Part II Waves of Men1ory

Transcription

1 Part II Waves of Men1ory

2 Retrospection, the art of looking backwards and reviewing past events, structures much fiction, but at times goes out of fashion only to return with renewed vigour later. Retrospective fiction experienced one such eclipse during the nineteenth century. Little Victorian fiction is retrospective in nature, with the notable exception of Charles Dicken's David Copperfield and of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which seldom exploit their retrospective framework and virtually no modernist fiction, except Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, utilizes the retrospective structure. After World War II, however, retrospective art suddenly began to be exploited fully again. In I937, the Catalonian surrealist, Juan Miro, using a magnifying mirror to help him render 'everything [he] saw in it, in the tiniest detail and on a very large scale', drew a self-portrait. 1 When he sold the drawing to James T. Soby, an American collector, 20 years later, he had it photographed, then enlarged the photograph to the drawing's original size, and finally superimposed a second self-portrait over it. The self-portraits juxtapose a painstaking though poetic realism with a deflatingly ironic image comprised of 'heavy black lines, a pair of ghoulish eyes and a head that sprouted three tufts of hair' embodying what Miro called 'a change of focus'. 2 Separated by contrasting styles, differing attitudes, a cataclysmic war, and a personal change in focus the two selves confront one another, manifesting discontinuous states of being. Juan Miro of the I 96os realized he simply no longer was the Juan Miro of I The English essayist, critic, and writer of short stories, V.S. Pritchett, addressed the same problems of the discontinuous self in his memoir, Midnight Oil. He opens his memoir with a description of himself staring at two photographs: One is, I regret, instantly recognizable: A bald man, sitting before a pastry board propped on a table, and writing. He does little else besides sit and write. His fattish face is supported by a valance of chins; the head is held together by glasses that slip down a bridgeless

3 20 Waves of Memory nose that spreads its nostrils over a mustache. He is trying to find some connection with the figure in the other picture taken fifty years ago. He knows that the young fellow sitting on the table of a photographer's in Paris, a thin youth of twenty with thick fairish hair, exclaiming eyebrows, loosely grinning mouth and the eyes raised to the ceiling with a look of passing schoolboy saintliness, is himself. The young one is shy, careless, very pleased with himself, putting on some impromptu act; the older one is perplexed. The two, if they could meet in the flesh, would be stupefied, and the older one would certainly be embarrassed. 3 Across the intervening 50 years, two very different V.S. Pritchetts stare at one another. The language of the paragraph underlines the dualities: bald, fattish, meditative, formal versus thickly haired, thin, active, careless. The older self is puzzled, perplexed, even disconcerted; the younger self is pleased, perhaps even confident. They are virtual strangers who happen to have shared the same name. Like William Golding's Sammy Mountjoy, the older Pritchett could exclaim 'he is not I. He is another person' and would probably agree that he is not a man who once sat on a photographer's table but rather is a man who remembers a young man once sitting on the table, posing and playing a role.4 More and more frequently, novelists of the 1g6os and 1970s have turned to retrospective narratives in which protagonists suddenly, often quite unexpectedly, confront a past they have buried, fled, or repressed in some way, only to discover that the meeting of past and present brings healing, freeing, or releasing. These protagonists have discovered what Walter Benjamin long ago concluded in his discussion of Marcel Proust: 'a remembered event is infinite, a possible key to everything that preceded it and to everything that will follow it'.5 The past functions as a key unlocking secrets about the present which needed to be unlocked so the promise of the future can be realized. It is as though Aristotelian reversal and recognition have been separated in time with the younger self experiencing the reversal and the older self achieving the moment of insight and understanding. Looking backwards may be a reconstitutive act in a number of contemporary novels, but looking backwards involves neither nostalgia nor sentimentality, because confrontation, not escapism, serves as the pivotal action in the novel. Two stories occur simultaneously - the story of the earlier self, and the story which results through the recapitulation of the earlier action by the older self. Neither Jane Eyre nor David Copperfield nor John Dowell is transformed by looking backwards, but L.P. Hartley's Leo Colston, Angus Wilson's

4 Waves of Memory 21 Sylvia Calvert, Rayner Heppenstall's Harold Atha, and Brian Moore's Mary Dunne are. A cluster of conventions has begun to evolve in retrospective novels. In them, characters sit down with a box of photographs, letters, books, or other mementos collected or created by the earlier, discontinuous self and a meeting of the two selves evolves from the remembering. Photographs have been particularly favored by a number of authors, appropriately, since, as Lewis Hine has said, they are 'ever- the Human Document to keep the present and the future in touch with the past'.6 Sometimes a death sparks the confrontation; occasionally, the present self meets an individual from his past, not a literal but rather a figurative ghost from the past, whom he can no longer avoid. In each instance, however, the character comes to see that he can get to the future only by going through the past, and sometimes the narratives are guided by metaphorical psychiatrists helping the protagonist heal himself by coming to terms with his past. In a complex way, the two selves re-fashion one another across the years. Because of certain crucial events or decisions, the earlier self largely made the later self what it is, but in turn the later self, in looking back, refashions the earier self through a new and often more mature perspective. Christopher Isherwood, one of the century's most autobiographical writers, has commented on this relationship quite perceptively in Christopher and His Kind: Christopher's declared reason for burning his Berlin diary was unconvincing. He used to tell his friends that he had destroyed his real past because he preferred the simplified, more creditable, more exciting fictitious past which he had created to take its place. This fictitious past, he said, was the past he wanted to 'remember.' Now that I am writing about Christopher's real past, I sadly miss the help of the lost diary and have no patience with this arty talk.7 Elsewhere, he explained even more candidly that, 'I write because I am trying to study my life in retrospect and find out what it is, what it is made of, what it is all about. The attempt to do this is ultimately frustrating, of course, but nevertheless the most fascinating occupation I can imagine. '8 Saying that looking backwards heals and frees implies a Freudian ethos in retrospective fiction, and, undoubtedly, the influence is there, but the novels are rarely case studies in neurotic personalities. Rather, they partake of the same world view pinpointed by Rudolf Bultmann in his Gifford Lectures:

5 22 Waves of Memory Man who complains: 'I cannot see meaning in history, and therefore my life, interwoven in history, is meaningless', is to be admonished: do not look around yourself into universal history, you must look into your own personal history. Always in your present lies the meaning in history, and you cannot see it as a spectator, but only in your responsible decisions. In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.9