Forgetting E-Book

Gabriel Josipovici

• Herausgeber: Little Island Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett - 'only he who forgets remembers' - Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture.Moving from the fear of Alzheimer's to invocations of 'Remember the Holocaust' and 'Remember Kosovo' by unscrupulous demagogues, from the burial rituals of rural societies to the Berlin and Vienna Holocaust Memorials, from eighteenth-century disquiet about the role of tombs and inscriptions to the late poems of Wallace Stevens, Josipovici has produced, in characteristic style, a small book with a very big punch.Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note

Preface

I            The Fear of Forgetting

II           Only He Who Forgets Remembers

III          'Remember Kosovo!''Remember Auschwitz!'

IV          Reticence and Repression

V           Nietzsche and the Need for Sleep

Interlude:

An Act of Destruction

VI         The Burial of the Dead (1)

VII        Tombstones, Inscriptions

VIII       'Who is the Man Sitting on General Gordon?'[

IX         Memorial Moments

Interlude:

I Examine a Photograph in a Newspaper

X          The Burial of the Dead (2)

XI         Hauntings

XII        Letting Go

About the Author

ALSO BY GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI FROM CARCANET

Contre-Jour: A triptych after Pierre Bonnard

Infinity: The Story of a Moment

In a Hotel Garden

The Cemetery in Barnes: A Novel Text and Voice: Essays

The Singer on the Shore: Essays, 1991–2004

The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature Culture, 1990-2015

FORGETTING

GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI

Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

This new eBook edition first published in 2020.

Text copyright © Gabriel Josipovici, 2020. The right of Gabriel Josipovici to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 891 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 892 2

PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 893 9

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

In Memory of George Craig

In her dream Mrs Devonshire saw two men approach. As they drew near one of them leant towards her and said in a low voice: ‘You think we haven’t forgotten you, but we have.’ Then she woke up.

PREFACE

It wasn’t till I started writing this preface that I realised how much my thoughts had turned to questions of memory and its secret sharer, forgetting, in the past twenty-five years. In 1993 I wrote a play for radio called The Museum of Forgetfulness. It was when museums were springing up everywhere on the South Bank, and I was intrigued by the paradox of a museum, a building dedicated to storing a nation’s treasures so that they can be looked at by all and so kept in the national memory, being devoted to the opposite, forgetting; and by the problem of how to represent forgetting, since by representing it one denies it. Then in 1998 I was invited to give a talk at a conference on the Holocaust and Memory, organised by the German-Jewish Centre at the University of Sussex. The result was a piece which I entitled ‘Memory: Too Little/Too Much’ and where I explored the notion that the slogan ‘We must never forget!’ is as dangerous as it is vital – vital because the terrible things that happened to Europe in the years 1933–45 must indeed not be allowed to disappear from memory – but dangerous because that phrase can so easily be used by demagogues to stir up hatred. For as Tom Sharpe puts it in one of his South African novels, ‘Heroes Day provided everyone with an opportunity to forget the present and revive old hatreds.’ The problem of forgetting is more than a conceptual paradox.

      Over the next two decades, like so many of my generation, I found myself comforting friends whose spouses or parents had succumbed to Alzheimer’s or dementia, and watching the effects of this disease on families and individuals. Then, in 2015, as I was finishing a book on Hamlet, I realised to my astonishment that it touched on many of the issues I had been turning over in my mind in connection with both the public and the private aspects of memory and forgetting: how to lay the past to rest; what constitutes a person; whether it’s possible to know what one feels, and so on. And it seemed to be no accident that Hamlet was written and performed around 1600, just when in Europe the transition from medieval to modern was accelerating. Any discussion of memory and forgetting, I sensed, should be, must be, conducted with an awareness of changing cultural landscapes.

      At the same time, I felt very strongly that all attemptsat a historical or cultural exploration of memory and forgetting had to acknowledge the fact that each person’s mode of remembering and forgetting is subject to personal, generic, cultural and historical imperatives. Thus I decidedto introduce interludes into the text at key junctures to jolt the reader into contemplating specific cases of the anguished interconnectedness of the need to forget and the fear of forgetting.

I would like to thank all those who have contributed to this book. First my mother for helping me to understand the importance of both remembering and forgetting in life, and for providing the anecdote I have used as epigraph and the one which opens section eight. Sadly, she did not liveto read either the lecture on the Holocaust and memory or the Hamlet book, on both of which I would have welcomed her views. Rosalind Belben, Steve Mitchelmore, Giglia Sprigge, Bernard Sharratt and Tamar Miller all read drafts of the book and made detailed and perceptive comments on it, some of which saved me from error or made me think again about how best to put my argument and some of which I chose to ignore, perhaps to the detriment of the finished work. To all, and especially to Tamar, who has been a supportive presence for as long as the book has been in gestation, I am profoundly grateful.

Lewes April 2019

I

THE FEAR OF FORGETTING

Today, we are terrified of forgetting.

      Suddenly, it seems, Alzheimer’s is all around us. Few of us do not have relatives or friends who have been struck down by the disease, living proof of its deadly power. And everyone over sixty finds him or herself constantly checking for evidence that it has not (yet) got hold of him or her.

      The disease was only recognised in the early years of the last century, barely a hundred years ago. Previously it had been elided with senility: when you got old you lost, among other things, your memory, and in some cases this was more pronounced than in others. Then in 1901 Dr Alois Alzheimer, a senior physician at the Frankfurt Hospital for the Epileptic and the Mentally Ill, was alerted to the case of a fifty-one-year-old woman, Auguste B., who had been admitted to the hospital by her husband, who had found himself unable to cope any longer with her inexplicable outbursts of rage and increasingly alarming memory lapses. By 1904, three years after her admission to the hospital, Frau Auguste was bedridden, permanently curled up in a foetal position, her knees drawn up to her chest, muttering, unable to speak, and needing assistance to eat. She died in April 1906.

      Though he had by then moved to Munich to work with the renowned psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin, as soon as Dr Alzheimer learned of Frau Auguste’s death he put in a request to be allowed to examine her corpse. Because of recent advances in medical technology he was able to do what had not been possible before, to examine the brain of the victim of a terrible and mysterious illness. What he and his assistants found in the cerebral cortex was what a recent writer on the subject has described thus:

The cortex was speckled with crusty brown clumps – plaques – too many to count. They varied in size, shape and texture, and seemed to be a hodge-podge of granules and short, crooked threads, as if they were sticky magnets for microscopic trash.1

At the same time, in the second and third layers of the cortex nearly a third of the neurons had been obliterated, overrun with what Alzheimer called ‘a tangled bundle of fibrils’. These are the ordinary components of every neuron, but in Frau Auguste’s brain they had grown out of all proportion, destroying everything within their reach.

      That was in 1906. A century later and despite huge advances in medicine and neuro-science we still know far too little about the disease, even though it now seems to be all around us.2 Yet it was only in the 1970s that countries in the West began to realise that unless some sort of cure was found the strain on medical and social resources would become almost impossible for society to bear. This is because, though Alzheimer’s is now understood as qualitatively different from the forgetfulness and absent-mindedness that naturally overtakes the elderly,it is nevertheless a disease whose likelihood increases with age, and, as advances in medicine since the war have led to a population that lives ever longer, the incidence of Alzheimer’s has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, though hardly a month goes by without a newspaper headline proclaiming that a cure has been found, there is no sign yet of any solution to the problem of how to stop or reverse it.

      Scientific description of the condition tells us nothing of what it feels like to inhabit it. And it is obvious that if you suffer from it you are unlikely to be able to describe it. Writers over the past half century have tried to imagine it, with more or less plausibility. One of the finest such attempts, to my mind, is by the French writer Jean Echenoz in his extraordinary little novel, Ravel. The musician probably suffered from the condition towards the end of his life (it has even been suggested that the compulsive repetitive nature of Bolero is proof of this), and Echenoz brings home to the reader how part of the horror, for him, was his awareness of what was happening:

If he no longer recognises most people, he is aware of everything. He sees clearly that his movements no longer achieve their purpose, that he grabs a knife by its blade, that he brings to his lips the lighted end of his cigarette only to quickly correct himself – no, he murmurs to himself, not like that. He knows that one doesn’t cut one’s nails like this, that one doesn’t put on one’s glasses that way, and, if he nevertheless dons them to read Le Populaire, the muscles of his eyes no longer allow him to follow the lines. He sees all this clearly, the subject of his fall as well as its attentive spectator, buried alive in a body that no longer responds to his intellect, watching a stranger live within him.3

Emerson, the great nineteenth-century American essayist who also probably suffered from Alzheimer’s in later life, summed up the common view of the role of memory in our lives in his essay on the subject. Without memory, he said, ‘all life and thought were an unrelated succession. Memory holds together past and present… and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is possible, hereby a new fact has value.’ The peculiar horror for the family and friends of the victim of Alzheimer’s stems from the fact that our loved ones are still there, looking as they have always looked, moving, for the most part, as they have always moved, occasionally even talking as they have always talked, But because they are starting to forget – forget what has just happened or been said to them, as well as large chunks of their past – we feel that they are only intermittently ‘with’ us. In many cases there are violent outbursts and even aggressive behaviour, as though the person has not just forgotten who they are but even what it means to be a human being. A line has been crossed and even the victim knows that it can never be crossed back again.

*

It was probably not the sudden increase in the observed cases of Alzheimer’s in the seventies that first alerted the general public in Britain and America to the fact that we had in our midst men and women like ourselves in every way except that they had lost the ability to remember, but rather the publication of a book that was not about Alzheimer’s disease at all. This was Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings.

      Sacks was a young British neurologist working in a New York hospital when the book came out in 1973. Its subject matter was extraordinary and it was written with a passion and a command of language unusual in a scientific book. Indeed, it was the literary rather than the medical establishment which first recognised its merits. It had been rather frostily received by the medical establishment on its first appearance, leading Sacks, in the second edition published by Penguin three years later, to develop, often in footnotes, where exactly he felt at odds with received medical wisdom. The copious quotations from writers in this edition, especially the two seventeenth-century writers, John Donne and Thomas Browne, who both wrote about illness, show him growing in confidence in the articulation of the larger picture. He argues that medicine, since the time of Donne and Browne, had made great strides by focussing on the body as a machine, but had in the process forgotten that the body is first and foremost an organism, a whole, and should be treated as such. Donne and Browne, religious men in a religious age, had a strong sense of the interconnection of the physical and the spiritual and thought it quite natural to invoke notions such as soul and repentance in connection with illness, and this struck Sacks as truer to his observations as a neurologist than the obsession of the medical profession only with observable phenomena. This obsession, he suggests, infects the very language with which we speak of disease and healing, thus subtly falsifying what we are attempting to understand. Seemingly neutral terms like ‘silver bullets’ and ‘side-effects’ suggest that something is central and something is peripheral, whereas the body is one and change, for better or worse, happens to the whole person.