Forgetting

by Gabriel Josipovici

 We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett - 'only he who forgets remembers' - Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture. Moving from the fear of Alzheimer's to invocations of 'Remember the Holocaust' and 'Remember Kosovo' by unscrupulous demagogues, from the burial rituals of rural societies to the Berlin and Vienna Holocaust Memorials, from eighteenth-century disquiet about the role of tombs and inscriptions to the late poems of Wallace Stevens, Josipovici has produced, in characteristic style, a small book with a very big punch. Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

160 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2020

About the author

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of seventeen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are Two Novels: 'After' and 'Making Mistakes' (Carcanet), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press), Heart's Wings (Carcanet, 2010) and Infinity (Carcanet, 2012).

Reviews

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Josipovici is always good. Here, he is thinking about memory, forgetting, mortality, burial traditions, the relevancy of monuments. All of it of course - by using his favourite authors and artists (Proust, Wordsworth, T. S. Elliot, Muriel Spark and my others. I would not recommend it as starting point to get familiar with this wonderful author and the thinker. His extended review What Ever Happened to Modernism? or his fiction would be a better choice for this. But memory and forgetting is a very interesting area to read and think about. And he has a lot to say, discuss and quote.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a book that tells me something different and new. Even better when that book takes me off in search of other books, and expands my knowledge along the way. This short book has all that and more.
We take our cue from Beckett ‘only he who forgets remembers’ and we consider all manner of both forgetting and remembering, we delve deeply into the topic of memorials, why we have them and why we need them.

One theme that will reoccur many times is about the damage done to the Jewish people, the killing and the virtual annihilation, and hence the call never to forget, in the hope that we will never let this happen again. But the use of ‘Look how we have suffered’ is now rolled out “to justify actions which are morally reprehensible and legally suspect.” Calling Israelis ‘left-over Crusaders… taking their revenge for all medieval history’ is the problem with public memory, ‘the takeover of history by memory is also the takeover of history by politics.’

There is a wonderful section about the noun reticence, which derives from the Latin re, again and tacere, to be silent. The OED dates the noun to 1603, giving it meanings such as the maintenance of silence, avoidance of speaking freely and disposition to say little. The OED dates the adjective, reticent to 1834 but adds confusion to the meaning by saying ‘given to silence or concealment.’ We therefore have a conflict where the first characteristic we might admire – a person who does not shoot their mouth off but weighs their words, but the second describes someone who has something to hide and is thus inherently suspicious. I find the consideration of word development fascinating, especially where this additional meaning has crept in.

Parts of ‘Forgetting’ wander into philosophy. We will consider Nietzsche and why animals in the fields are happy with their simple lives. The human however, “wonders at himself that he cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past.” We move to T S Eliot who said “Bad poets imitate; good poets steal.” In other words the past should be plundered for our needs, not worshipped as a monument.

And we have plenty of discussion of monuments; in Berlin the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe just south of the Brandenburg Gate, a memorial to lose yourself among the 2,700 blocks of concrete. While in Vienna a monument created by Rachel Whiteread, is the negative space inside a library, filling the places which are normally empty, rather than creating spaces as happens at the Berlin monument. Contrast these with the US monument to the Twin Towers, where although there is nothing problematic about remembering the fallen and the heroism of the first responders, the inscription calling to ‘strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom’ is more difficult and echoes President George W Bush’s words that said terrorists “hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.’ Such sentiments push the visitor into thinking along certain lines. That, the book argues, is not the purpose of a memorial. They should ‘reflect absence’ and encourage to visitor to step outside their daily treadmill and look and ponder – but only if they feel like it. “By trying to nudge the viewer into experiencing a particular set of feeling you destroy the delicate balance between the viewer and the work.” And this is the crux of the argument: “By shouldering the burden the monument relieves us of the need to remember all the time, allows us to forget. For only he who forgets remembers.”

Returning to T S Eliot, there is some discussion of ‘The Wasteland’ in which I discovered this wonderful paragraph:
“We all have corpses buried somewhere in our garden, corpses we are afraid to think about, corpses which will not remain safely buried, which we are afraid will bloom like hothouse plants which the dog will one day dig up. This is the condition of the waste land of modernity, that we no longer know how to bury our dead so that they stay buried. Instead we try to shut them out all thought of them. Burial should allow for a proper separation of body and spirit and allow the spirit of the dead to watch over us and help us live our lives. It would also allow us to accept that one day we too must join them. The denial of death and the dead, on the other hand, means that we live in a perpetual state of anxiety, ready to do anything to stop ourselves thinking of what is there in the garden and what awaits us in the end. Such a situation is a nightmare from which we are for ever trying to awake, but in vain: we are in the waste land and there is no exit.”

‘Forgetting’, as you can see is full of literary references; Eliot and Sterne, Shakespeare and at one point a reference to a short story by Franz Kafka had me off searching through my book shelves, until I found his complete short stories which I have owned since the early ‘90s after I had been to Prague. The reference was to ‘The Hunter Gracchus’, which Josipovici describes as one of Kafka’s few ghost stories.

‘Forgetting’ has a pleasing structure of quite short chapters, some of which are preceded by one or two blank pages, urging the reader to dwell a moment on what has just been said. There are two chapters which are titled ‘Interludes’ – personal reminiscences rather than factual renderings. I love them both. In the first Josipovici remembers the home he shared with his mother near London’s Putney underground station. I can see it so clearly and hear the rattle of the trains, having lived close to a West London station myself. In the second he describes a photograph in a newspaper which is much more than it seemed at first glance. It is a fine example of how context can change everything, and how sometimes we cannot see everything at first glance. It is a moving, powerful interlude.

This is a book that keeps on giving. There are so many things to consider and read again.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.

Josipovici quoting (but as he admits originally misrembering, the above is the corrected quote) Beckett on Proust

The great Gabriel Josipovici's latest book, Forgetting (published 2020) is a collection of essays. In the author's own words (from https://carcanetblog.blogspot.com/201...

This personal book explores both the public and the private dimensions of forgetting and its scary Siamese twin, remembering. Forgetting takes in our modern fear of Alzheimer's and dementia; the abuse to which such slogans as 'Remember Auschwitz!' can be put; the human need to bury the dead and our modern inability to do so; tombstone inscriptions and war memorials today; and how poets and novelists help us understand these dilemmas.

Highly erudite, carefully argued, moving, Josipovici draws on a wide variety of literary sources, mostly foundational text such as The Iliad, the writings of Petronius the second century Latin writer, a precursor of Rabelais or Thomas Bernhard, Beowulf, Hamlet, Tristram Shandy, A La Recherhe, Sound and Fury, The Wasteland, Borges, the writings of Beckett and the poems of Wallace Stevens among others, as well as covering neuroscience, Holocaust memorials (and the contrast to that for 9-11) and burial rites. And all this in 140 carefully constructed and beautifully written pages.

Inevitably in such a wide-ranging yet compact discussion some essays will work better than others for individual readers, perhaps depending on their familiarity with the source material.

The collection seems to have little critical attention to date, indeed the relative popular critical neglect of Josipovici's work remains a mystery to me, compared to many of his overblown peers, as he is to be clearly one of Britain's most important writers.

Three reviews which I have found:

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/69...

https://www.thejc.com/culture/books/r...

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispat...

Strongly recommend as is all of the author's work

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few notes and impressions

The early chapters had everything for me, Oliver Sacks, Proust, Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne, Samuel Beckett. It was a frisson of delight for the mind to have this parade of thinkers on the page.

The subject of the book can be summed up by Sam Beckett writing about Proust 'Only he who forgets remembers'. At least that is what Josipovici recalls from reading Becket's book on Proust. What he found by looking further was that the closest Beckett got to it was: "The man with the good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything". That's what the madeleine moment is all about - memory brings up what is forgotten.

This line made me think of that poor bastard Funes the Memorious, who remembered everything and was cursed to be incapable of living his life as more memories became his life.

Josipovici retells the tragic story of Rosa, who was awakened after decades of dormancy in Sacks' book Awakenings, by new medicine that brought her to the present. But she could not bare it and refused further treatment. She simply could not stay in a place she did not belong or understand.

With these stories, I think of both my parents. Children of war. My mother left her home aged 26 to move to the end of the earth for a better life. But over the years, I discovered that her points of reference were still her village, the well, the fields, the houses, the lake, the annual pilgrimage, the friends she grew up with after the war. She never left, she still saw the world as though her home was its centre and the points of the compass radiated from it. She never forgot, making living in the present a chore.

My father could never escape the way war took his childhood away from him. All he wanted to do was forget, but, that trauma never left him. He spent the rest of his life believing he had a better life, but it was only the other side of the same coin. Better, safer, but the deep flaws in his personality told of his troubles. That is also what Josipovici is doing here, remembering can only bring about what was forgotten. For my parents, forgetting never occurred. Memory was a curse, like that experienced by Borges' Funes.

I learned a fascinating thing, the statues of confederate heroes all over the southern USA weren't put up after the civil war but decades later as a reaction to emancipation, in the fight against it. So the contest for keeping them, is really the symbol of racial hatred, like the Jim Crow laws that sought to reverse the freedoms won by imposing segregation.

Forgetting is what we all need, to get on, memorials, another rich area of examination in this book, allow forgetting by holding the details of events even traumatic ones for us. If we have to think about memorials too hard, we are given the responsibility of it. This is a troubling thought, shouldn't we all take responsibility for past wrongs? Memory is a burden if you have to deal with it yourself. The point being forgetting is essential to move on, to allow a cultural change to happen for a future.

Josipovici does what we really want all academics to do for us, not just stick to their silos, but explore outside and into the matters that trouble us, and ease us into new ideas. He reminded me of my family and how they lived, and I forgive them just a little more. So I can forget it all.

Shakespeare's Hamlet, Sterne's Tristam Shandy, Wallace Stevens late poems, tombstone inscriptions, Holocaust memorials, S11 memorial, The Iliad, Passover, Nietschze, Srebrenica, are all reference points for forgetting.

..............

One of the best books I've read this year.

[Hailey Beaupre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book closely looks at the cultural shift and perception of remembrance, memories, and forgetting throughout history. Taking a very close and analytical view of literature, historical events, tragedies, museums, art, and mind based on events and time periods. The author discusses the impact those kinds of things have on society and how they’ve changed. As someone who has one degree, and is in the process of getting another that has some connection to the perception of memory, this book really highlights both the importance, as well as the impact it can have throughout time. Whether this be positive or negative inclination, again one must look at the time and place of the cultural shifts in society and ask: why?

[Victoria]

Forgetting is a curious and engaging collection of ruminations on what is remembered, what is forgotten, the uses to which memory can be put -- and whether the past should sometimes simply slip away to leave us more firmly engaged in the present. The thoughts may especially appeal to those concerned with the proliferation of memorials, and of their removal, a kind of delayed forgetting.

A few items are reworked from previously published material, which gives Forgetting a longer arc of time, and indicates Gabriel Josipovici's continued interest in the subject. It invites a leisurely reading pace, and happily ends without firm conclusions, in the same speculative mood as throughout.

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great collection of essays, but mostly a stew made up from the material ideas of other authors. What he manages to do is build a conversation out of many voices. To address the modern preoccupation with (/fear of) forgetting. On many levels. Both a fear of individual mental decline. And also on a more social scale.

Gone are the festivals built to ritually re-enact, and create a collective remembrance of history, not individually experienced. Instead, now we are trapped assuming we each are one of the few capable of recalling. Where others live their lives in ignorance.

It isn't the case. And a genocide doesn't reoccur out of forgetting. It is equally likely to be repeated out of an insistence to remember. As a certain country has done so expertly. Building a sort of ideological defence shield that prevents their actions being contrasted with those of a certain historical group that targeted them. I'm skirting around the specifics. Dancing around detail. Because you know what I mean. And I want plausible deniability, so that I don't have my account suspended.

The point is less of a political one and more simply to highlight one of the more valuable lessons of this collection of essays. Remembering and forgetting are not two ends of a spectrum. It's not as neat and tidy as that. Like light, the point is for the darkness and light to work together into a wholeness of vision.

That's what I took from the book anyway. Not a thought I hadn't had before. But it was important to remember.

If you haven't read Nietzsche, Borges, Goethe, Sacks, Strauss, Echenoz, Zizek... Etc... Then this is a great little meal. Use it as a stepping off point. You'll get a lot from it.

(Tiny Easter egg here: Josipovici wrote the introduction to The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf. It drove me mad trying to remember where I had encountered his name before. They don't tend to credit the authors of introductions on their Goodreads page. Took a long while to discover this. )

3.5

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Large swathes of this went over my head (a reflection on me, not Josipovici) but the sections I understood were wonderful

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traces several arcs of remarkable lucidity, from the most literal forms of forgetting to its role in death, both culturally and to ourselves.