email: nh923@nyu.edu

In “How Societies Remember” I was really dawn to the distinction that Connerton makes between incorporating and inscribing practices as it relates to the element of time. For Connerton incorporating practices are, “a transmission occurring only during the time that their bodies are present,” (72) whereas inscribing practices, exist outside of the body in some semiotic form that “traps and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing.” (73) I am still struggling to really grasp my question or what I want to say here but I know that it has something to do with the idea of memory as a fixed thing and the process of remembering as an action.

Drawing on Hirsch’s work is it possible to consider Maus as an attempt at creating and transmitting a memory, and Austerlitz as focused on creating the act and process of remembering? I do not think that either fits neatly into this binary, nor do I think that Connerton views incorporating or inscribing practices as exclusive binary processes, but I do feel like in comparing the two, I began to think a lot about what the question of truth and authenticity in memory, which Hirsch touches upon in relation to Maus (41), and the role of creation and remaking that might be possible in post-memory.

Another idea of Connerton’s that stayed with me when thinking about memory and trauma was the idea of habit. Habit is something that “has become redundant,” through repetition and “a long course of incorporation,” and is therefore unconscious or unrecognizable to the ‘performer.’ (93) Though unnoticeable once acquired, as is show in the example of the student learning to play piano, the process of forming habit, is felt and seen. I found this interesting when thinking about trauma as a breaking or an interruption. What habits are exposed, made visible, and possibly changed and lost through a traumatic rupture?  Hirsch takes up this question in her discussing of post-memory and the importance of “forms of remembrance that reconnect and re-embody an intergenerational memorial fabric that is severed by catastrophe.” (32) Going back to this question of truth in post-memory, it seems that this process of reconnecting calls for a move away from absolute truth or fact and into something else. What becomes important in the memory and in the act of remembering?

In looking at Rosana Paulino’s work, you can see this process of reconnecting – through the physical and drawn images of thread – and the reanimating of the past by repairing or recreating this torn “memorial fabric” in a way that both memorializes the past but simultaneously creates a new memory or process of remembering in the present.