Narrative Life Span, in the Wake 9 reflection, its echo and repetition in Derridas text is an

encounter that yields no gifts and bears no offspring.

Derridas remarks attest to a blocked encounter: one that leaves no narration in its
wake and so presumably permits no generation or transmission. Precisely the contrary,
then, of how the West will so often have thought of memory and its origin, its offspring
and its destiny. On the margins of this disjunction between memory and narration,
however, one still senses an occasion for thought: Why did I not receive this gift from
Mnemosyne? From this complaint, and probably to protect myself from it, a suspicion
continually steals into my thinking: Who can really tell a story? Is narrative possible? Who
can claim to know what a narrative entails? Or, before that, the memory it lays claim to?
What is memory? (MdM 10).
In drawing attention to the long-established links between narration and memory and
in underscoring the canonical figures according to which those linkages are normally
understoodthe figures of generation and procreation, of the lover-mother and her
offspringDerrida restages the inaugural moment of a tradition in which narrative, born
of Mnemosyne, is given the task of preserving the past. But he restages that birth not in
order to set a generative logic into motion but rather to expose the relation between
memory and narration to thought, including even the most basic assurance that
narrative memory guarantees continuity between generations. And this, too, is an act of
restaging: It was Socrates who, on the verge of (his own) death, is reported to have said
that he was not good at inventing stories.3
At the risk of leveling down Derridas complex gesture of invocation and citation, it might be possible to situate
its questioning of narrative in relation to work done by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt on narrative and
memory. By asking the question of what is at stake when the relation between memory and narration is not
simply given or assured, Derrida effectively inherits memory as a dilemma, a dilemma that had started to
become especially pressing in Benjamin and Arendts time. Both Benjamins The Storyteller (1936) and
Arendts The Concept of History (published first in 1958 and again in Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought in 1961) recall the figure of Mnemosyne and, like Derrida, displace the
operation of its traditional meaning as a force of unity between past and present. The motif functions as a kind
of touchstone for their work, through which they are able to gauge the ruptures in memory itselfruptures for
which, according to Benjamin, Mnemosyne has