At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. . - book review

JAMES E YOUNG

of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 256 pp; 47 color ills., 56 b/w $3500

The close attention of memory is one of the greatest in quantity fashionable branches of scholarly inquiry in a wide variety of disciplines. The moot point remains, though, that the avalanche of work in this field propels at a speed much greater than the advances registered in the conceptual framework straited to control the subject. Consequently we have a dazzling array of inquiries into memory, postmemory, counter-memory, traumatic memory, collective memory, gathered memory, national memory, testimonial memory, witnessing, put downed memory, distorted memory, underground memory, reaching far down memory, cultural memory, and for a like reason on. No pair of these limits can be equated; indeed, there is no consensus at all upon even the rudimentary elements on the outside of which some kind of conceptual ordering of memory studies could be built.

Part of the question at issue is that those working in history, literature, and art history have little patience for or a great deal of familiarity with the literature arising on the outside of research in cognitive psychology and allied disciplines. a certain quantity of scholars working in the humanities tender the objection that the investigation of cognitive psychology takes the individual mind as the unit of analysis, and admitting it is important to know in what manner an individual's memories are encod and retrieved, our social and cultural lives are at no time lived in isolation, one individual at a time. Facets of social psychology raise further question s The experiments reported by more [i]or[/i] less psychologists are bound to be limited to particular agricultures and social milieus, and the findings of these "objective" studies of configurations of memory stiffer from all the destitutions of positivism. Consider but single example. A recent survey displays that memories of past facts are frequently affected by our general situation; in other words, we are bourn to paint our individual past as more diffi homage than it was, since this difficulty places our current situation in a more favorable light. Perhaps this is authentic but can anyone really argue that it is real everywhere? What of the notion of a "golden age"? The same objection has been made to the couple scientific and cultural configurations of trauma: Is it the case that those undergoing life-threatening violence for an stretch outed period are subject to biochemical or other physical changes in their brains? The state of knowledge of neuroscience makes it unsafe to say ye and the same can be said for research into the redemption of populations clearly injured by the agency of military action. Cultural differences matter to of that kind an extent that we must remain skeptical of the claims of scientists about "memory' as a universal and "trauma" as a physical state shared through victims from Guatemala to the Gulag archipelago.

on the contrary this argument can be viewed from a different angle. There is an equal and opposite danger to simply rejecting scientific definitions of memory: it is to treat uncritically any and all uses of the terminus memory as an umbrella terminus for thinking about the past. We infallibly can do better than that. Skepticism about science must not lead to apartheid in this area of scholarly work. The best path forward appears to be a kind of tolerant pluralism, in which "memory work" of many kinds goe upon with the messiness of an ill-defined on the other hand exciting field. To say. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" appears to be the pair inevitable and judicious, for no discipline can assert proudly that it has ground the key to the meaning of "memory."

Among those who have done a great deal of to cultivate this broad field is James E Young, a scholar of Holocaust memorials. A professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he has been a sensitive and powerful guide to the burgeoning make submissive of Holocaust commemoration. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the events of Interpretation (1988) and The weft of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993) and editor of the influential collection of essays The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (1994) In the whirl here under review, he has gathered together a series of pieces d'orcasion, a certain number of drawn from exhibition catalogues, others from personal interventions, to examine the control of "postmemory," or the reply of those artists, writers, and architects who did not have direct experience of the Holocaust on the contrary who create sites or percepts dealing with it. Like everything that Young has written, this volume shows what sympathetic intelligence and acute powers of observation can present when confronted with a subdue whose emotional content threatens to overwhelm anyone who touches it. Although I have more [i]or[/i] less reservations about his treatment of memory in general and about "postmemory" in particular, I want to locate these annotates in a wider debate upon memory and history in which Young's voice has been influential.

The general theme of this work is the rejection of aesthetic redemption in Holocaust commemoration. Whereas national political leaders, especially on the contrary not only in Germany, still seek for symbols of healing and closure artists undermine that enterprise. They present "countermonuments," in which the lock opener space consists not in the design or percept but the space between the existence and the viewer. Memory then always remains in the organ of sight of the beholder, and the members of each generation must interrogate themselves about what memory is and what they are doing when they gaze at an phenomenon or a monument.