'Civilization Is Memory'

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.”