Memory and History

Mr Gatt (Standing) on far right at Le Salon

Anchoring The Gramophone Years' underlying themes of belonging and nostalgia, Le Salon was extremely fortunate to have Mr Charles Gatt, a charming and charismatic raconteur, on board. Mr Gatt peppered the account of his voyage by ship, leaving Maltese shores in 1958, to emigrate to to  Canada, with anecdotes of hardships endured, and idiosyncrasies experienced against a colonial backdrop whilst forging and assimilating  identities.  One of the aims of Le Salon is to provide a platform for oral history. An extract from a critique (by Warren Bugeja) on reading  Nathan Wachtel's tract on Memory and History , served as an introduction to Mr Charles Gatt's interlude.

 Memory and History

In the absence of a history of the common people, oral history helps fill the gaps in collective memory by giving a voice to the invisible players in history. By democratizing ‘official memory’ long guarded by  scholarly historians, relying primarily on written documentation, oral history provides the soap box on which women, minority groups, the illiterate and the ordinary man in the street can reconstruct a ‘forgotten ‘past through their life stories.

History, commissioned and manipulated by ownership of the dominant mass media of each epoch, has always been told from the top down. From the viewpoint of the conqueror, rarely the conquered, the rich, the famous or infamous.  ‘Inequality persists beyond death in the inequality of the preservation of recollections’ ( Nathan Wachtel, quoting Phillipe Joutard). One of the aims of Oral History, Wachtel claims, is to ‘establish a counter-history. This is not to present Oral history, however, as a substitute for written history but as another tool in the historian’s methodological toolbox, juxtaposing oral narratives with other sources of data such as related artifacts, written documentation and other interviews.

Oral history as the systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experiences, depends, for its life blood upon human memory and the spoken word.  One of the main criticisms of Oral History is the very nature of the ‘retrospective and fluid character’ of memory that makes it an ‘unwieldy tool ‘from the perspective of scientific criteria. There is no ‘pure memory, only recollection’, Wachtel states. But what people leave out, (forget or not consider important) from their stories may be as tellingly interesting as what they include or more interestingly choose to remember. Marcel Proust in his ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ asks the question what is more real, more vivid? The actual event or the memory of it brought to life by the recollection of it? In his 1978 work ‘The Voice of the Past’ P. Thomson demonstrates that the same event experienced by several persons is then coloured by the later ‘experiences and destinies’ of the same witnesses who recollect it very differently years later from their initial reminiscences.

Yet if oral narratives are a subjective reading of history then history can be seen to be a gestalt or a collective recollection of individual presents seen from the perspective of the past. The bias towards subjectivity is seen in a positive light. Chosen recollections become tradition. The work of the memory in what it recollects becomes a representation (important in its own right) not a reflection of the past. And Wachtel asks ‘since every memory has a history, is it not possible to construct a history of the memory?’

The human tendency to impose a narrative structure on events that may not be closely connected, the serving motives of the storyteller, the power relationships between interviewer and interviewee that affect what and how events are reported, represent inconsistencies in the oral method. Linguistically people do not speak in complete sentences. They repeat themselves and leave things out. There is a gap between the spoken word and the written word trying to capture it, as there is a gap between thoughts and speech, thoughts being much faster and speech clumsy in comparison.  The task of the transcriber to put spoken words onto paper with a semblance of written coherence without changing the narrator’s meaning is no mean feat.

Questions of accuracy are not unique to oral history.  Written sources can carry personal or social biases. They occur within a social context. An approximation of accuracy of a collective representation of  an event depends on the cross section of people interviewed in connection with the particular event being ‘remembered’ , especially if as Maurice Halbwachs argues in Durkheimian vein that ‘one only ever remembers as a member of a social group.’ ‘Recollections’ he says ‘exist and are only localized in the past by linking up with the memory of others’. Although in Oral history, the human life span puts boundaries on the subject; the researcher can only go back one lifetime; for Halbwachs there is a living link between generations. Memory is a product of its time and is influenced by the formative psychological and social ‘atmospheres’ of the epoch peculiar and appertaining to each successive generation. Memory thus for Halbwachs is anchored and limited by a generation in space and time.

Roger Bastide took Halbwach’s theories of collective spatial memory one step further  in his studies  illustrating how the cohesion and transnational location of an African ethnic identity owes much to the spatial dimension of worship, not just recreated in artifacts and sites  but also ‘rehabilitated’ within the body, expressed for example, in ritual dance. Could the physical maneuvers within the Gospel tradition be a christianising of voodoo memory muscle motor mechanisms? Bastide argued that it was the structure of the group as opposed to the group in of itself that provides the framework for social memory. Therefore a destructuralization  or obliterated by a syncretism or merging (taking on) of memories from a new culture or generation to which they adapt to or confront to.

With the rise of nationalism official historians were entrusted with documenting and elaborating a history legitimizing and eulogizing the nation state. History became part of a national mythology accompanied by flags, anthems, symbols, public monuments and elaborate civic rituals, providing a common national consciousness that invalidated individual consciousness and memory that did not support or conform to the nationalistic ideology. In the wake of the Annales school and as a reaction to nationalistic narrative discourses, historical writing began to divert from a purely, linear, temporal  unfolding of cause and effect to a pluralistic, temporality, panorama of problem history entertaining working class, feminist, group and regional ‘counter perspectives.

If memory is a component of individual and group identity it also then can be false, constructed as a force of resistance or insulation against a hostile environment. This is revealed by the research of Freddy Raphael on the sympathetic memory Alsatian Jews had of their former relationship with the inhabitants of a village they had since departed from. These same villagers held very contradictory recollections (indeed they stereotypically referred to the Jews as ‘smelly’) to those nursed by the Alsatian Jews. The latter were when faced with these opposing views, were forced to reassess their own ‘official memories’. Oral history creates for a rich tapestry of memory, memories that co-exist, that dissent from each other, ‘memories that are the object of struggles, strategies and power relations’ official or secret’. There is individual memory that contributes to group memory by establishing its own spokesmen as the memory bearers. These constitute ‘histories of the memory’.

In a 21^st century world where humans rather than write letters, travel to see each other, make telephone calls that ‘dissolve into thin air’ or write e-mails that are promptly deleted, the scarcity of written records is safeguarding the future of oral history, so much so that academia, once the stamping ground of the official historian, now offers University degrees in the subject.