The forms of remembrance. Collective memory.

Abstract

Memory has a narrative structure. Its contents, forms, and modes of expression make this clear. Drawing on the ideas of the founders of the collective memory perspective, Halbwachs, Blondel, Bartlett, and Vygotsky, and reflecting on Bruner’s postulates, this paper argues that memory, even so-called individual memory, is constructed on the basis of narratives that constitute forms of discourse and ways of organizing experiences, such as past experiences, which are culturally endowed with meaning. In order to be intelligible to the person, group, society, or community to whom they are presented, they must be expressed in logical narratives that demonstrate the verisimilitude of what is being remembered or recounted. Certainly, in everyday life we find many narratives about collective experiences, we find “storytellers,” and as in literature, it is not only what is told that matters, but how it is told. Just as there are conventions of ideas about reality, there are also conventions for narratives: there are narrative models that make one narrative more plausible than another. Such narratives give meaning to the world. Narratives also become social frameworks of memory, like the time and space Halbwachs spoke of. The narrative mode is a framework, a way of framing experience, and what is not structured narratively is lost from memory. Bartlett called these frameworks schemas, which are outlined by institutions, customs, and groups that dictate how past events should be presented, that is, how they should be narrated, and as narratives, they shape the realities they create, which operates for the past experiences that the group keeps.