Since retiring, my father’s taken on the role of family archivist, desiring to leave a trace that endures, daily scanning negatives from my childhood and frequently sending them to me as crisp, digital images. As much as these pictures attract me, though, and lead me to ponder the relation between my past and present, and life itself as a series of chance events, in viewing them I also experience a sense of loss and disconnection; I may know that this child is me, yet since I either have no memory at all or only a slight remembrance of these moments, I also do not entirely accept my knowledge of this fact. There is a part of me that feels a sense of seemingly unavoidable—though also undeserved—suspicion toward these images of the past, and I remain unsure about whether this feeling comes as disavowal (I turn away from the past I do not know), or instead, if it comes from an unvoiced recognition that I feel this past a little too closely. It was thus with surprise that I recently received the following message from my father: “In my digitizing work ... I am recovering from our familial past, I am tracing a visual counterpoint (of the child you once were).” While he works as an archivist “tracing” our family history, my father has also slipped in his words here, and instead of “recovering from our familial past,” he simply meant to write (as he later offered in clarification), “I am recovering our familial past,” saving the photographic images from the inevitable effects of material decay and aging. This slip, however, reveals an important relationship that I explore throughout this article, between recovery as retrieval and as reparative convalescence, or more simply, between a recovery of and a recovery from. To help me question this connection, I turn to the literary knowledge—unreliable and uncertain—of Michael DeForge’s (2016) graphic narrative Big Kids, a peculiar story about adolescent life, bodily growth, perception and memory, in which the protagonist falls asleep and wakes to discover the shape of his body has changed to that of a tree, although his sensate faculties function as delirious variations of their former labors. In the work of making history, which often involves a narrative recuperation of past events, I also wonder in what capacity these curious categories

中文翻译：

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“尚未经历的事情在过去确实发生了”：迈克尔·德福奇的《大孩子》和童年记忆的档案不可能

退休后，我父亲担任了家庭档案管理员的角色，希望留下持久的痕迹，每天扫描我童年时代的底片，并经常将它们作为清晰的数字图像发送给我。然而，尽管这些照片吸引了我，让我思考我的过去和现在之间的关系，以及作为一系列偶然事件的生活本身，在观看它们时，我也体验到一种失落感和脱节感；我可能知道这个孩子就是我，但因为我要么完全没有记忆，要么对这些时刻只有一点点回忆，我也不完全接受我对这个事实的了解。有一部分的我对这些过去的图像有一种看似不可避免的——虽然也是不应该的——怀疑，我仍然不确定这种感觉是否是否认（我拒绝过去我不知道），或者相反，如果它来自一种无声的承认，我觉得这过去有点太近了。因此，我最近从父亲那里收到了以下信息，这让我感到惊讶：“在我的数字化工作中......我正在从我们的家族过去中恢复过来，我正在追踪一个视觉对位（你曾经是的孩子）。” 虽然他是一名档案保管员，“追溯”我们的家族历史，但我父亲在这里也隐瞒了他的话，而不是“从我们的家族过去中恢复过来”，他只是想写（正如他后来在澄清中提供的那样），“我正在恢复我们家族的过去，”将摄影图像从材料腐烂和老化的不可避免的影响中拯救出来。然而，这个错误揭示了我在整篇文章中探讨的重要关系，即恢复作为恢复和修复恢复之间，或者更简单地说，在恢复和恢复之间。为了帮助我质疑这种联系，我转向迈克尔·德福奇 (Michael DeForge) (2016) 图形叙事大孩子的文学知识——不可靠和不确定，这是一个关于青春期生活、身体成长、感知和记忆的奇特故事，主角在其中睡着了醒来发现他的身体已经变成了树的形状，尽管他的感官功能就像他们以前劳动的精神错乱一样。在创造历史的工作中，通常涉及对过去事件的叙述性恢复，我也想知道这些奇怪的类别以什么身份 感知和记忆，其中主角睡着了，醒来发现他的身体已经变成了树的形状，尽管他的感官功能是他们以前工作的神志不清的变化。在创造历史的工作中，通常涉及对过去事件的叙述性恢复，我也想知道这些奇怪的类别以什么身份 感知和记忆，其中主角睡着了，醒来发现他的身体已经变成了树的形状，尽管他的感官功能是他们以前工作的神志不清的变化。在创造历史的工作中，通常涉及对过去事件的叙述性恢复，我也想知道这些奇怪的类别以什么身份