Memory and Trauma in Historical Materialism

This essay examines why image and trauma are engaged concepts to the extent that they work in terms of psychological effects. This idea of relating image to trauma illustrates how Walter Benjamin’s materialistic historiography works in interpreting the moment of trauma that gets crystallized among images. I explore the interrelationship between image and trauma through Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). In the film, an impostor who struggles with unidentified images finally recognizes underlying cause of his trauma by encountering his real identity. I argue that trauma holds images in suspension and then crystallizes images after shock. By virtue of suspension, the immanent power of “retention” helps develop and harness images. This essay focuses on the function of image which actualizes trauma within the mnemonic structure. This is why trauma can be called “the result” of the selection after a long “retention.” In other words, image and trauma are not any actual memories within the mnemonic structure, but they belong only to counter-memory against its original memory. In the case of trauma, the mnemonic constellation of images is identical with Benjamin’s “materialistic historiography” because the procedure of crystallizing trauma is analogous to that of the configuration of history. In Spellbound, the impostor experiences how trauma happens as a dialectical product between time and space. Traumas are born after the constellation of the first memory and the second or the later one. It is also to say that the crystallization of trauma is in line with that of Benjamin’s materialistic historiography. Furthermore, the moment of trauma echoes the Messianic time Benjamin welcomes with the window opened. In the film, the Messianic time finally arrives but it is not recognized because its presence is imminent within another time.