Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, “Introduction: Forecasting Memory,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
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Life itself is a creative construction, and there is a point at which a person’s life and the stories she tells about it begin to merge. However, stories require interlocutors, and the right to establish authoritative versions never rests with the individual telling the story alone. It shifts from communal institutions and collective memory to the domain of experts and beyond—to market forces and the power of the state. Our memories are shaped in part by the narrative forms and conventions of our time, place, and position. But as they do not appear to come to us in such a mediated fashion but to be simply what they are, convention is concealed.… Narrative is chronotopic, its world and the shape of its action constituted by spatio-temporal dimensions particular to a narrative convention.… Just as there have been successive and alternative forms of narrative realism in the novel, so there are in narrative memory. These conventions constrain the narrative products, influencing what kinds of actors and events are likely to be the focus of attention and how they are described and connected.… Acts of memory can likewise be distinguished according to the degree of identity accorded these roles. Does the narrator claim authorship and does she fully identity with the central character, or is she trying to explore and develop the spaces among them?… What other cultural and political resources exist for influencing whether the narrative will be one of preemptive closure and permanent inscription or one of continuous creativity?
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