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Overview
Francis O'Gorman shows how forgetting has been embraced as a requirement for modern existence and how our education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnects us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives that urge us to resist our collective amnesia. O'Gorman argues that such narratives, in rich but oblique ways, indicate our guilt about modernity's great unmooring from history.
Forgetfulness asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501324697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2017 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Forgetfulness
Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia
By Francis Ogorman
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2017 Francis O'GormanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5013-2470-3
CHAPTER 1
Cultures of memory
"You do stir up in me a longing for my brave comrades, speaking of unforgettable, unforgettable things [...]" Xerxes Emperor of the Persians, in AESCHYLUS, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Persae (472 BC)
Guidebooks stand in for an education some of us did not have. They fill gaps with chatty informality, lending us temporary knowledge we have not forgotten but never acquired. As my girlfriend and I opened the hired Citroen's doors in the dusty car park at Mycenae in the summer of 1994, we were there because our Rough Guide to Greece had told us to go. No one had taught me classical Greek, let alone the terms of Mycenaean culture, at my West Midlands comprehensive school. What I knew of the Olympian myths was from children's introductions. I knew how the skyline of Periclean Athens looked from advertisements. Indirectly through English literature I had grasped something of the basics of Greece's most important surviving narratives. The Rough Guide had a useful description of the family tree of the House of Atreus. I ought to know about this, I felt, guiltily. The cicadas in the gnarled trees were loud. The heat was almost suffocating.
Fire, recently, had swept across the undergrowth near the ancient palace, a military fortification that 1,500 years before the birth of Jesus had dominated the southern Greek world: ancient Mycenaean culture. Scorched yellow by the sun, the ground was charred. We walked over the inhospitable soil. A snake, nearly a meter long, broke cover — from whatever half-cremated stalks, holes, and pebbles constituted "cover" The snake, in angry S-like waves, powered ahead.
Brown, primitive, fast, it was Vipera ammodytes, the most toxic of the European vipers, and one of the European continent's most ancient living species.
Insight has long been associated with such creatures. Here was a carrier of secret knowledge, occult understanding. It possessed, supposedly, the wisdom of the serpent. Judeo-Christian history began with both respect and fear of such beings. The burst of panic we briefly witnessed, nevertheless, had no wisdom. Indeed, it had no clue where it was. The snake did not understand that it was almost on top of the scene — so it has been asserted — of one of ancient Greece's most famous murders. But then, except for the Rough Guide's family tree, neither did I.
Clytemnestra, urged by her lover Aegisthus, slew her husband, Agamemnon, here. (I'm suspending discussions of the relationship between plain and figurative sense, between what the Jewish tradition would call peshat and derashi in the Greek histories for a moment.)
Agamemnon's name, perhaps, means "think about things a lot" and he commanded the eventually victorious Achaean (the old term for the ancient Greeks) armies during the long siege of Troy. That siege was perhaps the single most significant ancient event in the surviving records of the Turkish-Greek-Mycenaean-Mediterranean world.
Either Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon with a mesh (perhaps a blanket) and a knife, or Aegisthus did it himself, or they both committed the crime together: sources differ. Entangled like a dolphin in a trawler's net, Agamemnon, in most versions, could neither free nor defend himself. He died.
It has long been forgotten whether this treacherous event, the butchering of a husband by a wife, is historical or imaginary (it ought to be added that Agamemnon had been disloyal to Clytemnestra too: this was not a one-sided moral problem). The founding stories of classical Greece may or may not be true — but then that necessitates a difficult question about what might be meant by true: peshat or derash. The Greeks, certainly, had a complex and advanced sense of what constituted veracity. It did not merely reside in what was factually certain or empirically demonstrable. If one were to judge Homer or Aeschylus, for instance, simply by the standards of historical accuracy, one would be faced with a reassessment of what constitutes accuracy itself.
In Mycenae in 1994, as my girlfriend and I walked to the small outcrop of scorchingly hot stones, I recognized the ground plan of a palace, the pockmarks on an arid landscape of an ancient habitation. And, closer to the palace walls, I saw deep pits. What were they, I asked? It was as if some embittered archaeologist had left behind crude symbolic representations of what had mostly been done with the past. Thrown into a hole, left in a dark place without a sign to say what it was or a memory to recall it.
I looked at the Rough Guide. The sun made the pages painfully white. The grave of Agamemnon, I read. Or, at least, this is what the nineteenth-century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90) thought.
No one remembers whether the House of Atreus is real or otherwise. But Schliemann — a businessman as well as a despoiler of ancient tombs, who made a fortune out of military contracts from the Crimean War (1853–6) — either believed he had found Clytemnestra's victim or thought that fame would come from asserting that he had.
The archaeologist had either obtained evidence that Agamemnon was real or he was roguishly endeavoring to lend him a corporeality he never possessed. I could not judge. Schliemann's team dug into the burial site in the rain in November 1876. And at the bottom, after a weekend off, they encountered a royal sepulcher. The body had long gone. But the mask protecting the head had not. "I have today" Schliemann is alleged to have declared, "gazed on the face of Agamemnon" Had he?
Here, Schliemann claimed, was a momentous survival from what other people thought a legend. Schliemann had named his son Agamemnon and his daughter Andromache. Yet he had also fathered a dispute, a contention about the historical authenticity of what he had exhumed in the rain of the Peloponnese a year before Queen Victoria's Ruby Jubilee. In the absence of memory, queries and uncertainties creep up even as, sometimes, hard facts return.
Studying Schliemann's mask on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, I wondered if anyone would ever know what it was. Would there be a future point when it was established for sure whether this treasure, made from solid gold, belonged to one of the most significant narratives in the surviving antique histories of Western humanity? There is some evidence to imply that the mask long predates the period traditionally associated with the Trojan War. But there is also an argument which says that those traditional dates are wrong and that the events described in the Odyssey and Iliad relate to a period far more remote than the age in which Homer's narratives were written down. And Homer himself, as Adam Nicolson reminds us, is a figure of speech, not a human being. Homer's true starting point may be much more ancient than we understand. "No man called Homer was ever known," Nicolson says, "and it doesn't help to think of Homer as a man. Easier and better is to see him abstractly, as the collective and inherited vision of great acts done long ago." My book might be thought as a brief exploration of the implications, in general terms, of that adroit observation. There are other, more mundane, claims that Schliemann slipped an artifact into the tomb from another dig, as the fraudulent ghost-buster Harry Price (1881–1948) made up evidence that Borley Rectory was England's most haunted house in the middle of the 1930s. History is not without its pretenders.
There is no agreement about the mask. A flat, lifeless face cut in gold in a museum case. It struck me, as I looked, that it was not unlike a German patrician from the 1870s. There was a hint of an Otto von Bismarck moustache. Could Schliemann have simply forged it?
If I remembered the grave of Agamemnon at Mycenae later, was I recollecting a hard historical fact from the dawn of modern Europe? Or was I recalling the product of a nineteenth-century businessman's delusion? I did not know. Schliemann had been obsessed enough to baptize his children with chanted words from the Iliad. I gazed into the hole, wondering what I was seeing. Then I looked over the charred Attic ground where the snake had traveled. Above me was the luminous sky. It was like a holiday advert for a week in Greece. This book about forgetfulness, with its exploration of what we cannot recall, started in that blazing sun of the northeastern Peloponnese. It commenced its life — at least I think I am right in remembering this — among ancient graves of almost-forgotten origin, and with stories that no one can recollect any longer whether they are true.
It was a peculiarly appropriate place, now I see, in which to begin. That is because the ancient Mediterranean deplored what slipped from the mind. And the meanings of modern forgetfulness can be grasped with clarity, I think, by comparing them to the work of memory in ancient Europe, of which I briefly take Mycenae as representative. The "back story" of modern forgetfulness has two principal parts, which I explore here. One is the memory culture of the ancient West. The other is the transformation of that culture's understanding of time by Christianity.
* * *
European antiquity conceptualized forgetfulness in terms our world, the ideas that constitute our Western present, can barely comprehend. In Mycenae today, the visitor stands at a historical site that (perhaps) provided a core narrative that all educated Athenians, all educated Greeks in general, would have known. Whether these narratives are literally true or otherwise is not, here, the point. Invented or empirical, they were always — so far as we understand — to be remembered. These were family sagas that not only bore retelling but also required it.
The history of the House of Atreus, to take one saga, is first glimpsed in Homeric texts that were possibly first written down — language analysts suggest — at the beginning of the eighth century before the birth of Jesus. We do not know how many centuries previously the oral tradition had begun. The same narratives were performed on the Athenian stage four centuries later. They were echoed in Rome by Vergil (70–19 BC) in the Aeneid just a few decades before Jesus's birth. These were plots that survived across centuries, most likely through more than a millennium.
Why were these stories remembered? It was because the culture, as well as the political, theological, and ethical life, of Greece was peculiarly averse to forgetfulness. Ancient Greece distinguished between two different forms of time: chronos (the simple succession of events) and kairos (the moment of consequence, the point at which something of significance occurs). If chronos was easily to be forgotten (when exactly did the Fall of Troy occur? Homer, for one, is bad on dates), kairos was certainly not. In the memory of great deeds, the recognition of past events of consequence — given permanent literary form in, for instance, Homer's epics — human beings discerned their principal source of meaning and stability.
Committed, in due course, to the honor of ancestors and in perpetual hope of their assistance, the remotest human communities, long prior to the mature civilizations of Greece and Rome, preserved, it is hypothesized, a living sense of the presence of history. History real was here and now. It's inferred, as Larry Siedentop points out in Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014), that the first human social units were built around the family. These units have left no written trace. But, like the hypothesized language of Indo-European, something can be gleaned, something tentatively reconstructed, from descendants.
Within that family cell it is likely that there were rigidly fixed gender expectations. There were, most probably, predetermined hierarchies of power in general. The purpose of this book is not directly to defend these. The purpose in adducing the structures of the ancient world is, rather, to point up, via a contrast, the distinctiveness of our own assumptions about time and history. What is of interest among the values of the remotest European cultures are the suggestive implications of a continual and continued devotion to vital histories, to ancestors whose protection and displeasure were, respectively, craved and feared. These values set the terms, established the foundations of rules and regulations, of the earliest human groups to which we can have (some) access, and their relation to time. What gradually occurred in the history of societal development, as much as it is now comprehended, was the slow expansion of these small family units into larger ones: into extended families, then into hamlets, villages, towns, and finally into cities. But the governing principles did not essentially alter. The family rules developed into the guiding conditions of what we can now call, in shorthand, the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (polis) — the city as the source of citizenship.
Within the elongated but specific structures of the ancient polis, with its own gods, traditions, and rites, a citizen's place and responsibilities were clear. This was in essence the same as, long before, all family members' had been. Clear and unchallengeable, too, were the social locations, duties, responsibilities, and dangers of those who were not citizens: women, minors, slaves. Only in the polis, the home city, could a citizen — by definition a male — properly worship. In turn, only in his home place could the citizen avoid dishonoring, and therefore being punished by, his household gods. With the polis as the conceptual basis for order and meaning, the ancient Mediterranean invented the idea of the country: it was that which was contra the polis (to mix languages): the wilderness, the opposite of arrangement, sense, and plan.
Solely in his own city could the citizen retain harmony with his ancestors whose goodwill he cultivated. The past could not be forgotten. It was barely recognized as past. Only in the polis was such a man, paying what was due to his local ancestral divinities, able to live out the existence intended for him in, as he believed, an ordered universe. The polis gave the citizen a role and an identity. It was a microcosm of the structured cosmos in which he understood he lived, and which the polis — as he thought — replicated at a sublunary level. Obeying the rules of his own city, the citizen was able to be the person he was meant to be.
Such principles, for the purposes of this book, defined a memory culture, a way of existing in a community where shared assumptions about history and the vigor of continuations were necessary. To forget here was to destroy. It is worth, certainly, remembering Freud's alternative perspective on such early communities in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), his assessment of the fact that the great enemy of civilization is humanity's natural tendency to violence. Here, Freud dwelt on the obvious fact that the citizen's right to express himself came at a cost. "[Let] us not forget" Freud said of primitive man, "that in the primeval family only its head could give full rein to his drives; its members lived in slavish suppression" But in terms of the mental furniture of such early life, we can see, however much Freud is right, securities. To attend to the past faithfully was to ensure safety; to fulfill one's obligations to history was to cement one's relationship with the present as something grounded in and by the past. And, conversely, it was clear when an attitude to time was dangerous. To overlook one's ancestors, for example, was to incur peril from their hypervigilant wrath. To omit to honor one's gods was to invite vengeance. And revenge is the dark side of a culture that cannot forget.
Failure to recall the polis and its traditions was, in addition, to declare oneself not only a traitor but also a nonperson. Rebels were the antagonists of memory. And in turn they were enemies of the society's best values. Such unconscionable, mutinous forgetfulness was a form of suicide. In fact, it was something more terrible than that. For the ancient world, with its faith in the living continuations of the remembered, there was a fate worse than death.
The loss of the polis was annihilation. And so exile was more dreadful than execution. The banished citizen became a no-man, a creature without an identity because he was outwith a structuring, defining society. The exile was the etiolated wanderer of a foreign landscape, multiply displaced from, and contra, who he was and ought to be.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forgetfulness by Francis Ogorman. Copyright © 2017 Francis O'Gorman. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Cultures of Memory
2. The Making of Modern Forgetting
3. Contemporary Cultures of Amnesia
4. Forgetfulness in Contemporary Cultural Narrative
5. Learning Pasts
6. The Problems of Forgetting National and Local Histories
Acknowledgements
References
Index
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