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

inability to recall the actual thing itself as our failed attempt to fully capture the feeling and thought that our sensory faculties had generated. Augé calls this phenomenon oblivion—“loss of remembrance”: “What we forget is…the remembrance.”²⁹ What Augé means by “remembrance” is similar to what Ricoeur calls “perception.” Ricoeur talks about the “imprint” and “likeness” of the actual thing in the mind to illustrate that memory is an absence (forgetting) made present through imagining (remembering). Similarly, Pontalis explains, “All our remembrances…are ‘screens,’ not in the sense that they would conceal older memories, but in the sense that they ‘serve as a screen’ to ‘traces’ they both conceal and contain at one and the same time.”³⁰ In other words, remembrances are reflections of the traces, imprints, or likenesses of past actual things stored in conscious and subconscious minds. What we remember is engineered by what we forget of the actual past things. This dual function of forgetting and remembering creates the memory, which is captured by Augé’s metaphor, “memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea.”

Remembering and Forgetting

What we call memory, then, is the representation or reproduction of an intricate working of remembering and forgetting all at once. As we remember, we cannot help but forget. When writing about memories of a painful past experience—be it one’s own or someone else’s—we are thereby morally bound to be constantly aware of the forgetting in the midst of our remembering. In his introduction to W. G. Sebald’s moving novel Austerlitz, James Wood evokes the reflections of the philosopher Theodor Adorno on memory: “the memory is the only help that is left to them [the dead]. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.”³¹ The ethics in all memory works is that we are responsible