The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

recollection by which the present would be reconciled with the past.”²³ The work of truth commissions is to give the society an opportunity to remember and to mourn. The contemporary Chinese environment does not allow any public platform, such as a truth commission, where individuals can give their testimonies, so writing and publishing become a substitute. Yet allowing personal testimonies to be presented in an open forum is only part of the process of uncovering the truth about the past. Interpretation of collected testimonies is another essential part. Hence our interpretation of scar literature, for example, becomes crucial in our attempt to understand the historical trauma that underlies the Cultural Revolution.

The pathology of traumatic memory can most easily be seen in the behavior of individuals. Although collective entities such as a nation or a society can exhibit the same pathological behaviors, a broader sociological perspective and a longer historical view may be required to detect them. Such pathology afflicting a nation or society manifests itself not in blocked memory but in manipulated memory. As Ricoeur moves from this first level of the abuses of memory to the second, practical level, he also moves a step away from being concerned with the psychology of the individual and a step toward seeing abuses of memory within the framework of power and ideology.²⁴

On the practical level, abuses of memory take the form of manipulated memory, created in conjunction with the quest for identity. Here Ricoeur is talking more about collective identity than individual identity. His concern is not so much “Who am I?” as “What are we?” Abuse of memory on this level lies in the intimate connection between memory and identity, mediated by language. Here, “narrative is the function through which memory is incorporated into the formation of identity.”²⁵ Because identity is laden with familial, social, cultural, historical, and political values, memory as the building blocks of identity is prone to manipulation by the individual or the collective under the influence of social institutions governed by power and ideology.