‘What began as autopsy ended in inspiration,’ writes Patrick H. Hutton in the final pages of The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing (p. 204). The book recaptures the dynamic interplay between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ from the 1960s to the present, detailing how a crisis in French historiography helped to shape the vibrant interdisciplinary field of ‘memory studies,’ in which sociologists have become central players.
The foundational text for the story that Hutton tells is Pierre Nora’s three-volume Les Lieux de mémoire (1984-1992). The motivations for Nora’s project—and for the ‘memory phenomenon’ broadly conceived—were both historical and historiographical. At an historical level was widespread disillusionment with progressive national narratives that never delivered on their promises: a development that prompted Nora to turn to the ‘deep sources of French national heritage,’ beyond the Revolution. To this end, Les Lieux unearthed ‘residues of once bright and vital memories, now long lost and forgotten,’ seeking to bring them back into public consciousness (p. 32). In terms of historiography, Nora’s project was conceived within the ‘rhetorical turn’ that swept across the humanities and social sciences (p. 30), demanding that historians understand their work as narrative—with all the selectivity and bias that the term entails—rather than as neutral or objective representations of the past. With Les Lieux, memory became the ‘subject matter for historical scholarship’ rather than its ‘unwritten source’ (p. 37).
In the end, Hutton reflects, Nora’s monumental effort was more ‘requiem’ for the past than vision for the future (p. 48). Nevertheless, it helped to give life to an interdisciplinary and international phenomenon. It was far from the only source for contemporary memory studies, however. After a chapter that engages with Nora and some of his major critics, Hutton traces ‘three royal roads along which pioneering studies’ at the intersection of history and collective memory ‘once traveled’ (p. 26). Each line of inquiry developed autonomously throughout the 1960s and 1970s before beginning to converge in the 1980s. First, studies on the politics of commemoration (Chapter 3) focused primarily on the twentieth-century wars that became central to cultural remembrance. Here, collective memory was understood as an integral part of nationalism: conceptualised as ‘highly selective’ and ‘easily bent’ to promote patriotism and engender loyalty to national causes. Second, the concept of cultural memory (Chapter 4) developed in part as a way to understand the relationship between memory and the technologies of communication that shape our ability to create and preserve it. In the digital age, scholars of media and communication, among others, have heralded a new ‘wave’ of memory studies that eschews the earlier focus on the nation and instead thematizes memory’s movement across national and cultural borders. Finally, scholarly debates about the history and legacy of the Holocaust—including the ‘Historians’ Dispute’ of the mid-1980s, which interrogated ‘the conditions under which the memory of the Holocaust might be permitted to pass into history’ (pp. 101–102)—spotlighted the relationship between trauma and memory (Chapter 5). Freudian psychoanalysis returned to the fore as historians considered trauma’s power to block remembrance of past suffering. For a time, traumatic pasts became such a core preoccupation that they overshadowed all other inquiries into the relationship between memory and history.
In these three chapters, historians are the major figures, but Hutton also shows how each of these ‘royal roads’ invited interdisciplinary exchange. In the process, history became a kind of midwife for the deeply interdisciplinary venture of memory studies as it took shape in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In turn, Chapters 6 and 7 suggest that the interdisciplinary reckoning with memory gave life to a reimagined historiography, one that came to occupy a central rather than peripheral role in the discipline writ large. ‘Once a technical subject dealing with methods for laboring in the archives, historiography has been reborn as a study of the conceptual schemes in which history is framed,’ Hutton explains (p. 151). Rather than standing in opposition to memory, then, history has become ‘one among the many arts of memory’ (p. 180): one way of knowing about, and reckoning with, the past, alongside commemorations, historical novels, and imaginative re-enactments, to name just a few of the examples that Hutton examines.
In fact, while Hutton’s story begins with the historian Nora’s Les Lieux, it ends with a collaboration among three sociologists: namely, Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy’s The Collective Memory Reader (2011), which Hutton describes as the other ‘bookend to the mnemonic turn in history’ (p. 182). Bringing together some 100 excerpts, the Reader solidified memory studies as a field and, in the editors’ introduction, conceptualised it as a broad intellectual movement ‘springing not from a mere decade of work in historiography but rather from that of a century across the spectrum of scholarly disciplines’ (p. 182). In contrast with Nora’s nostalgic effort to preserve old sources of common identity by paying attention to ‘memory as it had faded,’ The Collective Memory Reader draws our eyes forward, to ‘memory as it is regenerated and recycled’ (p. 183). The development of memory studies has only accelerated since the Reader’s publication, Hutton points out. The newly formed Memory Studies Association, which held its first conference in 2016, provides the institutional infrastructure for continued growth.
As such, scholars new to memory studies will find that there is a great deal to catch up on. Fortunately, Hutton’s synthesis will prove immensely useful to researchers from any discipline who are preparing to enter the conversation. The Memory Phenomenon is a clear, concise, and remarkably comprehensive overview of how memory studies came into being. It also provides précis of numerous texts that initiates will need to understand in order to enter contemporary debates. Although it inevitably reflects Hutton’s vantage as an historian—again, as Hutton himself underscores, The Collective Memory Reader tells a different story of the field’s emergence—the author reads appreciatively across the many disciplines that have come together around the topic of memory, including sociology, literary studies, and media studies.
Specialists, too, will benefit from reading. For as much as Hutton focuses on the past, on addressing historical and historiographical questions, he concludes with an eye toward the future, especially the prospects for memory studies in, and of, the digital age. In the future that he foreshadows, Hutton’s own discipline of history plays a relatively modest role: as one among many fields that is engaged in building up memory studies, and as one among many arts of memory. Yet he alludes to a hope that—even as we acknowledge and accept all the ways in which the boundary between memory and history has necessarily and irrevocably been blurred—we can perhaps accord certain epistemic privileges to history, over and above other arts of memory that emphasise affect over the archive in reconstructing the past. As Hutton writes in his final line: ‘the work of historians remains as vital as ever in its vocation to balance initiatives to recapture the meaning of the past with that of ascertaining as accurately as possible the reality of what actually transpired back then’ (p. 211). Sociologists who are likewise committed to grounding claims-making in empirical evidence should be among the first to affirm Hutton’s assertion. Indeed, in an era of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ when more extreme postmodernist epistemologies are deployed to justify deception and undermine democracy, Hutton’s commitment to uncovering the ‘reality’ of the past—with all the caveats that term unavoidably entails—is crucial for us all.