Remembering the Story of Israel

"I begin with two very different stories about storytelling and memory. In a now infamous experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century, Frederic Bartlett asked Cambridge students to read and recall the Native American folktale "War of the Ghosts." They read the text and then had to write it down from memory at various intervals, which ranged from fifteen minutes to many years after reading it. In findings that would become influential for the study of memory for the entire twentieth century, Bartlett noted that in almost every case students produced substantially condensed and altered versions. According to Bartlett, his scientifically staged "telephone game" demonstrated the use of a "mental schema" in our memories, "an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences." In each case, Bartlett's students reproduced a narrative reconfigured from memory into a meaningful whole, even as details, proper names, and numbers were lost in the reproduction. As they reproduced the narrative over increasingly lengthy intervals, particular aspects of the story became confirmed in their memory. The story often stabilized in the retelling, though the more unfamiliar elements were permanently excised. These excised pieces, however, were almost always smoothed over, and the students configured the reconstructed narrative into a coherent whole in each retelling"--