The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between

Monumentality and Morphing

ANN RIGNEY

1. Memory Studies: From “Sites” to “Dynamics”

When collective memory first rose to prominence on the academic agenda
in the late 1980s, the emphasis was on the “sites” which act as common
points of reference within memory communities. Such “sites” (as dis-
cussed in earlier sections of this collection) do not always take the form of
actual locations, but they have in common the fact that, by encapsulating
multifarious experience in a limited repertoire of figures, they provide a
placeholder for the exchange and transfer of memories among contempo-
raries and across generations.
As we know from recent work, memory sites neither come “naturally”
into being nor all at once. Instead, they are the product of a selection
process that has privileged some “figures of memory” above others (J.
Assmann) and, linked to this, of multiple acts of remembrance in a variety
of genres and media. For it is only through the mediation of cultural prac-
tices that figures of memory can acquire shape, meaning, and a high public
profile within particular communities. The repertoire of such cultural
practices changes over time together with technological and aesthetic in-
novations: The historical novel was at the forefront of new mnemonic
practices in the first decades of the nineteenth century, for example, but
this role is arguably now being played by graphic novels like Art Spiegel-
man’s Maus (1973, 1986) or Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde (2000) and by
virtual memorials using the new digital media.
Although it has proven useful as a conceptual tool, the metaphor of
“memory site” can become misleading if it is interpreted to mean that
collective remembrance becomes permanently tied down to particular
figures, icons, or monuments. As the performative aspect of the term
“remembrance” suggests, collective memory is constantly “in the works”
and, like a swimmer, has to keep moving even just to stay afloat. To bring
remembrance to a conclusion is de facto already to forget. While putting
down a monument may seem like a way of ensuring long-term memory, it
may in fact turn out to mark the beginning of amnesia unless the monu-
ment in question is continuously invested with new meaning (Koselleck).
In light of these considerations, it seems inevitable that attention
should have turned in recent years from memory sites as such to the cul-
tural dynamics in which they function (Olick and Robbins 122-30; Rigney,
346 Ann Rigney

“Plenitude”). The distinction made by Jan Assmann between “communi-

cative” and “cultural” memory already indicated that cultural remem-
brance is subject to a certain internal dynamic or lifespan: It evolves from
the relatively unorganized exchange of stories among contemporaries and
eyewitnesses to the increasingly selective focus on “canonical” sites which
work as points of reference across generations. Other scholars have con-
sidered how the development of cultural remembrance is affected by the
changing social frameworks that influence what is considered relevant
enough to remember at any given time (Irwin-Zarecka). Research has
shown that the canon of memory sites with which a community identifies
is regularly subject to revision by groups who seek to replace, supplement,
or revise dominant representations of the past as a way of asserting their
own identity (Olick and Robbins 122-28).
In this ongoing process, existing memory sites become invested with
new meanings and gain a new lease of life. But they may also be upstaged
by alternative sites and become effectively obsolete or inert. Indeed, the
“dynamic” perspective on cultural remembrance suggests that “memory
sites,” while they come into being as points where many acts of remem-
brance converge, only stay alive as long as people consider it worthwhile
to argue about their meaning. One of the paradoxes of collective remem-
brance may be that consensus (“we all recollect the same way”) is ulti-
mately the road to amnesia and that that it is ironically a lack of unanimity
that keeps some memory sites alive.
The current interest in the dynamics of cultural remembrance pro-
vides a new perspective on the role of art, including literature, in the for-
mation of collective memory. Moreover, as we shall see, this shift from
“sites” to “dynamics” within memory studies runs parallel to a larger shift
of attention within cultural studies from products to processes, from a
focus on cultural artifacts to an interest in the way those artifacts circulate
and influence their environment.

2. Literary Studies: From “Products” to “Processes”

Given the historical importance of writing as a medium of cultural mem-
ory, it is not surprising that there should be widespread interest in cultural
memory studies among literary scholars (for a summary, see Erll). The
focus has mainly been on individual texts, and the ways in which the tex-
tual medium is used to shape remembrance by paying attention to certain
things rather than others, to structure information in certain ways, and to
encourage readers to reflect on their own position in relation to the events
presented.
 The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 347

One especially fruitful line of inquiry has picked up on earlier discus-

sions within the philosophy of history and addressed the role played by
narrative structures in the recollection of real events. As Hayden White
had shown from the 1970s on, events do not “naturally” take the form of
a story, meaning that whoever narrates events is in fact involved in ac-
tively shaping experience into an intelligible pattern with a beginning,
middle, and end, and with an economy of antipathy and sympathy cen-
tered on particular human figures. These insights into the “value of narra-
tivity in the representation of reality” (White) have led to an interesting
body of research into the use of narration as an interpretative tool that is
wielded both by historians and those working in other fields of remem-
brance. Within more recent discussions, moreover, narrativization has
emerged, not just as an interpretative tool, but also as a specifically mne-
monic one. Stories “stick.” They help make particular events memorable by
figuring the past in a structured way that engages the sympathies of the
reader or viewer (Rigney, “Portable”). Arguably, all other forms of re-
membrance (monuments, commemorations, museums) derive their
meaning from some narrativizing act of remembrance in which individual
figures struggle, succumb, or survive.
One of the issues that inevitably crops up in discussions of the role of
narrative in cultural memory is the relation between historiography and
fiction. While the difference between factual accounts and, say, novels has
come to seem less absolute than it once seemed (since even factual ac-
counts are based on a narrative structuring of information), the freedom
to invent information, and not merely structure it, nevertheless gives to
fiction a flexibility which is absent in other forms of remembrance. Stud-
ies have shown that fiction (as in the historical novel) is a great help when
it comes to narrativizing events since narrators who are free to design
their own stories can more easily evoke vivid characters and give closure
to events (Rigney, Imperfect Histories 13-58). Those who “stick to the facts”
may paradoxically end up with a more historical and authentic story, but
also a less memorable one, than the producers of fiction. The latter not
only enjoy poetic license when narrativizing their materials, but also often
have creative, specifically literary skills that help give an added aesthetic
value to their work. This aesthetic dimension means that they can attract
and hold the attention of groups without a prior interest in the topic, but
with a readiness to enjoy a good story and suspend their disbelief (Lands-
berg 25-48).
More research needs to be done on the relation between memorabil-
ity, aesthetic power, and cultural longevity. But there is already evidence to
show that “inauthentic” versions of the past may end up with more cul-
tural staying power than the work of less skilled narrators or of more dis-
348 Ann Rigney

ciplined ones who stay faithful to what their personal memories or the
archive allow them to say. Whatever their shortcomings as history, fic-
tional works like Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865-69) or Spielberg’s Schindler’s
List (1993) have enjoyed a high public profile and undeniably provided
cultural frames for collective recollections of the Napoleonic era and
World War Two respectively. To the extent that they are fictions, the
status of such narratives is chronically ambivalent, meaning that they are
continuously open to challenge by non-fictional recollections of the past.
In practice, however, fictions often prove difficult to displace because it is
not easy to come up with a non-fictionalized account that has the same
narrativizing and aesthetic power (Rigney, Imperfect Histories). In the case of
traumatic events, moreover, the freedoms offered by fictional genres and
literary modes of expression may simply provide the only forum available
for recalling certain experiences that are difficult to bring into the realm of
public remembrance or that are simply too difficult to articulate in any
other way (see Kansteiner and Weilnböck, this volume). Indeed, what may
distinguish literary narratives from fictional narratives as such is their ex-
pressiveness: their power to say and evoke more because of the writer’s
imagination and unique mastery of the medium.
The idea that literature, along with the other arts, has a privileged role
to play in giving voice to what has been overlooked in other forms of
remembrance is a recurring theme (see Rigney, “Portable”). Indeed, lit-
erature and the other arts often appear specifically as a privileged medium
of oppositional memory, as a “counter-memorial” and critical force that
undermines hegemonic views of the past (Hartman). This line of reason-
ing, reflecting the moral authority of writers even at the present day, is
deeply rooted in the dominant tradition of twentieth-century criticism in
which artistic value is correlated with the defamiliarization of received
ideas and in which the close reading of individual, highly-regarded texts is
pitched towards showing how they subvert dominant views and envision
alternatives (e.g., Bal and Crewe).
As indicated above, however, the “dynamic” turn in memory studies is
itself part of a larger shift within culture studies away from such a focus
on individual products to a focus on the processes in which those prod-
ucts are caught up and in which they play a role. Behind this shift in em-
phasis within literary studies lies among other things the idea, associated
with New Historicism, that individual products are part of the social cir-
culation of meanings and the idea, associated generally with post-structur-
alism, that meaning as such is never fixed once and for all, but is some-
thing that happens in the way events, texts, and other cultural products are
appropriated (over and over again, always with a difference). This dynamic
turn has led recently to an increase of interest in the way texts give rise to
 The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 349

commentaries, counter-narratives, translations into other languages, ad-

aptations to other media, adaptations to other discursive genres, and even
to particular actions on the part of individuals and groups. Adaptation,
translation, reception, appropriation have thus become key words, with
the cultural power of an artistic work being located in the cultural activi-
ties it gives rise to, rather than in what it is in itself. The Mona Lisa, for
example, is culturally significant, not “in itself,” but as a result of its re-
ception, including all the appreciative commentaries, parodies, imitations,
and so on that it has spawned. Artistic works are not just artifacts, but also
agents (Gell).
When the various approaches to literary works (as product, as agent)
are taken together, then a double picture emerges of their role in cultural
remembrance. Firstly, literary works resemble monuments in that they
provide fixed points of reference. They are “textual monuments” which
can be reprinted time and again in new editions even as the environment
around them changes (Rigney, “Portable”). And interestingly, monumen-
tality in this sense applies not just to those works that are themselves acts
of recollection (like War and Peace), but also to all other works that have
gained a monumental status as part of the literary canon (see Grabes, this
volume). At the same time as they may enjoy this monumentality, how-
ever, literary works continuously morph into the many other cultural
products that recall, adapt, and revise them in both overt and indirect
ways.
This combination of monumentality and morphing, of persistence and
malleability, can be illustrated by the case of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819).
This novel has been reprinted countless times and thus exists as a “textual
monument” to which we can refer (even here it proves useful as a com-
mon point of reference). At the same time, the original narrative has been
re-written and reshaped in various other media (theater, comic books,
film, digital games, re-enactments) and by many other writers, including
both historians inspired by Scott’s example and those intent on replacing
his account of the Middle Ages by a more accurate one. Thus the medie-
valist Jacques Le Goff recently claimed in an interview in Lire.fr (May
2005) that his whole oeuvre as a historian “began” with his reading of
Scott’s novel: “c’est à partir de là que tout a commence.”
The line from Ivanhoe (1819) to Le Goff’s Héros et merveilles au Moyen
Âge (2005) is long and winding, but its existence bears witness both to the
persistence and the mutability of stories.
350 Ann Rigney

3. Texts: Both “Monuments” and “Agents”

It is clear from the above that the role of literary works in cultural re-
membrance is a complex one. To understand it fully one needs to go be-
yond the analysis of individual works to the study of their reception and
their interactions with other acts of remembrance in a variety of media
and genres. When literature is located within this broader dynamics, tradi-
tional themes can be revisited in the light of the various roles played by
literary works in the performance of cultural memory. As least five inter-
related roles can be discerned, some of which apply to all fictional narra-
tives, irrespective of medium, while others are more specifically linked to
literary works with recognized cultural value:
1. Relay stations: Fictional narratives often build on or recycle earlier
forms of remembrance (Rigney, “Plenitude”) and, in this sense, they
can be described as relay stations in the circulation of memories. It is
because figures are relayed across media (image, texts), across discur-
sive genres (literary, historiographical, judicial) and across practices
(commemorations, judicial procedures, private reading) that they can
end up becoming collective points of reference for individuals inhab-
iting different locations. Thus Victor Hugo’s vivid evocation of the
cathedral in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) not only “reiterates” in textual
form the actual Gothic building, but also picks up on contemporary
discussions regarding its preservation (Friedrich). In this way, fictional
narratives can be seen as one of the many channels through which
figures of memory are circulated and given a high profile. Indeed, they
are arguably the most important of relay stations given their wide cir-
culation and their broad appeal.
2. Stabilizers: Fictional narratives, as was mentioned earlier, can succeed
in figuring particular periods in a memorable way and so provide a
cultural frame for later recollections. Their sticking power as narra-
tives and as aesthetic artifacts thus works as a stabilizing factor (A.
Assmann) in cultural remembrance. Thus Walter Scott’s novel Old
Mortality (1816) became a privileged point of reference, if only as a
punch bag, in discussions of the seventeenth-century Scottish civil
war (Rigney, Imperfect Histories 13-58); Erich Maria Remarque’s Im
Westen nichts Neues (1929) has played a comparable role with respect to
the First World War. Illustrating the fact that the memory of culture
represents a specific field within collective remembrance (alongside
events like war) the literary canon itself has also traditionally func-
tioned as a stabilizer of remembrance: The celebration of literary
“monuments” from the past (whether or not these themselves have a
mnemonic dimension) helps reinforce communality in the present.
 The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 351

3. Catalysts: Thanks to the imaginative powers of their creators, fictions

seem to have a particular role to play in drawing attention to “new”
topics or ones hitherto neglected in cultural remembrance. In such
cases, they are not merely relay stations, but may be actually instru-
mental in establishing a topic as a socially relevant topic and in setting
off multiple acts of recollection relating to it. Thus the publication of
Louis de Bernière’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) provided an occa-
sion for commemorating the Italian experience in Greece during
World War Two, while Günter Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (2002)
contributed to the intensification of discussions on the plight of
German refugees at the end of World War Two.
4. Objects of recollection: Literary texts do not just work as media of remem-
brance, but themselves become objects of recollection in other media
and forms of expression (Erll 159). The basic point is illustrated by
the extensive celebrations that took place in Dublin in 2004 to com-
memorate the centenary of the (fictional) story set in 1904 that James
Joyce narrated in Ulysses (1922). But literature is not only an object of
recollection in this formalized way. “Remakes” of earlier texts, revi-
sions of earlier texts, and the remediation of early texts in new media
also represent important means of keeping earlier narratives “up to
date,” that is, memorable according to the norms of the new group.
Research into the way in which stories are morphed in new media and
appropriated in new contexts is still at an early stage (Sanders), but has
already opened new perspectives for cultural memory studies. It gives
us insight into the cultural life of stories and the way in which the lat-
ter may mutate into something new or become eroded by “over-expo-
sure.” While recursivity ensures that certain stories become known, it
also means that they can end up exhausted from having been repeated
in increasingly reduced form, from theater and film to souvenirs and
other tie-ins. By the time Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) is only known
as the name of a cinema in Manhattan, for example, we are no longer
dealing with a story that is still actively shaping the course of collec-
tive remembrance.
5. Calibrators: Canonical literary “monuments” also have a specific role to
play as a benchmark for reflecting critically on dominant memorial
practices. Indeed, revisioning canonical texts (as distinct from merely
remediating them; see 4) represents an important memorial practice,
especially within the framework of a postmodern literary culture
where originality is sought in the re-writing of earlier texts rather than
in novelty as such (see Lachmann, this volume). Familiar figures from
earlier texts function as coat stands on which to hang new, often radi-
cally opposing versions of the past or as a wedge to break open up a
352 Ann Rigney

hitherto neglected theme. Thus J. M. Coetzee re-wrote Defoe’s Robin-

son Crusoe (1719-20) in his novel Foe (1986), which is a post-colonial
palimpsest of the earlier story; while Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart (1958) and V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) can both be
seen as critical rewritings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) (see
Plate for many other examples). The result is a critical form of cultural
remembrance that is arguably distinct to artistic practices whereby
writers exploit the monumentality and malleability of earlier works in
order to reflect critically on those earlier accounts and the memory
they have shaped.

4. In Conclusion
Locating literary practice within the larger framework of cultural memory
studies has shown up some of the complex processes involved in the cir-
culation of stories and the evolution of collective remembrance: both the
convergence of remembrance on particular sites and the gradual erosion
of those sites. In many respects, literary texts and other works of art can
be considered as simply one form of remembrance alongside others. At
the same time, however, they are capable of exercising a particular aes-
thetic and narrative “staying power” that ensures that they are not always
simply superseded by later acts of remembrance. Whether as objects to be
remembered or as stories to be revised, literary texts exemplify the fact
that memorial dynamics do not just work in a linear or accumulative way.
Instead, they progress through all sorts of loopings back to cultural prod-
ucts that are not simply media of memory (relay stations and catalysts) but
also objects of recall and revision.

References
Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck, 1999.
Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Iden-
tität in frühen Hochkulturen. 1992. Munich: Beck, 1997.
Bal, Mieke, and Jonathan Crewe, eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the
Present. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1999.
Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Stuttgart: Metzler,
2005.
Friedrich, Sabine. “Erinnerung als Auslöschung: Zum Verhältnis zwischen
kulturellen Gedächtnisräumen und ihrer medialen Vermittlung in
 The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing 353

Victor Hugos Notre-Dame de Paris und Les Misérables.” Arcadia: Zeitschrift

für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 40.1 (2005): 61-78.
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1998.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Public Memory and Its Discontents.” The Uses of
Literary History. Ed. Marshall Brown. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 73-91.
Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Mem-
ory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994.
Koselleck, Reinhart. “Kriegerdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der Über-
lebenden.” Identität. Eds. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle. Poetik
und Hermeneutik 8. Munich: Fink, 1979. 255-76.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remem-
brance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.
Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From
‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Prac-
tices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-40.
Plate, Liedeke. “Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Recep-
tion.” SPIEL 19.1 (2000): 155-67.
Rigney, Ann. Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic
Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.
—. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of
European Studies 35.1 (2005): 209-26.
—. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of
Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 361-96.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation. 1981. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.