"To turn from history to memory is to move from the disciplined effort to marshal evidence about the “truth” of the past to the slippery terrain on which individuals and groups invent traditions and record partisan versions of the past on the basis of which they seek to construct particular conditions in the present. “Memory,” Pierre Nora writes, is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation. . . . [H]istory on the other hand, is the reconstruction . . . of what is no longer. . . . History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. . . . At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to . . . memory."
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Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” “Representation 26 (1989): 8-9; as quoted on pp.9-10.
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