memory and historiography
ELEKTRA If this were all you were, Orestes,
how could your memory
fill my memory,
how is it your soul fills my soul?
I sent you out, I get you back:
tell me
how could the difference be simply
nothing?
Look!
You are nothing at all.
Just a crack where the light slipped through.
Sophocles (trans. Carson), Elektra, 1501–13
In the polis, memory remained open to constant reworking: honoric statues could be moved or re-inscribed; complex rituals meant to enshrine collective visions of the past and to restate communal identity...Rather than deploring such gestures as servile and decadent, we should see real, meaningful choices by communities—and also the underlying message that a city's past monuments were its own to rework. The ongoing construction of memory meant that there were no sacred cows for the polis as living community.
To realize this is perhaps to discover the capacity for past communities and individuals to live with the ‘inkling of bad faith’ (for the concept cf. again Veyne 1971) which modernity all too often assigns exclusively to itself. We might go further, and wonder if constructedness is not the whole point: ritual, memory, and monument were lived as if they were timeless and pervasive, but by historical actors who were aware, constantly if mutedly, of the constructed and plastic nature of memory...
—Ma, "The City as Memory", 252–53
Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
—Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1
As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone, and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. When we remember – as psychologists so often tell us – we don’t reproduce the past, we create it.
—Mantel, "Historical Novelist"
BASHIR
The situation was hopeless, he was out of ammunition, the Mexican army was swarming the Alamo's battlements. He would have surrendered. It's as logical as that. Simple.
O'BRIEN
I'm not saying it couldn't have happened. I'm just saying there's no proof.
WORf
You are both wrong. The only real question is whether you believe in the legend of Davy Crockett or not. If you do, then there should be no doubt in your mind that he died the death of a hero. If you do not believe in the legend, then he was just a man and it does not matter how he died.
DS9 7.07, "Once More unto the Breach"
How often did you wish for the convenience of narrative to bow to your whims?
—Martine, A Desolation Called Peace
[Clio][1] was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle’s, that tragedy was more philosophic than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been.
—Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, 186
works cited
- Beerbohm, Max. Zuleika Dobson: or, An Oxford Love Story. London: Heinemann, 1911.
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York City: Basic Books, 1992.
- Ma, John. "The City as Memory". In The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, edited by G. R. Boys-Stones, Barbara Graziosi, and Phiroze Vasunia, 248–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Mantel, Hilary. Why I Became a Historical Novelist". The Guardian, June 3, 2017.
- Martine, Arkady. A Desolation Called Peace. New York City: Tor Books, 2021.
- Sophocles. Elektra. In An Oresteia, translated by Anne Carson, 87–172. New York City: Faber and Faber, 2009.
- The Muse of History; one of nine and, in Beerbohm's telling, especially jealous of Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy.^