Rebels and Their Biographers

The always-readable Terry Eagleton (whose recent book on sacrifice I discussed here) has a rather savage review in the current London Review of Books of a biography by Claire Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. Eagleton's major complaint is that the biographer indulges too much in what Melanie Klein might call projective identification with her subject, turning him into an emotionally overwrought nice guy when, Eagleton says, he was anything but.

Elsewhere in the same issue the well-known historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has a critical review of Roy Flechner's St. Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint, published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. MacCulloch notes that there are numerous strengths to the book, but that it sometimes gets tripped up with the same historiographical problems that tend to bedevil treatments of Patrick and others from that era, some of which will probably never be resolved no matter how many times this ground is retrod and the story retold.

Colin Grant offers a fascinating review of David Blight's recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2018), 892pp. The book has already won a number of awards since publication last October. About it the publisher tells us this:

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.

Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe).

Forgetful Remembrance of Ireland's Troubles

Back in 2016 I began exploring several new works treating the theme of forgetting as an unexplored category for how we treat controversial, divisive pasts, particularly between Eastern and Western Christians. I continue to read in the area for an article I'm working on.

Two weeks ago, on a tiny lake in northern Indiana while my kids spent the day swimming and playing, I sat on the deck and began reading a very dense but fascinating new work by Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018), 736pp. If you have any interest in Irish history, or the history of religio-political conflict, of British imperialism, and of historiography, this book will give you depth and detail in abundance. It is the very impressive fruit of serious and wide-ranging research into all kinds of out-of-the-way places and sources.

Being no expert in Irish history, I will not essay comments on the book's treatment of it. Let me, rather, note that the book's introduction alone is worth the price and effort of slogging through the whole thing. The author has given a wonderful summary of a large body of literature in memory studies, cognitive psychology and neurology, and historiography. Much of this he picks up again in his concluding chapter, "Rites of Oblivion."

The book breaks new and important ground between the heavy emphasis found in much of Western culture since at least 1945 on social remembering (of, e.g., the Holocaust), and the more recent, and still developing, awareness of the importance of forgetting both as an important phenomenon in its own right, but also as part and parcel of how human remembering works. Its use of the category of "social forgetting" shows how, in situations of longstanding and complex conflict such as that of Northern Ireland, politically mandated forgetting of, say, "The Troubles" does not always or even usually result in total obliteration of any and all memories of those events. Instead, what one finds is that officially or publicly "forgotten" events may not be discussed openly by those in power, but unofficially, in, say, families, or cultural societies or historical associations, they may be kept alive in varying forms. Thus socially and politically one may pretend to "forget" while, sotto voce as it were, one does not. The relationship between these two phenomena has not been well studied, and so, as the author says in his preface, that is what he seeks to do: "Studies of cultural and social memory have too often made sweeping claims that have not been fully substantiated. It is therefore necessary to lay out the nuts and bolts of remembrance in order to closely examine the mechanics of how social forgetting actually works" (xvii). Thus his book is situated somewhere between les lieux d'oubli and les lieux de mémoire.

The irony of any requests or still more demands--especially those enforced by the power of the state--for forgetting is, of course, that it makes remembering more likely. But curiously, Beiner notes, "the request to disregard does not" have the same effect. As he puts it, reviewing a number of recent studies, including those of juries in courtrooms, a "conscious effort to forget produces an altered form of memory, and this 'forgetful memory' needs to be better understood" (18).

Forgetting of all kinds, Beiner notes, is still given short shrift in many places, and it is often badly understood, too. Later in the book Beiner distinguishes, based on what he has observed in Ulster historiography since 1798, different kinds of forgetting: troubled forgetting, partial forgetting, nonconformist remembering that forgets differently from others around it, and a kind of "restored forgetting" brought to bear once the prevailing politics shifts again and something that was for a time officially remembered must now be suppressed in the interests of, say, an "amnesty" after a long period of political violence and a fragile social peace that feels victims must "forgive and forget." These and other types of forgetting are similar to what Mary Douglas (in an essay in Shifting Contexts) called "selective remembering, misremembering, and disremembering."

Many people assume that forgetting is bad, remembering good, and there is a straightforward connection between them. But in some ways, at least as far as human memory is concerned, remembering is the problem or, better, the aberration: we spend most of our time forgetting most things. Think, e.g., just over the last 12 hours of your life: can you give an hour-by-hour, or even more minute-by-minute recounting of everything you saw, thought, smelled, heard, and did? Would not most of us recollect only in broad outline: "Well, I was in a meeting this morning until 11:30, and then I had lunch, and then I did some paperwork at my desk for a couple hours, took tea about 3pm, and knocked off around 5 to drive home?" In other words, we forget much more of the details of a given day than we remember, and this is not only normal but necessary for if we remembered every detail out memory would soon approach saturation and exhaustion.

If attempts to enforce forgetting are problematic, so too are those demanding remembrance of an event, for it is becoming clear in the literature that "constructions of memory are not uniform and cannot be simply imposed from above and passively adopted by subservient communities" (23). Practices of social forgetting are similarly complex and incompletely successful. They may and often do come at some cost: "Practices of disremembering bury secrets" (30), with all the well-known psychic sequelae that follow from keeping traumatic secrets.

This is perhaps especially clear in the partition of states, the formation of new states, or civil war between factions within a state (see, e.g., the el pacto del olvido decreed in the 1977 Amnesty Law after Franco left office in Spain). Much of that violence is forcibly buried, resulting in disremembering in the very peculiar ways we see--what Vamik Volkan, to whom I have so often returned, calls narratives of "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory." Here ostensibly (or even genuinely) traumatic pasts get traduced for present felt purposes. Much of these dynamics and developments are still only just now being understood, and so as Beiner comes to the end of his very long and dense book, he notes that "the history of these dynamics of generating, repressing, and regenerating social forgetting has been mostly missed by conventional historiography."

There is much in Forgetful Remembrance that needs to be brought to bear on Christian ideas of forgetting, especially of major conflicts in ecclesial history--e.g., the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, or the Union of Brest, or the pseudo-sobor of 1946. It is clear that exhortations to remember such events as these have left Christians unable to move towards that "healing of memories" so often called for by the late Pope John Paul II. But it is equally clear that simply calling for all such events to be forgotten will not work either. Instead, I think we need to explore that "thin line between an inner duty to remember and a right to be outwardly forgotten" which Beiner calls "social forgetting," for it "offers another way to approach this dilemma" by seeing that "the desire for willful forgetting produces rites of oblivion, which are in effect forms of unofficial remembrance that are discreetly performed alongside social memory in defiance of state prohibitions and social taboos" (626).

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/10 (23 May 2019)

If there's a theme to this issue of the London Review of Books it is surely historical materialism and its ghosts, for lack of a better phrase. A case in point is a review of Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018), 394pp. The review discusses Christophers' evidence of how much land has been sold off, and so cheaply and with so few requirements or regulations, in the last several decades in the United Kingdom, whose government has deliberately kept poor, vague, or non-existent records of much of this transformation. One result of this is that it has jacked up housing prices by an enormous margin ("on average--that is, for all kinds of housing--land now accounts for 70% of a house's sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent").

Jacqueline Rose has a long essay, "One Long Scream," that makes for very harrowing reading indeed. She has done some very interesting work in a number of areas, including the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and trauma. She also notes one of the few psychoanalysts in South Africa today, Mark Solms, whose work has gained international attention

Her essay looks back over the last quarter-century in South Africa, discussing a number of works, including My Father Died for This by Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata.

As an Anglican coming of age in the 1980s, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a hero to me from a great distance. I followed the move from apartheid to freedom with great interest, and later on I would review the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in great detail for how it handled some truly vexed questions about memories of the past and their possible healing.

But I have not followed events closely since the turn of the century, blithely assuming that progress was being made much more quickly and comprehensively than Rose shows it actually is. The tortured state of progress is illustrated in part by Rose discussing various presentations and evaluations of the life of Winnie Mandela, including, most recently, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018).

Clair Wills next reviews Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Haymarket, 2018), 330pp. This is a reissue of a book McCann first published in the 1970s. It shows the enormous complexity of the issues in the latter half of the twentieth century and how the politics was often shifting.

The essay has really forced me to start reading in Irish history. Previously I confess that my Scottish and English grandparents have left me with a residue of snobbery about the Irish, and a very strong pride about British imperialism. But I am increasingly recognizing that both were grossly unjust.

Sudhir Hazareesingh next reviews Herrick Chapman's France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Harvard UP, 2018). It only reinforces my desire to read more about de Gaulle, who seems by all accounts to have been a maddeningly complicated man.

Poor Charles Darwin. Rosemary Hill reviews the latest volume (26) of his Correspondence. It seems the fate of all revolutionary men that they are bombarded with letters, and Darwin, we are told, is no less the case. But apparently with extraordinary patience and effort, he responded to nearly all his letters personally.