Forgetting

Gabriel Josipovici

• Publisher: Little Island Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781784108908
• eBook ISBN: 9781784108915
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

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.

VI

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD (1)

The rightful burial of the dead has been a theme of literature for as long as literature has existed.

Take the Iliad, the first and greatest of all Western epics. It opens with a sort of overture, a short passage in which the central themes of the poem are all touched upon in one extraordinary sentence:

The wrath do thou sing, O goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, that baneful wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of warriors and made themselves to be a spoil for dogs and all manner of birds. (I.1–5)

To be a spoil for dogs and birds – in other words to lack a proper burial – is not the fate that should await a valiant warrior, but, as a result of Achilles’ refusal to fight with the Achaeans because of a personal vendetta with their leader, Agamemnon, it is what overtakes many of them. Andthis, as the overture indicates, is the central theme of the poem: proper burial or the lack of it. It will end, first, with the proper burial of Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus, whose death leads him finally to enter the fray with his fellow Achaeans, and then with the proper burial of his enemy, Hector, son of Priam, King of Troy, the killer of Patroclus. At these funerals the lamentations of the living, especially the women, play a crucial part in the proper conduct of the burial. The first to vent her grief at Hector’s funeral is Andromache, his wife, followed by Hecabe, his mother, and finally by Helen, his sister-in-law and the cause of the whole war:

Hector, far dearest to my heart of all my husband’s brethren! In sooth my husband is godlike Alexander, that brought me to Troy land – would I had died ere then! For this is now the twentieth year from the time when I went from thence and am gone from my native land, but never yet heard I evil or despiteful word from thee… Therefore I wail for thee and for my helpless self with grief at heart; for no longer have I anyone beside me in broad Troy that is gentle to me or kind, but all men shudder at me. (XXIV 760–76)

These eruptions by women into a poem dominated by men are always desperately moving. After all the fighting and boasting we are, at such moments, brought face to face with human fear and loss and with the love and fondness of mothers for their children (Andromache in Book VI), of wives for their husbands, or, as here, of a wife for her husband’s brother.

‘So spake she wailing’, the poet remarks as she concludes her lament, ‘and thereat the countless throng made moan’. Clearly this is more than a private outpouring of grief but part of an orchestrated lamentation. In Book XIX, at the burial of Patroclus, for example, we have the same sequence as first Achilles’ concubine Briseis throws herself on Patroclus’ body and utters a great lament, and, when she has finished, ‘thereto the women added their laments’ (282-301). But Homer’s verse moves on in its majestic hexameters, leaving us to imagine the details of the wailing for ourselves. The Athenian dramatists of the following centuries are not so restrained. The great scenes of lamentation and mourning for the dead in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Euripides’ Trojan Women are full of onomatopoeic words, otototoi, aiai aiai, ea ea, and so on. At the climax to the earliest extant play, Aeschylus’ Persians, Xerxes, the King, and the chorus of Persian elders lament the fate of their army, defeated and destroyed by the Greeks:

Xerxes:	Utter words of grief and sorrow, Full of lamentation; for this divinity Has turned right round against me. …….
Chorus:	Cry ‘oioioi’ and learn it all. Where are the rest, your multitude of friends? Where are those who stood beside you, Men such as Pharandaces was, Susas, Pelagon and Damatas…? …….
Xerxes:	Ió, Ió, ah me! After setting eyes on ancient Athens, Hateful Athens, all of them in one stroke, È è è è, gasp their life out wretchedly on the shore…
Chorus:	They have gone oi! – without a name.
Xerxes:	Ieh, ieh! Ió, Ió!
Chorus:	Ió, ió, you gods, You who have caused suffering that no-one expected For all to behold!...
Xerxes:	Cry out now in response to my cries.
Chorus:	A sad answer of sad sounds to sad sound [dosin kakan kakõn kakois].
Xerxes:	Raise a song of woe, joining it together with mine.
Xer & Cho:	Ototototoi! (941–1043)^17

The English translation inevitably limps along, but at least it registers the places where the words give way to ritualised lamentations and conveys something of the impact the play must have made when first staged.

Robert Pogue Harrison, in his fine book on the importance of burial and burial rituals in human culture,¹⁸ compares this to a lament of a girl for her brother from southern Italy collected and transcribed by the great Italian ethnographer, Ernesto de Martino and published by him in his remarkable book, Morte e pianto rituale del mondo antico (1958):

O my Francesco, O fair
O brother, O brother
O my Francesco, O brother, O brother
How will I cope, O fair
O my brother, O my brother, How I love him!¹⁹

The lament, as de Martino shows at exhaustive length, helps the bereaved move from the animal to the human,from that which has been wrenched out of the social by grief to its reintegration in society. He is at pains to point out that simply reading a transcript of a funeral lament from the kind of peasant society he found in southern Italy and in Romania in the immediate post-war period can give one very little sense of what is going on. For these laments depend on three things: ritualised gestures, ritualised melodies and ritualised words and phrases. But – and that is one of the many fascinating things to emerge from his detailed examination of these laments in situ – the very precision of the choreography of the rituals allows for moments of improvisation, enabling individual details – about the kindness of the deceased or the number of cattle he had – to emerge and be integrated into the ritual. Not only that. Describing the funeral of a priest in a Romanian village, he notes that one of the mourners would break off to admonish her friends: ‘Keep going, Keep going. The gentlemen have to write in their books.’ At another time one or two would interrupt their lamentation to finger admiringly the cloth of ‘the gentlemen’s’ suits before slipping back into the lament.

To us all this may seem distasteful if not downright bizarre.²⁰ We tend to operate, here too, with a simple binary of either heartfelt and genuine or false and hypocritical, but a study like de Martino’s should alert us to the fact that this is the result of a mindset which has only been prevalent in the West since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which was put in place by the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth. De Martino’s peasants, on the other hand, and their predecessors in the ancient world of the Mediterranean (he has a fascinating account of a present-day Egyptian Moslem funeral) would have made no sense of this opposition. The task of the funeral as a whole and of the funeral lament in particular, is to help the bereaved, broken by grief (as we see Achilles in the Iliad broken by his grief for Patroclus), incapable of speech, driven either to mutism or to howls of agony by the death of a loved one, to overcome this and return to life in the community. These rituals, which de Martino calls ‘cultural memory’, a memory, that is, consisting of bodily movement, melody and words, enact both the death of the loved one and the torment of the bereaved, and in so doing allow a space to be created where the healing process can start to take place.

To return to the lament of the sister for her brother. As Harrison points out (60ff.), while the semantic content of the lament is minimal it is nevertheless crucial. First there is the assertion that brother and sister must go their separate ways, he into death (‘Now you must go, O brother’) and she back to life. But then comes the acknowledgement that soon she too will follow him: ‘I must die too, O brother’. The lament charts the return of the wounded animal to the social, but changed now, recognising that the loss is irrevocable and accepting that its own turn will one day come. King David, in the Book of Samuel, puts the whole thing with devastating simplicity: ‘I will go to him, but he will not come to me’, he says, after he has lain silent and grief-stricken for a long time, unable to come to terms with the death of the child Bathsheba has just borne him (2 Samuel 12.23). I will go to him but he will not come to me.

But the funeral is in one sense not a terminal point at all. The tomb, once established, becomes the focus for further displays of grief and emotion. Once the funeral has taken place with its appropriate rituals and the body has been buried, a quite different relationship to the dead is established. There are special days in which they are remembered by fresh rituals enacted at their tombs, by bringing flowers or a ritual meal on the anniversary of their death, and so on. Here too what we witness is the work of cultural memory. And the important thing is that it allows the living to find peace and release from the torments of remembering for the rest of the year. As Nietzsche would say, it allows the survivors to sleep in between the ceremonies, and allows the dead to become benign presences rather than vengeful ghosts. Only he who forgets remembers, and older cultures devised rituals of remembrance that allowed us to forget.

*

As de Martino brilliantly shows, it is no coincidence that the episode of the shield of Achilles, forged for him by Hephaestus, follows on from Achilles’ despair at the death of his beloved friend. The shield’s depiction of the changing seasons argues de Martino, and of those who go about their business in the fields, helps us, as it will help Achilles, to recognise that the death of a loved one, devastating as it is for the bereaved, has to be placed in the wider context of a universe which goes its own way oblivious of human suffering and loss, and that for every person who dies there is one who is born. That of course has been the lesson of the Iliad throughout. Human beings, says the poet, are like leaves on a tree, ‘one generation of men springeth up and another passeth away’. (VI.146–50) This is not the bitter cynicism of Ecclesiastes but rather a wise recognition of the way things are. And, de Martino suggests, within every ancient funerary lament and within every peasant funeral lies not just the lesson that the dead will not return to life but also the lesson that if the seed does not die there will be no growth in the spring. In other words, these funerals tap into the ancient Mediterranean myth of the dying god, whether he be Tammuz or Osiris or Jesus Christ.

It is a commonplace of modern cultural history that both Judaism and Christianity differentiated themselves from the other cults of the ancient Near East by their insistence that they were historical faiths, based on the singular action of God in history – leading Israel out of bondage in Egypt, sending mankind His only son to redeem them. And both faiths have fought tooth and nail to maintain this distinction from the nature religions of the region, with their cyclical view of history and their multiple gods. Yet in the central rites of both Judaism and Christianity an occasion, long gone, which might, but for the ritual, have faded into obscurity, is both recalled and re-enacted. And this is important. Just as the south Italian peasant mourning ritual is an action at the end of which something has changed, so with both the Passover meal in Judaism and the Easter ceremony in Christianity. Both commemorate the founding events of their faiths, singular events where great tragedy is averted by the intervention of God, and in both the ending is joyful – the Israelites, having been slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, triumphantly cross the Red Sea into freedom; Jesus, having died, is resurrected. The sorrow and the joy, the dark and the light, are one here – without the one there would not, could not, be the other. Had Pharaoh not been on the point of annihilating the Israelites their escape would not be so miraculous; had Jesus not died, He would not have risen. In both cases, without the reason for lamentation there would be no reason for celebration.

It is because these ceremonies combine strict choreography with a certain open-endedness that they are not subject to the kind of manipulation we saw at work in the demagogic injunction to remember – the Holocaust, Kosovo, Bloody Sunday, etc. It is precisely because both the Easter service and the Passover meal are playful re-enactments rather than simple injunctions to remember that they acquire their efficacity. The debates in the early years of Protestantism between those who said the Mass was a re-enactment of Jesus’s Passion and those who said it was merely a remembering were so bitter because they were about a great deal more than an abstract principle; they were about the very soul of Christianity.

Judaism, which has been more relaxed about these things, as is to be expected of a religion based on practice rather than belief, makes of its central story something to be celebrated primarily not in a place of worship but in the home. At the Passover seder a certain order (seder means order in Hebrew) is to be respected, but the meal would last so long if every word were read and every gesture carried out, especially since discussion and elaboration are encouraged throughout, that each family finds its own way through it, abridging here, making room for the new there, much as in the ritual funeral laments recorded by de Martino. And of course, since it is after all a long meal in which all who can shoul...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Note
• Preface
• I The Fear of Forgetting
• II Only He Who Forgets Remembers
• III 'Remember Kosovo!''Remember Auschwitz!'
• IV Reticence and Repression
• V Nietzsche and the Need for Sleep
• Interlude: An act of Destruction
• VI The Burial of the Dead (1)
• VII Tombstones, Inscriptions
• VIII 'Who is the Man Sitting on General Gordon?'
• IX Memorial Moments
• Interlude: I Examine a Photograph in a Newspaper
• X The Burial of the Dead (2)
• XI Hauntings
• XII Letting Go
• About the Author