19 - 25 April 2001
Issue No.530
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 April 2001 Issue No.530 |
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Between Scylla and Charybdis
Injy El-Kashef listens to Tzvetan Todorov lecture on the workings of memory
Tzvetan Todorov, internationally renowned literary critic whose extensive writings on fantasy literature -- which he has dissected, labeled and diagrammed -- constitute a cornerstone and offer a paradigm upon which numerous works in the field have been based, and currently research director of the Paris-based Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, gave a lecture on the instrumentalisation of collective memory last week at CEDEJ.
The audience was meagre, a circumstance for which the attendees were probably grateful: no more than about 30 interested individuals found themselves in the CEDEJ's large and ornate conference room, scribbling notes around a large table at the head of which Todorov eloquently spoke about "The Three Stages of Memory."
The memory in question is social and collective, rather than personal and individualistic and, Todorov argued, national, even global memory can be "instrumentalised" for the sake of humanity insofar as it represents a key force in the conflict between good and evil -- two basic antonyms to which Todorov's frequent and recurrent references were, in the context of the current intellectual milieu which values equivocation and fuzziness, not only interesting but also refreshing.
Where evil is concerned, there is, Todorov pointed out, an inherent danger in indulging, as is currently the case, in an extreme attitude of "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" (to understand everything is to forgive everything). After all, a real belief in, and respect for, man's free will, one grounded in the assumption that all men are created equal, with an equal capacity for evil, implies that there are limits to the degree of compassion an act of evil deserves; there comes a point at which a line must be drawn and responsibility must be assumed for one's actions. A distinction must be made between analysing the sources of evil in the interest of future prevention, on the one hand, and understanding an evil act for the sake of forgiveness, on the other.
Just as different scales are employed in the treatment of private and public offence, so too, Todorov pointed out, different mental processes should be put to work in the evaluation of a present public act before it comes to be described in the past tense.
In the assimilation of experiences, a selective mechanism takes place and results, Todorov asserted, in one of three conditions: omission, sacralisation or banalisation. The first, an indispensable and inherent dynamic of the human mind -- the workings of memory are selective by nature -- assists individuals in coping with their daily lives by forgetting what is unnecessary and what is too painful.
More pertinent to collective memory, and to public acts, are the remaining two. Todorov describes sacralisation and banalisation as the Scylla and Charybdis of memory as both deny the proper use of the past in the present. The one places the event beyond reach and the other makes it too widely available. Sacralisation seeks to isolate an event in the past as disproportionate to any possible common denominator and thus incomparable to any present act. In Marcel Proust's words: "We never learn from any lesson because we fail to bring it down to a general level and always fancy ourselves to be in the presence of an experience with no precedent in the past." Banalisation, on the other hand, seeks to find similar examples of the same event on both the time and space trajectories so that its consequences are deprived of their real value. To use Todorov's example, the recent inter-ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia have been unrealistically compared to World War Two, with Slobodan Milosevic directly likened to Adolf Hitler. Milosevic is not, however, the only ruler to be described as a Hitler figure; almost every single dictator, at one point or another, has been subjected to the same comparison.
It is clearly the mental shape taken by a past event that determines its potential utilisation in the present for the sake of the public good, or evil. As Todorov writes in the April 2001 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, "the same painful past and suffering experienced by the Jews has led to two opposing lessons: it is in the name of this same past that judge Moshe Landau legalised the torture of the 'enemy' [i.e. Palestinians], it is in the name of this same past that Professor Yechayahou Leibovitz fought against it with all his strength." Also commenting on the Palestinian question, Todorov mentioned at the lecture that the Holocaust could have, and should have, been the most important factor for Israel not to adopt its current policy.
Instrumental in the creation of a collective memory, and by extension a whole nation's identity, the historian's role, implicitly, is therefore to carefully navigate the facts through the Scylla of sacralisation and the Charybdis of banalisation.
An Egyptian historian in attendance related an interesting experience he encountered while collecting data for a biography: he had gathered 50 anecdotes, 25 of which seemed realistic; 25, implausible. He was about to omit these latter when, upon checking with sources he was lucky enough to find still alive, he discovered that the preposterous stories were confirmed as real while the other 25 turned out to be fictitious.
Questions to Todorov after the lecture were numerous and long, but what he and surely others found interesting, though slightly irritating, was the number of questions centering around the mind's potential to fabulate past events in the creation of memory. Todorov was adamant that a citizen's right to seek the truth is fundamental, but he failed to see how pertinent it was to discuss the truth's level of purity in the context of his lecture. Pressured, however, by repeated questions on the subject and even directly criticised for ignoring this issue, he was baffled and simply answered "that's why we have historians; to sift through everything and extract the real truth from the fables. I'm surprised that such an obvious point should be so persistently requested to be made."
But, the question remains, how can we know that, in sifting, the said historians have not committed the errors of omission, sacralisation and banalisation? How indeed.
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