives Vaterland,’’ quoted in Assmann 1999: 306), a possibility that has clearly been enhanced by the development of new printing techniques and pocket-size vademecums or livres de poches.39 Whereas all texts are in principle transportable into new situations, literary texts are by definition susceptible to being relocated, because they are valued as pieces of verbal art and hence preserved as a recognized part of a cultural heritage and/or because they are fictional and as such not bound to any single historical context. Reactivated at a later point in time through the medium of such texts, memories can enter into new combinations. Having considered the genesis and composition of The Heart of Midlothian, I want to complete this study by examining the cultural afterlife of the novel on the assumption that the writing of a text and the recording of memories is less the outcome of a process than a new starting point. In the end, the proof of the memorial pudding is in the reading and remembering. How then did The Heart of Midlothian function at later points in time in keeping alive cer39. In his study of German literary culture during World War I, Wolfgang Natter (1999) provides a fascinating discussion of the way in which the production of paperback editions of canonical works was linked to the notion that literature was a form of heritage which was by nature ‘‘portable.’’ 384 Poetics Today 25:2 tain (partly fictionalized) memories of the eighteenth century? And, linked to this, how has the novel itself, as a piece of cultural heritage, dating from the early nineteenth century, functioned as an object of remembrance or lieu de mémoire? As we shall see, this work has several afterlives which run concurrently: as the story of Jeanie Deans, as part of the oeuvre of Scott, as a novelistic text that can still be read today. The Heart of Midlothian is generally considered to be one of Scott’s most popular works, a popularity borne out by the National Union Catalogue, which lists no fewer than eighty-seven editions between 1818 and 1900. Moreover, the story also survived—albeit in a different medium—in the many pictorial illustrations to the work and the many (more or less reverent) adaptations to the stage that took place throughout the nineteenth century.40 The Heart of Midlothian was produced more than three hundred times on the British and American stage in a variety of theatrical genres, from melodrama (for example, Daniel Terry, The Heart of Midlothian: A Musical Drama, in Three Acts [1819], and Thomas Dibdin, The Heart of Midlothian: A Melodramatic Romance [1819]) to burlesque (William Brough, The Great Sensation Trial; or, Circumstantial Effie-Deans: A Burlesque Extravaganza [1863]) to high opera (Joseph Bennett and Hamish MacCunn, Jeanie Deans: A Grand Opera in Four Acts and Seven Tableaux [1894]).41 Through the many reprints of the novel and through these multiple adaptations to other media, then, the story of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ became something of a household word in the nineteenth century, especially in Scotland. As with the other Waverley novels, the popularity of The Heart of Midlothian seems to have been due to the combination of the subject matter and the narrative style. As I have shown elsewhere (Rigney 2001: 30–58), readers appreciated Scott’s work in the first instance for offering a colorful and plausible image of eighteenth-century life in a highly readable form. One can speculate that the particular popularity of The Heart of Midlothian was also linked to its having a relatively uncontroversial plot based on an unknown historical figure (as we have already seen, Scott sidelines the more controversial Porteous affair in the narrative). Thus, where Old Mortality (1816), which dealt with a well-known and traumatic civil conflict, led to extended discussions on the validity of Scott’s representation of history, readers of The Heart of Midlothian do not seem to have been overly concerned with historical accuracy. Even after the identity of Jeanie’s prototype was dis40. For pictorial illustrations, see, for example, Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland 1873. More generally, regarding the reactions of visual artists to Scott’s work, see Gordon 1988: 286–358. 41. Bolton (1992: 259–96) provides an excellent account of the many versions, productions, and performances of the novel, which was also available in abridged form (Stewart 1833). Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 385 closed, her factuality has been less an issue, as I suggested above, than the moral significance of her character seen as representative of a certain age in Scottish history and of a certain class in Scottish society. Thus Georg Lukács (1962 [1936–1937]: 56), in keeping with the earliest reviewers, praises Jeanie Deans as a historically and morally significant character but makes no mention of her actual prototype.42 Such an attitude confirms what was said earlier about memorability and the fact that actual historical accuracy may be less important in the long-term than exemplariness and relevance. From the so-called magnum opus edition of 1830 onward, most reprints of the novel have included an introduction by Scott in which he narrates the story of Helen Walker and reproduces his correspondence with Mrs. Goldie. In principle, therefore, the story of Helen Walker has been available for those willing to look it up, alongside that of her fictional successor Jeanie Deans. The result has been a certain amount of fame, a persistent if tenuous afterlife in later discourses: Helen Walker was the subject of John M’Diarmid’s ‘‘The Real Life of Jeanie Deans,’’ which I mentioned earlier; she figured in propria persona in Charlotte Yonge’s Book of Golden Deeds (1864), as she did in the anonymous ‘‘Jennie [sic] Deans, or Helen Walker,’’ published in Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine (June 1855)—basically a retelling of the Walker story through the prism of the novel. More recently, she has figured in an Internet heritage site devoted to celebrating women’s role in Scottish history, a modest renewal of interest in Helen in the postfeminist era, which suggests that cultural memory loss is reversible as long as the relevant information has been stored somewhere.43 And of course, Helen has also received some attention in scholarly discussions of the novel—including the present one (see, for example, Lascelles 1980). But these various recollections of Helen Walker remain fairly marginal beside the memory of the fictitious Jeanie Deans, which has enjoyed a widespread cultural life. Symptomatic of the enormous popularity of Scott’s (or, for that matter, Dickens’s) work is the fact that his characters have become so well known that they can enjoy a new life as cultural icons. Thus, alongside all the reproductions and adaptations of Scott’s story mentioned above, the figure of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ also circulated independently of any of the particular texts in which her story was told or dramatized. As importantly, her name was circulated in cultural spheres which had nothing to do with 42. For an early appreciation of Scott’s success in portraying Scottish manners of the period, see, for example, the anonymous reviews in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany, August 1818, 107–17 (see p. 109); the London Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc. 81 (August 1818): 497–500 (see p. 498); the Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, August 1818, 564–74 (see p. 570); and the Edinburgh Review 1 (1820): 1–54 (see pp. 3–4). 43. See ‘‘Women in History of Scots Descent,’’ available online at www.electricscotland.com/ history/women/walker helen.htm. 386 Poetics Today 25:2 literature as such. Thus ‘‘Jeanie Deans,’’ as I indicated at the very beginning of this article, crops up in a variety of social and cultural domains, from horticulture and transportation systems to hospitals and hostelries. The prominence of Scott’s characters in the naming of ships and railways is particularly noteworthy. The fleet of Craigendoran steamers on the river Clyde was called after various characters and novels in Scott’s oeuvre and included the famous paddle steamer Jeanie Deans (as if to drive the point home, the first-class lounge was furnished in light oak and with etchings from The Heart of Midlothian); the same fleet also included a ship called Waverley that had a ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ lounge. This mixing up of different stories illustrates once more the way in which memories are dislocated from their original contexts and then ‘‘collected’’ again to form composites.44 A similar pattern emerges in the development of the Scottish railway network: this included the famous Waverley station in Edinburgh, at least one train called after Scott himself, a type of locomotive called the ‘‘Scott class,’’ a ‘‘Waverley route,’’ and various generations of engines called after his characters, including the ubiquitous Jeanie.45 The inscription of Jeanie Deans and others in the public transport systems suggests that the literal ubiquity of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ was part and parcel of a more general invocation of the oeuvre of Scott and the figure of Scott himself as symbol of Scottish heritage. (This status was borne out by the erection of the Scott monument in Edinburgh between 1840 and 1844 and the emergence of Abbotsford as a major tourist destination in the same period.)46 Presumably, the names of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ and others on the sides of railway engines were meant to be recognized by the general public of travelers. In this sense, the names help recall the particular stories and texts in which they figured, or for those who only have a secondhand knowledge of the novels, they invoke a generalized acquaintance with Scott’s oeuvre or, at the very least, the idea of a common Scottish heritage. In this sense 44. The steamship seems to have been the most famous of a series of Jeanie Deans, including the four-masted sailing ship in the 1840s and a motor yacht registered in Brisbane as recently as 1973 (www.amsa.gov.au/Shipping Registration). A history of the Craigendoran steamers is given in McCrorie 1986. For an affectionate ‘‘biography’’ of the steamship, see MacHaffie 1977. To a certain extent, the steamship has by now become celebrated in its own right, without any reference to Scott. But the Scott model is incidentally recalled; for instance, when MacHaffie contrasts the positive outcome of Jeanie’s trip to London with the neglect and destruction awaiting the ship there: ‘‘In ‘Heart of Midlothian’ Jeanie Deans journeyed to London to plead the cause of her sister Effie imprisoned in the Tolbooth, Edinburgh. The satisfactory outcome of the mission was not matched by Jeanie Deans’s visit to the capital city’’ (ibid.: 29). On the Waverley, see MacHaffie 1982. 45. On the different generations of ‘‘Scott’’ locomotives, see Nock 1988: 80–88; on the ‘‘Waverley’’ line, see Siviter 1988. 46. On Abbotsford as a tourist site, see Crockett 1905 and Durie 1992. Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 387 they are what Juri Lotman (1990: 264) calls ‘‘mnemonic symbols,’’ that is, symbols which do not so much recall the past as remind us of a memory. An epidemiological study of the spread of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ would provide insight into the role of literature in linking up different areas of cultural experience and, specifically, its role in providing a framework for the ‘‘acculturation’’ of new technologies and new practices.47 In seeing a train, one is reminded of the (literary) past. The close relationship between technological innovations and the literary heritage suggests that a process of ‘‘acculturation’’ is going on whereby modernization and renewal are symbolically linked to the cultural heritage and hence rooted in existing traditions (the fact that Edinburgh’s most famous football club should carry the name ‘‘Heart of Midlothian’’ can be ascribed to a similar process of acculturation).48 In being carried over into new cultural situations and linked with other aspects of Scottish life, the memory of ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ was thus perpetuated at the same time as it contributed to the formation of new memories and the mapping of new forms of heritage. For both locomotive Jeanie and steamship Jeanie have in turn become established parts of the engineering heritage of Scotland, and this, as an Internet search confirms, is the object of much devoted study and remembrance on the part of professional and amateur devotees. A layering process seems to be going on, with the continuous erosion and accretion of shared memories: just as ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ took over from ‘‘Helen Walker’’ in 1818, the memory of Scott’s character has in turn been largely replaced by the memories of the steam engine, the steamship, and the football club. The affectionately written biography Jeanie Deans 1931–1967: An Illustrated Biography (MacHaffie 1977) thus refers to the steamship, not to the (fictitious) woman who walked to London. In all of these morphings, ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ takes on a life as a cultural icon 47. Jan Assmann (1997: 145–51) discusses the ‘‘acculturation’’ of new groups in the evolution of cultural memory, but the case of Scott suggests that the issue also arises with respect to new technologies. 48. The Heart of Midlothian Football Club was founded in 1874; the name of the club originated in the name of a dance hall which the players frequented and which may have originated in Scott’s novel or in the memory of the ‘‘Heart of Midlothian,’’ the popular name for the prison demolished in 1817. Whatever the exact origin of the name of the dance hall, the official history of the football club links the name to the work of Scott: ‘‘The Tolbooth of Edinburgh, which was demolished in 1817, was known locally as the Heart of Midlothian. Sir Walter Scott immortalized the name in his writings and many institutions were named after this old jail’’ (Heart of Midlothian Football Club 1998: 9). Since its foundation, the football club has acquired its own history, which is celebrated in such publications as the Hearts Official All- me Greats (Heart of Midlothian Football Club 1999) and The Hearts Quiz Book (Blackwood et al. 1987); it is worth noting, as an indication of memory loss, that the quiz book, focusing on the goals and penalties of famous players, includes no reference to Scott. 388 Poetics Today 25:2 which is rooted in The Heart of Midlothian but takes place independently of it. As a cultural icon, her story is circulated in an ever reduced form, however, and this means that, although her name is inscribed in various cultural spheres, there is no guarantee that the original story of Jeanie Deans, not to mention Helen Walker, will also be remembered. Both forgetting and memory loss are part of the evolution of cultural memory, as we have seen, and at a certain point, some people will presumably know ‘‘Jeanie Deans’’ more as a lounge bar than as a Presbyterian. Moreover, there is evidence that the general public of 2003 is no longer as familiar with some of the more obscure characters from Scott as were those generations who traveled by steam train and to whom those ‘‘Scott’’ locomotives were addressed.49 The fact that some memories are lost and others gained is not to suggest, however, that memorial dynamics is either linear or irrevocable. As we have already seen, Helen Walker has recently made a modest comeback. And this brings me to my final point, which bears on the fact that Scott’s text remains in print and that artifacts can outlive memories.The durability of texts, to which I referred earlier, means that it is always possible for certain accounts of the past to be reactivated and appropriated by new groups. Whenever those texts are reread, certain images of the past are at once rereactivated and adapted to the new context in which they function. Up to a point, this can be said of all sorts of texts stored in archives: they too may be dusted off, brought into circulation, and become meaningful again in new contexts. But the chances of this happening are far less than in the case of literary texts, which, by their nature as display texts, as fictions, or as pieces of literary heritage, lend themselves to recycling. At this point, the poetic qualities of Scott’s text which I discussed earlier become relevant again. Scott’s skill in telling the story of Jeanie Deans and making her memorable presumably contributed to her longevity as cultural icon. But The Heart of Midlothian as such still remains a highly readable text for contemporary readers (at least if they are not put off by the lengthy passages of dialect, which even Scott’s earliest readers found a bit difficult).50 49. Nock’s (1988: 87) comments on the Scott class of locomotives in his history of the northern railways again reflects memory loss: ‘‘Even at this early stage [1909–1912] in the naming of this ultimately numerous group of locomotives, it would need a specialist quiz contender to identify some of the personalities involved in those North British engine names! Who, for example, was ‘Madge Wildfire’ and who was ‘Vich Ian Vohr’?’’ The fact that this recent historian of the railways is apparently not familiar with minor characters from The Heart of Midlothian and Waverley shows that the work of Scott is much less well known nowadays than in 1909. 50. While the Monthly Review (December 1818: 356–70 [p. 363]) saw the use of dialect as one of the attractions of the novel, the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register ( July–December 1818: 250) was more negative, dismissing it as a Scottish affair—of interest to the Scots in Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 389 To be sure, the book has become dated in some ways, and Scott’s confidence in the existence of a natural justice whereby the good are rewarded and the bad deported seems naive from the perspective of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, my own reading experience has shown that the book, through its powers of description, dramatization, and characterization, can still engage a contemporary reader and interest her or him in the fate of eighteenth-century characters whose agendas are quite foreign. At another level, as I suggested earlier, it also arouses interest in the nineteenth-century world of Scott and his agenda as he struggles and ultimately fails to resolve in poetic form the tensions immanent in the history of Scotland. Whether or not every reader nowadays will share this particular judgment of Scott’s novel is not in itself important. What is important is the theoretical point that it allows me to make: the case of The Heart of Midlothian demonstrates that literary works—by virtue of their poetic and fictional properties—may have a distinctive role to play in reawakening eroded memories in later generations. Linked to this and perhaps even more important, literary texts may have a role to play in arousing interest in histories which are not one’s own, in the history of groups with which one has hitherto not identified. This suggests the importance of seeing literary texts not just as channels for perpetuating certain memorial traditions but also as the source of new traditions and the means for broadening the horizons of what one considers one’s own heritage. Concepts of cultural memory have generally been premised on the idea of some sort of continuous memorial tradition, albeit one subject to erosion and modification, in which the shared memories of a particular group are gradually deposited, a bit like rainwater in a bucket.51 This is not in itself surprising since, as we know from at least Renan, the sense of sharing memories and of having a common heritage is an important part of identity formation. The evidence presented here suggests that literary works (and, mutatis mutandis, films) indeed play a role in identity formation in this sense. But my case also suggests that literary works are capable of arousing interest in the history of other groups and hence in creating new sorts of affiliations based on ‘‘discontinuous’’ and cross-border memories. This is something which has hitherto received little systematic attention but seems particularly pertinent to the role of literature and other forms of artistic expression. The point is borne out if you consider not only the perennial interest of someone like Scott even for those who are not Scottish, but also ‘‘recalling to their minds the traditionary facts of their early days’’ but relatively inaccessible to the English reader. 51. On the relation between ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘cultural memory,’’ see especially Hutton 1993. 390 Poetics Today 25:2 the fact that recent historical fiction on Balkan history by such writers as Ismail Kadare and Danilo Kiš is readily available in English translation and hence has presumably found a ‘‘foreign’’ readership. This suggests that literature plays a role in transferring memories not just between individuals belonging to the same community, but also across groups.This was presumably what Geoffrey Hartman (1995: 90) had in mind when he proposed that ‘‘the arts, and literature in particular’’ serve to remind us ‘‘that the heritage of the past is pluralistic and diverse.’’ 52 The case of The Heart of Midlothian shows, however, that literature does not have a single pre-given role in memorial dynamics; nor do literary works have only one cultural afterlife. The same literary work may serve both to confirm and consolidate the sense of a common heritage and, depending on who is doing the reading, to arouse interest in the heritage and experiences of other groups. To take the point even further: it is arguable that making uninterested parties ‘‘interested’’ in the experience of others may be as much a key to the construction of cultural memories as the putatively spontaneous identification with the experiences of one’s family or the experiences of the ethnic group with which one usually identifies. Why certain stories rather than others should succeed in awakening interest in ‘‘other people’s experience’’ is a question which calls for the future integration of research in poetics and in the dynamics of cultural memory. 3. Conclusion The case of Jeanie Deans troubles any clear distinction between ‘‘literature’’ and ‘‘life’’ in that it shows how the formation of cultural memory is a part of collective life at the same time as it is discursive ‘‘all the way down.’’ From Mrs. Goldie’s selection of a ‘‘tellable’’ tale to pass on to the novelist to the transformation of Helen into Jeanie to the transformation of Jeanie into a steam locomotive: there is no point at which one can say that historical experience is ever free of narrative models. More specifically, the case of Scott shows that a literary work can play a mediating role both in the acculturation of new phenomena and in the recall of things past. To be sure, Scott was an exceptional case, and one highly popular ‘‘author of Waverley’’ does not make a theoretical springtime. Yet considered in all its diachronic complexity, the case of The Heart of Midlothian does raise a number of issues that at the very least deserve more detailed consideration in any future considerations of the dynamics of cultural memory and the 52. A similar idea was expressed even more recently by Tim Woods (1998: 346), who argues that literature is ‘‘a mechanism for collective memory that opens up the past to scrutiny’’ and that acts ‘‘ethically by resisting dogmatic, fixed, closed narratives.’’ Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 391 place of literature in it. To begin with: the cultural ubiquity of Scott’s work indicates the importance of an interdisciplinary approach which takes into account the various media, discourses, and cultural spheres through which memories are conveyed and transformed. Secondly, the cultural longevity of his ‘‘portable monuments’’ shows the importance of a nonlinear approach to the evolution of cultural memory, which would allow for different temporalities and for discontinuities within traditions. Thirdly, the complexity of his works as literary artifacts points to the need for a further elaboration of a ‘‘poetics’’ of memorability based on the principle that literary form may be constitutive of memory and not merely a travesty of ‘‘authentic’’ experience. Linked to this: the fact that Jeanie Deans has upstaged Helen Walker forces us to take into theoretical account the idea that ‘‘artificial’’—even patently false—memories crafted by writers may prove more tenacious in practice than those based on facts which have not been submitted to the same creative reworking. An uncomfortable idea for historians, perhaps, but an interesting challenge for the literary scholar. 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Sebeok, 350–77 (Cambridge: MIT Press). Kadare, Ismail 2000 Three Elegies for Kosovo, translated by Peter Constantine (New York: Harvill). Kansteiner, Wulf 2002 ‘‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,’’ History and Theory 41: 179–97. Kellner, Hans 1987 ‘‘Narrativity in History: Post-Structuralism and Since,’’ History and Theory 26: 1–29. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museum, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press). Koselleck, Reinhart 1979 ‘‘Kriegerdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der Überlebenden,’’ in Identität, Poetik und Hermeneutik No. 8, edited by Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle, 255–76 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink). LaCapra, Dominick 1998 History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Langer, Lawrence L. 1975 The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). 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Novick, Peter 1988 That Noble Dream: The ‘‘Objectivity Question’’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rigney • Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans 395 Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins 1998 ‘‘Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,’’ Annual Review of Sociolo 24: 105–40. Perry, Jos 1999 Wij herdenken, dus wij bestaan: Over jubilea, monumenten en de collectieve herinnering (Nijmegen: SUN). Pushkin, Alexander 1999 [1836] ‘‘The Captain’s Daughter,’’ in The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, translated by Alan Myers, 101–208 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Renan, Ernest 1887 ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ in Discours et conférences, 277–310 (Paris: Calmann Lévy). Ricoeur, Paul 1983–1985 Temps et Récit. 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil). 2000 La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil). 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Memory Studies http://mss.sagepub.com/ Divided pasts: A premature memorial and the dynamics of collective remembrance Ann Rigney Memory Studies 2008 1: 89 DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083892 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mss.sagepub.com/content/1/1/89 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Memory Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://mss.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://mss.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://mss.sagepub.com/content/1/1/89.refs.html >> Version of Record - Jan 1, 2008 What is This? Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 Divided pasts: A premature memorial and the dynamics of collective remembrance ANN RIGNEY, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Abstract The commemoration of the participation of Irishmen in the British army in the first World War has reflected the political divisions on the island. This article focuses on the Irish National War Memorial, which was built in the 1930s in Dublin but only officially opened in the 1990s, and analyses the cultural life of this monument in relation to the difficult integration of a marginalized group into the dominant national narrative. The case is used to support a call for an integrated study of collective remembrance that takes into account both its multi-medial character and the dynamic interplay between cultural and social processes. Key words consensus and contestation; First World War; Ireland; mnemonic communities; prospective memory-making; synthetic memory sites The last picture ever taken of my father shows him standing between two wisteriatrailed arches in the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge, Dublin. This extensive garden of remembrance is dedicated to the almost 50,000 Irishmen who lost their lives in the First World War while serving in the British army. We had gone there in 1997 at the instigation of my father who, born in 1910 and with personal recollections of shellshocked veterans in his home town, knew of my interest in collective memory and mnemonic practices. The garden forms a sunken amphitheatre, with lawns and pergolas, along with bookrooms housing Ireland’s Memorial Records, listing the names of the dead. It was empty and, as my father recollected, he had always known it like that and, until recently, as very much neglected. Indeed, he had once found himself there alone at 11:00 am on 11 November. The carefully designed space was set up as a memorial, but there was noone around to do the remembering; a purpose-built site of memory, but no group visibly identifying with it. His personal memories of this abandonment are borne out MEMORY STUDIES © SAGE Publications 2008, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1750-6980, Vol 1(1): 89–97 [DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083892] Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 90 MEMORY STUDIES 1(1) by other sources that indicate that the garden had been severely neglected for decades until it was restored in the 1990s (Leonard, 1996). How to explain the existence, and yet emptiness, of a garden of remembrance? And what does this tell us about the dynamics of collective memory? The Islandbridge gardens were built between 1931 and 1938, after many years of discussion as to the appropriate location and design of a war memorial. How to find an appropriate form for commemorating Irish participation in the British army from a post-independence and hence also post-partition perspective? After all, the foundational event for the independent Irish state, established in 1922, was the Easter Rising of 1916. This had been fought against the British army in which an estimated 200,000 Irishmen had enlisted, many of them in the belief, actively encouraged by their political leaders, that their service in the First World War would not only help defend the liberty of small nations but also ultimately contribute to Irish independence.1 From the perspective of independent Ireland, remembrance was focused on those who fought for independence on the side of the Easter Rising, not those who had fought for it by serving in the British army. The situation was further complicated by the fact that public remembrance of the First World War abroad had to be negotiated in a country that had recently experienced not only independence, but also partition and civil war. In other words: within the Irish nation as it was constituting itself in these years, there was still no consensus as to how the recent past at home should be remembered, just as there was no consensus as to whether, given partition, the project of achieving Irish independence from England was completed or not. Reflecting the divided state of the island, the commemoration of the First World War followed a distinctive path in Ulster and quickly became focused on the iconic battle of the Somme. Within the Northern Ireland framework, service in the British army was thus construed as a demonstration par excellence of Loyalism (the nationalist involvement was generally left out of the picture) and hence as one of the foundational stones of the distinctiveness of Ulster within the UK. As a number of commentators have pointed out, the divergence in the mnemonic traditions between North and South thus reflected the division of the island itself after 1921.2 Within quite a short time, the poppy became coded, both north and south of the border, as an expression of allegiance to Britain. The lack of an alternative language of commemoration meant that Remembrance Day rituals became associated with Britishness, making it all the more difficult to find a modality within independent Ireland for commemorating the large-scale participation of Irishmen in the First World War. From 1919 on, attempts were made. Money was not the problem in the first instance, since relatively large sums towards a memorial had been raised throughout the country. This money was partly spent on producing Ireland’s Memorial Records, lavishly adorned with Celtic and art deco motifs, for distribution to the principal libraries in the country (the bookrooms for these memorial records would later be the centrepiece of the garden of remembrance). But when it came to putting down a permanent public monument in the capital city, as distinct from making a book that was housed in libraries, there was a lot of discussion. Initially, debate centred on the question of whether the money would not be better spent looking after veterans rather than on statues, on the still Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 RIGNEY DIVIDED PASTS living rather than the dead (Johnson, 2003: 92–4). Once the idea of a memorial was finally accepted, however, the crux became finding a suitable location to commemorate a sizeable group that was nevertheless not seen as representing the new state and its aspirations, but rather a ‘path not taken’ in history. Several proposals involved locating the monument in one of the central city squares (Jeffrey, 2000: 103–7). But these plans foundered on the principle that it would be inappropriate to erect a monument of any size recalling Irish service in the British army so close to the emblems of new Irish statehood. The city-centre location also ran the risk of being too easily a forum for public clashes. A temporary cenotaph located in the city centre had provoked public unrest around Remembrance Day commemorations in the 1920s: those doing the commemorating clashed with those who objected to any display of insignia relating to the British army, the whole event becoming a focus for demonstrations of differing political allegiances. This sort of interference between remembrance and politics bears out Ernest Renan’s contention that nation-building is an ongoing process in which both remembrance and forgetting are shaped by presentday aspirations, while present-day aspirations are expressed through public acts of identification with particular actors in the past (Renan, 1947–61[1882]). In the end, agreement was reached on an off-centre location at Islandbridge on the outskirts of the city, with the plan to build a park designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens (also creator of the cenotaph in London and the Monument to the Missing at Thiepval) (Winter, 1995: 102–8). The fact that it would also function as a park facilitated its being sponsored by the government on the grounds that it would be both a memorial to the dead and a contribution to public health. The garden covered an extensive area, but was also so far removed from the city centre as not to be in competition with any other national monuments, functioning in a sort of splendid isolation among parklands rather than close to the seat of government. As such, its location was in marked contrast to the nationalist Garden of Remembrance, cramped into the city centre, which was planned in 1938 and inaugurated in 1966 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.3 In the event, the Islandbridge memorial was not completed as planned (the final bridge linking it to the main city park never materialized for lack of funds). More importantly, the plans for the official opening of the memorial by representatives of the Irish state were postponed indefinitely in 1939 when the outbreak of the new war rendered inopportune any public commemorations of British servicemen in officially neutral Ireland. After the Second World War, the plans for an official opening were not resumed, though the garden began to be used by veterans’ associations for their annual commemoration (Johnson, 2003; 110–1). This practice was subsequently dropped from 1971 onwards, in a climate of bomb scares and against the background of the Northern Ireland troubles. For the next 20 years, the sadly neglected garden went into decline (Leonard, 1996: 109–12). Street sales of poppies were cancelled and the annual ceremonies, intermittently attended by members of government, were relocated to the sanctuary of the Protestant cathedral.4 It was arguably left to literary and theatrical works to keep the topic alive in general public remembrance, with performances of Frank McGuiness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 91 92 MEMORY STUDIES 1(1) and Seán O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (1929; revived 1987) being important reminders of a group left out of the dominant national narrative. In the 1990s, expressing a shift in public opinion arguably prepared through such artistic works, but specifically linked in the media to repulsion towards the IRA bombing of a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen in 1987, a move was made to have the garden restored. Some 60 years after its original inception, the memorial garden was finally opened officially by a government minister in 1994 (Leonard, 1996: 111). Subsequently, the gardens became the location for annual Remembrance Day services, now attended by government representatives and expanded to include the commemoration of Irish soldiers lost in United Nations operations and hence less marked by Britishness. In July 2006, the 90th anniversary of the battle of the Somme, the lieu de mémoire par excellence for Ulster unionists but in which many other Irishmen were also involved, was commemorated at the gardens in the presence of the head of state, ambassadors from the other countries involved in the battle, representatives of the British Legion and the Northern Irish Administration, and representatives of various political parties in Northern Ireland, including Unionists.5 This multiparty ‘all Ireland’ ceremony was explicitly designed as a parallel to the commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising that had taken place several months earlier, and it received wide media coverage for its symbolic importance as part of the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland. This historic event – a concept which in itself indicates that prospective memorymaking is at the heart of monumentalization – marked the symbolic acceptance of those who fought in the British army into Irish national memory, including (albeit not foregrounded) even those who may have done so as part of a Unionist rather than an Independence agenda. It was explicitly conceived as a further step towards all-Ireland reconciliation and in terms of a moral injunction emanating from the original victims to ensure that their collective sacrifice had not been in vain.6 The pluralist perspective was underlined by the recitation at the ceremony of McCrae’s canonical poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (written by a Canadian and mainstay of many British commemorations) along with the singing of the Irish national anthem. The official booklet published for the occasion also included ‘The Irish in Gallipoli’ by the Meath poet Francis Ledwidge, who had enlisted as a nationalist and died in Flanders in 1917. In this slow process of construction, neglect and rehabilitation, we see how the garden gained official recognition at an ever higher level within the Irish Republic, indicating a slowly emerging willingness to revise the national narrative to include a sidelined group. Along the way, the garden was not just an inert piece of ground, but a constitutive medium of remembrance in that it provided a forum both for expressing views of the past and for mediating between different groups. The Islandbridge case is very specific, but it raises some more general issues about the interplay between fixed locations, public acts of remembrance and mnemonic communities.7 Maurice Halbwachs argued in his La mémoire collective (1997 [1950]) that collective memory tends towards ‘gathering’ in particular locations (like rainwater as it were flowing to the lowest point), because actual sites can create a bridge between past and present. Even as particular places recall the past, they can also be visited in the here and now, and Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 RIGNEY DIVIDED PASTS thus become the theatre of new experiences and hence of new embodied memories. Space, Halbwachs argued, can give ‘the illusion of not changing across time and of finding the past in the present’ (Halbwachs, 1997[1950]: 236, my translation), thereby allowing ‘a group to organize its actions and movements in relation to the stable configuration of the material world’ (p. 235, my translation; also Halbwachs, 1941). It is presumably for this reason that so much importance has been attached, particularly since the 19th century, to re-locating and ‘centralizing’ the national past by putting down public monuments in the urban space. When mnemonic communities extend beyond face-to-face contacts (characteristic of family memory) to mediated contacts (characteristic of imagined communities spread over an extensive territory), synthetic memory sites become all the more important.8 By synthetic sites I mean those locations that are custom made as sites and that are the result of various forms of symbolic investment, including both monuments and the rituals surrounding them. Albeit synthetic, such sites provide actual locations in which members of imagined communities ‘share memory’ in the course of ceremonies and visits. As Christine Boyer and others have shown, modern European capitals have provided a surface on which the sites of memory of the national community have been laid out as a spatial expression of collective memory, with the relative distance to the centre of power often used as an indicator of relative significance for the dominant mnemonic community (Boyer, 1994; Hayden, 1995). Given that space is always a scarce resource, groups jostle for public positions and for sites close to the seat of power and the symbolic heart of the city. The erection of new monuments in the public space is thus often construed as the final outcome of a process whereby minority counter-memories are accommodated within the larger social frame and given state recognition.9 This brings me more specifically to the relation between points of stability and dynamics in collective remembrance. Pierre Nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire has proven useful in descrbing the highly invested figures of memory that provide communal points of reference in modern, mediatized societies (Nora, 1997[1984–92]). But to the extent that his idea of ‘site’ also suggests something static – on the lines of a museum with artefacts – it has led to an overemphasis on the manner in which collective remembrance becomes tied down to particular figures, icons or monuments. However, as my use here of the term remembrance suggests, collective memory is not a matter of collecting, but of continuously performing.10 It is constantly in process, involving both recollection and forgetting in the light of changing patterns of relevance and shifting social frameworks.11 This is even true of monuments. Thus, while putting down a monument may seem like a way of ensuring long-term memory by giving it an official status, sometimes after a long struggle for public recognition, it may in fact turn out to mark the slow beginning of amnesia and indifference by foreclosing further discussion.12 Conversely, erecting a monument, as at Islandbridge, when the public culture is not ready for it, means that it may be a dead letter. But precisely because of its enduring material presence, it is also a dead letter that, given different circumstances, may always be revived. The case of Islandbridge indicates that memory sites only emerge over a longer period of time and that they continue to change both status and meaning as the Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 93 94 MEMORY STUDIES 1(1) mnemonic community is reshaped around them. The neglect suffered by the garden in the 1970s, like the pigeon droppings and graffiti at present accumulating on the Waterloo monument in the Kreuzberg district in Berlin, bears testimony to the fact that material monuments have their own life span and that they need to be maintained, both physically and through new acts of remembrance, if they are to survive as mnemonic media as distinct from just pieces of masonry or flower-filled spaces. The cultural life of a monument is dependent on people’s willingness to re-invest in it: in the form of commemorations, but also in the more ‘mobile’ media (texts, images) that reach people in various locations and encourage them to go to the place itself. As we have seen, the gardens in Islandbridge became the focus of media attention and of new rituals in which earlier acts of remembrance (poems, songs) converged and were recycled in a highly public way.13 If you remove the attention, the monument ceases to function as a mnemonic medium and becomes ‘inert’ again.14 Ironically, consensus may facilitate inertia, and pace Nora, controversy rather than canonization may be the most important motor in keeping a memory alive. Only if it is vital to defining current identities will a monument be worth disputing and hence newsworthy. Consensus also leads to invisibility. As long as the material monument is still there, however, it may always be reinvigorated if the occasion for new controversy arises. As Andreas Huyssen shows in his analysis of the wrapping of the Reichstag by installation artist Cristo in 1995, the defamiliarization of inert monuments can make them start working again as media. The second time around, however, they are the focus for an unsettling and critical revision of memory rather than the expression of consensus.15 Collective remembrance is like swimming: in order to stay afloat you have to keep moving. It has its own, open-ended dynamic. This involves the ongoing circulation of acts of remembrance across different media, including monuments, whereby memories are continuously being refigured.16 It also involves the ongoing interplay between hegemonic and marginalized memories in the shaping of public acts of commemoration with the help of these various media. What makes the Islandbridge memorial so interesting from the perspective of these dynamics is that it was premature: whereas public monuments are usually the outcome of a long process leading to official recognition, often preceded in civil society by acts of remembrance in literature and the arts, the Islandbridge monument was put down in the public space before the story it mediated had found a place within the dominant memory of the Irish state. Although it had significance for particular groups, it had to wait 60 years for official, governmental recognition and this depended, in turn, on changing views of Irish history. By the time these were forthcoming, the garden had accumulated an extra layer of meaning: no longer just a memorial to the war dead, it itself represented the actual site where the neglect of a certain tradition within Ireland had literally been played out. The absence of recognition during so many decades is as much a part of what is currently recalled in official ceremonies as the war victims themselves. In the meantime, the garden of remembrance at Islandbridge has also become a designated Irish heritage site, although the website of the Office of Public Works suggests that this has as much to do with its architectural interest and the number of its roses as with its Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 RIGNEY DIVIDED PASTS symbolism (Heritage Ireland, n.d.). At a point when the political conflicts that fed the divided remembrance of the First World War have hopefully given way to lasting peace, and the high profile zeal with which, in recent years, official ceremonies have sought to compensate for years of neglect has given way to annual, much less newsworthy commemorations, it may well be the architectural beauties of the garden that will ensure the long-term ‘stickiness’ of an increasingly dim memory of the First World War. Although unique, this particular case may provide some more general insight into the complex dynamics of collective remembrance involving the ongoing interaction between cultural processes and social ones, between private and public remembrance, between the top-down official organization of remembrance and the more bottomup conditions feeding into it.17 The media of memory (and there are many of them working together in the case we have been looking at: location, memorial book, theatre, poems, songs, garden design, commemorative performances, newspaper and television reporting, website) converge and hit off each other, and ensure the circulation of memories. In doing so, they also help constitute mnemonic communities by offering the means to articulate and to perform affiliations in a public way. Whereas Halbwachs believed that remembrance is shaped by social frames that pre-exist the act of remembrance, it is clear from this case that if the frames help constitute public acts of remembrance, they are also constituted by them and that remembrance plays an active role in defining and dividing communities. To understand such complex interactions between the role of media and the formation of mnemonic communities requires the combined expertise of various disciplines and a new interdisciplinary forum for discussion – such as the present journal. Notes 1 For details, see Jeffery (2000: 6–7); Beiner (2007); more generally on memory politics in Ireland, McBride (2001). 2 On the exclusion of nationalists from Ulster remembrance, Canavan (2004). 3 On the design of the Garden of Remembrance, Hill (1998: 157–60). 4 The historical role of St Patrick’s cathedral as a site for minority memories with no outlet in public space is discussed in Leerssen (2001). 5 For details of this official ceremony and accompanying publication, see Department of the Taoiseach (2007). This ceremony also echoed the opening of an extra-territorial All-Ireland peace park at Messines, Belgium in 1998. See also Beiner, 2007: 389. 6 The official publication included a quote from the nationalist Tom Kettle who had died at the Somme: ‘this tragedy of Europe may be and must be the prologue to the two reconciliations of which all statesmen have dreamed, the reconciliation of Protestant Ulster with Ireland, and the reconciliation of Ireland with Great Britain’. On the relation between moral injunctions and remembrance, see Derrida (1994). 7 On ‘mnemonic communities’ as an elaboration of Halbwachs’s (1925) ‘social frameworks’, see Zerubavel (2003). 8 For a wide-ranging discussion of monumentalization in nation-building, see Leerssen (2006). 9 I am endebted here to Aleida Assmann’s attempt to describe the dynamics between communicative memory (in the private sphere), social memory (in civil society) and official memory (institutionalized); (2001). Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 95 96 MEMORY STUDIES 1(1) 10 For more on the relation between remembrance and performance, see also Burke (2005); Solterer (1996). 11 On the inseparability of forgetting and remembrance: Weinrich (1997); Ricoeur (2000). For the interplay between relevance and social frameworks: Irwin-Zarecka (1994). 12 On monumentalization and amnesia: Koselleck (1979). 13 For a more extensive discussion of convergence and recycling in cultural remembrance: Rigney (2005). 14 The role of inertia and contestation in the dynamics of remembrance is also discussed in Olick and Robbins (1998). 15 Huyssen (2003). Huyssen’s analysis is part of a more general critique of the monumental and the search for new forms of memorialization (anti-monuments) that could persist in space and still resist inertia, or that, like the works of an artist such as Andy Goldsworthy, would be more like temporary ‘happenings’ rather than actual monuments with their bronze-like durability. 16 On the dynamics of cultural remembrance, see especially Irwin-Zarecka (1994); Olick and Robbins (1998). For approaches from cultural studies, see Rigney (2005, forthcoming). 17 For a sceptical view of the power of official remembrance in Ireland to impact on ingrained habits of remembrance (‘deep memory’), see Beiner (2007). References Assmann, Aleida (2001) ‘Vier Formen von Gedächtnis: Von individuellen zu kulturellen Konstruktionen der Vergangenheit’, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft 9: 103–23. Beiner, Guy (2007) ‘Between Trauma and Triumphalism: The Easter Rising, the Somme, and the Crux of Deep Memory in Modern Ireland’, Journal of British Studies 46: 366–89. Boyer, M. Christine (1994) The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burke, Peter (2005) ‘Performing History: The Importance of Occasions’, Rethinking History 9(1): 35–52. Canavan, Tony (2004) ‘The Poppy My Father Wore: The Problems Facing Irish Nationalists in Commemorating the Two World Wars’, in Eberhard Bort (ed.) Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, pp. 56–67. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Department of the Taoiseach (2007) Somme brochure. Available at: http://www.taoiseach.gov. ie/attached_files/Pdf%20files/Somme.Brochure9.pdf Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge. Halbwachs, Maurice (1925) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel. Halbwachs, Maurice (1941) La topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte: Étude de mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Halbwachs, Maurice (1997[1950]) La mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel. Hayden, Dolores (1995) The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heritage of Ireland (n.d.) ‘War Memorial Gardens (Dublin)’. Available at: http://www. heritageireland.ie/en/ParksandGardens/DublinArea/WarMemorialGardensDublin/ Hill, Judith (1998) Irish Public Sculpture: A History. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Huyssen, Andreas (2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 RIGNEY DIVIDED PASTS Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona (1994) Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Jeffery, Keith (2000) Ireland and the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Nuala C. (2003) Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart (1979) ‘Kriegerdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der Überlebenden’, in Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (eds) Identität (Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII), pp. 255–76. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Leerssen, Joep (2001) ‘Monument and Trauma: Varieties of Remembrance’, in Ian McBride (ed.) History and Memory in Modern Ireland, pp. 204–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leerssen, Joep (2006) National Thought: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Leonard, Jane (1996) ‘The Twinge of Memory: Armistice Day and Remembrance Day Sunday in Dublin since 1919’, in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds) Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture, pp. 99–114. London: Macmillan. McBride, Ian (ed.) (2001) History and Memory in Modern Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nora, Pierre (ed.) (1997[1984–92]) Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins (1998) ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40. Renan, Ernest (1947–61[1882]) ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?‘, in Henriëtte Psichari (ed.) Oeuvres complètes d’Ernest Renan, 10 vols, vol. 1, pp. 886–907. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Ricoeur, Paul (2000) La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Rigney, Ann (2005) ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, Journal of European Studies 35(1): 209–26. Rigney, Ann (forthcoming) ‘The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Solterer, Helen (1996) ‘The Waking of Medieval Theatricality: Paris, 1935–1995’, New Literary History 27: 357–90. Weinrich, Harald (1997) Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens. Munich: Beck. Winter, Jay M. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (2003) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. ANN RIGNEY, Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, is author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Imperfect Histories (Cornell University Press, 2001). Address: Literatuurwetenschap, Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, Netherlands. Email: Ann.Rigney@let.uu.nl Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com at University Library Utrecht on March 13, 2012 97 

Offprint from Cultural Memory Studies An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook Edited by Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing ANN RIGNEY 1. Memory Studies: From “Sites” to “Dynamics” When collective memory first rose to prominence on the academic agenda in the late 1980s, the emphasis was on the “sites” which act as common points of reference within memory communities. Such “sites” (as discussed in earlier sections of this collection) do not always take the form of actual locations, but they have in common the fact that, by encapsulating multifarious experience in a limited repertoire of figures, they provide a placeholder for the exchange and transfer of memories among contemporaries and across generations. As we know from recent work, memory sites neither come “naturally” into being nor all at once. Instead, they are the product of a selection process that has privileged some “figures of memory” above others (J. Assmann) and, linked to this, of multiple acts of remembrance in a variety of genres and media. For it is only through the mediation of cultural practices that figures of memory can acquire shape, meaning, and a high public profile within particular communities. The repertoire of such cultural practices changes over time together with technological and aesthetic innovations: The historical novel was at the forefront of new mnemonic practices in the first decades of the nineteenth century, for example, but this role is arguably now being played by graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973, 1986) or Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde (2000) and by virtual memorials using the new digital media. Although it has proven useful as a conceptual tool, the metaphor of “memory site” can become misleading if it is interpreted to mean that collective remembrance becomes permanently tied down to particular figures, icons, or monuments. As the performative aspect of the term “remembrance” suggests, collective memory is constantly “in the works” and, like a swimmer, has to keep moving even just to stay afloat. To bring remembrance to a conclusion is de facto already to forget. While putting down a monument may seem like a way of ensuring long-term memory, it may in fact turn out to mark the beginning of amnesia unless the monument in question is continuously invested with new meaning (Koselleck). In light of these considerations, it seems inevitable that attention should have turned in recent years from memory sites as such to the cultural dynamics in which they function (Olick and Robbins 122-30; Rigney, 346 Ann Rigney “Plenitude”). The distinction made by Jan Assmann between “communicative” and “cultural” memory already indicated that cultural remembrance is subject to a certain internal dynamic or lifespan: It evolves from the relatively unorganized exchange of stories among contemporaries and eyewitnesses to the increasingly selective focus on “canonical” sites which work as points of reference across generations. Other scholars have considered how the development of cultural remembrance is affected by the changing social frameworks that influence what is considered relevant enough to remember at any given time (Irwin-Zarecka). Research has shown that the canon of memory sites with which a community identifies is regularly subject to revision by groups who seek to replace, supplement, or revise dominant representations of the past as a way of asserting their own identity (Olick and Robbins 122-28). In this ongoing process, existing memory sites become invested with new meanings and gain a new lease of life. But they may also be upstaged by alternative sites and become effectively obsolete or inert. Indeed, the “dynamic” perspective on cultural remembrance suggests that “memory sites,” while they come into being as points where many acts of remembrance converge, only stay alive as long as people consider it worthwhile to argue about their meaning. One of the paradoxes of collective remembrance may be that consensus (“we all recollect the same way”) is ultimately the road to amnesia and that that it is ironically a lack of unanimity that keeps some memory sites alive. The current interest in the dynamics of cultural remembrance provides a new perspective on the role of art, including literature, in the formation of collective memory. Moreover, as we shall see, this shift from “sites” to “dynamics” within memory studies runs parallel to a larger shift of attention within cultural studies from products to processes, from a focus on cultural artifacts to an interest in the way those artifacts circulate and influence their environment. 2. Literary Studies: From “Products” to “Processes” Given the historical importance of writing as a medium of cultural memory, it is not surprising that there should be widespread interest in cultural memory studies among literary scholars (for a summary, see Erll). The focus has mainly been on individual texts, and the ways in which the textual medium is used to shape remembrance by paying attention to certain things rather than others, to structure information in certain ways, and to encourage readers to reflect on their own position in relation to the events presented. The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 347 One especially fruitful line of inquiry has picked up on earlier discussions within the philosophy of history and addressed the role played by narrative structures in the recollection of real events. As Hayden White had shown from the 1970s on, events do not “naturally” take the form of a story, meaning that whoever narrates events is in fact involved in actively shaping experience into an intelligible pattern with a beginning, middle, and end, and with an economy of antipathy and sympathy centered on particular human figures. These insights into the “value of narrativity in the representation of reality” (White) have led to an interesting body of research into the use of narration as an interpretative tool that is wielded both by historians and those working in other fields of remembrance. Within more recent discussions, moreover, narrativization has emerged, not just as an interpretative tool, but also as a specifically mnemonic one. Stories “stick.” They help make particular events memorable by figuring the past in a structured way that engages the sympathies of the reader or viewer (Rigney, “Portable”). Arguably, all other forms of remembrance (monuments, commemorations, museums) derive their meaning from some narrativizing act of remembrance in which individual figures struggle, succumb, or survive. One of the issues that inevitably crops up in discussions of the role of narrative in cultural memory is the relation between historiography and fiction. While the difference between factual accounts and, say, novels has come to seem less absolute than it once seemed (since even factual accounts are based on a narrative structuring of information), the freedom to invent information, and not merely structure it, nevertheless gives to fiction a flexibility which is absent in other forms of remembrance. Studies have shown that fiction (as in the historical novel) is a great help when it comes to narrativizing events since narrators who are free to design their own stories can more easily evoke vivid characters and give closure to events (Rigney, Imperfect Histories 13-58). Those who “stick to the facts” may paradoxically end up with a more historical and authentic story, but also a less memorable one, than the producers of fiction. The latter not only enjoy poetic license when narrativizing their materials, but also often have creative, specifically literary skills that help give an added aesthetic value to their work. This aesthetic dimension means that they can attract and hold the attention of groups without a prior interest in the topic, but with a readiness to enjoy a good story and suspend their disbelief (Landsberg 25-48). More research needs to be done on the relation between memorability, aesthetic power, and cultural longevity. But there is already evidence to show that “inauthentic” versions of the past may end up with more cultural staying power than the work of less skilled narrators or of more dis- 348 Ann Rigney ciplined ones who stay faithful to what their personal memories or the archive allow them to say. Whatever their shortcomings as history, fictional works like Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865-69) or Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) have enjoyed a high public profile and undeniably provided cultural frames for collective recollections of the Napoleonic era and World War Two respectively. To the extent that they are fictions, the status of such narratives is chronically ambivalent, meaning that they are continuously open to challenge by non-fictional recollections of the past. In practice, however, fictions often prove difficult to displace because it is not easy to come up with a non-fictionalized account that has the same narrativizing and aesthetic power (Rigney, Imperfect Histories). In the case of traumatic events, moreover, the freedoms offered by fictional genres and literary modes of expression may simply provide the only forum available for recalling certain experiences that are difficult to bring into the realm of public remembrance or that are simply too difficult to articulate in any other way (see Kansteiner and Weilnböck, this volume). Indeed, what may distinguish literary narratives from fictional narratives as such is their expressiveness: their power to say and evoke more because of the writer’s imagination and unique mastery of the medium. The idea that literature, along with the other arts, has a privileged role to play in giving voice to what has been overlooked in other forms of remembrance is a recurring theme (see Rigney, “Portable”). Indeed, literature and the other arts often appear specifically as a privileged medium of oppositional memory, as a “counter-memorial” and critical force that undermines hegemonic views of the past (Hartman). This line of reasoning, reflecting the moral authority of writers even at the present day, is deeply rooted in the dominant tradition of twentieth-century criticism in which artistic value is correlated with the defamiliarization of received ideas and in which the close reading of individual, highly-regarded texts is pitched towards showing how they subvert dominant views and envision alternatives (e.g., Bal and Crewe). As indicated above, however, the “dynamic” turn in memory studies is itself part of a larger shift within culture studies away from such a focus on individual products to a focus on the processes in which those products are caught up and in which they play a role. Behind this shift in emphasis within literary studies lies among other things the idea, associated with New Historicism, that individual products are part of the social circulation of meanings and the idea, associated generally with post-structuralism, that meaning as such is never fixed once and for all, but is something that happens in the way events, texts, and other cultural products are appropriated (over and over again, always with a difference). This dynamic turn has led recently to an increase of interest in the way texts give rise to The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 349 commentaries, counter-narratives, translations into other languages, adaptations to other media, adaptations to other discursive genres, and even to particular actions on the part of individuals and groups. Adaptation, translation, reception, appropriation have thus become key words, with the cultural power of an artistic work being located in the cultural activities it gives rise to, rather than in what it is in itself. The Mona Lisa, for example, is culturally significant, not “in itself,” but as a result of its reception, including all the appreciative commentaries, parodies, imitations, and so on that it has spawned. Artistic works are not just artifacts, but also agents (Gell). When the various approaches to literary works (as product, as agent) are taken together, then a double picture emerges of their role in cultural remembrance. Firstly, literary works resemble monuments in that they provide fixed points of reference. They are “textual monuments” which can be reprinted time and again in new editions even as the environment around them changes (Rigney, “Portable”). And interestingly, monumentality in this sense applies not just to those works that are themselves acts of recollection (like War and Peace), but also to all other works that have gained a monumental status as part of the literary canon (see Grabes, this volume). At the same time as they may enjoy this monumentality, however, literary works continuously morph into the many other cultural products that recall, adapt, and revise them in both overt and indirect ways. This combination of monumentality and morphing, of persistence and malleability, can be illustrated by the case of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). This novel has been reprinted countless times and thus exists as a “textual monument” to which we can refer (even here it proves useful as a common point of reference). At the same time, the original narrative has been re-written and reshaped in various other media (theater, comic books, film, digital games, re-enactments) and by many other writers, including both historians inspired by Scott’s example and those intent on replacing his account of the Middle Ages by a more accurate one. Thus the medievalist Jacques Le Goff recently claimed in an interview in Lire.fr (May 2005) that his whole oeuvre as a historian “began” with his reading of Scott’s novel: “c’est à partir de là que tout a commence.” The line from Ivanhoe (1819) to Le Goff’s Héros et merveilles au Moyen Âge (2005) is long and winding, but its existence bears witness both to the persistence and the mutability of stories. 350 Ann Rigney 3. Texts: Both “Monuments” and “Agents” It is clear from the above that the role of literary works in cultural remembrance is a complex one. To understand it fully one needs to go beyond the analysis of individual works to the study of their reception and their interactions with other acts of remembrance in a variety of media and genres. When literature is located within this broader dynamics, traditional themes can be revisited in the light of the various roles played by literary works in the performance of cultural memory. As least five interrelated roles can be discerned, some of which apply to all fictional narratives, irrespective of medium, while others are more specifically linked to literary works with recognized cultural value: 1. Relay stations: Fictional narratives often build on or recycle earlier forms of remembrance (Rigney, “Plenitude”) and, in this sense, they can be described as relay stations in the circulation of memories. It is because figures are relayed across media (image, texts), across discursive genres (literary, historiographical, judicial) and across practices (commemorations, judicial procedures, private reading) that they can end up becoming collective points of reference for individuals inhabiting different locations. Thus Victor Hugo’s vivid evocation of the cathedral in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) not only “reiterates” in textual form the actual Gothic building, but also picks up on contemporary discussions regarding its preservation (Friedrich). In this way, fictional narratives can be seen as one of the many channels through which figures of memory are circulated and given a high profile. Indeed, they are arguably the most important of relay stations given their wide circulation and their broad appeal. 2. Stabilizers: Fictional narratives, as was mentioned earlier, can succeed in figuring particular periods in a memorable way and so provide a cultural frame for later recollections. Their sticking power as narratives and as aesthetic artifacts thus works as a stabilizing factor (A. Assmann) in cultural remembrance. Thus Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality (1816) became a privileged point of reference, if only as a punch bag, in discussions of the seventeenth-century Scottish civil war (Rigney, Imperfect Histories 13-58); Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) has played a comparable role with respect to the First World War. Illustrating the fact that the memory of culture represents a specific field within collective remembrance (alongside events like war) the literary canon itself has also traditionally functioned as a stabilizer of remembrance: The celebration of literary “monuments” from the past (whether or not these themselves have a mnemonic dimension) helps reinforce communality in the present. The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 351 3. Catalysts: Thanks to the imaginative powers of their creators, fictions seem to have a particular role to play in drawing attention to “new” topics or ones hitherto neglected in cultural remembrance. In such cases, they are not merely relay stations, but may be actually instrumental in establishing a topic as a socially relevant topic and in setting off multiple acts of recollection relating to it. Thus the publication of Louis de Bernière’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) provided an occasion for commemorating the Italian experience in Greece during World War Two, while Günter Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (2002) contributed to the intensification of discussions on the plight of German refugees at the end of World War Two. 4. Objects of recollection: Literary texts do not just work as media of remembrance, but themselves become objects of recollection in other media and forms of expression (Erll 159). The basic point is illustrated by the extensive celebrations that took place in Dublin in 2004 to commemorate the centenary of the (fictional) story set in 1904 that James Joyce narrated in Ulysses (1922). But literature is not only an object of recollection in this formalized way. “Remakes” of earlier texts, revisions of earlier texts, and the remediation of early texts in new media also represent important means of keeping earlier narratives “up to date,” that is, memorable according to the norms of the new group. Research into the way in which stories are morphed in new media and appropriated in new contexts is still at an early stage (Sanders), but has already opened new perspectives for cultural memory studies. It gives us insight into the cultural life of stories and the way in which the latter may mutate into something new or become eroded by “over-exposure.” While recursivity ensures that certain stories become known, it also means that they can end up exhausted from having been repeated in increasingly reduced form, from theater and film to souvenirs and other tie-ins. By the time Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) is only known as the name of a cinema in Manhattan, for example, we are no longer dealing with a story that is still actively shaping the course of collective remembrance. 5. Calibrators: Canonical literary “monuments” also have a specific role to play as a benchmark for reflecting critically on dominant memorial practices. Indeed, revisioning canonical texts (as distinct from merely remediating them; see 4) represents an important memorial practice, especially within the framework of a postmodern literary culture where originality is sought in the re-writing of earlier texts rather than in novelty as such (see Lachmann, this volume). Familiar figures from earlier texts function as coat stands on which to hang new, often radically opposing versions of the past or as a wedge to break open up a 352 Ann Rigney hitherto neglected theme. Thus J. M. Coetzee re-wrote Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719-20) in his novel Foe (1986), which is a post-colonial palimpsest of the earlier story; while Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) can both be seen as critical rewritings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) (see Plate for many other examples). The result is a critical form of cultural remembrance that is arguably distinct to artistic practices whereby writers exploit the monumentality and malleability of earlier works in order to reflect critically on those earlier accounts and the memory they have shaped. 4. In Conclusion Locating literary practice within the larger framework of cultural memory studies has shown up some of the complex processes involved in the circulation of stories and the evolution of collective remembrance: both the convergence of remembrance on particular sites and the gradual erosion of those sites. In many respects, literary texts and other works of art can be considered as simply one form of remembrance alongside others. At the same time, however, they are capable of exercising a particular aesthetic and narrative “staying power” that ensures that they are not always simply superseded by later acts of remembrance. Whether as objects to be remembered or as stories to be revised, literary texts exemplify the fact that memorial dynamics do not just work in a linear or accumulative way. Instead, they progress through all sorts of loopings back to cultural products that are not simply media of memory (relay stations and catalysts) but also objects of recall and revision. References Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck, 1999. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. 1992. Munich: Beck, 1997. Bal, Mieke, and Jonathan Crewe, eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1999. Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Friedrich, Sabine. “Erinnerung als Auslöschung: Zum Verhältnis zwischen kulturellen Gedächtnisräumen und ihrer medialen Vermittlung in The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 353 Victor Hugos Notre-Dame de Paris und Les Misérables.” Arcadia: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 40.1 (2005): 61-78. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Public Memory and Its Discontents.” The Uses of Literary History. Ed. Marshall Brown. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 73-91. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Kriegerdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der Überlebenden.” Identität. Eds. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle. Poetik und Hermeneutik 8. Munich: Fink, 1979. 255-76. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-40. Plate, Liedeke. “Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception.” SPIEL 19.1 (2000): 155-67. Rigney, Ann. Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. —. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35.1 (2005): 209-26. —. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 361-96. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. 1981. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.