Remembrance in the twenty-first century

Peter Childs

pp. 268-270

in: Sebastian Groes (ed), Memory in the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

In modern secular Western cultures, remembrance creates a link between the living and the dead, most often placed in a ceremonial context of remembering those who died in the service of country. The "national memory" is therefore a repository of emotional, social, and cultural importance. It is also political. What is remembered and what is archived affect understandings of not just the past but also the present and the future. Most famously in literature, this is exploited in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the remembrance of the past is tightly controlled and constantly revised. The fallibility of personal memory makes this revisionism all the more possible, allowing individuals to doubt their own recollections against the misinformation provided by the Party as "official evidence" to constantly rewrite the "national memory". The gaps of personal memory are mirrored in the novel by memory holes: small chutes leading to a large incinerator. Here are consigned all scraps of contradictory evidence as the collective memory of the past is rewritten to show the Party in the best light. The novel's protagonist Winston Smith is himself employed to operate a censorship of past events by revising old newspaper articles in order to serve the interests of propaganda. Also, in order to control the corroborating evidence of any personal memory, the Party forbids citizens to keep written records of their lives, and decrees that any photographs or documents be sent into the memory holes. The Party's ultimate goal is to be able to rewrite the memory of each of its citizens. Thus it seeks to control the story of the past as a way to control the present.