National forgetting and remembering in the Poetry of Robert Frost.(Critical Essay)

"Forgetting," wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, "is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." "Indeed," he continues, "historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality" (11). In the case of the United States, the conquest of Native Americans exemplifies the violence that according to Renan must always be forgotten in the formation of a nation. A number of Robert Frost's poems reflect the necessary forgetting that Renan describes, but many of them engage in acts of remembering that honor the past without subverting any particular ideology. As a poet, Frost is both settled and unsettling, a writer who composes without resorting to simplistic moral categories or the easy romanticization of Indians as noble savages. At the same time that his poems testify to their conflicting positions within the Joycean nightmare of history, Frost himself "distrusted progressive models ... and was apt to see certain of his inheritances as natural and unchangeable" (Rotella, 242). In his thinking about national history and empire, Frost adopts a Virgilian perspective, assuming that tears are in the nature of things and that in the long-term perspective of human history, the European conquest of the Americas merely gave rise to the world's most recent empire, which in its turn, too, would someday fall. In particular, Frost's treatment of the theme of the American Indian shows that despite the willed forgetting entailed by national narratives, the memory of the brutality that founds the nation persists in the imagination of European Americans. Many of Frost's poems show the ways in which that memory can haunt otherwise confident expressions of patriotism, troubling complacent formulations of American history as a straightforward progress toward freedom and equality.

Benedict Anderson explicates a particular passage from Renan's essay in order to convey the odd temporality of the process of "national forgetting." "The essence of a nation," writes Renan,

 
    is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that 
    they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he 
    is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French 
    citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or 
    the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. 
    (11) 

Anderson zeroes in on the French phrase that is rendered in this translation as "has to have forgotten," pointing out that Renan wrote "obliged already to have forgotten" instead of "obliged to forget." To him, the phrase "suggests ... that 'already having forgotten' ancient tragedies is a prime contemporary civic duty. In effect, Renan's readers were being told to 'have already forgotten' what Renan's own words assumed that they naturally remembered!" (200). Anderson accounts for this paradox by arguing that the citizens of modern nations must undergo "a deep reshaping of the imagination of which the state was barely conscious, and over which it had, and still has, only exiguous control" (201). This reshaping exacts a forgetting in order to reconfigure the bloody events of the past as disputes between common members of a nation--as fratricidal or civil conflicts instead of wars between enemies unrelated by blood. This remembering-through-forgetting gives birth to a conception of the nation as an extended family. In his effort to account for the necessity of already having forgotten something one may be expected to know, Anderson writes that

 
    the creole nationalisms of the Americas are especially instructive. 
    For on the one hand, the American states were for many decades weak, 
    effectively decentralized, and rather modest in their educational 
    ambitions. On the other hand, the American societies, in which 
    "white" settlers were counterposed to "black" slaves and half- 
    exterminated "natives," were internally riven to a degree quite 
    unmatched in Europe. Yet the imagining of that fraternity, without 
    which the reassurance of fratricide cannot be born, shows up 
    remarkably early, and not without a curious authentic popularity. 
    In the United States of America this paradox is particularly well 
    exemplified. (202) 

Forgetting past events in order to reconfigure the nation as a family, the citizens of the United States nonetheless confront themselves (as the plural name of their country suggests) as a diverse population that is anything but a family. Despite American society's being more gesellschaft than gemeinschaft, Anderson suggests, the need for a sense of national unity is so great that it overcomes (or seeks to overcome) fragmentation by figuring the social contract (gesellschaft) of the U.S. Constitution in the kinship terms of family or tribe (gemeinschaft). The conflict between these two views of social relations may inform the conflict in Frost's poetry between the dutiful forgetting that accepts the metaphor of the nation as a family and the sometimes less sociable act of remembering that troubles that metaphor. However, unlike Anderson's examples of fraternal partnerships from nineteenth-century American literature (Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, or Jim and Huck Finn), Frost's poems offer no soothing view of American history as "reassuring fratricide" or a peacefully fraternal companionship (199-203). Frost's speakers might at times sympathize with Native Americans, but they ultimately avoid the sentimentality of transfiguring them from threatening "others" into comforting brothers.

As Frost insisted in his reflection upon his practice as a poet, the category of the nation was fundamental to his identity as a writer. "'Nationality,'" he told an audience at Middlebury College in 1943, "is something I couldn't live without'" (Cook, 34). For Frost, nationality and individual personality were parallel terms. In "Education by Poetry," he explains what he means: