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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
THOSE WHO GO FORTH AS TOURISTS COME HOME WITH KITSCH. SUCH IS the banal tragedy of the search for authenticity: it leaves in its wake a Sherman's march of simulacra, an increased rather than diminished distance from its object. Worst of all, the travesty of historical experience escapes the experiencer. Kitsch is in the eye of the beholder rather than the possessor. It is often left for those who stayed home to break the news that the traveller's memorabilia consists only of so much junk.
What is it about such quests that turn on the seeker in such cruel ways? Historian Pierre Nora suggests that the modern discipline of history condemns us to a similar trajectory in its struggle to undo a distorting alienation from organic relations to the past, from embodied memory. History's attempt to compensate for memory's erosion is, according to Nora, actually a war on memory, further fragmenting older forms of temporal awareness sewn into flesh by ritual and community, holistic forms that cannot fit the truth-functional demand to know "what happened." In a provocative and somewhat elegiac essay, Nora divides memory from history, portraying the second as an insidious body-snatcher of the first whose sway has become all but complete. The essay appeared in a special issue of Representations, and the editors of the volume amplified the shifting uncertainty of a modern history that, in order to repair memory, renders it suspect. This in turn contributes to an instability in historical practice itself. "The claim that memory is historical," write Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, "is itself subject to shifting historical boundaries...."(1) For Nora, history is historical largely because history always occupies a certain technology of preservation, one now dominated by an information superhighway, overwhelming the relatively narrow, personal, familial sphere of identity-formation. Contemporary technologies of history have a global reach, and they foster imperial designs on all other forms of transmission. "Indeed," says Nora, "we have seen the tremendous dilation of our very mode of historical perception, which, with the help of the media, has substituted for a memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of current events."(2)
Like those in literary studies who lament the explosion of the traditional canon, Nora complains that an ungovernable multiplicity seems to have broken from the constraints of tradition; his observation that "[t]he decomposition of memory-history has multiplied the number of private memories demanding their individual histories" takes the tone of a complaint (15). But the consequences of this modern turn are more complicated than hegemonic revision. According to Nora, old-fashioned history's abstraction and systematicity, substituting objectivity for embodied intimacy, has destabilized internally, and somnambulistically circled back on itself. History's "objective" separation from memory renders it in the final analysis a puppet of memory. On the one hand, Nora asserts, "History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it" (9). On the other, though, "memory dictates what history writes" (21). And this second, mesmerizing memory creates a strange new practice in historical discipline: it ushers in "a new type of historian ... who, unlike his precursors is ready to confess the intimate relation he maintains to his subject" (18). So not only does history waylay memory; this kidnapping leads to a substitution, a compulsive transferential relation to its object. The return of alienated memory looms even more spectrally vampiric than the displacements of the methodological discipline of written history.
In Nora's remarkable history of history here, the repressed returns as a cheesy simulacrum in the Imaginary. Kitsch, perhaps, is the result of this identificatory bond. And kitsch is also the greatest risk of those who plumb their supposed depths and the supposed depths of the world for "powerful feelings." So it is not a great leap to associate Nora's remarks with William Wordsworth's suspicion of romantic reflexivity, for example, his condemnation of language loosened from its roots in the Tombs of his Forefathers as "a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve."(3) We might find in these remarks, written in 1810, after his "great period" had passed, evidence of Wordsworth's patriarchal apostasy from romantic freedom fighters, a freedom, above all, of the word. Derrida, indeed, grounds the threat of writing in a threat to paternity. In "Plato's Pharmacy," he enlists Socrates' narrative of the myth of King Thamus and Theuth in The Phaedrus as a portrait of such suspicion.(4) According to the myth, Theuth invents writing, and hurries to the great King to present his gift with the claim that it will make the Egyptians wiser, especially insofar as it will "improve their memories" (Derrida 75). As Derrida relates, whether or not writing constitutes a good gift is the business of the King to judge, an illiterate King, whose power is thus shadowed by the very existence of such an invention. "God the king does not know how to write," reports Derrida, "but that ignorance or incapacity only testifies to his sovereign independence" (76). Thus, "the value of writing will not be itself, writing will have no value, unless and to the extent that god-the-king approves of it" (76). So value remains in the provenance of presence, of memory unmediated by an Other. But in spite of its strictly enforced supplementarity, writing infiltrates presence, and threatens the intimate, familial bond of fatherhood: "From the position of the holder of the scepter, the desire of writing is indicated, designated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion. Isn't this pharmakon [meaning "medicine" in the sense of both "remedy" and "poison"] then a criminal thing, a poisoned present?" (77). Writing steals authority, and steals it not to flaunt it like a usurper, but keeps its crime hidden, a body-snatcher of the body of the king. To improve memory with writing--and with history--is to steal memory by a hidden theft.
Such paranoia directs its energies towards an inevitability. First of all, if the only way to avoid a fall into demonic possession by kitsch is, as Wordsworth suggests in the Essays Upon Epitaphs to deliteralize the word and return it to the local community, as he asserts in his praise of "frail memorial[s]," exemplified by a laconic grave-marker of an infant (2.93), then it is not at all clear what to make of his vocation as a poet. In fact, we might perhaps conclude that Wordsworth too is possessed by a counterspirit, and has been so bewitched by words that he believes his own writings are some ineffable...
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