History is collective memory; Memory is personal history. Trauma is Memory. Memory and Morality. Memory Prioritizes.

1. Memory Novel
The Theme of History and Memory
The Only Story
Julian Barnes
History is collective memory; Memory is personal history.
Trauma is Memory.
Memory and Morality.
Memory Prioritizes.

2. Memento is philosophically more significant . . .
 Cinematic and narrational gimmicks apart, `Memento'
contained a philosophical and ethical message at its core. If
our memory is taken away from us so also is our moral
responsibility for our actions.
 The protagonist in the film was being manipulated by
conspirators who wanted to use him as the perfect
instrument of murder, in that - having no memory of the
crime - he could not later feel any remorse which might
prompt him to confess to the deed. (Other examples - Tale-
tell heart – Claudius confession, Arthur in Scarlet letter)

3.  To add a further twist - both to the plot and to the moral
question mark that it poses - there is ambiguity as to
whether the exploited amnesiac is in fact exploiting the
situation so as to make the most of his memory-free
state and achieve a godlike - or devil-like - transcendence
above and beyond the duality of good and evil.
• Is our sense of morality rooted in memory, and if we
erase memory, do we erase morality along with it? This is
the disturbing question raised by `Memento’.
• Memento' questions not just the concept of a moral self
but also the concept of a continuous moral identity - an 'I'
- which is responsible for its past actions.

4. Trauma is memory
• One needs to understand the relation between memory and identity”, the
“shared structure of a sentiment”, “the sense of trauma and its contradictory
relation to the question of the past”.
• One of principal arguments seems to be that “the narrative structure of the
memory of trauma works on a principle opposite to that of any historical
narrative”.
• According to him, “a historical narrative leads up to the event in question,
explaining why it happened, and why it happened when it did, and this is
possible only when the event is open to explanation. What cannot be
explained belongs to the marginalia of history.”
• Chakravarty, Dipesh. ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’ in Habitation of Modernity, pp
116-17.

5. Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending
• “ ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the
imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ ”
(Patrick Lagrange)
• Historians have always been faced with the lack of direct evidence for
things.
• historians need to treat a participant’s own explanation of events
with a certain skepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye
to the future that is the most suspect.
• And mental states may often be inferred from actions. The tyrant
rarely sends a handwritten note requesting the elimination of an
enemy.

6. The Only Story
• Paul goes on to introduce another feature of
memory that will shape his story:
• “I would guess that memory prioritizes whatever is
most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories
going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing
happier memories to the surface first.”
His will be, he’s advising us, a story with a time line and
an arc: happy first things first, upswing, downswing.

7. Illustrations from the novel
•Did he feel regret at what he always thought of as
his ‘handing back’ of Susan? No: the proper word for
that might be guilt; or its sharper colleague,
remorse. But there was also an inevitability to it,
which lent the action a different moral colouring. He
found that he simply couldn’t go on. He couldn’t
save her, and so he had to save himself. It was as
simple as that.
•No, of course it wasn’t; it was much more
complicated.

8. Read following episodes in the novel
• Eric – His affair with Ashley: He is not ready to give entirely for
her love.
• Eric – beating while coming from a fair – Paul ran away –
cowardly act
• Max Verstappen – Formula One Race – 19 yrs – youthful
fearlessness rather than true courage, did the same age
disclaimer apply in reverse: to cowardice?
• Fellow in forties – She is like a bird – fly away – shit on a
shoulder
• All these references surfaces like residue of a memory –
significant to infer the character from the mental state from
which these episodes emerge in the memory of Paul

9. Works cited:
• Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. 2011.
• Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. 2018.
• Chakravarty, Dipesh. ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and
Prejudice of Dwelling’ in Habitation of Modernity, pp 116-17.
• Nolan, Christopher. Memento. 2000.
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