Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Introduction: Contested Pasts

Founded on the notion of an originary traumatic event, however, trauma theory returns us to precisely the problems about the nature of the event that memory as it stands in relation to history helps us to rethink. Memory cannot be seen as a simple evasion of the problem of referentiality, since it is itself a referential system. But its relation to historical ‘events’ is complex and mediated, involving fantasy and wish rather than simply recording what happens. If memory slides uncertainly along a line with history and fantasy at either end, trauma theory has difficulty in acknowledging the place of fantasy.

To the extent that trauma theory is a memory discourse, it aims precisely to summon up the presentness of memory, to insist on unfinished business: guilt and reparation remain the dominant themes. So to emphasise memory over history, perversely enough, can mean to remain past rather than future-oriented.

But at the point where memory binds and limits the past into a purely subjective mode, and undoes the distinction between the individual and the collective, then its effects are perhaps more problematic.

For if memory, at least in common use, implies a person who is remembering, then with the rememberer, memory dies; and history traditionally might have been seen as that which replaces memory, as generations replace one another.