Freud’s essay “Screen Memories” considers the memory process that occurs when one vividly recalls events from the vague haze of childhood, memories that appear to have no relationship to what has happened in the past. They manifest from seemingly nowhere. However, Freud finds that these memories do have meaning and their source is not from the moment they are experienced in childhood. Instead these memories are complex compositions formed in the present, not in the past through the subjectivity of a child, but through the lens of adult “phantasies”, desires and wishes. He describes this process as an unconsciously selective “repression and replacement of objectionable or disagreeable impressions” (Freud 249) for a symbolic and less offensive object or event on the perimeter of the desire or trauma. The (usually pleasant) memory under scrutiny is not quite a memory but a screen for an inaccessible one. Upon a closer look these pleasant memories reveal, “An unsuspected wealth of meaning…concealed behind their apparent innocence” (Freud 236).
This process of pulling memories from childhood, distorting them, focalizing on selected material, are all in order to cover real desires. In doing so, we create self-deceiving stories that are “almost like works of fiction” (Freud 242), not in terms of genuineness but rather the narrative quality of these stories. For what is misremembering but a personal narration as we overwrite the actual memory with our own version.
In Kazou Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, the reliability of Stevens, the protagonist and narrator, stems from a similar process as Freud describes. We, the readers, are wary of the quality of truth and facticity of his story. In the presentation of these fragments of his memory it appears that they serve his own purposes (these purposes in themselves could be a lengthy response, but for example, in trying to portray himself as effortlessly dignified, in order to make meaning out of his past with Miss Kenton). But beyond the question of the selectivity of his memories, it is apparent that Stevens hides from himself and denies his feelings, for Miss Kenton, for his father, etc. in attempt to compartmentalize the events, his feelings, his beliefs and his interpretations. These feelings we must infer after becoming acquainted with Stevens’ personality. Instead of confronting these feelings, or even just acknowledging them, he hides behind a façade of dignity and concentrates on the minutiae and the inessentials.
After this reading of Freud, one could see how Stevens also screens his traumatic memories. However, he does not exactly cover these memories with a more innocuous, neighboring one, or focus on a symbolic object like Freud’s patient and the basin or the other patient and the yellow dandelion. Rather, he hides the trauma behind a screen of dignity and triumph. He focuses his memory of that specific moment away from his subjectivity and instead narrows in on details and events that are connected with his value of dignity and the feeling of success and triumph that come with it. From pages 218 to 226, Stevens suffers two traumatic blows in quick succession. Miss Kenton, the love of his life, tells him that she has a marriage proposal and Mr. Cardinal seriously questions Lord Darlington’s judgment, the man that Steven entrusts everything.
Instead of allowing for interpretation, even in retrospection, when Stevens narrates the story/memory of that night, he concentrates on the seemingly inconsequential moment beneath the arch where he stood in opposite the doors that led to “the most powerful gentlemen of Europe”. He remembers the moment in great detail and states that, “…That hour I spent standing there has stayed very vividly in my mind throughout the years.” He acknowledges his mood as being “somewhat downcast” and attributes this feeling to enduring an “extremely trying evening,” without paying special attention to why. Instead he holds back on this introspection and settles his thoughts on the manner of “which [he] had managed to preserve a ‘dignity in keeping with [his] position,’” and the subsequent “deep feeling of triumph that started to well up within [him]” (Ishiguro 227). While he, “can see few other explanations for that sense of triumph [he] came to be uplifted by that night,” (Ishiguro 228) the reader already acquainted with Stevens defense mechanisms can conclude that is not true. We can see that in creating his own self-deceiving “work of fiction”, a “sham” (Freud 234) if you will, when Stevens returns to his memory he retreats into dignity and triumph, (unconsciously? Consciously? That is to be determined) allowing them to become a screen, partitioning his evaluative faculty from his memories of trauma and desire.
Work 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. Random House, Inc., 2010.
-Stephanie Koch
Narrative and Memory 