Memory, Trauma, and Performance – Mid-term Response – Ray

Email: hy2873@nyu.edu

 

Memory is the recalling and retaining of information and past experiences (“AP Psych Unit 5 Notes: Introduction to Memory Review | Fiveable,” n.d.). In our course, we discuss the relationship between memory, trauma, and performance. And how does the body remember it? Freud believed that repressed memories of traumatic events could resurface in the conscious mind through remembering, allowing individuals to confront and work through the associated emotions. When people encounter traumatic experiences, their memories have already been engraved. During World War II, for instance, numerous Jews were murdered by the Fascists. The traumatic experience for Jews cannot be forgotten and the memories remained in their brains. “Our memories are located within the mental and material spaces of the group” (p.13, Connerton). The brain will reflect on people’s bodies as a part of the body when the image or recalled memories are shown to the people who experienced this event. Then, their bodies will react to this traumatic experience. After that, the memory also transformed to the next generations called “post-memory”, As Hirsch mentioned. For example, the comic of MAUS exhibits that one of the father mice tells a wartime story to his child. The father mouse encounters war experience and expresses to his child and lets his child sense the scene of that period.

 

Performance means the functions of human activities that will disclose human behaviors in humanity’s context and all activities such as people’s traumatic experiences and memories connected with performance. On the other hand, performance means arts productions such as theater pieces, paintings, films, and so on. When people encounter traumatic experiences, there are two ways to illustrate it. Firstly, the traumatic experience transmits a human activity, people how to feel and spread it. Secondly, after experiencing the traumatic event, they can recall this event and keep the memory resources in the real archives. In other words, people who experienced the traumatic experience write down the words or create a series of artworks to retain these kinds of memories.

 

In our class, we did a workshop with George Emilio Sanchez, he expressed that organizing a chair that is the highest one in the space than other chairs. It let me think about other chairs. Are these chairs oppressed? If we metaphorically connect to human beings, it makes me think about patriarchy. As Herman mentioned, “A social system of male dominance and female subordination has prevailed over millennia and still prevails to a greater or lesser degree in countries throughout the modern world” (p. 55, Herman). In a patriarchal society, the highest chair is like males, and the other chairs are like females. Females stay in a passive situation where they should belong to males. Some women were raped by men and how they treat and how their wounds heal. “Rape could be considered the signal crime of male supremacy, a pure enactment of power for its own sake” (p. 57, Herman). This kind of experience also links to memory it cannot be forgotten and is a long-term disturbance of the victim’s body and mind. As Connerton notes, “Our bodies… keep the past also in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled actions” (p. 72, Connerton).

 

In the context of the art for performance, I would like to illustrate a film – Pianist. The film was based on the true story of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist and composer, during World War II and the Holocaust. The director Roman Polanski chose this historical event to express the traumatic experience and let the after generation remember what happened before. As Caruth notes, “the attempt to gain access to a traumatic history, then, is also the project of listening beyond the pathology of individual suffering, to the reality of a history that in its crises can only be perceived in unassimilable forms” (p. 156, Caryth). The traumatic experience was the center of the film’s narrative and portrays how trauma can shatter a person’s world, leading to a profound psychological impact that lasts long after the events have occurred. It highlights the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable suffering. It showcases the power of art and music as a means of coping and finding solace amidst such devastation. The film serves as a powerful portrayal of the enduring effects of traumatic experiences on individuals and their ability to find strength and healing amid immense adversity.

 

In the article on Bodily practices by Connerton, he illustrates that the body practices include two kinds of steps “incorporating practice” and “inscribing practice”. Incorporating practice means that the body’s activities connect with each other such as “a handshake” or “words spoken”. It can be “present to sustain that particular activity” (p. 72, Connerton). Inscribing practice means that using “modern devices to store information, print, encyclopedias, indexes, photographs, sound tapes, computers, all require that we do something that traps and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing” (p. 73, Connerton). For the Pianist, the director Roman Polanski used the “inscribing practice” to store the memory of Władysław Szpilman from the real traumatic experience to memories. Although it was a personal memory, it reflected generational memories that people cannot forget what happened before.