Commemoration, Public History and the Professional Historian: An Irish Perspective

We live in time--it holds and moulds us--but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage (Barnes 2012: 3-4). I'm sure many of you will have recognized these lines from the opening of Julian Barnes's 2011 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. It would not have been especially difficult to find alternative, but equally apposite quotations, from several other recent, acclaimed novels: memory (and its relationship to History--in effect, the different ways in which we deal with the past) has become something of a major preoccupation of writers in recent years. Perhaps it has always been so. Nor is it simply a fashion among novelists or other 'creative' writers. The historian Richard White (American born, with maternal Irish ancestry), in his classic Remembering Ahanagran (1998) addressed directly the issue of how a trained historian, with a scruple for verifiable evidence, engages the stories (in effect, oral history) that his mother told of her youth and early upbringing in Ahanagran, a townland outside the village of Ballylongford in North Kerry, in the 1920s/early 1930s: I once thought of my mother's stories as history. I thought memory was history. Then I became a historian, and after many years I have come to realize that only careless historians confuse memory and history. History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed. Few non-historians realize how many scraps a life leaves. These scraps do not necessarily form a story in and of themselves, but they are always calling stories into doubt, always challenging memories, always trailing off into forgotten places. But there are regions of the past that only memory knows. If historians wish to go into this dense and tangled terrain, they must accept memory as a guide. In this jungle of the past only memory knows the trails. ... [Turning to the mother's stories that he has 'researched', White continues] There is nothing my mother has told me that is without some basis in the past. But neither, at least in those cases where I can recover the historical scraps, is there a story that to a historian sifting through the evidence clearly happened as she remembers. These stories and our collaboration have taught me much about the relation of history and memory. They have made me face in at least a small way the cruelty of recovering what memory seeks to bury or disguise. It is no wonder people prefer memory to history (White 1998: 4-5). Memory is indeed a major preoccupation of our time. Professor Aidan Moran of UCD has spoken of our time as an 'age of reminders': with lists kept by people, in offices, in diaries, on mobile devices etc, to 'remind' them of things to do, appointments to keep, tasks to fulfil. This need for 'reminding' reflects, no doubt, the busy lives we lead and perhaps our distrust of our ability to remember everything on our crowded schedule. But, more darkly, the lengthening life expectancy of people (at least in the developed world) has brought with it anxieties about the failing or the loss of memory--senility, forms of dementia and Alzeimers--as an issue that has to be dealt with in our own personal lives or in the lives of family and friends. …