Shammas and Haneke

Haneke and Shammas both explore the active role the past plays in shaping the present, a role that moves beyond merely having had previous influence on the characters’ lives. This agency attributed to the past plays an interesting role in both works, creating the sense of the past as a character in and of itself rather than as a possession of the characters.

In Cache the mysterious arrival of the tapes physically embodies this impinging of the past on the present. Accusing any character of the surveillance suggests a range of possible motives, from revenge to encouraging healing. The anonymity of the agent behind both the recording and the presenting of the tapes suggest that the motive behind these actions is purely to make the past interact with the present, forcing the characters to confront things they would rather avoid regardless of the consequences. In Arabesque Shammas talks of insistent threads, the so-called “loose ends” of a story or memory, that force Anton to follow them to their logical conclusion. He describes the strands that refuse to stay woven into his story, and wonders, “What guarantee do I have that this act is not a proclamation of liberty on the part of that thread, once it had been unbound?” (36). Any time he feels he has tied all of them neatly together one manages to wriggle free, forcing him to dig deeper. The past itself seems to strive to converse with the present.

The character of the past is also shaded by the shifting reliability of the narrators. In Cache we slowly discern that we cannot trust Georges’ recollections through a variety of hints dropped in his evasive conversations. The conflicting stories he tells suggest the flashbacks he sees of Majid as a child are actually constructions, twisted versions of the actual events. Georges is deceiving himself as much as he is deceiving anyone else, and may or may not be aware of the depth of his own unreliability. The past may then be pushing for Georges and Majid to accept a more accurate portrayal, to uncover the truth of what occurred by facing their inaccurate constructions.

Shammas also blurs the line between story and memory in the passages alternating between the cleaning of the cistern and his visit with Surayyah Sa’id. The two seemingly unrelated memories are woven together by brief points of contact in the feelings and sensations the two stories share. He has clearly forged a strong connection between the two in his mind, such that as he describes leaving Surayyah Sa’id he recounts, “Deep inside me a cistern gaped open, and I am again a ten-year-old boy far down inside it, alone in my dim, enchanted kingdom” (58). Surayyah’s claim that the other Anton is still alive threatens his very identity just as Nawal had threatened the privacy of the cistern. Though both of these stories are presented as fact, Shammas then reveals, “But in fact I never set foot in the village of Silwad, and the whole trip to see Surayyah Sa’id is just a tale” (60). It is as if the writhing threads not woven smoothly into the rest of the cloth demand that he follow them to their end in his mind even if he is prevented from doing so in real life. Here the insistence of the past results in deception rather than the revelation of truth, for Anton’s inability to actually trace out these dangling threads leads him instead to construct a plausible pattern without any actual knowledge.

Works Cited:

Caché. Dir. Michael Haneke, Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. Film.

Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. Trans. Vivian S. Eden. Berkeley: University of California, 2001. Print.

– Hanna Torrence

Shammas and White

Shammas prefaces his novel with a quote from Clive James: “Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel” (Shammas 1). Immediately, the reader realizes that Arabesques is a memoir of sorts. But as Shammas begins his narration, he tells stories from when he was a very little boy (Shammas 3) and then from a time before he was even born (Shammas 9). How does Shammas inspire trust, then, in his tale’s truthfulness, and how does he form doubt?

Shammas’ first strategy to make his story seem “true” is his use of person. In the first part of Arabesques, Shammas uses the first person for stories which directly involve him, giving him an assumption of authority: I was there, so I know (Shammas 31). These sections are more subjective, since the reader recognizes that he or she is looking directly through Shammas. He uses the third person, however, to narrate events for which he was not present, keeping himself out of the story and giving a seemingly objective account (Shammas 21). And in the second section, he narrates even his own story in the third person (Shammas 77). The events give the illusion of telling themselves, providing their own story with no narrator’s agenda (White 7).

In reality, however, there is no way to have a truly objective retelling of past events. Even when he switches to the third person, Shammas still chooses which events to include and which to leave out (White 14), taking events and giving them plot with a beginning, middle, and end, giving them meaning simply in their inclusion. If there weren’t a second way to tell Shammas’ story, he would not bother to tell it (White 23). There is always a hint of bias, if for no other reason than the narrative form naturally creates a purpose for a story (White 18).

But Shammas uses evidence to support his claims, ensuring the reader that he is not simply making up events. He quotes letters, for example, allowing the reader to see testimony from other characters (Shammas 69). He also references other family heirlooms, such as the notebook detailing important events in the history (Shammas 16). But mostly he relies on oral history, which even he admits is not completely reliable (Shammas 11).

Eventually, he openly admits that he completely fabricated part of his story, destroying the trust he had developed with his readers concerning the events’ verity (Shammas 60). But must his brief divergence from the “truth” make him completely untrustworthy? If he admits that he fabricates a story to further the “true story’s” plot, does it make the story less true? Since “real events do not offer themselves as stories,” a narrator may have license to mix fiction with non-fiction. A story becomes a history when the narrator draws the line between what’s true and what’s made-up (White 8). But, as Shammas’ epigraph says, Arabesques is not a history; it is a novel. His trustworthiness, therefore, need not be a problem. Shammas uses real events to tell a story, not a story to tell real events.

Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2001.

White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in Critical Inquiry 7:1 (Autumn 1980), 5-27.

Haneke and Amis

Both Michael Haneke’s Caché and Martin Amis’ Times Arrow see protagonists spiraling back to a tragic moment in history with lasting repercussions on their lives, but the awareness and honesty with which these characters approach these moments are frequently called into question. Both Haneke and Amis craft characters that have a complicated relationship with moral culpability, Georges due to an almost willful and directed amnesia, and the narrator inside Odilo Unverdorben who cannot seem to affect the passage of time but still alternatively questions and aligns himself with it.  These issues and how they are presented allow for a substantive reflection on where memory and its relationship to history and self might break down.

In Caché, the historical moment around which the plot revolves is a massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961. The massacre leaves Majid, a boy from Georges birthplace, homeless and his parents offer to take him in. As the surveillance tapes left on Georges front step begin to be accompanied by childlike drawings and Georges begins to suspect Majid’s involvement, the viewer is granted glimpses of Majid as a youth, his face covered in blood or him cutting off the head of a chicken. The problem: the majority of these visuals, or possibly memories, are revealed to be lies told by Georges. This revelation only comes about after Georges has a number of confrontations, with his family and Majid. The viewer had thought they were seeing accurate memories; rather, they saw concoctions.

Georges is already shown as being less than forthcoming with the truth to his wife. Now there is the addition that he is less than forthcoming with himself. He is more or less the only one who knows the particulars of his lies, yet he seems to have become complacent in accepting them until they are externalized and sent to him as drawings. Only through confrontation of this sort does he find himself working through the actual events, though it is unclear if he ever reaches the truth. This confrontation to elicit truth resembles in no small part the sort of battles those questioning dominant historical narratives – for instance, around the 1961 massacre – face.

This issue of falling into or attempting to reveal suppressed narratives in history can be seen in Times Arrow. Many times throughout the novel, Amis will change the pronouns the narrator uses based on how it views itself relative to Odilo’s actions and feelings. Earlier in the novel when it is attempting to determine how it is situated to Odilo (or, as he was known at the time, Tod Friendly), the narrator describes an inability to direct Odilo, but it still tries to “look elsewhere” from Odilo’s eyesight. The narrator is trapped by the particular conditions of Odilo’s life, where Odilio stands, looks, acts at any given time, but it still attempts to find an alternative viewpoint or way of understanding Odilo’s actions. This immediately conjured to my mind the attempts and frustrations of a community trying to present an alternative account of history. The novel finds the narrator attempting to make sense of the flow of time, questioning the morals and cause-and-effect relations presented, until it reaches the Holocaust where everything seems to accord. In that moment, the narrator stops the questioning it has previously engaged in, a resignation that gives it immense horror at the end of the novel when it sees “an arrow fly – but wrongly” (Amis 165).

In such formal and narrative techniques, these works present complexities that surround dominant narratives of history, and how resisting them or pursuing alternative accounts can, within a single person’s psyche or memory, show inconsistencies or breaks.

Haneke and Woolf

The worlds of Caché and Mrs. Dalloway are both defined by voyages into childhood memory and extreme intimacy between the viewer/reader and the protagonists. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, we are constantly drawn back in time to the childhood of Peter and Clarissa; drawn back to the house they grew up in. Haneke similarly takes us back to Georges childhood home. But what makes these recollections interesting is the second commonality between the two works: the flow. The flow of Caché is one of the most interesting and unique aspects of the film: we are left with long scenes of seemingly non action that result in the feeling of being actually present voyeurs into the characters’ lives. We are the strange video camera that records it all. We see life as it is, as slowly as it goes. In this way I found Caché to be reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway: we follow the threads of peoples lives in real time, not jumping around through their days, but rather staying with them even through long, uncomfortable moments. We are taken back in time to their memories, but even those scenes are uncut and unadulterated. We follow the flow of day to day life and day to day recollections just as in Mrs. Dalloway, we have uninterrupted access to each character’s thoughts as we move between them.  Of course, in Haneke’s film we are tied closest to Georges and Majid, and really only see their memories and their long, tense moments.

The affect this sort of narrative style has is to bring us exceptionally close to the characters—we are within Clarissa’s mind, within Peter’s memories, we are bound to Georges and we see his most intimate moments. The way Caché flows creates a narrative that messes with our conceptions of time in movies, and most closely resembles Woolf’s web of thought and memory in Mrs. Dalloway. We are used to following characters in movies throughout the most important parts of their story, we are used to have cuts to action scenes; Haneke messes with this perception by leaving us with Georges for long, agonizing minutes where seemingly nothing happens. In this way it is different in Mrs. Dalloway because the written medium allows us to truly get inside a character’s mind and follow their progression of thoughts, but while watching Caché, we still feel eerily omnipresent in George’s mind and life.

Freud and Amis

Freud’s “Screen Memories” and Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow

An interesting topic touched on by both of these works is the relationship between feelings and image recollections, and more broadly, how this relationship persists when recalled by a person other than the experiencer.

In “Screen Memories”, Freud describes a screen memory as an image based memory that hides or reconstructs a repressed thought or memory. He explores this kind of memory using a case study as an example. In this particular study with one of his patients, Freud recounts the patient’s screen memory that includes an image of children playing in a field of yellow flowers. Here, Freud suggests a connection between feelings and the images that arise in our memory, namely, but not exclusively, that feelings can prompt recollections (Freud 237). This “wealth of impressions” include, in this particular case, feelings such as “longing,” “excite[ment],” “love,” and “doubt” (Freud 240). Here, not only is the image recountable, but the feelings experienced at the time are as well. Because the case study in “Screen Memories” is recounted in a linear sequence, the patient’s feelings can be seen alongside the recollected image.

This, however, is not the case when looking at Time’s Arrow. The events of Time’s Arrow occur chronologically backwards though the narrative structure goes forward. This narrator has “no access to his [Odilo’s] thoughts – but [is] awash with his emotions” (Amis 7). Here, feelings arise as something separate from the narrator and don’t necessarily prompt recollections. There is no obvious relation between a recollection from the narrator and a feeling related to it and the very act of recounting a past event is problematized. It seems that events experienced by the narrator seeing the world backwards prompt images as recollections more often than feelings. For instance, the narrator will refer back to Irene in instances with women rather than in instances when thinking about love. At times, these associations cause him to recall an image of Irene that he later uses in referencing his present time.

The relationship between Freud’s case study and Amis’ narrator is that the case study in “Screen Memories” and the events of Time’s Arrow are told by narrators who did not themselves experience the events they are describing. Both storytellers didn’t experience the events or feelings first hand, and must impose a narrative over the memory when recounting it to a listener.Whether or not the feelings and recollections were told or experienced, there exists in both these pieces a mediator that must impose another narrative onto the one that is being shown to a reader. This is related to Freud’s statement that “there is a phychical significance of an experience and its retention in the memory ” (Freud 230) in that some meaning is ascribed to a memory. Not only is meaning ascribed to memory, but in turn meaning is ascribed to the narrative that unfolds from this memory.

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York City: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Screen memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 299-322.

Freud and Amis

The narrator of Time’s Arrow has the strangest experience of memory: he lives Odilo Unverdorben’s memories as his future. Our narrator has access to Odilo’s feelings, but none of his thoughts. In this way, because we as readers do not see any of Odilo’s immediate thoughts from the time of the event, and only have his sentiment and our narrator’s interpretation to go on, Time’s Arrow can be seen as the relation of one big screen memory. Freud defines screen memories as a recollection “whose value lies in the fact that it represents…thoughts of a later date whose subject-matter is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links.” (Freud 243) While his main discourse is regarding screen memories of childhood events, Freud’s notion of these reinterpreted memories is the focus of Time’s Arrow. At the end of the novel, we find that the voice inside Odilo “came at the wrong time—either too soon or after it was all too late.” (Amis 165) Given the premise of the backwards moving time that our narrator is witness to, it seems most likely that our narrator is the piece of Odilo that came too late: the Odilo that looks over the past and finds new meaning and new emotions within it. The narrator of Time’s Arrow creates screen memories with every comment he makes while watching his/Odilo’s life move back towards the past. He reinterprets remembered actions (though he does not have recollection of the events himself, they are events that have already happened) with his own emotions and beliefs that are often very different from Odilo’s sentiments. Freud also says that screen memories owe their “value as a memory not to [their] own subject-matter but to the relation existing between that subject-matter and some other, suppressed psychical material.” (Freud 247) We may look at the narrator of Time’s Arrow as the voice of all Odilo’s ‘suppressed psychical material.’ Perhaps the most compelling evidence towards this connection can be found in one of Freud’s examples: “the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that this child is himself; he sees this child…as an observer from the outside.” (Freud 248) Ironically, our observer-narrator in Time’s Arrow is within the person whose life he looks back on.

Having established this connection, let us turn to the differences between Freud and Amis’ views on memory. Freud arguably sees memory as something that ties together the stages of an individual’s life. Even falsified screen memories, where the “raw material…out of which it was forged remains unknown to us in its original form,” serve as a connection to the past. (Freud 249) It is more of a blending of past and present, where important events in the past become relevant to the present via reinterpretations and applied symbolism. Time’s Arrow, however, posits the idea that the way time affects memory causes a bifurcation between past and present self. At the end of the novel, there is a brief moment when time makes sense, when “for a while…there was redemption,” and in this moment, the narrator says, “[Odilo] and I were one…He put us back together.” (Amis 147) But this is short-lived, and at the strange beginning/ending of Odilo’s life, the narrator tells us “he’s on his own.” (Amis 147) There is an irreconcilable quality to the relationship between the narrator and Odilo, because of their separation in time. While they have the same body and the same events occur to both of them, because of the different way the narrator interprets Odilo’s memories, there is a huge disconnect between the two psyches. This sense of separation is heightened by the fact that we never get to see Odilo’s thoughts—they are completely unknown, separated by the reinvented memory of the narrator.

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York City: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Screen memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 299-322.

Freud and Haneke

Freud’s “Screen Memories” provides an interesting lens through which to view Michael Haneke’s film “Caché,” a film invested in invented memories, willful forgetting and the visual processes of memory, particularly as captured on a video camera. The first overlap between the two that can be seen is Georges’ insistence to his mother that he had completely forgotten about Majid until recently. As the viewer knows, the thing that jogs his memory is the tapes and the eerie drawings included. The man in the case study in “Screen Memories” has a similar jogging of his memory. He mentions that “it seems to me almost a certainty that this childhood memory never occurred to me at all in my earlier years. But I can also recall the occasion which led to my recovering this and many other recollections of my earliest childhood” (Freud 239). He goes on to say that it is a stay in the country, for the first time since his early days of living there with his parents, before they were forced to move because of job prospects. It is for this man a place which brings back many recollections from his childhood, while for Georges it is the childlike crayon images of a head with blood gushing out. Interestingly, however, it is at his mother’s house, his childhood home, where Georges has the first extended recollection of Majid, beyond the second-long flashback of a child with a bloody mouth that the viewer had seen prior to that.

However, the memory that Georges has at his mother’s house in a dream is an invented one. As the viewer finds out later on in the film, Georges as a child convinced his parents that Majid had been threatening toward him. Georges ordered Majid to kill a rooster and then convinces his parents that he did it to scare him. In the dream/memory, the child Majid kills the rooster as Georges had instructed him in real life, but then comes toward Georges with the axe, raising it above his head, at which point Georges wakes up. This is an interesting take on Freud’s notion of the screen memory, which is that “the essential elements of an experience are represented in memory by the inessential elements of the same experience” (Freud 234). Perhaps before this recollection came upon Georges as a result of the tapes, he had a screen memory which covered over the memory of Majid in his life. But now, he is haunted by a memory of Majid which he has himself invented. This haunting memory ultimately comes to fruition in real life, when Majid kills himself in front of Georges. There, the very thing Georges created as a child to try and distance Majid comes back in full force upon Georges through Majid’s ultimate suicide.

Finally, there is the use of the camera as a present entity to show the visual processes of memory. For one, in the first viewing of the surveillance tapes, the disembodied voices of Georges and Anne attempt to recall their days, their comings and goings, as they watch it unfold as it happened in “real life” on the videotape. Later, the viewer sees Majid being taken away from Georges’ parents’ house in the same steady, one shot only technique of the camera, pronouncing the definitiveness of this occurrence in time. In this way, the kind of work that memory does according to Freud (to remember more or less based on a memory’s psychical importance, p. 230) and that occurs to Georges in his (perhaps) willful forgetting of Majid is drawn in sharp contrast to the creation of a definitive physical memory that is employed by the steady shot video camera.

Works Cited:
Freud, Sigmund. “Screen memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 299-322.

Cache. Dir. Michael Haneke, Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. Film.

Freud and Ishiguro

“Screen Memories” by Sigmund Freud is a paper named after its subject matter in which Freud explores what constitutes a screen memory and its implications on a person’s life both by theorizing about the matter and by examining the screen memories of several actual patients. At the conclusion of the paper, he defines a screen memory as a memory as an actual yet seemingly innocuous/unimportant memory that derives its meaning not from what is being remembered, but from what is being suppressed—the screen memory being a conglomeration of symbols to give us clues as to unlocking the suppressed matter which may not be memories at all but wishes, desires, or fantasies.

This paper is, as I say, a paper: unlike Remains of the Day, it is not a novel nor prose nor a work of fiction at all. Thus, the most fruitful way it interacts with Ishiguro’s novel is not in how they compare formally, but in how we can use Freud’s concept of screen memories to examine Mr. Stevens as both a character and as a narrator of his own life.

Throughout Remains of the Day, Stevens establishes himself as a professional of the highest caliber, going so far as to swear off his own personal feelings in favor of the dignity he so values. However, just because he doesn’t allow himself to be anything other than cold, detached, and consummately professional doesn’t mean he has eradicated emotion within himself. The concept of screen memories provides a useful means of unpacking the memories he chooses to share and indicating to the reader what emotions Stevens had suppressed.

Stevens generally recounts his memories with a great deal of specificity, but in certain instances he becomes fuzzy on the details of something. For example, on pages 226-227 he describes the day he came upon Miss Kenton crying. In this recollection, the image of Miss Kenton seems to have overpowered his memory of the circumstances of coming upon her crying:

As I recall, there was no real evidence to account for this conviction [that Miss Kenton had been crying]—I had certainly not heard any sounds of crying—and yet I remember being quite certain that were I to knock and enter, I would discover her in tears. I do not know how long I remained standing there; at the time it seemed a significant period, but in reality, I suspect, it was only a matter of a few seconds […] I cannot imagine I would have delayed unduly.

We can reasonably that this memory—and the fact that it has stood out in his mind despite the fact that it apparently did not seem very important to him at the time—indicates a certain romantic affinity for Miss Kenton that Stevens never allowed himself to consciously realize. In this way it is similar to a screen memory: the subject matter is not as important as Stevens’s relationship to the subject matter, that is, his unconscious, suppressed love for Miss Kenton being the reason that this otherwise innocuous moment should persist for so many years in his memory. It does, however, differ in that for Freud, a true screen memory tells its story through symbolic imagery: for example, Stevens could have vividly remembered the snow falling outside because the white of the snow unconsciously reminded him of the white of Miss Kenton’s dresses or something along those lines. This particular memory is more literal than the ones Freud discusses in his paper, but it captures the general gist of a screen memory.

In this way, we can keep screen memories in mind when listening to Stevens’s story—it is a useful interpretive tool that we can use to remind ourselves that the details of Stevens’s life and the secrets that Mr. Darlington kept are at least as important as what Stevens doesn’t say, that is, the true feelings he has now or that he had at a given time that he has denied even to himself for all these years.

Freud and Woolf

A Comparison of “Screen Memories” and Mrs. Dalloway

In analyzing Mrs. Dalloway from a Freudian angle, Septimus Warren Smith provides the most obvious meat. He is a character suffering from shell shock, the very disease (or psychological disorder) that refutes the prevailing belief that hysteria is a women’s disease. Shell shock—now known as PTSD—gave more influence to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, and his other theories on the mechanisms of repression and conversion that occur unconsciously within the mind. We know that Woolf was more than just familiar with Freud’s theories—she was interested in them (publishing translations of some of his lectures), and indeed had struggles with her own mental health throughout her life. Smith’s role in Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates the broken or abnormal mental processes, which can be compared with the “normal” processes that other characters, like Rezia, Clarissa Dalloway, and Peter Walsh, possess—though it is my belief that Woolf tries to complicate the normal/abnormal binary. “Screen Memories” also helps illuminate instances in Mrs. Dalloway in which memories are recalled or formed.

Because Freud’s work is of a completely different kind as Woolf’s (one is an academic nonfiction work, the other is a novel), it will be more useful to take Freud’s ideas and the content of his piece to Mrs. Dalloway, rather than comparing the form of the two narratives. However, it should be noted that Freud’s work itself has an interesting form. Its narrative relies primarily on the ‘direct evidence’ of a conversation Freud had with a 38-year-old man (also briefly mentioning the case of a paranoid woman, 234, and also two cases in a work by the Henris). This conversation, ironically, is not a transcript of a recorded conversation but is rather reconstructed or “remodeled” from Freud’s memory (and probably notes), much like the screen memories he talks about, and is used as an argumentative device in rather the same way as Plato’s dialogues (245).

The idea of the potency (or “great pathogenic importance”) of a childhood or early memory occurs in Mrs. Dalloway in relation to several characters walking in Regent’s Park (220). This place serves as a trigger for Peter Walsh, much in the same way as Freud’s friend is “overwhelmed” by past memories upon returning for the first time to his birthplace in the countryside (239). Walsh has not been back to Regent’s Park for some time, having just returned from India: “Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s Park—odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhpas…” Soon after, Woolf writes a dreamlike sequence as Walsh falls asleep next to a nurse, who herself provides a metaphorical and literal link to early childhood. In this critical sequence, Peter’s thoughts are a kind of dream or “reverie” (the concept of reverie as an unhealthy indulgence was popular in the Victorian era) are paralleled with Septimus’ thoughts that occur later, only feet away from Walsh in Regent’s Park (through repeated images, like trees and nature). Thus, Woolf is pointing out that the haphazard, disorganized, thoughts that we all have, for example, when drifting off to sleep or during dreams, are not too far from the thoughts of someone who is mad–and indeed, Freud views dreams as a way of expressing repressed thoughts in order to restore a kind of equilibrium within the mind. The teenage character of Maisie Johnson also provides a contrasting example to Peter’s reflections on his childhood: she sees the Warren Smiths and the narrator (now more omniscient, though focused on Johnson) that seeing Rezia and Septimus stuck out to her so much that “should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine summer’s morning fifty years ago.” Thus, we get two sides of the same idea—the recollection and the ‘production’ of memories, so to speak. There is a sense also that the baby and child with the gray nurse are forming memories their own memories in Regent’s Park (the child, rather than being isolated, has a real interaction, bumping into Rezia).

Freud writes about how metaphor and figurative language can serve as a mechanism for the creation of a screened memory (245)—for example in the expression to “deflower” someone (243), in the German expression to masturbate (246), in the concept of a “bread-and-butter occupation” (241) and even with the color yellow itself (242). For Woolf, the nurse I mention earlier provides a sort of metaphorical link to childhood. Elsewhere in the story nurses are a stand-in for childhood—Peter, Clarissa, and Lady Bruton all have an “old nurse,” that they think of in relation to their childhood. Indeed, there is a presence of a “nursemaid” in Freud’s friend’s ‘dandelion memory,’ as well (238). Other images, like roses (referenced 40 times in Woolf’s novel), ocean or water imagery, trees, and others still, provide thematic links to both the different characters and parts of the complex web of London, but also links from the past to the present to the future, as they crop up in the thought processes of the many characters.

Freud compares “screen memories” to self-contained narratives, writing “I can assure you that people often construct such things unconsciously—almost like works of fiction” (242). Woolf, as a creator of fiction, consciously adds these sorts of elements from past memories (though they often remain unconscious to the characters who experience them), relying as “screen memories” do on symbol and metaphor, one as a literary device, the other as the “mechanism of mental processes” (239). Woolf concerns herself with the contrast between the symbolic and the literal, illusion and reality, abnormal and normal—consciously addressing Freud’s theories through the characters of Septimus Smith (and Sir William Bradshaw, the kind of man who would have been performing psychoanalysis) but also simply including elements that parallel the “screen memory” in the 38-year-old man’s case in fascinating ways.

Freud and Ishiguro

In Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens the butler is a seemingly staid and upright character with a highly enigmatic deployment of memory. His recollections of the past and indulgences in future speculation through the past seem to heed no one upholding principle, nor do many of them seem very significant in the totality of their action. Yet viewed through the lens of Freud’s idea of screen memories, the strange attention to seemingly trivial peculiarities of Stevens’ memories seems to support  what can only be called the dastardly nature of memory- to appear to clarify and present itself as a capsule of a true moment while allowing it’s currency of honesty to fool the rememberer into forgetting important skepticism.

Freud uses the term “manufacture” to describe the process of memory making, arguing for a certain inorganic (or perhaps exceptionally organic) process that occurs between the occurrence of an event and the later recall of it; it is clear that these two moments are mutually unintelligible (Freud 242). That is, there is no such thing as a memory true to the event, but that perhaps these “works of fiction” are essentially and necessarily what sustain our ideas of self (Freud 242). It is interesting that Freud uses the word “screen” (Freud 243) to describe these memories, as the enigmatical character of the word certainly describes both the shielding and decision making process of memory making. To be thrown into the minute world of Stevens and the painful clarity of his hallway memories is to pinpoint in vain the exact formulation (in the sense of creation and content) of the memory- is he, at the time of the event, completely unaware of the nature of his feelings, or just the later significance of the moment as a missed turning point? The brevity of the moment in contrast to how “vividly” it is recalled already suggests a process of manufacture which has elevated this moment above the plane of ordinary connections, but perhaps this is one more manipulation of screening- to make obvious the significance of the event without letting on to the contents of it’s meaning (Ishiguro 212).

That both memory making and memory viewing are processes of going backwards seems significant too. There is this great distance in all respects of memory that is only truly measured as a great yawning divide when released from the mind of the recaller and given up to the interpretations of another- the Henris’ subject to Freud, Stevens to the reader. Discussed in this manner, dissociated from all the intricacies of the mind that produced it, the memory seems quite clear in the emotion it attempted to capture, but this singular distillation is the closest memory can bring the introspective back to the moment of creation. Stevens’ incomplete grasp of the momentousness of his moment rooted to the spot outside the door still manages to convey the sense of utter loss, noticing a fleeting, powerful moment even as it comes and goes without being grasped, yet the meaning of memory cannot be truthfully deduced in this way. Perhaps this is the kindness of the screen memory when the intensity of life and its millions of rebounding repercussions cannot and should not be reproduced and relived except hidden in the details of the “inessential elements” (234). The threads of self-constructed narrative are too intertwined amongst each other and our minds to do more than notice the passing of the screen memory as it wanders through the hallways of our consciousness.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. “Screen memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 299-322.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Knopf, 1989. Print.

Willa Zhang