English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Radical Practice of Memory

Alison Landsberg. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 240 pp. $22.50.

By Beth Widmaier Capo, Illinois College

            What do you remember about slavery? About the holocaust? No, I’m not asking you to remember the facts and statistics you learned in your history classes. I’m asking you to think of your visceral, physical memory, the cramped spaces of the ship’s hold, the cold poverty of the slave’s quarters, the hunger and degradation of the concentration camp. These are the feelings, both emotional and physical, that color and give form to history’s statistics. But how can we remember something we have never experienced? Alison Landsberg, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University, explores the question of how mass cultural formations such as film and novels can provide a sense of “prosthetic memory” haunting our collective consciousness.

            “Collective memory,” its formation and subsequent threat or promise, has ranked high on contemporary historians’ hit parade.[1] Landsberg engages with this scholarship while offering a provocative new angle that argues for the value of our capitalist consumer culture in forming private memories that transcend boundaries of lived experience and offer the potential for progressive political action.

            Landsberg opens her study of memory in the age of mass culture with a description of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1925 film The Road to Yesterday, a narrative to which she returns periodically. She explores a series of questions about the role of memory in modern American culture, its production via personal and communal experience, the role of mass culture as a “technology of memory,” and the possibility of mass-produced inorganic memories to serve progressive political ends. Key to answering these questions is the book’s concept of “prosthetic memory,” emerging “at the interface between a person and a historical narrative” where the person “takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live” (2). Thus the memory is prosthetic: inorganic, transportable, worn on the body, commodified, and ultimately useful.

            A cultural historian, Landsberg deftly unpacks how modernity, including immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of mass culture, produced the conditions necessary for this “new form of public cultural memory.” In the introduction, she quickly reviews historical modes of negotiating a relationship with the past, such as memorizing a text or participating in a religious ritual, that allow for the transmission of and identification with history. This discussion of how memory functions and its various modalities leads into a quick overview of the impact of modernity on collective memory and identity formation. The cinema, for instance, functions as a site “in which people experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a past that was not actually theirs” (14). Thus you get much more than a few hours of entertainment and a bucket of popcorn for your money: you can form memories of an experience you did not actually live through.

            After establishing that memory as an embodied experience can be collective and potentially transformative, Landsberg moves into four chapters offering case studies of different mass cultural sites of memory. The nuanced use of historical, film, and cultural theory provides just enough theoretical discussion to introduce complex ideas to readers without becoming bogged down in technical abstraction. Weaving together the useful elements from different academic disciplines, Landsberg examines an interesting variety of texts, including film, literature, autobiography, the graphic novel, and museum sites. A discussion of the trope of implanted memories in the sci-fi films Total Recall and Blade Runner establishes that memory is transportable and does not dictate an essentialized identity: that is, it does not matter if a memory is “real” or Memorex to function as a building block of personal identity. In a logical but rather startling leap, Landsberg moves from these sci-fi films to a chapter on immigrant narratives by Mary Antin and Philip Roth, exploring the “creative editing—the individual acts of suture—that were continually used to imagine oneself as an American” (51). Immigrants consciously took on not only new styles of clothing and a new language, but American memory itself, a process that would “create sameness and reinforce dominant narratives by rejecting difference” (79-80).

           In perhaps the most interesting chapters of the work, Landsberg takes on the twin traumas of American slavery and the Holocaust. How do we remember slavery? What acts of reconstruction occur that allow whites and blacks to create memories of slavery in the early 21^st century? Slavery itself disrupted the transmission of memory by dismantling families and communities, necessitating that other forms of transmission be found. As Toni Morrison has so beautiful explored in Beloved, slavery is not a story to “pass on”: it is neither easily transmittable, nor is it a chapter in our history we can ignore and pass over. Landsberg offers quick examinations of fiction and film to support her argument. While her discussion of literary works such as Faulkner’s Absalom, Abasalom and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon ties together the strands of “natal alienation” and created memory networks, it is this discussion of literature that is least satisfying (I filled the margins with suggestions for more scenes that should be examined that would support and complicate her argument.  For instance, what of Quentin Compson’s final tortured cries that he doesn’t hate the South?). Landsberg continues her argument by analyzing film, including Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and John Singleton’s Rosewood but not the movie version of Beloved, a strange omission, especially considering her inclusion of Alex Haley’s Roots in both the novel and television miniseries form. This chapter effectively argues that prosthetic memories can transcend color lines leading to empathy and a sense of belonging. But perhaps because the argument is so intriguing, the chapter speeds by, leaving at least this reader wanting more discussion.

           Landsberg continues this theme in an analysis of how the “Holocaust circulates in American mass culture” (23). She describes how works such as Art Spieglman’s graphic novel Maus, the films Schindler’s List and The Pianist, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum can act as transferential spaces that pass on memories of Holocaust survivors to the body of those with no “authentic” link to the historical event. For example, the Holocaust Memorial Museum is designed to ensure that visitors confront images and objects while physically experiencing aspects such as walking through a boxcar used to transport Jews to a concentration camp. Other spaces are filled with piles of objects, such as shoes, which emit strong symbolic resonance (the absent bodies that would wear those shoes) and a poignant physical reminder of the detritus of death. This experience allows the visitor to construct their own memory: “We, too, produce a memory that no one else ever had, and the act of taking on these prosthetic memories transfigures our own subjectivities” at the same time that it allows for empathy (137). Thus our bodies, the bodies of those not directly experiencing the Holocaust, will be able to testify to the historical trauma of the Holocaust, ensuring its continued vitality in cultural memory.

           The ability of mass media to transcend the bounds of essentialist identity politics creates, according to Landsberg, a potential for progressive politics. These prosthetic memories “create the conditions for ethical thinking precisely by encouraging people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity of, the ‘other’” (8-9). Landsberg treads on tricky ground here, which she negotiates by stating her argument a bit less strongly (the word “perhaps” repeatedly insulates her argument here) and recognizing the limitations of her theory. She successfully avoids naïve utopianism while still offering a positive spin on consumer commodification and mass culture. 

           This is a well-written and tightly argued book. Indeed, my critique is that the work occurs almost too quickly, leaving gaps crying out to be filled. For instance, what of the politics of representation in these mass cultural visions? That is, what interests are represented in whose stories are told, and how those stories are told—the politics of museum displays, the “director’s vision,” the “male gaze” of most films, and other issues that would complicate and enrich the idea of prosthetic memory. Another glaring omission is the trauma of war as represented by recent films such as Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot, Thin Red Line, and Pearl Harbor, with their handsome heroes, romance subplots, and national narratives of bravery. What kinds of prosthetic memories are these glossy Hollywood offerings forming even as the national news media barely covers our current wars? Perhaps what I am envisioning is beyond the scope of this book, but the provocative theory it forwards certainly leads to further questions.

             Prosthetic Memory is a timely work with more to offer than academic finesse. This useful new way of conceptualizing how memory functions in the age of mass culture optimistically advocates empathy and progressive action.  As we read it, we should consider how 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and future conflicts will be represented not just in the present, but how media representations, be they novels, films, memorials or museums, will continue to shape cultural memory.