If “civilization is memory,” as Hugh Kenner maintains in The Pound Era (1971), then amnesia risks abetting barbarism. He devotes the chapter titled “Privacies” to the first generation of Modernists, born in the 1880s – Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, et al. They came to maturity in the years immediately preceding the Great War. Here’s that chapter’s full final paragraph: “Their destiny should have been to people the Vortex. Instead it was to maintain continuity. Civilization is memory, and after 1918 effective memory was almost lost.”
We laud the radical
innovations of Eliot and Joyce (Modernism is virtually synonymous with a new
way of going about literature) while forgetting the immersion of these men in
Western culture. They had read everything and do not represent a break or a
repudiation; rather, “continuity.” As Eliot puts it, personally and
historically: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Clive James dubs our new,
proudly willful ignorance “cultural amnesia.” In the introduction to his 2007
book of that title, James writes: “If the humanism that makes civilization is
to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates
will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which
they were not yet alive.” We can’t blame the fashionable presentism of our
present age on a world war. The causes are complicated but boil down to politics,
technology and fallible human nature.
On Sunday I had a long
telephone conversation with Donna Fricke, who was one of my English professors at
Bowling Green State University more than half a century ago. Donna is eighty-two,
retired and living in Maine. I was indifferent to most of my teachers but Donna
introduced me to Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett, Boswell and Johnson,
and Jonathan Swift’s poetry, among other things. I took several classes from
her including “The Eighteenth-Century English Novel.” The reading list for that course included
Don Quixote (seventeenth century, Spanish) and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed
Factor (twentieth century, American). From Donna I learned that literature need
not be academic, that reading is not segregated from life but coexistent with
it, one of its essential components.
“It’s so good to have
somebody I can talk about books with,” Donna said. “So many of the people I knew are dead.”
2 comments:
Back, now I realize more like 60 years ago, as student at the short lived New School College, I recall we had a literature course in which the reading list included Barth's book "The Floating Opera," and Fielding's "Joseph Andrews." Both Fielding and Barth seemed able to step outside their fiction from time to time as visible authors and observers, without muddling about in the fiction itself and breaking stuff. The continuity was clear, perhaps because the word "postmodern" was not yet in vogue.
I have always liked Barth, whose occasional intrusions always seemed to be a way of saying the equivalent of "wow, I'm writing real fiction, isn't that great? Now back to the story;" as opposed so some others (Coover comes to mind) who seem to be saying "I'm the boss, it's only fiction, and you're the chump for forgetting it."
Though I should note that in this case, the literary course was part of a larger interdisciplinary theme of "values," and Barth's main contribution there was his contention that values are not disqualified for lacking an absolute anchor.
The Orwell phrase, "memory hole" gets more apposite every day, and the lonely (damn near radical) act of committing yourself to good, old fashioned text becomes rarer and rarer. A while back, while having dinner in a restaurant with my wife, I saw a lady at a table occupying herself while waiting for her meal. She wasn't on her phone - she was reading a physical book. I have no idea what the book was; it could have Chaucer or Jacqueline Suzanne, but whatever it was, I almost got up to thank her, as one subversive to another. I wish I had.
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