REFLECTIONS ON MEMORY AT THE MILLENNIUM1 1999 Presidential Address, by Susan Rubin Suleiman

It is not news that we in the West (and doubtless elsewhere) are wallowing in memories, especially in bad ones. From collective commemorations of war and genocide to individual accounts of sexual abuse or drug addiction, with myriad forms of public and private memorializing in between, evocations of the past surround us. The personal memoir is becoming the most popular genre of writing in the United States, while in France the monumental historical project of Les lieux de memoire is itself becoming (as its chief editor Pierre Nora has pointed out) a "site of memory," part of a generalized "duty to remember" ("devoir de memoire"). The millennium, it would seem, will reach us from behind, our heads turned firmly in the other direction.

When did this "surfeit of memory" (as the historian Charles Maier has called it) start, and why? And will it/should it end? The fall of communism and the opening of archives in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the trials of the last surviving war criminals from World War II in France, the rise of "identity politics" and its accompanying claims to "group memory" in the United States and elsewhere, the rapid ageing and imminent disappearance of survivors of Nazi death camps all over the world, the arrival of major anniversaries as well as the approach of the millennium itself-these are but a few of the reasons why a fascination with the recent past, and especially with the years of and around World War II, has become so pervasive over the last decade or so. As for its end, if we are to believe a recent French commentator on the Papon trial, it is nowhere in sight. According to Jean de Maillard, author of a long article in the highly respected journal Le Debat, the explanation for this widespread interest in memory-and, indeed, for all the "historical" trials of the past fifteen years in France, from Klaus Barbie's in 1987 to that of "le sang contamine" ten years later-must be sought in the machinations of global capital.ism. Maillard's argument-- which concludes that the "resurgence" of French interest in the Vichy government's collaboration with the Nazis is a displaced and largely unconscious attempt to "demonize" the nation-state in favor of atomized individuals who will be all the more susceptible to global control-has a certain paranoid charm. But it is also conveniently exculpatory, implying that the fault is not with Vichy, or with Papon, but with global capitalism. However one looks at it, this argument confirms-performatively, as well as in its reasoning-a truism about memory, whether public or private: memory is contextual, anchored in the present and oriented toward the future. What we remember, and how, depends on where we are and where we are going.

Maybe we are not backing into the millennium after all-or maybe, like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, we have no choice in the matter: the very "storm of progress" obliges us to keep our eyes turned back as we move forward. But no, that is not the image I want here. This angel cannot, strictly speaking, remember, for he has never forgotten-his gaze is fixed, unblinking: %'here we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage." In this respect, Benjamin's angel reminds me of Borges's Funes the memorious, who can never forget anything and therefore cannot think: "to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details." Another truism, then: a thinking memory requires forgetting. Or: a productive engagement with the past involves not a fixated stare at a "single catastrophe" but the possibility of blinking-forgetting, anticipating, erring, revising.

If all memory is contextual, then the most interesting memories -or rather, accounts of memories, for a memory can be known only insofar as it is told-are those that prove problematic in some way. Revising Tolstoy's dictum, we might say that unproblematic memories are inert while problematic ones are productive, each in its own way. It may be argued, of course, that all memory is problematic in some way. Memory is a construction of the past, not the past itself; as such, it is necessarily mediated and incomplete. I would suggest, however, that some constructions of memory are more problematic than others-specifically, those that involve not only an individual life but also larger issues of history and collective experience.

The term "self-writing," which has gained increasing currency in recent years, refers not only to straightforward autobiography or memoir, but also to autobiographical novels and to borderline genres straddling the fictional and the historical. I will discuss, briefly, three types of problematic memory in recent self-writing, each with its particular kind of discursive or writerly productivity. My discussion will focus on memories of World War II and on France, but it should be applicable to other cases as well.

Contested Memory

Contested memory is always a "matter of fact"; it is the clearest case of intersection between memory and history, and between individual and collective experience. In another domain, factuality is the crux of the heated contemporary debates over "repressed memory," whose implications are juridical and social as well as psychological.

Two dramatic cases have received international attention in the past few months: that of Rigoberta Menchu's Nobel-Prize winning testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchu, some of whose factual details have been shown to be false; and that of Binjamin Wilkomirski's childhood memoir of the Holocaust, Fragments, which also won many prizes but whose total veracity has been put into doubt. Both of these cases concern events of strong collective significance (the struggle of Guatamalean peasants, the Holocaust), whence the force of the contestation of individual memory. Aside from their structural similarity-historical fact pitted against narrativized memory -each case needs to be studied separately, for the meanings and the stakes involved are highly specific.

Here, however, I want to discuss yet another case, perhaps the most complicated one to have played itself out recently: the so-called "affaire Aubrac" in France, which also involves a past event of huge collective significance. Narrowly defined, this event is the arrest by the Gestapo of the Resistance leader Jean Moulin and a number of his associates (including Raymond Aubrac, a highly placed member of the "Secret Army") in a suburb of Lyon on June 21, 1943; broadly defined, this event is the whole French Resistance, or rather the "story of the French Resistance" as it was perpetuated after the war (by both De Gaulle and the Communists) for reasons of "French unity." Although the major myths about the Vichy period and the Occupation have been amply deconstructed and demystified since the early 1970s (including the "resistancialist" myth that all of France had "said No to the Occupant"), the complete and authoritative history of the Resistance has not yet been written. Many members of the Resistance are still alive and have provided written or spoken accounts of their memories, which have served as the basis for some historical accounts. Today, the ground exists for confrontations not only between and among Resistants but also between memoirists and historians. That is precisely the ground on which the importance of the "Aubrac affair" stands out.

Since it appears certain that Moulin's arrest was the result of a betrayal (most likely by another Resistant, Rene Hardy, who was tried twice after the war but failed to be convicted both times), and since the Gestapo chief who tortured Moulin to death was none other than "the butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie, the "actualite" of Moulin's arrest and death became all the more pronounced after 1983, when Barbie was captured and returned to France to stand trial for crimes against humanity. It was around then, and partly in response to his coming trial, that Lucie Aubrac, herself an active and courageous Resistante, published her memoir Ils partiront dans l'ivresse ( 1984). Described by her in the foreword as "an account as exact as possible in time and in the facts," the book recounts a tale of romance and high adventure, involving false identities, dangerous playacting on Lucie's part (she pretended to be Raymond's pregnant girlfriend, enrolling the Gestapo s help in making "an honest woman" out of her), a daring shootout and escape organized by Lucie, and then a night flight to London just as she was about to give birth to their second child. Quite a story but altogether true-- or so she claimed.

The Aubracs, already well known by specialists, became nationally known celebrities after the publication of her book, which in subsequent years was widely translated and inspired two feature films in France. Although already advanced in age (Raymond was born in 1914, Lucie in 1912), the Aubracs became indefatigable and impressive public speakers throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Raymond Aubrac published his own memoir, Ou la memoire s'attarde, in 1996.

In the meantime, Klaus Barbie died in prison-but not before leaving behind a document, the so-called "testament de Barbie," purportedly written by him but more likely by his lawyer Maitre Jacques Verges, in which lie claimed that Raymond Aubrac was the betrayer of Jean Moulin. This document, regarded as unreliable by all reputable historians, was resuscitated in at book published in 1997, Gerard Chauvy's Aubrac Lyon 1943, which actually launched the "affaire Aubrac." Chauvy, a journalist from Lyon who had already written one book about the Occupation, subjected both of the Aubracs' memoirs to what the historian Jean-Pierre Azema has called a "hypercriticist mill," "moulinette hypercriticiste." Indeed, Chauvy underlines several apparently glaring contradictions between the two memoirs and previous statements by both of the Aubracs (they had testified in various postwar trials, and Raymond was "debriefed" twice after they reached London in 1944). Chauvy prints in an Appendix the official transcripts of many of these testimonies, never before published. Although he finally concludes that there is no documentary evidence to support Barbie's accusation, Chauvy clearly insinuates that the Aubracs were guilty of not telling the "whole truth."

So far, this is a fairly classic-albeit particularly dramatic-case of contested memory: X, a generally recognized "hero" or "heroine," writes a memoir about his/her role in an event of great collective significance; Y, generally recognized as a liar and a villain in the story, claims it is false; Z investigates, finds inconsistencies in X's story, and without actually accusing X, casts troubling doubt on X's veracity. Z's motives? Not political, he says. Rather, he (in this case, Chauvy) wants to find out the truth, "substitute History for legend." The really interesting twist, however, comes next: X, that is Raymond Aubrac, invites a blue-ribbon group of historians to a round table, with the express purpose of responding to calumny: "I've been calumniated and I want to respond to the calumny.

Raymond Aubrac asked the daily Liberation to organize the event, "a meeting of historians who would ask us whatever they wished American-style journalism, you see?" The round table, a full day long, took place as he requested, on May 17, 1997. But the results were not exactly what the Aubacs had expected instead of simply exonerating them, the historians grilled them about the inconsistencies reported by Chauvy and about the hitherto unexamined documents published in his Appendix. The Aubracs were unable to clear up the inconsistencies. Instead they invoked the failures of memory, the exigencies of simplifying a factual narrative for the sake of greater coherence and readability (in the case of Ils partiront dans l'ivresse), and finally even their own puzzlement. While the historians rightly refused to draw unwarranted conclusions from these contradictions, they concluded at the end of the day that "areas of shadow remain" in the Aubracs' story.

A case with unresolved questions, then (and I have discussed only a very small part of it here), which will surely generate more writing. In the meantime, the Aubracs have successfully sued Chauvy and his publisher for libel and been awarded damages. The judges considered that "the duty of the judge obliges him not to abdicate in favor of the expert . . ., not to renounce-in the name of some higher imperative of historical truth-protecting the right to honor and respect of those who, thrown into the maelstrom of the war, were its forced but courageous actors." Understandably, some historians have reacted with outrage-not at the condemnation, for Chauvy's book can in fact be considered libelous in its insinuations, but at the judges' apparent disregard for historical truth in favor of history's "courageous actors."

Seen from this side of the Atlantic, this story of contested memory tells us above all that the Resistance in France remains a quasi-sacred subject of enormous symbolic significance-or else, that it has become even more so now that the ignominies of the Vichy period have had to be integrated into the national memory. If Vichy was guilty, let the Resistance remain innocent-this seems to be the message (or at least one of the messages) of the judges in the libel case of Aubrac vs. Chauvy.

Revised Memory

If contested memory is a "matter of fact," revised memory is a matter of rewriting-which also means, of course, reevaluating and rethinking. Obviously, these are overlapping categories: when the facts are shown to be wrong, revision often follows. But in revised memory the emphasis is less on the facts that are corrected than on the process of rethinking itself, which may lead to a totally new way of understanding past experience. In other words, revision is a powerful literary trope, part of the complex negotiations among memory, forgetting, and ongoing interpretation that structure an examined life. Although a revised memory may be only of` personal rather than collective significance, its stakes may also be historical, especially if the memory (or the memoirist) represents an experience shared by many people.

One outstanding recent example of revised memory, which at the same time has collective resonance, is Jorge Semprun's beautiful memoir, L'ecriture ou la vie ( 1994). This complex and self-conscious work can be seen as a "revision" of some of Semprun's earlier books, in particular his very first one, the novel Le grand voyage (1963), and his subsequent memoir about Buchenwald, Quuel beau dimanche! (1980). Semprun's revisions are occasionally simply a way to "set the record straight" (thus he tells us that he invented characters in Le grand voyage and in another novel touching on the war, even though there is no memory lapse involved or any obligation to "correct," since the works in question didn't claim to be true). But the really interesting revisions in L'ecriture et la vie are of a different kind, leading to reevaluation and rethinking as well as factual clarification. The most striking of these comes at the end, when Semprun recounts a 1992 return to Buchenwald, in which he discovers that the account he had given of aIl In important episode in the beginning of the book had been erroneous. This discovery, involving a misunderstanding on his part at the time he arrived in Buchenwald, not only forces him to rethink a crucial moment of the past (his arrival and registration in the camp in 1944), but also functions as an internal revision within this work.

Since at the time of writing he already "knew," Semprun could simply have recounted the episode correctly to begin with, instead of saving his discovery for the end. But like the narrator's much belated discovery, in A la recherche du temps perdu, that he had misinterpreted Gilberte's gesture in Combray many years earlier, Semprun's moment of discovery functions as (among other things) a sign of textuality, of the craftedness of the text. And it may also signal that writing, especially writing about the self, is a continuous process of revision.

Semprun suggests this in vet another way when he discusses in this same book his complicated relation to the French language, which he long ago chose as his language of writing over his native Spanish. He recounts a conversation with Carlos Fuentes in which the Mexican novelist playfully proposed that he translate his first book from French to Spanish and then back into French, over and over, revising it each time. He would thus realize, Fuentes told him, "the dream of every writer: to spend his life writing a single book, ceaselessly renewed!"

Absent or Invented Memory

The term "absent memory" was proposed a few years ago by Ellen Fine in an essay devoted to post-Holocaust French writing. This term like a number of others proposed in recent years--Marianne Hirsch's "post-memory," James Young's "received history"-refers to the complicated relationship between Jewish writers who were born after the war, many, of them into families decimated bv the Holocaust, and a past of which they can have no actual memory but that nevertheless haunts their lives and imaginations. Although referring specifically to Jewish writers and the Holocaust, the concept of absent memory obviously has broader applicability-notably, to postcolonial diasporas.

The best known of the French writers of "absent memory" is doubtless Patrick Modiano (born in 1945), whose entire oeuvre can be seen as an attempt to work through, and in a sense compensate for, his "absent memory" of wartime experiences-experiences lived through by the generation of his parents and their children born during the war. Henri Raczymow (B. 1948) and Gerard Wajcman (B. 1949), also born after the war, have linked "absent memory" to the specific culture of Eastern European Jews and their language, Yiddish. In all these cases, the normal transmission of cultural or collective memory has been blocked by the radical disappearance of the older generation, or else by their traumatized silence. But this absence, this death, is endowed with a paradoxical generativity: because a culture, and those who belonged to it, have been eradicated and because the writer has no personally lived memc)rv to work from, writing occurs: invention replaces recall.

Some other French writers who come to mind here include Georges Perec, Sarah Kofman, Serge Koster,Jean-Claude Grumberg, Serge Doubrovsky, Helene Cixous, and Regine Robin. Although born shortly before or during the war and therefore not literally without memories of that time, they were too young to have processed the experience. (Of course, even adults continue to "process" past experience, but they have more fully formed memories at their disposal.) These writers too have constructed much (or at least some) of their literary work around absent memory, a void.

One can see the kinship of this kind of writing to the nouveau roman and more generally to the "theory of the text" as it was being elaborated in France at the time these writers started to publish. The decentered text, the text of absence, death at the heart of writing-these concepts inform, in one way or another, the work of the postwar generation with its various needs for remembering as well as, in some cases, for certain kinds of amnesia. One thing that may distinguish these Jewish writers of memory from the larger cohort is that for them absence is more than a trope-it refers, rather, to the physical, material destruction of the carriers of memory: people and places.

Paradoxically, along with a lost language and culture, it is the very suffering and annihilation of the earlier generation that these writers appear to mourn-both for the sake of those who were destroyed and, in a sense, for themselves. One can say of them what the historian Nadine Fresco has said about the children of Holocaust survivors in general: "[they] feel their existence as a sort of exile, not from a place in the present or future, but from a time, now gone forever, which would have been that of identity itself."

Again, a sense of "exile from identity" is not the unique province of Jewish writers, whether born before or after the war. Or else, we are all "Jewish writers," the way Maurice Blanchot has suggested that "etre-jif" ("being-Jewish") in its essential homelessness is the emblematic condition of all contemporary identity. Personally, I don't feel comfortable with this use of Jewishness as universal trope-there is something facile about it. Yet, it has its attractions. Jacques Derrida writes, a propos of Edmond Jabes: "Jew would be the name of that impossibility to be oneself." Regine Robin, quoting Derrida, goes on to quote a verse by Marina Tsvetaeva that Paul (;elan used as an epigraph for one of his poems: "All poets are Jews." Robin herself declares: "The writer is someone who, without knowing it most of the time, accomplishes by the work of writing a mourning for origins, in other words a mourning for the mother tongue.

One (someone my age, at any rate) cannot help but hear, behind this last sentence, the famous, often-quoted dictum by Roland Barthes, which summed up the program as well as the vocabulary of avant-garde writing and theorizing in the 1970s: "The writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother: in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body. I would go so far as to take jouissance in a disfiguration of language . . ." Playing, body, limit, disfiguration or defacement .. I feel nostalgic just saying those words. How light we were, how devoid of memory and responsibility, twenty-five years ago!

This nostalgia, however, comes too easily, and we must be wary of it, as of all easy nostalgias. Indeed, the writers I have mentioned are all aware, to varying degrees, that their own nostalgia about absent memory and lost cultural identity can become a trap, both aesthetically and politically. Politically, it can lead to the "snug withdrawal of cultures into ghettoization and folklorization," as Robin puts it. Or, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, to the unreflective and aggressive nationalism that one sometimes finds in exile communities. Aesthetically, the nostalgia of origins may produce its own kind of folklorization (another name for kitsch), or else the facile pleasures of "a smooth writing, arousing emotion, playing on identification, on complacency." This is not Roland Barthes describing the "readable text" of Balzac in S/Z, but Regine Robin describing the kind of writing she refuses to practice in her recent book of stories L'immense fatigue des pierres.

In the last of these stories, a metafictional text that also serves as a moving memoir about the loss of murdered members of her family, Robin writes about an ideal mode of` writing: "an absence of text, nothing but an absence of text, and the transmission if there is one occurs only in the blanks." Whence her proclaimed aesthetic: "an aesthetic of the relic, the remainder, the fragment, bits and pieces." An anti-nostalgic aesthetic, in sum. In fact, the statement by Robin I quoted earlier, with its apparent nostalgia for the lost mother tongue, already ended with a twist (which I withheld but add now): "The writer is someone who . . . accomplishes through the work of writing a mourning for the mother tongue, or more exactly for the belief that there is a mother tongue" (my emphasis).

A mournful-but also, as here, ironic-awareness of one's own illusions, including the illusion that one once possessed a true mother tongue, is a good antidote for too easy nostalgias, as is an aesthetics of the unfinished, the void, the fragment. The one caveat-or, if you will, the final twist-I would present to such a postmodern embrace of absence is to beware its systematization. Maurice Blanchot has remarked that "the System" has a way of reasserting itself, even in the "discredit with which it is credited by the rule of the fragment." But, Blanchot continues, if "the rule of the fragment"-or, I might add, the rule of absent memory-itself becomes a system, writing ceases: "One can only become a writer without ever being a writer; as soon as one is one, one stops being one." This salutary warning may make aphasics of us all. Or at least, hesitant.