Memory, Archive, and the Political: A Certain Scenery on Modernity

The notion of linearity has been the basic logic of the narrative sequence of time since the Aristotle’s Poetics. As Shakespeare portrayed time as the sum of the past, present and future up to “the last syllable of recorded time,” the memory has been considered as the immutable element of the past within the traditional notion of narrative time. In the modern era, from around the beginning of the 20^th century, this traditional notion of time as the whole of recorded memories has been changed. From this recognition, memory could not guarantee the representational value of the event, disseminating itself into the different layers and circuits of unrepresentable time which could be embedded into various implications of the political. This essay will delve into how the modes of time could be forking from the traditional notion of linearity, by making a detour to the analysis of certain narrative aspects of Rashomon, Last Year at Marienbad, and Shoah.