Frames of Remembrance

The Dynamics of Collective Memory

Iwona Irwin-Zarecka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What is the symbolic impact of the Vietnam War Memorial? How does television change our engagement with the past? Can the efforts to wipe out Communist legacies succeed? Should victims of the Holocaust be celebrated as heroes or as martyrs? These questions have a great deal in common, yet they are typically asked separately by people working in distinct research areas in different disciplines. Frames of Remembrance shares ideas and concerns across such divides.

PART I
The Inquiry

1
Setting the Analytical Parameters

Why be interested in studying the dynamics of collective memory? And, moreover, why insist that the subject matter define the terms of its analysis, to the effect of virtually erasing interdisciplinary boundaries?

Let me begin with the second question; it is the easier one. Fora person of my generation—I was born in Poland in 1955—the world in which we were growing up would have been quite incomprehensible without reference to World War II and its aftermath. I could not directly remember the war, of course. I learned about it in school, listened to stories told by my parents and their friends, read books, watched movies and, later, television programs, recited poems at various commemorative occasions. Most of all, perhaps, as I walked through the streets of Warsaw, a city rebuilt on the ruins, I would be surrounded by reminders of the war—buildings with bullet holes still there, memorial plaques, the very newness of the “Old Town.” At first, as a child, I tended to see that past in terms of high drama and adventure; even my Jewish father’s accounts of the fate of the family fitted the pattern—he and his sister both survived by “passing” on the Aryan side. Later, the picture acquired a far more sombre tone, and, as I was trying to understand my Jewish heritage, I would rapidly become aware of the pieces that had been missing, missing in my city, my books, and the lessons at school. Making sense of the past became a struggle, not to be resolved until much later when I embarked on an academic study of Polish-Jewish relations. By that time, I lived in North America and my quest was very much a private endeavor. Had I so chosen, I could have separated myself completely from memory of the war. On the other hand, although there were no bullet holes in buildings around me, the libraries were of help. I gathered the missing pieces.

My relationship with “collective memory” may be an especially close one, partly of necessity, partly by choice. But it is not unique, in that we all make sense of the past with the help of a whole variety of resources, that this making sense is motivated by our personal experience but facilitated (or impeded) by public offerings, and that such public offerings are a mixture of presences and absences. A “collective memory”—as a set of ideas, images, feelings about the past—is best located not in the minds of individuals, but in the resources they share.¹ There is no reason to privilege one form of resource over another—for example, to see history books as important but popular movies as not. For some people, in a given place, at a specific time—the East Germans in 1992—it is the raw contents of the Stasi archives that inform, wound, stir debate. For others, elsewhere—the American voters in the same year—the echoes of Vietnam may still resound in political speeches and commentary. And it is through an empirical investigation, rather than theoretical fiat, that we assess which resources matter to whom.²

It is also empirically that we need to establish the relationships between publicly articulated and privately held views of the past; an abundance of resources does not guarantee that people actually use them, nor is persuasiveness of an account a predetermined constant. As we look at a collective memory, at what it offers and at how its offerings change, we ought to remain modest in our claims. Individuals are perfectly capable of ignoring even the best told stories, of injecting their own, subversive meanings into even the most rhetorically accomplished “texts”—and of attending to only those ways of making sense of the past that fit their own.

Allowing for highly idiosyncratic reactions to what is publicly available does not mean that we abandon cultural analysis altogether. It means that the analytical tools we use need to be capable of illuminating, if not accounting for, the dialectic between public and private. The notion of “framing” serves this purpose, I believe, very well. Generously borrowed from Erving Goff man’s approach to social situations as well as “texts,”³ questions about framing direct our attention to the powers inherent in public articulation of collective memory to influence the private makings of sense. Questions about framing are essentially about limits to the scope of possible interpretations. Their aim is not to freeze one particular “reading” as the correct one, rather, it is to establish the likely range of meanings. Following Goffman, I too treat our interpretive practices as patterned by the ways we define the situation at hand. And how we define the situation at hand is largely, but not totally, dependent on socially shared framing strategies and devices.

Framing can be an explicit procedure; to be on the safe side with strangers, we often introduce a potentially problematic story with the “it’s a good joke” tag, for example. More often than not, though, framing devices are more subtle, relying on our common sense of the world for effectiveness. Newspaper editorials do not ordinarily restate the principle that they are expressions of opinion, their special positioning within the newspaper does that, on the assumption of the readers’ tacit knowledge. Framing cues can also be mixed and confusing. In a classroom situation, when a male student comments on a female professor’s “nice new haircut,” it is not clear what is going on. In Oliver Stone’s film JFK, the seamless combination of documentary footage with fictional accounts works against the concluding description of the movie as a “search for truth.”

But what exactly do framing devices do? Rather than approach the question in general terms, let us now focus on the realm of collective memory. Frames that can be found here are put to a great variety of uses; indeed, it is that elasticity of the concept that accounts for most of its heuristic value.

First, there are frames that define the status of a particular “text,” the kind of reading it is to receive. History books presenting themselves as “true accounts” to be incorporated into “basic knowledge” differ from a television docudrama aiming to entertain and only secondarily to teach. Considering the tremendous variety of symbolic means securing some presence of the past, it is not surprising that the framing devices operating at this level are also tremendously variable. Most, though, establish a particular claim to historical truth together with a particular claim on our attention. In some cases—commemoration ceremonies, for example— we are being asked actively to remember. In other cases—a magazine article about Columbus—we may be asked to reflect and to inform ourselves. And if there are certain patterns to be observed here, related to the differences among cultural forms themselves, there is also room for surprises and contradictions. The already mentioned JFK, for example, represents an unabashedly didactic exercise, rarely to be encountered in commercial cinema. The Vietnam War Memorial in New York, covered with writings but made up mostly of glass, does not allow for much contemplative reading.⁴ Thus when inquiring into how different “texts” work, we may be equipped with several general rules but still need to attend to their individual qualities.

We also must attend to the qualities of the authorial voice itself. While many of the frames here are genre-related, how a “text” functions can rarely be separated from who produced it. Within a specific genre, such as history books, the authority granted to individual authors varies; differences in scholarly reputation, political perspective, sponsorship and also the personal connection to the events being described may all come into play.

The two commercial films, both made by Oliver Stone—JFK and Born on the Fourth of July—and both making strong claims to historical truth, are actually very different. Stone served in Vietnam and he was an observer, albeit a concerned one, of the Kennedy assassination aftermath. A conservative in France may trust a story in Le Figaro, but not in the Communist L’Humanité. The factors responsible for these differences in authority are context-specific; what matters to Canadians is not the same as what matters to Cambodians. Once again, if there are some general rules likely to apply—such as the importance of being a witness—there is also the need for case-by-case specificity.

This principle—that while one can posit certain patterns of how framing of the past operates, we must resort to empirical, context-sensitive inquiries for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of collective memory—informs this book as a whole. The analytical tools developed here are exactly that, tools. They are to be used, and some have already been used by others, and myself, to illuminate the subject at hand. When it is possible to formulate a general proposition, such is always meant to be tested against case studies, those now available and those still to be done. In other words, what is being offered is a heuristic approach, a “way of seeing” but especially a way of asking questions.

The preceding paragraph is in itself an example of framing, of course. I am calling on you to read my book in a particular way, although I know that some of you will not. I am also, rather deliberately, making my case through the use of examples instead of theoretically sophisticated rationales. This too is a framing device, in that it helps define the “ideal reader” as someone who may come from any number of disciplinary backgrounds or indeed be a novice in the field. Finally, my use of language, favoring common usage terms even when proposing new concepts, also contributes to framing this work as a tool-kit open to many. My own intentions notwithstanding, how this book is read—if at all—very much depends on the subsequent “editorial” input from other people. Critics, reviewers, teachers, the reader’s colleagues or friends, all may have a say in the matter. And this too is an example of how framing works. The process is not static, nor to be located solely with the “text” and its “reader.” A whole chain of intermediaries could be involved, opening for multiple possibilities of reinterpretation. Collective memory is a terrain especially prone to such overlaying of different frames, I would argue, because it is filled with reused and reusable material. What is one day an heirloom stored in your attic can tomorrow become a precious part of a museum exhibit. American textbooks describing the history of the “evil empire” are already becoming testimony to their age. And the novels written by minority writers increasingly gain status as part of mainstream heritage.

Some of these shifts in meaning are a result of deliberate effort and much public discussion, others may be occurring more naturally within complex social and cultural changes. Whatever the source, the appearance of new frames is an opportune moment for the analyst, as it allows one better to expose the dynamics of collective memory. At issue here, however, is a great deal more than our continuous “rewriting of history.” Just as any given “text” implicates certain claims to truth together with demands on our attention, public discourse about the past when seen as a whole does more than telling us what happened. Framing devices employed at this meta-level, as it were, provide the structure to both the contents of the past and the forms of remembrance. The debates about the meaning of 1492, for example, introduced both the conflicting versions of historical facts and figures as well as serious questions about the propriety of commemoration itself. The fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor was an occasion to retell different stories, but also to ponder the virtues of forgetting.

To understand how collective memory works, we cannot restrict our inquiries to tracing the vicissitudes of historical knowledge or narratives. We must also, and I believe foremost, attend to the construction of our emotional and moral engagement with the past. When looking at public discourse, this translates into questions about how the past is made to matter.⁵ Framing events, heroes, places as worthy of remembrance and honor is quite different from defining whole historical chapters as a burden to be mastered. Marketing European castles as a tourist attraction is not the same as making it compulsory for schoolchildren to visit a local museum. Speaking of the need to understand the legacy of the Communist system in the name of success for economic and political reform may be a lot more appealing and effective than evoking the moral principles of punishing those responsible for its crimes.

Here, once again, some of the framing devices may be visible to all while others require patient unearthing. Advocates of constructing the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. were explicit⁶ about Americans’ obligation to this chapter of—now defined as universal— history; a few years earlier, producers of the television drama Holocaust implied something similar. But when looking at the fate of the same memory during the preceding decade, we would need a whole combination of clues, from those found in textbooks to the responses to Holocaust literature, in order to reconstruct the dominant frame that had then assigned that remembrance to the Jews.

Considering the now high level of analysis, it is not surprising that questions about framing become more complex. To trace how—and which—past is made to matter, we also need to ask: by whom, to whom, when, where, and why. If we stay close to the empirical ground, as I do here, we immediately recognize that rarely are these issues settled within public discourse, on however limited a scale. Even within the relatively small community of Vietnam veterans, for example, we would find great dissonance in publicly voiced views about their experience and its “proper place” in Americans’ memory; all this before we would begin to inquire about their private accounts and actions. Disagreements, however, often make our analysis manageable. The otherwise dormant framing strategies then become articulated and open to our inspection. Collective memory becomes activated, as it were, allowing for more direct access to its construction. This also happens when people engage in what I call “memory projects”—concerted efforts to secure presence for certain elements of the past, efforts often coupled with self-justifying rationales.

Disputes, discussions, introduction of altogether new frames—these are all heuristically invaluable opportunities for students of the dynamics of collective memory. They also remind us, and in North America such reminders may indeed be quite necessary, that our subject matter matters. Different people, at different times, care about their past in different ways. Some kill because of memory obligations. Some demand political change. And some are content to look to the future, even if entertained by stories of past adventures.

How—and how much—people care is, as we observed before, strongly influenced by idiosyncratic factors. But equally strongly, it is informed by the socially shared “frames of remembrance.” If the roles assigned to the past are by no means constant, even within a given community, there are at least two reasons why collective memory is a factor in human affairs we must reckon with. First, collective memory is intricately related, though in variable ways, to the sense of collective identity individuals come to acquire. And second, it is imbued with moral imperatives—the obligations to one’s kin, notions of justice, indeed, the lessons of right and wrong—that form the basic parts of the normative order. On both counts, collective memory is then a significant orienting force, or, something we need to understand better in order to account for why people do what they do.

It may well be that seeing collective memory in this light is the result of my being European; I know that when first introduced to the subject, my students in southwestern Ontario look interested but also puzzled. And yet, if they start out with the notion that the past is at best a pleasant diversion, after a little coaching they too have no trouble recognizing how much their family bonds rely on shared reminiscing—or how inadequate their knowledge of Canadian history is for dealing with the country’s constitutional (and identity) crisis. They also become quick to point out how their high school training had not prepared them to understand current world events, with the bloody conflict between Serbs and Croats being perhaps the most baffling. Here, it is not simply that they lack the background information, but more importantly, they have few means of empathizing with the peoples for whom the past so clearly matters. The issue is not academic, either. There are many Serbs and Croats living in our area and while not yet violent, mutual hostility has been high.

Students in Ontario are only required to take one Grade 9 Canadian history course to graduate, I should add. And I suspect that even with a more structured curriculum, they would still be ill prepared to understand the feelings of their Croatian friend. If the interest in collective memory has increased dramatically in recent years, we are still very far from mainstream status as explainers of social dynamics. This book is written with the hope that some day in the future, after a great deal more work is done, an appreciation of the dynamics of collective memory might indeed belong in the classroom.

Such an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Inquiry
• Part II: Dynamics of Relevance
• Part III: Dynamics of Memory Work
• Select Annotated Bibliography
• Index