Time travel or how healing happens?

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoy Žižek treats William Tenn's (aka Philip Klass) 1955 story, “The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway.”

An art historian living in the 25th century builds a time machine to go back and encounter a man who was entirely unknown in his time period—our present day—but later became regarded as the greatest painter of all time. The historian made his career studying this artist’s work and acquired recognition as the de facto expert on this famous but mysterious historical person.

Using the time machine, the historian travels back, eventually locates the artist, and learns that the man is an absolute disaster. He is, basically, in mania all the time. He is deceptive and unruly. He doesn’t care about anything except himself. Eventually, the man steals the historian’s time machine, leaving the historian stranded in the past.

After freaking out a bit, the historian comes up with a plan for how to keep himself sane, stranded, as he is, hundreds of years in the past, broken off from his family, and alone. He decides to paint the famous artist’s works from memory. He teaches himself how to paint and acquires all the materials. Gradually, he reconstructs all the paintings that he had dedicated so many years to studying and interpreting.

After accomplishing this task, it dawns on the historian that it was he himself all along who was the famous painter. The original “man” he had spent so many years studying was himself, though he couldn’t have known that until enacting the time travel, getting stranded, determining to paint the paintings from memory, etc.
Yet, what then is “memory” or “history”?

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