Amnesia and the Nation

History, Forgetting, and James Joyce

Vincent J. Cheng

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319718187
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the relationships between memory, history, and national identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of James Joyce's works—as well as of literary texts by Kundera, Ford, Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Luria, Anderson, and Yerushalmi, this study explores the burden of the past and the "nightmare of history" in Ireland and in the American South—from the Battle of the Boyne to the Good Friday Agreement, from the Civil War to the 2015 Mother Emanuel killings.

© The Author(s) 2018

Vincent J. ChengAmnesia and the NationNew Directions in Irish and Irish American Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71818-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination

Vincent J. Cheng¹

(1)

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Keywords

AmnesiaForgettingMemoryTraumaImaginationNarrative

End Abstract

Amnesia and the Will to Forget

Let me begin on a personal note. Although I am known among my family and friends for having a good memory, I have long been aware, since my childhood, of the attractions, even the desirability, of forgetting. Indeed, in my teens and twenties, I used to regularly experience what I grew to call “amnesia fantasies”—that is, wish-fulfillment fantasies in which I imagined that I found myself suffering from amnesia , and having no idea who I was. In that condition, I could be, of course, unburdened of my own troubles, and free to move on. I suspect I am not alone in having had such fantasies: after all, who has not, in periods of unhappiness, wished to be someone else—or at least wished to be able to slough off one’s own past and identity and what Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus refers to as the nightmare of history? And what more attractive and dramatic fantasy—even more attractive perhaps than Freud’s “family romance”—than to obliterate one’s own personal past and identity by finding oneself an amnesiac?

Of course, the discourses of Western culture are always enjoining us to remember, not to forget, warning us instead about the dangers of forgetting: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it; the Holocaust enjoins Jews to “never forget,” just as the Hebrew Bible reminded them always to remember Zion, even by the rivers of Babylon; we are each urged to remember our roots, our identity; trauma victims are coaxed into recovering repressed memories so that they may heal and move on; and so on. Hardly anyone ever talks about the desirability or usefulness of forgetting. Indeed, amnesia—as a neurological condition—is always represented as a negative thing, a loss of a personal identity that one desperately needs to recover. After all, one’s identity is basically constituted of one’s memories: the ultimate version of an amnesia fantasy is, arguably, Alzheimer’s disease , which in its advanced stages constitutes both the total loss of memory and the total loss of identity.

But I would suggest that our culture also has a collective fascination with amnesia. Actual amnesia, as a medical condition, is an extremely rare occurrence. Yet, in popular culture it is an extremely frequent occurrence, almost ubiquitous. Stories of amnesiacs are the stuff of spy novels, mystery novels, popular films, television soap operas, science fiction, sensational tabloid journalism, and so on. Think, for example, of the popularity in recent years of the novels and films of The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Jason Bourne ; other recent films like Memento and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; a host of mystery, science fiction, and psychological novels with titles like Amnesia, Amnesia Moon, and so on; the wide international news coverage given a few years ago to that Englishman who disappeared in a canoe in the North Sea, then turned up five years later claiming to have lost his memory; in fact, the very first episode, in 1973, of the daytime television staple The Young and the Restless was a story about an amnesiac. One could go on and on with examples of our collective cultural fascination with amnesia—in spite of the fact that almost no one has ever personally met or known an actual amnesiac.¹ What is it about amnesia that is so fascinating—and even attractive—to our collective consciousness? Is it a trope for something deeper, something repressed? At the very least, what this phenomenon suggests to me is that we have, in fact, a cultural will to forget—a compulsive attraction/fascination for the idea of a clean slate. This notion, and the corollary ability to remake oneself, certainly is a long-standing and defining tradition at least in American history, from Benjamin Franklin to the novels of Horatio Alger to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . It is as if we have a need (even if in fantasy) to erase one’s past from one’s memory.

One of the most famous and defining examples of clinical amnesia was the case of the World War II soldier who was shot in the head at the Battle of Smolensk. The great Russian psychologist Alexandr Romanovitch Luria told his story in a book titled The Man with a Shattered World : The History of a Brain Wound; Luria also recorded a very different case history in a second book called The Mind of a Mnemonist : A Little Book about a Vast Memory. The two cases are almost mirror-images of each other as opposites: the story of the wounded, amnesiac soldier, and the story of a man who remembered virtually everything, the mnemonist. The first we understand as a tragic pathology. But, as the great Jewish philosopher and historian Yosef Yerushalmi writes: “Yet the phenomenon of the mnemonist was no less pathological. If the brain-damaged man could not remember, the mnemonist could not forget. And so it was even difficult for him to read, not because, like the man of Smolensk, he had forgotten the meaning of words, but because each time he tried to read, other words and images surged up from the past and strangled the words and text he held in his hands” (Yerushalmi 106). This is sensory and mnemonic overload (what today we might call “information overload”): the world and the text are both too crammed with remembered meanings for the individual to function. As Luria himself notes: “Many of us are anxious to find ways to improve our memories; none of us have to deal with the problem of how to forget. In [this man’s] case, however, precisely the reverse was true. The big question for him, and the most troublesome, was how he could learn to forget” (Mind 67).

The mnemonist’s haunting dilemma, I would suggest, is not unlike that confronted by James Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus , and indeed by the Irish people, in the face of a traumatic colonial history: “History,” says Stephen in Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (U 2.377). To describe history as a nightmare from which one wants to awake implies a complex relationship between the past, trauma, suffering, sleep, waking, forgetting, memory, amnesia, and repression. Similarly, as I have argued elsewhere, “for Stephen and his fellow Irishmen imperial history is very much an oppressive nightmare of the present from which it is hard to awake—if for no other reason than that its oppressive presence and hegemonic, discursive terminology is written all over the face of Ireland and of its cultural constructions, and thus forms the [unavoidable] hour-by-hour subtext and context of all their thought and experiences” ( Joyce, Race, and Empire , 169)—as, for example, in the “Hades” episode of Ulysses, as the funeral carriage conveys the Irishmen first past the statue of William Smith O’Brien , a patriotic hero of the failed rebellion of 1848, then past “the hugecloaked Liberator’s form” (U 6.249), Daniel O’Connell’s statue; then “Nelson’s pillar ” (U 6.293), the hated English imperial symbol; then the “Foundation stone for Parnell” (U 6.320; now the Parnell Memorial in Parnell Square); and so on. The streets of Dublin—like the streets of many cities and towns in the American South , similarly filled with statues and memorials to the Confederate dead and their failed leaders—become themselves a concrete text which one is never allowed to forget, a constant reminder of one’s oppressive colonial past and one’s continued colonial subservience, denying the attractions of forgetting, denying the possibility of any relief from the nightmare of history. As with the mnemonist, the inability to forget and the sensory overload of too much memory produce an agonizing paralysis, a nightmare from which one cannot awaken.

In his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (first published in 1874), Friedrich Nietzsche remarked that “life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness”:

[W]e must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically. This is the point that the reader is asked to consider: that the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture. (Cited in Yerushalmi 107)

But, if health lies somewhere between total remembering and amnesia, between the mnemonist and the soldier in Smolensk, what is the right balance? As Yerushalmi asks: “[G]iven the need both to remember and to forget, where are the lines to be drawn? … How much history do we require? What kind of history? What should we remember, what can we afford to forget, what must we forget? These questions are as unresolved today as they were then; they have only become more pressing” (107).

What should we forget, and what should we remember? And when should we forget, and when remember? If both activities are important to the health of an individual, they are perhaps also both important to the health of a nation or a people. Which of the two is the more important, which is the greater danger? Yerushalmi himself is unequivocal on this issue. Asked to consider what might be the “Uses of Forgetting,” he writes: “In the Hebrew Bible they are not to be found. The Bible only knows the terror of forgetting. Forgetting, the obverse of memory, is always negative, the cardinal sin from which all others will flow.” (108) The key Biblical text, Yerushalmi suggests (108), is to be found in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy:

Beware lest you forget the Lord your God so that you do not keep His commandments and judgments and ordinances … lest you lift up your hearts and forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage … And it shall come to pass if you indeed forget the Lord your God … I bear witness against you this day that you shall utterly perish. (Deut. 8:11, 14, 19)²

On the other hand, Ernest Renan —as we shall see—has argued memorably that a nation’s unity depends on the process of forgetting—and that for purposes of a nation’s collective well-being, some things are better forgotten: “Unity is always effected by means of brutality …. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things …. It is good for everyone to know how to forget” (11, 16).

Remembering and the Imagination

Memory studies has become an increasingly important and crowded field in recent decades—and much scholarly and scientific work has been done on issues having to do with memory, Alzheimer’s , trauma, remembrance, memorials and monuments, truth and reconciliation. Some of the most important recent studies include: Maurice Halbwachs , The Collective Memory (1980); Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Memoire (1997); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1996); James E. Young , The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993); Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (1995); Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995); Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983); Edward S. Casey , Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (1987); Paul Ricoeur , Memory, History, Forgetting (2004); Paul Connerton , How Modernity Forgets (2009); Anne Whitehead, Memory (2009); Theories of Memory: A Reader (2007), edited by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead ; and many others. Much of the current interest and scholarship within memory studies has been further fueled in recent years by the sub-fields of trauma studies and Holocaust studies. And now there is increasing interest in the study of forgetting: not only are doctors and scientists developing the “emerging science of forgetting” (www.​newsweek.​com/​health-life-science-forgetting-77209), but theorists and scholars of memory have become increasingly interested not just in remembering but a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination
• 2. The Nightmare of History and the Burden of the Past
• 3. The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses
• 4. The Memory of the Past: National Memory and Commemoration
• 5. Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and Lost Causes
• 6. Slavery, the South, and Ethical Remembrancing
• 7. Afterword
• Back Matter