While physicists were re-imagining the shape of the universe, writers were experimenting with narrative and verse forms that mimicked the overlapping of time and space, thus complicating the representation of consciousness. Proust entitled his masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdu: “in search of lost time.” Loss, a common theme, drives many a twentieth-century protagonist to look for whatever has vanished. Because the past, as Bergson says, is “fugitive,” the search can be perplexing, especially since more often than not, what is sought is no external object but an inner peace. Pursuing that peace leads the searcher to consider and confront buried memories. Each writer offers an idiosyncratic view of how memory came to be buried in the first place. They all share, however, a sense that the institutions that should ideally preserve and transmit the values of the past and make them meaningful to the future¾family, church, and culture—had betrayed their trust. According to Freud, we forget purposefully, generally because parents and children are caught in unhealthy relationships that break the bond of past to future, and so we must be led through a therapeutic process of recovering the loss. Proust suggests that both forgetting and remembering are involuntary, so that his novel traces an elliptical path in which serendipity replaces excavation. Yet however memory may be regained, only through understanding what has been submerged can we unfold the layers of the past and live in the present. Having been complicit in the loss, we must become responsible for its recovery.
From a commercial site, this is a picture of an antique Victorian reticule, a repository of female secrets, and a significant symbol in Freud’s analysis of Dora.
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The Freudian Model: Case Histories
Memory lies at the heart of Freud’s analytic and literary methodology. His brilliant manipulation of layers of time in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, or Dora, is an artistic achievement of high order, whatever one may think of the conclusions that Freud drew from this case history. He begins with a statement of the importance of dreams and the way in which they fill the “gaps in the memory” (p. 1617) of patients who have developed hysterical symptoms. Patients create their own symptoms: “psychical material . . . on account of the opposition aroused by its content, has been cut off from consciousness and repressed, and has thus become pathogenic” (p. 1616). Drawing more on figurative language than on scientific terminology, Freud carefully steers the reader through “an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks” (p. 1616). Comparing himself to the author of an improbable short story (p. 1640), he reconstructs the chronology of the eighteen-year-old Dora’s history, withholding information from the reader when he deems it necessary and providing a brilliant reading of the symbolic language of Dora’s dreams, in which her incestuous feelings toward and concomitant suspicions of her parents and their surrogates vividly emerge.
From the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, an oil painting by Giorgio De Chirico, Gare Montparnasse (1914), an enigmatic rendering of a train station that resembles the destination in Dora’s second dream. “I saw the station in front of me and could not reach it” (p. 1654).
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Yet precisely because such language is symbolic, it is subject to misconstruction. Dora and Freud frustrated each other, because they disagreed about the meanings he assigned to the secret code that she divulged to him. Resisting the sexual interpretations and patriarchal assumptions on which his elucidation of her symptoms rests, Dora broke off their relationship, but even this rupture in treatment reinforces the reader’s experience of what remains a masterful modernist narrative. The art of the twentieth century testifies that if time is not a purely linear sequence of events and if interpretation shifts with the position of the interpreter, we must accustom ourselves to making do with what we have and find patterns in fragments.
Eadweard Muybridge with a magic lantern demonstrating his photographs of horses captured in time. As he thinks about the various rooms in which he has slept, the narrator of Swann’s Way emphasizes the “shifting and confused gusts of memory” and compares them to the way we perceive a horse running, failing to “isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear on a bioscope” (p. 1774).
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Proust and Lost Time
A world in flux
Proust introduces his multivolume novel by summoning up the confusions of late-night thought. His narrator sleeps fitfully, opening his eyes “to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness” (p. 1772), confounded by Time.
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours,
the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he
awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the
earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this
ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. (p. 1772)
The order of the world has been lost. As an unhappy child, the novel’s Marcel was allowed to play with “a magic lantern” (p. 1775), which, like the image of the kaleidoscope, is destabilizing, refracting light so that it throws color on the walls of his room, taking away his sense of comfort in his surroundings. The long sequence of novels that follows casts many experiences in terms of vision, which, in Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in A la recherche du temps perdu, the critic Roger Shattuck describes as the “optics of time” (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964, p. 43), a literary equivalent of Einstein’s space-time.
Merely to remember something is meaningless unless the remembered image is combined with a moment in the present affording a view of the same object or objects. Like our eyes, our memories must see double; those two images then
converge in our minds into a single heightened reality. (p. 147)
A diagram in Bergson’s Matter and Memory: “At S is the present perception . . . . Over the surface of the base AB are spread . . . my recollections in their totality. . . . the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and the base AB. . . . the general idea escapes us as soon as we try to fix it at either of the two extremities. It consists in the double current which goes from one to the other—always ready either to crystallize into uttered words or to evaporate into memories” (pp. 161-62). Past and present must work together for true cognition to occur.
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Memory and recognition
The narrative of Swann’s Way. Overture, begins by juxtaposing remembering and forgetting. The narrator, now an old man, remembers his childhood bedtime, and then, as in the passage cited above, broadens his vision to all the times when, waking from a deep sleep, “I could not even be sure at first who I was . . . . memory would come like a rope let down from heaven” and he then “would gradually piece together the original components of my ego” (p. 1773). The stakes are very high, for we do not recognize ourselves if we lack memory. Proust’s novel, full of exquisitely detailed descriptions that crowd Marcel’s memory, nevertheless moves fitfully until the narrator’s ego can finally constitute itself in the final Time Regained and thus give meaning to all the fragments of experience. The moment when he dips the madeleine into lime tea at the end of the chapter teases the reader and the protagonist: “I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy” (p. 1803). In order to make that discovery, Proust distends time as no novelist before him had ever dared, paying close attention to cognitive processes that cannot be comprehended until all the pieces of the puzzle finally come together. Memory on its own is not enough; one must recognize what it portends.
A picture of soldiers headed for the Front marching down a street in Chicago publicizing a song written in 1917 by W. R. Williams, from a site devoted to the preservation of sheet music associated with wars.
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World War I and a Crisis of Memory
In an odd way, World War I (1914-18) came to stand for the sense of futility permeating fiction that was published before it occurred, like Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913), James Joyce’s The Dead (published in1914 but completed many years earlier), T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (published in 1917 but completed in 1911), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). Frustrated by the complacency of a rigid social system that contaminated personal relationships, young artists lashed out against old formulas. Like the soldiers marching off to war singing “We Don’t Know Where We’re Going (But We’re On Our Way),” they had no clear sense of a destination, as iconoclasts rarely do. Yet a few years later, as civilization itself seemed to be coming apart, nostalgia for a partly illusory old world where people had played by the rules complicated the defiance of the would-be revolutionaries.
“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many” (
The Waste Land, I.61-62).
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Link 9 “Memories draped by the beneficent spider” in The Waste Land
Written just after the end of the war, the verbal fragments that constitute The Waste Land give expression to the longing for a lost order. T. S. Eliot had immersed himself in the poetry of the past, and the poem echoes with allusions, “fragments I shored against my ruins” (V.431). In an influential article in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism published in 1922, shortly before he wrote The Waste Land, Eliot insisted upon the relation between Tradition and the Individual Talent. He celebrates “the mind of Europe” that poets participate in across time and mocks the pretense that the past has been superseded by the present.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much
more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932; rpt. 1950), p. 6.
By incorporating lines from past masters like Shakespeare, Webster, and Dante, Eliot universalizes the trauma that afflicted Europe in the wake of the Great War. By referring to the medieval myth of the Fisher King, he links the malaise that accompanied the unprecedented destruction of what seemed to be an entire generation to an ancient association of sterility with a crisis of belief. Thus The Waste Land manages to draw on the past to elucidate the crisis of the present, a present that, as Paul Fussell notes in The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), Eliot has imagined with a specific modern landscape in mind.
The Waste Land seems more profoundly a “memory of war” than one had thought. Consider its archduke, its rats and canals and dead men, its focus on fear, its dusty trees, its conversation about demobilization, its spiritualist practitioners reminding us of those who preyed on relatives anxious to contact
their dead boys, and not least its setting of blasted landscape and ruins.
(pp. 325-26)
For Eliot, then, memory is all too persistent. The remembering self, however, is not a unitary figure like Marcel or Dora, but an entire society that has lost its moorings. Overwhelmed by echoes of the cultures of the past, the modern sensibility “can connect / Nothing with nothing” (III.301-02).
From Wikipedia, a reproduction of Michelangelo’s rendering of the Cumaean Sibyl in the Vatican. The epigraph that introduces The Waste Land quotes the despair of the ancient prophetess who bridges past, present, and future: “I want to die.”
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Remembering in the Wake of Cultural Loss
The myth of the Fisher King revolves around the loss of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ is supposed to have drunk at the Last Supper. For Eliot, the ultimate loss and betrayal of memory stems from a collapse of religious values. In his early poems, including The Waste Land, he examines the resultant breakdown of social and cultural coherence. Eliot himself clarified his own values and announced, in an essay published in 1928, his conversion to conservative aesthetic, political, and religious ideologies. Ultimately, then, Eliot found substance and comfort in the past. The modern world, soured for him both by personal suffering and the brutal World War, seemed suspect. And indeed, there were no victors in the First World War, which undercut the claims of the present. The countries that had “won” relaxed into decadence; those that had been on the losing side, like Germany, turned to fictive versions of a glorious past that justified the formation of authoritarian regimes after the devastation of World War I and brutally oppressed populations perceived as inimical to a harsh new order.
From the Web site of the United States Holocaust Museum, a photograph of the North Wall of the Hall of Witness that evokes the structures of imprisonment typical of concentration camp architecture.
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A Literature of Witness
The Nazi persecution of the Jews and the enormity of the Holocaust gave fresh immediacy to the need to memorialize what had been lost. Those who survived the horrors, like the Polish Tadeusz Borowski and scores of Jewish writers like Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertesz, have tried to ensure that the world will never forget the atrocities of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber, Borowski’s narrator moves in and out of the present tense, experimenting like Proust with the appropriate time in which to situate a story from which he cannot escape but whose meaning is beyond articulation. “For a few days the camp will speak about [this transport]” (p. 2786) and then, implicitly, it will be forgotten—unless someone writes about the experience.
A banana tree, a symbol of family continuity that empowers the heroine of Dadie’s The Black Cloth.
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Preserving the Past: Dadie’s Folktales and Communal Memory
Colonialism was another instrument of oppression that sought to crush memory and the native traditions of conquered peoples. Its title is an echo of a line from Yeats’s The Second Coming, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart chronicles the purposeful destruction of Nigeria’s Igbo culture, as Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman dramatizes the imperial power’s attack on Yoruba customs. The British Empire engendered greater bitterness than did the other colonial powers, perhaps because of its greater efficiency in seeking to eradicate local cultures. In their gentler folktales, Francophone writers like Birago Diop and Bernard Dadie demonstrate the tenacity of African cultures despite the efforts of French-speaking colonial regimes, which left space for the oral tradition to thrive.
Faulkner’s own hand-drawn map of his Yoknapatawpha County.
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Appeals to memory from the losing side: The American South
Another site of loss, the territory of the defeated Confederacy, was restudied and memorialized by a remarkable group of writers in the century after the end of the Civil War. None was more influential than William Faulkner, whose imagined Yoknapatawpha County, in another paradox of modernity, gave more penetrating witness to the ravages of slavery than did any purely factual documents. Time is not linear and space not defined for Faulkner, who approaches the history of a people with Proustian delicacy and Bergsonian deliberateness. In a 1956 interview originally published in The Paris Review, Faulkner declared, “There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow” [Rpt. in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-62, ed. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 255]. Like Proust, Faulkner evoked the complex interweaving of time and space with extraordinarily long complex sentences, layering chronological periods with the brilliance of Freud, giving information before it can be fully understood and then recalling it when the fragments come together. Like Eliot in The Waste Land, Faulkner writes about communities and culture, giving voice to multiple narrators whose varied perspectives challenge the reader. Like Cubist canvases, Faulknerian prose requires an analytical and sympathetic eye to assemble its different planes into an integrated whole.
The image around which the Cristero rebels, who opposed the secularization of Mexican politics and longed for a revival of true religious values, coalesced. Father Renteria,
Rulfo’s failed priest, joins the Cristeros in an effort to redeem himself (p. 2690).
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Faulkner and the Latin American Boom
Writing out of a quintessentially American experience, Faulkner embraced the stylistic innovations of the European modernists of the early 1900s. In a trail of influence, the Latin American writers of the mid-century looked to Faulkner as a model, noting a sense of shared humiliation among those who lost their country’s wars. Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Rulfo have all spoken of a special affinity with Faulkner. Garcia Marquez in particular has made much of his sense of connection to Faulkner, and parallels abound between the Buendia family in the imaginary town of Macondo and the interlocking families of Yoknapatawpha County. Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, however, predates Garcia Marquez’s novels. Comala, “the place over the embers,” as footnote 2 explains (p. 2625), ruled over by a man whose very name means wasteland, is cursed, like Eliot’s wasteland and Faulkner’s Yoknopatawpha County, inhabited by the dead whose thwarted memories whisper from the grave. Rulfo’s stifled characters speak from the dead because they enabled Pedro Paramo’s program of corruption. They seem doomed to remember what they could not bear to acknowledge when they were alive. Pedro Paramo himself dies, but Comala’s collective guilt does not.
The statue of King William III in Dublin’s College Green, which Johnny the mill horse circles around in James Joyce’s The Dead.
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