A CONVERSATION WITH SVETLANA BOYM

LT: “How does exile or migration affect the use of memory?”

SB: “Exile is both about suffering in banishment and springing into a new life. The leap is also a gap, often an unbridgeable one; it reveals an incommensurability of what is lost and what is found.”

“Does this gap at all parallel the one between hope and desolation, homeland and new land, memory and forgetting, fiction and non-fiction?”

“Only a few manage to turn exile into an enabling fiction.”

“And how different is that enabling fiction from the one it takes to get up in the morning, to try and do anything at all? I guess I am speaking of a collective memory of inherent exile, the metaphoric exile.”

“The main feature of exile is a double conscience, a double exposure of different times and spaces, a constant bifurcation. Exiles and bilinguals were always treated with suspicion and described as people with a ‘double destiny’ or half a destiny, as well as adulterers, traitors, traders in lost souls, ghosts.”

“A double-conscience, sure. One remembers what one wishes to forget, and vice versa. Memories as specters, forgetting as beyond spectral. It is as if the exile must narrate the other half of that conscience into the future, must write out that bifurcation, that betrayal, those ghosts.”

“For a writer banished from his or her homeland, exile is never merely a theme or a metaphor; usually physical uprooting and displacement into a different cultural context challenges the conceptions of art itself as well as the forms of authorship. In other words, the experience of actual exile offers an ultimate test to the writer’s metaphors; instead of the poetics of exile, one should speak of the art of survival.”

“Does this art of survival drive exilic narration and writing, or is it the other way around?”

“All immigrants know that exile is much more attractive as a poetic image than it is as a lived experience. It looks better on paper than it does in life.”

“Of course it is easier to record migrant memory than migrant forgetting, even though forgetting may be less painful and, at a certain level, more desirable and even necessary. The danger is when memory automatically imposes an alienated status on the migrant. What role does forgetting play in this exilic art of survival?”

“Instead of curing alienation – which is what the imagined community of the nation proposes – exiled artists use alienation as a personal antibiotic against homesickness.”

“So, the migrant must potentially forget the national origin, the home country, shift around memories of nationalism in favor of a different imagined community that may more easily embrace and utilize forgetting? What about the language?”

“Bilingual consciousness is not a sum of two languages, but a different state of mind altogether; often the bilingual writers reflect on the foreignness of all language and harbor a strange belief in a ‘pure language,’ free from exilic permutations.”

“But isn’t language innately riddled with ambiguity, possibility, and progress through misuse and mutation, no matter if exilic bifurcation is involved or not? Language continuously wedges itself into the dialectic of memory and forgetting. So isn’t it that a pure language could only be one that can express memory and forgetting simultaneously?”

ANCILLA OBLIVIONIS

Pierre Bertrand has written a book on forgetting in which he discusses in detail Freud’s art of forgetting. He asks what actually happens, according to Freud, after the moment of the cure. Must the cured patient (if he is cured) permanently retain in his consciousness the forgotten event that has been revived? Or does such an activation of consciousness, if continued for a long time, ultimately produce other kinds of psychic damage that can be healed only if the cured patient is also able to definitively forget what he has, with the help of the therapist, so happily dealt with? Hence Pierre Bertrand distinguishes a negative or bad kind of forgetting from a positive or good one. Adhering somewhat more closely to Freud’s judicial metaphorics, I should prefer to call these “unpacified” forgetting and “pacified” forgetting. The former is forgetting before psycholnalytic treatment; the latter is forgetting after it. If this conception is correct, and it seems to me to be implicit in Freudian theory, then Freud’s art of forgetting is essentially based on this distinction between an unpacified forgetting and a pacified forgetting as well as on the far-reaching recognition that there is no direct path, involving for instance mere weakening of the imagines agentes, that leads from unpacified forgetting to pacified forgetting. The detour by way of consciousness cannot be avoided, whence a certain paradox in the Freudian art of forgetting: if this detour is to be successfully gotten through, the art of memory must be relied on, so that the latter turns out to be an auxiliary to the art of forgetting (ancilla oblivionis).

– Harald Weinrich, Lethe: the Art and Critique of Forgetting

TWO CENTERS – ON MEMORY & EXILE IN CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ’S ESSAYS IV: DESPAIR

Despair, inseparable from the first stage of exile, can be analyzed, and then it would probably appear as resulting more from one’s personal shortcomings than from external circumstances.

– Miłosz, “Notes on Exile”

To maintain a conception of the past in “a sharply delineated, precise form” was a kind of privilege for Miłosz. As he describes in “The Nobel Lecture,” as memory became a “force” in the creative and social struggles of writers in post-war Central and Eastern Europe, it served to protect “us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.” It follows that the more a regime attempted to repress the writer who then proceeds to forcefully connect literature, memory, and reality lived in exile, the more the writer, as Miłosz explains in “Notes on Exile,” “blurts out his dammed-up feelings of anger, his observations and reflections, considering this as his duty and mission.”

Of course, the writer also enters a host of new problems in exile, not least of which is a consequence of destierro and destiempo (i.e., Józef  Wittlin’s concepts of temporal and spatial displacement, as explored in the second part of this essay series) in that “knowledge of everyday life in the country of his origin changes from the tangible to theoretical.” The tangible may remain in memory, but it is pinned to a certain stasis, almost fossilized. Through acts of memory-work, a dynamic element can be injected into the spatial determinants of the memory, and social frameworks can be pursued towards deeper and more oblique references. Theoretical abstraction may result due to the unavoidable distance of real exile, but this result conflicts with the atmosphere of Miłosz’s adopted country of the United States, in which, as he explains in “On Censorship”: “Bluntness, brevity, and brutality of expression, as well as simplified ideas, are prized because they can be conveyed by the most obvious and tangible ‘facts’ without involving any complicated reasoning.”

Accordingly, the other half of the “Paradigm” Miłosz constructs in “Notes on Exile” involves the understanding that, “Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say.” Coming up against the many obstacles of exile, which ultimately force energy inwards towards the theoretical, the exiled writer must not only battle the threat of his own forgetting, but also the willed (even violent) forgetting born of the disinterest and disinheritance that Miłosz saw plaguing the United States and the West. For in the exile’s experience, “that which in his country is regarded with seriousness as a matter of life or death is of nobody’s concern abroad or provokes interest for incidental reasons.”

These experiences lead the exiled writer to several modes of despair, all of which are based in relations with the writer’s native land and the collective, and of which there are three main causes: “loss of name, fear of failure, and moral torment.” Loss of name again reflects a perspective Wittlin outlines in “Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile”: “The fact that not only our ambition but our creativity itself has in exile no wide field of radiation and must give up the aura in the past surrounding our names may be favorable for our work, but more often it hampers us.”

As Miłosz explains in “Notes on Exile,” this despair over loss of name is only one of many results of displacement from a specific community, where a “writer acquires a name through a complex interchange with his readers, whether he appeals to a large audience or to a narrow circle of sympathizers.” The soft borders that delineate his professional and institutional relationships have now shifted into a painful anonymity. For according to Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, such writers in exile “carry the memory of oppression but also of their social significance that they could hardly match in the more ‘developed’ West.” Alleviation of the weight of such memories is achieved partially for the exile through the view that such fresh humiliations are “proportionate to his pride, and that is perhaps a just punishment,” thus reflecting again Miłosz’s mandate that exile accepted as a destiny necessitates the debasement of self-delusions. Indeed, engaging in personal memory-work along social and religious frameworks, there is quite a bit of exploration of pride in Miłosz’s essays. In “Saligia,” for example, he examines writerly pride and literary background in parallel to a concern over moral torment as regards name, and states, “I had enough superbia in me for it to carry me beyond nay mere authorship.” Further exploration of this concern for loss of name will be featured in the next essay in this series.

Previous essays in the “Two Centers – on Memory & Exile in Czesław Miłosz’s Essays” series:

• The (Polish) Essay Form
• Usage and Acclimitization, or, Destiny as Memory
• The Paradigms

OF THE WATERS OF LETHE

I must somehow have drunk of the waters of Lethe, Korin explained, and while disconsolately wagging his head as if to convey to them that the understanding of the manner and consequence of events would probably always lie beyond him, he brought out a box of Marlboros: Anyone got a light?

– László Krasznahorkai, War & War

24 HOURS OF OBLIVION XIV

Amazing how many people think Russia is the only guilty party when it comes to distorting, misremembering, and actively forgetting the past.

Forgetting to get glittered.

I hope I am not forgetting to worry about something that is very important to worry about today. Also, I hope I find some moss. I am a bear.

I keep forgetting Mike Tyson’s face tattoo is real outside of The Hangover movie.

Fuel your team between soccer, baseball, dance, and whatever it is you know you’re forgetting.

Most American thing ever? Forgetting May Day, which is about workers rights, but adopting Cinco de Mayo just for more tacos & tequila.

Giving up a base hit when you’re up 0-2 is like having a thesis paper done early then forgetting to turn it in on time.

The Oubliette is not a place of forgetting. It’s not a privacy heaven. It’s a panopticon.

Forgive your muscles and your joints for not forgetting, for keeping that imprint alive.

Forgetting about this drama, I’m really happy that Cameron is more active and interacting with us and posting on Snapchat more.

The first bar built for forgetting still stands.

Tumblr will have you forgetting racists are the majority in your country, LOL.

People keep forgetting that God “wrote the Constitution.”

Fingers crossed that I wake up forgetting tonight.

I’m seriously debating dedicating my life to religion and forgetting about everything else.

Forgetting is a privilege.

WHERE MEMORIES GET DISTORTED

This is a place where memories get terribly distorted: people in their fifties now say that the government was right to crack down in 1989. And many people forget that 1989-92 was an ice age, before China began marching towards the market. I don’t think ordinary people should have to concentrate on remembering – it’s not good for them, and it’s not their job. It’s intellectuals who shouldn’t forget. These days, they can’t say anything, though. They know the risks of speaking out: that there’s a huge difference between having government approval and losing it, in terms of the housing you’ll get, access to international funding, and so on.

– Chan Koonchung, in the preface to The Fat Years

ALETHEIA

The content the word “forget” designates is not adequately known. Our daily encounters with forgetting have no taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose – with sympathy or antipathy – forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral.

∞

Since the semantic element -leth-, negated by the alpha privative, also occurs in the name of Lethe, the mythical river of forgetting, on the basis of the construction of the word aletheia one can also conceive truth as the “unforgotten: or the “not-to-be-forgotten.” In fact, for hundreds of years Western philosophical though, following the Greeks, sought truth on the side of not-forgetting and thus of memory and remembrance; only in modern times has it more or less hesitantly attempted to grant forgetting a certain truth as well.

– Harald Weinrich, Lethe: the Art and Critique of Forgetting

TRUE AGENCY

Although history should not become a straitjacket, which overwhelms and binds, neither should it be forgotten. One must critique it, test it, confront it, and understand it in order to achieve a freedom that is more than license, to achieve true, adult agency. If you penetrate the seduction…then it becomes possible to confront your own history — to forget what ought to be forgotten and use what is useful — such true agency is made possible.

– Toni Morrison, “The Art of Fiction No. 134” in The Paris Review

NEVER IN EXCESS

In the first instance and on the whole, forgetting is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory. An attack, a weakness, a lacuna. In this regard memory defines itself, at least in the first instance, as a struggle against forgetting. And our celebrated duty of memory is proclaimed in the form of an exhortation not to forget. But at the same time and in the same fell swoop, we shun the specter of a memory that would never forget anything. We even consider it to be monstrous. Could there then be a measure in the use of human memory, a “never in excess” in accordance with the dictum of ancient wisdom? Could forgetting then no longer be in every respect an enemy of memory, and could memory have to negotiate with forgetting, groping to find the right measure in its balance with forgetting? And could this appropriate memory have something in common with the renunciation of total reflection? Could a memory lacking forgetting be the ultimate phantasm, the ultimate figure of this total reflection that we have been combatting in all of the ranges of the hermeneutics of the human condition?

– Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting

24 HOURS OF OBLIVION XIII

Humanity continuously puts the secrets of life in their pants, and forgetting they’re there, they sit down like they’re non-existent.

Never forgetting opens the door to perfect information, which in the long wrong undermines purpose.

Forgetting your spitter and having to constantly open your door driving down the road.

News from Berlin by Otto de Kat review – “forgetting is the enemy of happiness.”

Y’all be forgetting there’s a concept called “compatibility” and just bc someone is attractive to u doesn’t mean they’re the one for u.

We use the word “forever” a lot, forgetting that this word applies to الله only.

It was freezing this weekend, but that didn’t stop NYFW from forgetting its pants.

Forgetting is one of the freedom’s shapes.

Nothing excites me more than thinking about getting out of high school and forgetting about everyone and having a fresh start

I swear, all of life’s problems can be solved by forgetting about point A and point B, and concentrating on point A.5.

Today I got a text from my mom shaming me for forgetting my sister’s birthday. It isn’t her birthday today, it’s mine.

Kissing booth in the union until 1 for Autism Speaks! Hershey Kisses, not real ones…I heard someone was forgetting to say that (not me).

Forgetting is practically impossible, as you’ve stated with your theory of the “witness principle.”

I think we’re all forgetting Beck’s shining moment in Krusty the Clown’s non-denominational holiday spectacular.

I think he keeps forgetting how fragile I am. Prick.

You can’t be forgotten because forgetting you would be like forgetting myself — impossible. Maybe we’re better off as far apart as possible.

Day 2 of the clear-out yielded this oddity: a megadrive clone from Russia that I keep forgetting to review.

Tomorrow I invent forgetting and the fog, which we must re-paint soon.