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editor's notes
American Memory, American Forgetfulness...
The photograph on our cover dates from 1915 and
shows San Diego's Victorian railway depot being demolished to make
way for the newly completed Mission Revival style depot standing
behind it. The Mission style of California architecture makes a
nice emblem for selective memory in America. The original Franciscan
missions built along the coast in the late eighteenth century played
an important role in the region's history, of course, but one whose
scope was limited in several ways. All the missions were secularized
by the Mexican government in 1834 and, though they were returned
to the Church in the 1860s, in the intervening thirty years most
fell into disrepair, those buildings not destroyed by weather and
earthquakes being used by farmers to hold livestock. An 1861 visitor
to the mission at Carmel found the roof fallen in and a dead pig
lying beneath the abandoned font.
In any event, it was neither the missions nor their architecture
that fed the Mission Revival. It was a novel, Ramona, by Helen Hunt
Jackson, Emerson's favorite woman poet. Jackson's 1884 romance evoked
a lost California paradise in which kindly Franciscan friars prayed
quietly in their gardens, old Spanish dons dreamt their days away
in cool adobe courtyards, and contented California Indians worked
the fields, mission bells all the while ringing softly in the distance.
Of the many available pasts (there was, after all, a Victorian railway
depot in San Diego, not to mention a history of not-contented Native
Americans), the world of the Spanish missions turned out to be the
tradition of choice as the twentieth century began. It appealed
strongly to transplanted Anglos, for one thing, who got to imagine
that by entering a Franciscan past they were distancing themselves
from the weary stress of Yankee commercial life. It was this, plus
land speculation and tourism (the San Diego depot was rebuilt for
the opening of the Panama Canal) that culminated in the momentof
American memory and American forgetfulness our cover image captures,
a bit of forgetfulness that could, in fact, be ranked above seven
on the Richter scale ("buildings collapse").
Every act of memory is also an act of forgetting. Such, at least,
was one ancient understanding. In Hesiod, the mother of the Muses,
Mnemosyne, is not simply Memory, for even as she helps humankind
to remember the Golden Age she helps them to forget the Age of Iron
they now must occupy. Bardic song was meant to induce those twin
states:
For though a man have sorrow and grief..., yet,
when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds
of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once
he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all....
In this conceit, both memory and forgetting are dedicated to the
preservation of ideals. What drops into oblivion under the bardic
spell is the fatigue, wretchedness, and anxiety of the present moment,
its unrefined particularity, and what rises into consciousness is
knowledge of the better world that lies hidden beyond this one.
(The San Diego depot offers an American bardic welcome: forget your
cold Yankee ways, it says; welcome to California, where there is
no winter.)
I like to juxtapose Hesiod and Francis Crick, one of the men who
discovered the shape of DNA. In an essay in the journal Nature,
Crick and a colleague once argued that "We dream in order to
forget." Wretchedness and anxiety aside, each of our days is
so filled with particularity, we are so swamped with sensory detail,
that the mind needs some sort of filtering mechanism to sort out
the trivial and retain the essential. Dreaming, Crick argues, serves
this function. In fact, without some such process we would all be
like Borges's monstrous figure, Funes, who was unable to forget
even the smallest details of his days, so that a tree at 3:06 P.M.
with the light just so on its leaves stayed with him as wholly distinct
from the same tree two minutes later shaded by a cloud. "He
was... almost incapable of general, platonic ideas...," Borges's
narrator remarks, for "to think is to forget a difference,
to generalize, to abstract." It is required of us to forget
many particular trees before we can know Tree itself, and Hesiod
(or Plato) broadens the stroke: it is required of us that we forget
entire worlds—the Age of Iron, these aeons of hearsay—before
we can recall to mind eternal things.
Some have said that it is by way of a similar play of memory and
forgetting that nations come into being. In the late nineteenth
century, the philologist cum nationalist. Ernest Renan wrote an
essay—"What Is a Nation?"—in which he argued
that "the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have
many things in common, and also that everybody has forgotten many
things." The point need not be limited to nations; all group
identity, all knowing, has suchorigins. Families know themselves
by mixing recollection and elision; so do oral societies (which,
says Walter Ong, keep themselves "in equilibrium... by sloughing
off memories which no longer have present relevance"). Still,
for about two hundred years now nations have been perhaps the largest
theaters of Mnemosyne's ancient art. "I beg you to forget that
you are Bretons," Leon Gambetta told his provincial troops
recruited to fight the Germans in 1870, "and to remember only
that you are French."
The United States is not only a prime example of a similar play
of mnemonic forces, but it has its own distinctive style. Those
Americans who came here from foreign lands, for example, often did
so to break deliberately with the past, and even if they didn't
they were often urged to do so. "Forget your past, your customs,
and your ideals," reads a guidebook given to Jews entering
New York in the 1890s. The waters of the river Lethe must feed directly
into the oceans that surround the American continent (see in this
issue, for example, Ruth Behar's non-memoir of her Cuban childhood).
More than this matter of breaking with foreign pasts, Americans
have always claimed the right to reinvent themselves, and all changes
of identity call for strong doses of forgetfulness. This theme finds
one of its fullest articulations in Emerson's "Self-Reliance,"
an essay which is, among other things, an ode to forgetfulness in
the service of a shifting self:
Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest
you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?
Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be
a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even
in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into
the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
Of course it is not hard to contradict so confident a contradictor.
Some changes call for amnesia, but others call for anamnesis. Why
not bring the present for judgment into the thousand-eyed past?
Why not look at Mission style buildings through the eyes of the
western Shoshoni, or the Russians who came down from Sitka before
the gold rush, or the Chinese laborers who laid the tracks into
the San Diego depot? How might it look to Saint Francis of Assisi,
for that matter? One style of memory practice selects and idealizes,
to be sure, but there is another style that particularizes and demystifies.
"To think is to forget a difference," says Borges, but
that is only half the story; there is also the thinking that remembers
and insists on difference (that, in fact, finds no meaning except
in difference). It is hard now to think of such projects without
thinking of Michel Foucault's sense of "genealogy" as
a kind of counter-memory practice, working back into the past not
to find the great men and women who were our ancestors but to find
the thousand forgotten others whose recovery will make it clear
to what degree our present sense of who we are is the grossest of
simplifications. Foucault is hardly the inventor of such undertakings,
of course. In American letters the old master of subversive genealogy
is Melville, whofound it hard to describe a Yankee drawing room
without hanging in the corners a few sketches of fratricides, patricides,
land-thieves, rapists, and Indian-haters.
This sort of unblinking inquiry into the particularity of past experience
reminds me of the Buddhist aphorism, "We study the self to
forget the self." By this formulation there is no forgetting
something until it has been fully seen; self-recognition must precede
the freedom of self-forgetfulness. I am not sure to what degree
such models can be applied to collective experience, but the analogy
is suggestive: might we study the nation to forget the nation? Could
we, for example, become sufficiently conscious of the legacy of
slavery as to put that legacy behind us? It seems unlikely, but
it's hard to think how else to reconcile the contradictory strains
of American memory practice.
On the one hand, we can't simply follow the nation-builders' call
to forget our differences. Where difference once led to oppression,
it is for the formerly disenfranchised to announce the time to put
our differences behind us. The descendants of slaves should run
the ferries on that river of forgetfulness. But on the other hand,
it is hard to orient ourselves toward the future until we have agreed
upon some resolution of the past, and that calls for some idealizing,
no matter how many genealogies get written. In this vein we are
lucky that the promissory tone of American idealogy seems likely
to hold its charm well into the next century. Mr. Melville's retrospective
irony will always haunt us, but Mr. Emerson's forward-looking declarations
seem equally durable. Yankees should give up the idea that by moving
west they can erase their irksome origins. But the winters really
are milder in Southern California.
—LEWIS
HYDE
SOURCES
For a full history of the Mission Revival, see
David Hurst Thomas, "Harvesting Ramona's Garden: Life in California's
Mythical Mission Past," in Columbian Consequences, vol. 3,
The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, ed. D. H. Thomas
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991) 119-57.
For more on Hesiod and Memory, see Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and
Thought Among the Greeks (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1983), especially
chapter 3.
For "We dream to forget," see Francis Crick and Graeme
Mitchison, "The Function of Dream
Sleep." \\iture 304 (14 July 1983): 111-14.
I'm al>o indebted to David Lowenthal's new book, Heritage and
History (New York: Cambridge UP. 1996). and to Michael Kammen's
Mystic Chords of Memory (New York: Knopf,
1991).
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