Between the Living and the Dead: Performative ‘in-betweens’ in the Works of Alastair MacLennan

Abstract

In his article ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ French historian Pierre Nora discusses the fundamental change in the relationship between history and memory, the living and the dead, that took place during the Enlightenment. Nora observes that the basis for this profound alteration in the social and material relations with the dead and the increasingly pronounced distinction between intimate memories and public histories is the substitution of what he calls ‘places of memory’ (lieux de mémoire), ‘the artificial sites of the modern production of national and ethnic memories,’ for ‘environments of memory’ (milieux de mémoire), ‘the behavioural retentions of unscripted tradition, in which the dead, taking the form of ghosts and ancestral spirits, once participated more actively.’1 There is a stringent need to recapture the spaces of memory through (re)performing them, in an attempt to channel the ‘ghosts and ancestral spirits’ through effigies, in a séance that could make sense of our fragmented, troubled present.KeywordsJewish WomanGhostly ImagePolitical SpaceBinary OppositionAesthetic ObjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.