426
PARTISAN REVIEW
to remember inadequately-is
to
be dehumanized. One might
think, because we are surrounded by more means of memory
than have ever been in the world-because we have libraries,
"oral history" archives, films, documentary exhibits, works of
art in all media, even "memory banks"-that we are protected
from forgetfulness. I doubt it. Indeed, a ll these means seem
simply to lull us into thinking that devices of memory
are
me–
mory. But one must
learn
to remember, and thus to judge, the
past.
On the other hand, the charge "lest we forget" can also be
numbing. Many people fear that there have been such horrors in
our time, including the horror of living under the threat of an
event we call by the abstract name
the unthinkable,
that we must
be commanded to remember. Otherwise, it is argued, we will
perish by virtue of the past's repeating itself or of a holocaust
spread across the planet more definitively than any death camp.
But shelves upon shelves of answers to the command "re–
member!" can also lull us into thinking that vo luminous infor–
mation about the past constitutes memory.
Memory cannot be contrived and it cannot be commanded.
We do not learn by placing ourselves in archives, and we do not
learn by being required to receive information about past events.
To learn one must actively participate-one cannot just receive.
A
biography writer participates by preserving a life story
that would, without the act of preservation, be lost, in some
measure at least, with the passing of a generation. In my own
case, the element of storytelling, the handing down orally from
one generation to another, was crucial; for me, listening to and
reproducing the stories I was told was the most cha llenging task
of preserving a contemporary's life story. A biography reader
participates by interpreting the stories reproduced. My guidance
in writing came from a paragraph
10
Walter Benjamin's essay
called "The Story-Teller."
.
Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we
are poor in notewonhy stories. This is because no event any
longer comes to us without already being shot through with
explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that
happens benefits story-telling; almost everything benefits
information . Actually, it is half the an of story-telling
to
keep the story free from explanation as one reproduces it.
