Memory, Identity and Witness

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing on Paul Ricoeur's notion of narrative identity and on his observations concerning testimony in Memory, History, Forgetting, this article explores the operation of memory under two aspects, that of narrative identity and that of witness. This exercise involves some related discussion both of the history/memory problem and of the relationship between written and spoken traces in engaging the past. The methodological focus for the work is a written text of an unusual kind, comprising an extensive and detailed eyewitness account written, forgotten and re-discovered by the same individual – Lionel Curtis – after an intervening period of half a century.