Marc Augé writes from the standpoint of a
philosophical anthropologist with a postmodern interest in absence and lack.
This latest translation of his work takes the reader into the territory of
memory. Through interlaced reflections on anthropology, literature and personal
reminiscence Augé develops the following core theme. The personal narratives
that weave together our memories — and help us to form an idea of who we are —
do not depend solely upon the constructive work of memory. They depend just as
much on the destructive work of forgetting. Memory in some sense depends upon
oblivion.

Metaphors are used to make the point: the
outline and contours of the memories that make us who we think we are take
shape through a process of erosion. ‘Memories are crafted by oblivion as the
outlines of the shore are caused by the sea.’ Oblivion plays a neglected or
repressed part in narrative construction. Augé’s understanding of memory and
narrative leans to some degree on Paul Ricoeur. (No bad thing.)

Here, it might be objected that Augé has too favorable,
too constructive a picture of forgetting. Why not think instead of the ravages
of Alzheimer’s or the chilling confrontation that any one of us might have with
a dying friend who can no longer identify us as the person they are waiting
for? Here, I think we must try to read the text as at least partly, a
corrective, and not just as an attempt to be interesting by praising oblivion
and all its works. The central point is rather something that we are in danger
of missing: our personal narratives are bound up with, and shaped by the
process of forgetting. (I am tempted to say here that it is the repressed other
of memory.)

The core of Augé’s case for this claim is made
in the final of the book’s three principal sections. It is a case made through
hints, examples and parallels rather than anything resembling a rigorous
argument. It is suggested, rather than demonstrated but it is a plausible case
and an important cluster of distinctions are made which might just convince the
reader that memory and oblivion are more intimately connected than they
might previously have suspected.

However, a question mark hangs over the
connectedness of the several different senses in which the term ‘oblivion’ is
being used. Augé points to three basic ‘figures of oblivion’ which are bound up
with our personal narratives and which ‘have a bit of a family look about them’,
i.e. the senses in which ‘oblivion’ is in used overlap rather than exactly
coinciding. Nevertheless, he still wants to maintain that all three are ‘daughters
of oblivion’. Here, I must confess to having a problem. Augé’s use of ‘oblivion’
strikes me as dangerously equivocal. At the same time I am uneasy about making
this objection. I may be missing the point that instability is the very stuff
of language, that what Augé is doing is subverting the fixed opposition between
(good) memory and (bad) forgetting. A reply along these lines will carry some
weight, although it presupposes an entire view about how language works.

Be that as it may, Augé manages to trace his
three figures of oblivion in ritual (the very stuff of anthropology) and in
literature. The first is the figure of the return, the forgetting of the
future and present in a nostalgic attempt to find a lost past. A literary appeal
is made here to Proust’s narrator in Remembrance as someone who dreads
the oblivionthey identify with death and the suffering they identify
with memory. He regains the past but only involuntarily and through the erosion
of memories that can no longer be sustained in the light of a visit to the
childhood places of Combray. Things are not as he remembered them. He
encounters Combray through a ‘wholly different life’.

The second figure is suspense, the
excitement of the moment that is a forgetting of both past and future. A
briefly cited example of this is 1968 as ‘psychodrama’ (Augé’s term and not
mine) as an intoxication with the present; a liberation from customary norms
that also looses sight of tomorrow. The selected text here is Stendhal’s Charterhouse
of Parma. Its hero focuses upon the present in order to forget other and
more threatening times.

The third figure is rebeginning, not in
the sense of repetition but of ‘radical inauguration’. The new future cuts
itself off from what has gone before, like the ship being launched in Julien
Gracq’s tale ‘Eyes wide open’ it slips away. Its departure is a rite and in
this sense it shares something with West African initiations in which the past
is left behind, symbolically put to death.

As already stated, this doesn’t exactly prove
anything, but then it doesn’t try to. It recalls us instead to the operations
of a forgetfulness that is going on all the time and is not just at work in the
case of exceptional memory loss. As such, it looks like an effective way to
redirect our attention towards lack and absence as partially constitutive of
what we are. And because they are constitutive, attention to oblivion is ‘necessary
for the full use of time’. Whatever problems may emerge in a closer examination
of the three figures of oblivion (e.g. their dependence on a particular
approach towards the literary texts in question) this requirement that we
attend to, and do not repress the constitutive role of oblivion seems like a
point well made.

This ends Augé’s substantial individual
contribution, but it doesn’t end the text. Augé tries to close by cashing out
the value of his approach by relating it to the ongoing argument about ‘a duty
to remember’, a discussion shaped by appeal to the war and to the death camps.
He points out that the victims do not need to be reminded, and that the manner
of our memorialization runs the risk of ordering and beautifying the
past. The ‘geometric splendour’ of the great military cemeteries obscures the
horror of those times. The orderly memorials and the accumulated stories of the
past must in some sense be forgotten by those who hope to recapture anything
like the moment. This point is less original thatn what has gone before, but it
is difficult to disagree with it.

 

©
2005 Tony Milligan.

 

 

Tony Milligan tutors in philosophy at Glasgow
University, where he recently completed his Ph.D. on ‘Iris Murdoch’s Romantic
Platonism’. His partner, Suzanne, remains a great deal smarter than he is.

Categories: Philosophical