Augé_Oblivion

foreword

James E. Young

In "Funes, His Memory," Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary fable about a young man with "perfect memory," we learn that in forgetting nothing, we cannot know the meaning of anyr!ling we've remeI]J.bered. More to the point, in forgetting nothing, we make no sense of anything. "With one look," Borges's narrator tells us, "you and I perceive three wine glasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple-every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to

reconstruct every drea~; every daydream he had ever

VlZ

viii foreword

had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire

day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day."1 Think of it, if nothing gets len out, if it all gets remembered, the perfect memory of a day takes exactly a day to reconstruct, second by second by second. The problem is, as Ireneo Funes tells our narrator, "My memory, sir, is like

a garbage heap." Not only does every remembered past moment displace the present lived moment, substituting memory fo;:}ife itself, but witho'iu1o~:gettf~gthe~e . is-Dei-space' le~ whIch to,!!ey'~g~~ .. ih~,~~~~~ng of what one has remembered.

~.--"""""",<."~~~,,,,-...... ,,,,,"---

In his sublime essay Oblivion, Marc Auge seems to have picked up where Borges has left off Part inquiry into his own practices of ethnographic investigation, part meditation on what he calls the "forms of oblivion," Auge's amazing essay isat heart a ruminative reflection on culture itself, on the "fictions" by which

culture tells and thereby constitutes itself Coming as it does from one of the world's great philosophical ethnographers, this may not be surprising, but what Auge tells us about memory as defined against forgetting is extraordinarily surprising-and altogether compelling, as counterintuitive as it may be.

lt may be a truism that forgetting is as integral to

memory as death is to life, as Auge tells us, part and parcel of that phenomenon it seemingly negates. But nobody I know has examined the logic of oblivion's constitutive role in memory as insightfully, suggestively, or poetically as Auge does in these pages. "The definition of oblivion as loss of remembrance takes on another

foreword ix

meaning as soon as one perceives it as a component of memory itself," he writes. Why is this so? "It is quite

clear that our memory would be 'saturated' rapidly if we had to preserve every image of our childhood, especially those of our earliest childhood," he answers, per

haps with Borges's Funes in mind. "But what is interesting is that which remains. AnA what remains ... is the P!:24~t of an erosion caused bX oblivion. Memories are craned by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea." Or, as he puts it even more succinctly,

"oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance

is its product." What, then, are the "fOrms of oblivion"? CitingJ.-B.

Pontalis's exquisite adumbrations of the role repression plays in remembrance, Auge suggests that what is inscribed in the mind "is not the remembrance but the traces, the signs of the ab;-nce." Without oblivion, without forgetting, these traces remain indistinguishable

from eacll other and therefore meaningless. Oblivion throws t~&lnto relief, allows them to emerge as nugg~ consci~sness._As ou;"remembrances ar; shaped by that which we have forgotten, the forms of oblivion are knowable by that which we have remembered. In the end, Auge posits what he calls three "figures" or "forms of oblivion," which he finds in both literature

and field study. The first is the return to an ancient past by forgetting the present or recent past; the second em

blematic form of oblivion is a suspension of time that cuts the present moment off from both the past and the future; and the third form of oblivion is what he calls the rebeginning, or starting over, which he describes

x foreword

as a radical inauguration, a birth of a new future that can take place only by forgetting what came before it.

Like other Continental philosophers of his generation, Marc Auge finds himself in an ongoing conversation with most of the past century's great phenomenological thinkers and critics-from Paul Ricoeur to Clifford Geertz, from Freud to Lyotard, J.-B. Pontalis

to Johannes Fabian. Trained as an anthropologist and ethnographer, Auge is informed by his experiences in the field and in material culture, but he is never shackled by them. Instead, together with his readings in hermeneutics, these experiences seem to have awakened in him a self-awareness that goes beyond mere ethnocentrism or egocentrism. Here he warns that even ethnologists "can be tempted into thinking that the others, those whom we are observing, live a kind of fiction to which we do not subscribe but which we do study: essentially, it is precisely to study it that we have gone to Africa,

Amazonia, and Oceania-to study a particular fiction in a particular place. But careful! It is a double fiction

and the person who sees only one side of it runs the risk of having illusions and of theorizing for nothing." That is, in defining "others" as living a kind of fiction, we risk ignoring the necessary fictions by which we live

and study the lives of others. In the exposition of these terms that follows, Auge

simultaneously enacts and explicates the process by which we come to understand the central role the "forms of oblivion" play in "the staging and the implementation that 'mold' time in life itself in order to make a kind of tale out of it that those who live it tell each other at

foreword xi

the same time that they are living it." In fact, this is as dose to a perfect working definition of culture as we may find. Living in the fictions of culture and writing about them is a double game, of course, as Auge makes dear. But if we don't acknowledge the rules of our own fictions and narratives, we ignore half of what we purport to study, whether it is another culture or our

own history. In either case, ohlivion rerp.ait:s the absep~ center around which memory and knowledge-each an ___ --"'.....,.._._""~_~ldd.¢ """""="

extension of the other-necessarily congeaL Ethnographic anthrop~l~gist;·~rr re;i this essay

for its profound insight into the complex relationship between ethnologist and subject, between the ethnologist and his own narratives of mind as he attempts to discern the narratives of a culture to which he does not belong. Literary historians can read this essay for the ways Auge has drawn on theories of time and narrative qy Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur to illuminate the middle space between living in history and telling

it, between systematizing a c0tU[~ and cons~K it. As inspi;;d and instructed by Auge's incisive critique of

ethnological practice as some may be, others of us will remain wholly preoccupied by and unable to shake Auge's startling insights into the role oblivion necessarily plays in memory itself "One must forget the recent past in order to find the ancient past again," he says, which is true enough. But the question augurs its own caveat:

Can we, do we ever, really forget something on our way to remembering so~ething else? Or is it all remembered in light of everything we ever knew, whether now for

gotten or remembered?

xii foreword

"We must know the right time to forget as well as

the right time to remember," Nietzsche admonished in

his scathing critique of what he regarded as a rampantly uncritical nineteenth-century German historicism.2 Here

again, Auge seems to pick up where others leave off In

his concluding remarks in ''A Duty to Forget," Auge echoes Nietzsche's case for oblivion and against the

kinds of fixed memory that disable life. But then he

extends this critique by reminding us once again that

because memory and oblivion "stand together," and

"both are necessary for the full use of time," only to

gether can they enable life. Even survivors of the Nazi

concentration camps, who do not need to be reminded of their duty to remember, may have the additional duty

to survive memory itself To do this may mean to begin

forgetting, according to Auge, "in order to find faith in

the everyday again and ma~ their time." In this

view, the value oflife in itsGuotidian)mfolding and the

meaning we find in such life are animated by a con

stant, fragile calculus of remembering and forgetting,

a constant tug and pull between memory and oblivion,

each an inverted trace of the other.

"We must forget in order to remain present, forget

in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful,"

Auge concludes. "Faithful to what?" we ask. Faithful to

life in its present, quotidian moment.

oblivion

preface

Oblivion is a necessity both to society and to the individual. One must know how to forget in order to taste the full flavor of the present, of the moment, and of expectation, bur memory itself needs forgetfulness: one

m.!lst forget the recent past in order to find the ®cic;nt past again. That is the principal argument of this book, 'Which therefore is presented as a small treatise on the

..." rl"Q;"''''~'''~ use of time. -- • I have Q;~ped this book like a three-lesson course,

but it is not a real course and I do not claim to be teaching anyone a lesson. This form simply allows me

to address the reader more directly. On a subject such as this I seek more than the reader's ear: I seek the reader's complicity. I wish to invite the reader to measure the

greater or lesser accuracy of the suggestions I propose based on his or her own experience.

The first "lesson" wonders with psychoanalysts about the notion of "memory traces" and the relationship

3

4 preface

between memory and oblivion. The second enters into dialogue with anthropologists and philosophers to test the hypothesis according to which every life is lived like a narrative. The third, with the help of a few novelists,

attempt;;; state th~ thr:,e J?att~.291ivi2e;:~t~;:,~ susEension, and starting over.

Finally, because I am an ethnologist, I draw on my own memories in the field or on ethnological literature for the material of the questions to which these three chapters try to respond. Thus, we are really concerned with an exercise in inverted ethnology; normally speaking, those who are the object of the inquiry come up with answers but do not ask questions.

memory and oblivion

From the outset, I would like to allow myself a detour, a few preliminaty considerations that will specify progressively the terms of the debate I plan to open. Indeed, first, and without any explanation, I need to say a few words that are .neither rare nor original, but that e~body some formidable pitfalls of thinking. By that I mean that for centuries these words have been a nap for multiple and varied thoughts whose colorful, noisy, and twirling flight risk terrifying the senses and the intellect of the reckless one who would set them free.

In fact, thoughts are set free evety day: professors, philosophers, high school students or university students who are writing their dissertations, politicians or journalists, and still others who spend their time playing with words often happen to Set thoughts free, whether by accident or audacity. But thoughts are homebodies and, even with us, where they became almost domesticated long ago, they retain a small foundation of the

7

8 memory and oblivion

feral. Barely have they stretched their wings and fluttered up to the light of day when they rush right back to the words that give them shelter, protect them, and conceal them. Perhaps they are birds of night, after all. That is possible, it is a widespread opinion. It is true, nevertheless, that the professional thinker, that birdcatcher of thoughts who became a breeder, first learns to mistrust them-some of them bite. He learns to track them down without hurting them, to anesthetize them, observe them, and follow them with his eyes when he lets them go. He lets them go to see where they dash off to, what other thoughts they meet up with, and in which words they seek refuge, as it is not unusual that a liberated thought seeks refuge-by mistake, in panic, or perhaps through affinity-in another word different from the one in which it used to reside initially. Today, it is no longer ruled out that thoughts shifting from one word to another are a more frequent and older phenomenon than was once believed-and, consequently, independent from the experimental conditions I have just mentioned.

Ethnology could have informed us in this regard, for distant societies have been offering the observer an infinite variety of new words. But this field has long been, and still is today, more than ever, paralyzed by an insidious evil: ethnocentrism and, even more so, the fear of ethnocentrism. Fear of ethnocentrism is respectable. It deserves the same respect that it gives others by postulating that one should not reduce their thoughts, even if they are savage, to slavery nor assimilate them

memory and oblivion 9

out of disdain for their originality. But sometimes this fear is a bad counselor: nothing actually tells us that thoughts born in our dimes have not found shelter in exotic words, nor conversely, that thoughts having come from far away have not been concealed within words familiar to us (we are far from knowing everything about the great migrations of thoughts, despite some general hypotheses). Neither does anything tell us-and that is actually the most interesting-that, different as they may be, thoughts sheltered in the words of others-black, yellow, or red thoughts, the shimmering of which fascinates or entertains us-are not comparable to those that live in our dimes; better yet, that, as they stand apart from them and to the vety extent that they stand apart, they do not have the power to trigger and awaken them, to make them leave their words as one sometimes makes a man fly off the handle, as they say-which is, after all, only one way like any other for him to open a door and go look elsewhere. Let us not be afraid of words: we have to make our thoughts angry and other people's thoughts can help with that!

The best way to crack a word half open in order to

let the thought or thoughts it shelters be revealed (for, I forgot to point this out, it happens frequently that a single word gives shelter to a whole range of thoughts, born of couplings about which we know very little and which do not necessarily resemble each other very

much) is to try and translate that word. I~:a.nslation.: as everyone kno~~simi1at to alJ ~~&:r;.phy. Every natural language has supplied the world ~

I..~ - ""-- ....... '"~.~-'.


with words (the exterior world and the interior world

of the psyche). Here they draw frontiers, but these fi-on

tiers do not match from one language to another. If

you take one word for another (following a transla

tion too rapidly produced), you risk being surprised.

The thoughts that inhabited the first word will not

be accustomed to the second; they either have too

much or too little space there. Bad translations are full of thoughts that overflow, float, or strangle each other

for lack of adequate words, and every good translator

knows that-according to the language in question-it

is absolutely necessary to omit or add words in order to

accommodate the thoughts of others.

The power to prompt these thoughts of others is

quite directly linked to the question of frontiers, to the

question of semantic carving that every language im

poses on reality. A simple, perhaps simplistic example:

"Wait and hope" was the motto of Edmond Dantes, the

Count of Monte Cristo. In our language-French-we

have learned to make the distinction between waiting

and hoping (even if it sometimes happens that we say

to someone for whom we have been waiting a long

time: "I was hoping!" with a note of affection or irony).

In Castilian, this distinction is not made: waiting is

hoping-an optimistic equation that is overturned, it is true, or at least modified if I invert the terms: hoping

;, waiting. Th,!act ,omain, ,jut a=ci'ting waiting with J !:,oping had to be difficult to formulate in the country that invented classical tra·gedy. Don Quixote and his

windmills for some, Phaedra and her son-in-law for

others!

II J I . " .


Some African languages, in which the same word

designates a material substance such as blood and (words

will fail me ... ) an "instance" or a psychic ability, located

right in the head in fact and as likely to leave it as to

come back to it, pose insoluble translation problems. At

the same time, this representation is not as indifferent or

foreign to us, affectively or intellectually, as we might be

tempted, a bit lazily, to assume. One can imagine the in

terest Freud might have taken in the study of the "sche

mata" by which several African groups represented the

psychic apparatus well before he did. These heaps of

substantified powers, brought into motion every night

by the magic of dreams, astounded the first observers.

But ethnocentrism (and this is surely the place to con

demn it), the reductionist ethnocentrism of mission

aries and ethnologists tainted by psychoanalysis, has

wreaked havoc not so much because one group- used

"guardian angel" to translate what the other labeled

"Superego"-which came from a rather crude approxi

mation so as to stand out clearly and not be taken at

face value-but because everybody passed over in silence (or mentioned it as a local curiosity, a "belief," a "super

stition") the materialism expressed by the dual asso-

'iation,q~ smrit 'Zish~JP"dlID'-S~.,~l~[~~TE~·", Therein, however, resides the most stimulating aspect

of the thoughts misused by those who are in too much

of a hurry to crack words, those bird-catchers who are

too ~ic or too full of themselves. Yet it is th~e thoughts or others of that kind that

could stimulate our own and energize them. Another

example: that of Native American languages and ideas


for which the adventures of the dream prolong those

of the previous day-thus making the previous day and the dream a continuous thought called upon to be the subject of a same account that can be completely refined only by the person who is strong and lucid enough to remember in the morning all the details of his or her nocturnal life. Such, in fact, is the case

for the best-known shamans. A writer such as Georges Devereux has, with the example of the Mojave Indians,

clearly shown how a thought pattern so different from ours put our own categories under tension and thereby offered them a chance to redefine themselves. l

The experience of dreams lies at the root of the theory of the universe outlined in the rituals, the behavior, and the intentions of the Mojave Indians. Devereux draws our attention to the fact that their observation of dreams is subtle and systematic. It gives its coherence to their interpretation of ills and troubles they themselves

judge to be deviant. Their intimacy with the dream leads them to consider the psychic evolution of neurotics and psychotics as more extreme manifestations of impulses that are expressed in "normal" dream activity as well.

Europeans are averse to acquiring an awareness of their own "psychotic core" and the best proof of this is that they have a tendency to forget their dreams-which is unthinkable among the Mojave. Certainly, Devereux recognizes. that, from the point of view of method, the Mojave have nothing to teach us (for their method is "supranaturalist" and trusts in a body of myths that existed before the observation of dreams and deviances). But, fundamentally, they describe real phenomena from


a "framework of reference" other than Western psy

chiatry and, at this time when our culture is becoming standardized, the latter would have everything to gain from disorientation testing-a test, Devereux suggests, that should help it to rethink familiar problems in an

unfamiliar setting. In appearance, then, Devereux's position is para

doxical, but only in appearance. If he makes use of the culture of others it is to diffuse the myopia or blindness that the routine and automatism of our culture might arouse. But the reasoning could be applied to the Mojave

in the same way. What blinds us !s our bei~.£.ke.d.i!llQ

~. T:::re~o~e, !n~~:?e.r ~~t;r~,~as r!,l!... m~~!!!~!~~.-,;,~~!2~ .. ,,~~~ int? , ~,his perspective has nothing to do ~ calling rationalism and science into question-quite the contrary, even if it is true that what we take as science is

not always that. Th£ relativi~atio~ of on~ 9!1ture ~.~other (changing the" frame of reference") is basically an

'exer~ise in anticultural ism that in every culture res~cts above all the power it has to destabilize the others.

___ .. ' t . " ,";)

I am now gomg to pronounce some enormous words: the word oblivion first of all, and those that oppose it merely by being linked with it, such as memory and remembrance; a few others that are harmonics, deformations, or outgrowths of the first ones more or

less-like pardon, indifference, or negligence on a line with oblivion, remorse, obsession, or resentment on a line with memory; and then there are two more words: life and

death, which are the least simple of all because they are both the most opposed and the closest that might


be conceived, so that it is hardly possible to use one without thinking of the other. And before we even consider translating them into other languages or finding them an equivalent in other cultures, they confront us with the impossibility of ever having the last word, of ever pronouncing the word of the end, in spite of the universality they denote.

For a short while we are going to let all these words divert, crash, link up, or come loose, and then, on the

way, we shall try to subject them to the double test of a few texts and a few cultures: texts that use them by im

posing a meaning upon them and cultures that develop other meanings with words that resemble them.

~ praise oblivion is not to revile memory; eve1!l~ is it to neglect remembrance, but rather to recognize the work of oblivion in th; first one and to spot it in the second. Memory and oblivion in some way have the same relationship as life and death.

Life and death are defined only in relation to each other and the omnipresence of sacrifice in human religions expresses this constraint in a semantic way. The life of some needs the death of others: this assessment may be applied in a trivial way to material and physical

facts or may be symbolically represented in complex constructions. It is the same with what we experience of the intimate relationship between death and individuali

ty: being inscribed in time characterizes the individual

from birth to death. The confirmations postulating that "one always dies alone" or that "death changes

life into destiny" -one almost with the sobriety of a proverb, the other with the eloquence of a writer who


sometimes is too much of an orator-only repeat this obvious fact. The definition of death as the horizon of every individual and distinct life, while obvious, nevertheless takes on another meaning, a more subtle and

more everyday meaning, as soon as one perceives it as a definition of life itself-of life between two deaths.

So it is with memory and oblivion. Tg,e definiti<?E_

of oblivion as loss of rel!1c:;;P..b£i!-Q.~ • .!.~k:;U~,B..,,~?lh~ ~;';~ing ~; s~;;;;:~~"~;e~~..ru?!l~£f mem'ol}" itsel£-

- Thi; p;;ximity of the two pairs -life and death,

memory and oblivion-is felt, expressed, and even symbolized everywhere. For many, it is not only of a metaphoric order (oblivion as a kind of death, life as remembrances), but it brings conceptions of death into play (death as another life or death as inherent to life)

that in turn command the roles given to memory and oblivion: in one case death lies before me and in the

pr~.~,:~~I!.~ust remembe~.lhat I h~.Mt~~~.J.; the other death lies behind me and I must live m the , ~"''O __ ~_

present without forgetting the ~~ it. The 1 ea of salvation, the Christian idea, belongs more to

the first case, and the idea of a return, the pagan idea of successive reincarnations, belongs to the second: a hope here and there, a remembrance inform daily existence. Barely expressed, this confirmation needs to be quali

fied: collectively and individually, Christians have a past (sin), while paganism does not know the future. ~ two ideas are, therefore, not totally irreconcilable and

o~y',gi'{i£I.£.c!.~~~~ ties of the future and the confusions of rSIlSlll.b!,ap.f~~ ~~~o .. -r''"'''~,~,'jlimA:~~)II."""",~I'nl/fll~lfl


The African societies that I have visited fit the second case better: in Togo and Benin, for example, the vodun gods are most often presented as ancestors, thus as former people. They call to order those who forget them, who neglect to make offerings and to make the sacrifices that are necessary for all vodun gods in order to allow them to survive in one or the other of their appearances. For the god is like remembrance: one and multiple, he bears a name (Hevieso, Sakpata) and surfaces in a few myths known by all or by many, bur he materializes in thousands of appearances, each with its own history, linked to that of a particular individual, in the sanle way that each person having lived through a same event has a memory of it that is both similar and different.

The return of the ancestors into the lineage or, to phrase it differently, the substantial kinship of the living to the person of their ancestors, the need to correctly fulfill the rites that allow the dead to achieve every stage of their course, if only to avoid their anticipated, unexpected, and vengeful return, also illustrates this attention to the presence of the past and issues forth from the Sanle logic-the logic of the second case. We shall try to see later how this second case can ask questions of the first, in other words how remembrance can question hope.

Let uS' begin by reflecting on the words themselves. The Littre defines oblivion as "the loss of remembrance." This definition is less obvious than it appears--or more subtle: what we forget is not the thing itself, the "pure and simple" events as they happened (the "diegesis," in


the language of semioticians), but the remembrance. The remembrance, what does that mean? Still going by Littre (it is useful to go back to the dictionary for it lists the thinking traps of which we spoke earlier), remembrance is an "impression": the impression "that remains in the memory." As for the impression, it is "the effect

exterior objects have on the sense organs." For this definition what is forgotten is the. event

already dealt with, internal mate~iafT;-some way; hot

aEsolute, i~dep;nden~ty, tut~f a lirst treatment (the-~pressi~;;'rof :.vhich oblivion is perliaps onl the natural continuation. Of course, one oes not forget everything. But neither does one remember everything. Remembering or forgetting is doing gardener's work, selecting, ptuning. Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower. Those plants that achieve their destiny, those flourishing plants have in some way forgotten themselves in order to transform: between the seeds or the cuttings from which they were born and what they have become there is hardly any apparent relationship anymore. In that sense, the flower is the seed's

oblivion (let us remember the verse line of Malherbe that continues the story: '~nd the fruit has gone past

the promise of flowers"). Perhaps the validity of my comparison can be con

tested and one might object that vegetable transformations are necessary and expected, that plants do ~ achieve their destinvbut realize their agm4a. This is not 7he case for remembrances because, in the beginning at


least, they are subjected to the contingency of the event, to the accidents of existence. Still, let us ask the following question: When we know someone well, when we

have already seen that person tested by love, mourning, or suffering, are We not able to foresee the events, the types of events that would "have an effect" on him or her, as they say and as Littre more or less states? And also the way in which he or she will remember them, transform, and ~e them as well, or in the long run forget them? Not to mention those that he

or she will refuse, suppress, deny, put in a corner right away in order not to think about it anymore? In its final form, then, the question would be: Is it not true that a given individual-an individual subjected like all others to event and history-has particular and specific remembrances as well as things forgotten? I shall risk setting up a formula: tell me what and I will tell you who you_are.

Perhaps one never knows anyone else well enough to make this kind of prediction (and yet ... ). But that is not quite the question. Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which

we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet-torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome:

they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little

I •


as we may care to, as our heart tells us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize theit shadows, colors, and relieE Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed.

Am I in the process of speaking about childhood memories? Yes and no: yes, provided that I specify that, in these terms, sometimes very different phenomena come together and seem to intermingle; no, to the extent that, beyond childhood memories, some memories are found that I would like to call "infantilized." These are memories worked over by oblivion, aged as some African statues are artificially aged when they are briefly buried unde{ground to acquire a patina, and to the extent that, on this side of these memories,

traces are spotted-what psychoanalysts call mnestic traces-that for no obvious reason haunt the individu

al's present but cannot always be assigned to a specific time and place, enshrined inside the anecdote of an authenticated remembrance.

Sometimes we are glad to give the patina of days long gone to rather recent memories, so that they can be positioned inside anecdotes or detailed accounts, thereby even giving them a kind of autonomy, of independence in comparison to the precise chronology.

~emor~s a smoke-screen memory that glues us" . ch'''':' to the present and removes that which is too close to ~ give us the illusion or perspective. It makes the most recent memories blurry and gives them depth. Pontalis,


in his last book,2 quotes Supervielle, who, in Boire it fa source, cried out: "And you, too, back off! you people

with fine memories. Know that I feel a very special

pleasure in not remembering exact dates." For others,

this subtle shaking up of memory that owes nothing to accident (a bad memory is maintained, cultivated)

has the effect of throwing a veil of uncertainty over the

movement of t~~e; if eve!Yt~,~~.~ old?~en nothing really is; a bad memory rejuvenates. This makes--~e thmk'~f a cha~a:ci:e;:'T~R;;b~rtS;b~tier's novel Canard

au sang, an aging but not resigned intellectual who de

clares: "I am a man between rwo ages, but I have never

known which ones."

It is quite clear that Out memory would be "satu

rated" rapidly if we had to preserve every image of out

childhood, especially those of out earliest childhood.

But what is interesting is that which remains. And what

remains-~es, we shall come back

to that-what remains is the product of an erosion

caused by oblivion. Memories are crafted by oblivion as

the outlines of the shore are created by the sea.

There, I have changed metaphors. Let us drop, if

I dare say so, my comets and my satellites and let us

think of the ocean. For millennia on end, the ocean has

blindly pursued its work o€_~.:~~~~~ and ~~~=~~!0g: t~ those who know how to read, the result (a landscape)

reilly nas to have something to sayaI;OUt die resist~ and weakness of the shore, o{ili--e" nature of its ro~k~' ari.Cflrs ~~iC'o"f its faults ;:;J.d its fractures, and whatever

ei~~'~·.:'S~~~~hing, too, of course:-~ut the press~;~s --of the ocean; but the strength and the direction of these

pressures also depend on the shapes of the submarine


relief-that extension of the earthly landscape ... On

me whole:ilien, ;omething of the complicity berween

earth and sea, which have both contributed to the

lengthy work of elimination of which the present land

scape is the result. In order for the marine metaphor to

be more or less to the point, we should mention more specifically those mushroomed landscapes where, as

on the coast of northern Brittany or in the China Sea, terresttial fragments-islets, broken rocky masses

seem to have spread themselves across the sea in such

a way that the gaze of the nonbeliever can ignore their -_.. -. -- ~--=-""''------seeming familiarity no more than he can reconstitute --....:;;;.---.... -----... -,-"'~-- .... '.--"""""'"" .......... ",.. ...... ,. .... ~" ..... -~,,. .. -~-."'.," .. , ... ,-" ... ~ .. --.. their lost integrEJr.

In short, oblivion is the life force of memory and

remembrance is its product.

The nature and the quality of remembrance thus

produced remain to be pondered. Childhood memo

ries are similar to remembrance-pictu~es: ghostly ap

pearances that, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more

insistently, haunt the common aspect of our existence,

vanished landscapes or faces we sometimes find again

in our dreams as well, incongruous details, surprising

in their apparent insignificance. It is a strange and dis

appointing experience to go in search of one's oldest

memory. For it is rare that we content ourselves with

allowing images 'to come to us without trying - wi~h someone else's help when that is still possibfe-to date~

. ---. /" them, situate them, and link them, in short turn them! c.ce .. L.v;l'

into a narrative.

As soon as one risks making "remembrances" into

a tale by bringing order and clarity to what at first

were merely confused and unique impressions, one


risks never to remember anything but the first tale

or those that followed it. The trouble with childhood

memories is that they are soon reshaped by the tales of

all those who take charge of them: parents or friends

who integrate them into their own legend.

Still, as soon as we distance ourselves from the tale,

as soon as we give up turning what we call "remem

brances" into a story, we distance ourselves from memory

too perhaps, and it is not certain that the analysand who

works hand in hand with his analyst is the only one or

the main one making an assiduous effort to remember.

Perhaps what he seeks to discover or glimpse is on this

side of all memory. That is what Pontalis suggests, in

any case.

Freud sees psychoanalytic treatment first of all as

a passing thro!$h the "recall" of factual and psychic ~----~--~-~ events, Pontalis reminds us. But, he wonders, does

repression truly have a bearing on remembrances? To

respond to that question, he wonders first what a re

membrance is exactly. Is it a reality buried in the atti.~'J c aur memory that may re~erge intact, under the cover -- -----of a tactile or taste sensation, as with Proust, stan:ing

f~ a word, a coincidep.c;~~~ is s~metimes the case in treatment? Or is it yet something else? Pontalis sugges;;~'-is something else. And

to su~mon that something else he begins with a first

remark: all our remembrances (even those to which we

are most attached because they moor us to the certainty

of our continuity, our identity) are "screens," not in the

sense that they would conceal older memories, but in

the sense that they "serve as a screen" to "traces" they


both conceal and contain at one and the same time.

These traces are apparently trivial and arise unexpect

edly in the mind of those who let themselves drift off in

reverie or make the effort of self-analysis: "the pattern

of the wallpaper of their childhood room, the smell of

the parents' bedroom in the morning, a word caught

in passing ... " What is inscribed and stands out, he

continues, "is not the remembrance but the traces, the

signs of the absence." In some way, these traces are dis

connected from any possible or credible tale; they hav~ Deen freed from the rememb.I;.~~

But what is a trace, a "mnestic trace"? To answer

that new question, Pontalis, by following Freud, suggests

several response components. First of all, he tells us,

memory is plural, there are several "mnestic systems."

In the second place, one should pass from the notion of

trace to that of the traced, the line, the secret and un

conscious repressed line. Repression does not apply to

the event, to the remembrance, or to the isolated trace

as such, but to the connections between memories or - -----~ between traces, "connections of which even our rail-

way networK,T~ whi;~~;P;;d~~~d ~,,~.elx.g;?.;,:~~,~~%~!.h.~,~~~l~~:: (101). Therefore, Pontalis concludes, one should remember less

but rather make associations, free associations as the

Surrealists tried to do, that is to say "separate the es

tablished, well-rooted links in order to have other ones

appear that are often dangerous liaisons ... " (102).

From all of this Pontalis is able to deduce a few

prescripts concerning finality and the method of analy

sis. But one uncertainty remains about the nature of


the place where the path, thus opened, ends up: that is the place of the "that" (thus named by default: the unspeakable that). This is the place where the question the analyst sometimes thinks he hears and the one the ethnologist also perceives when he observes the relationship of the believer to his "fetish," to his "god-object," is no longer one of identity but one of existence; no longer "Who am I?" but "What am I?"

If I have been anxious to thus run through what I shall call the "Pontalis track"-a bit fast, ro be sure, but all the way to the end-it is solely to situate the context, the environment of the questions I would now like to try and set up, starting with a certain number of ethnological "facts." I will therefore not consider these to be "facts once and for all," like answers, but like questions, exactly like questions that are normally not formulated by the individuals who are the objects of ethnology, in that they are always in the position of giving answers, not of asking questions. In this sense, we will in a way be doing an exercise of inverted ethnology.

Undoubtedly, one could have me note that it is I who am transforming answers into questions and that this sleight of hand does not give me the authority to speak in the name of other people. Taken literally, this is an irrefutable objection. But that does not in any way detract from the fact that, put in perspective and turned back toward us in a sense, put in the interrogative, a certain number of themes not only have meaning for us, but call for answers from us-themes developed by anthropology on the basis of answers furnished to


field ethnologists one day by their "informers." These are serious answers, detailed, and doubtless diverse, for on the whole not anyone of us has either the same references or the same story or quite the same culture.

Let us then state that ethnological literature teaches us a great deal about the question of time, in any case enough to question us, that it questions us on the use we can make of time, each for ourselves or gathered in more or less ephemeral groups, of time in general, of our time, of other people's time, of time passing and time returning, of dying time and time remaining, of suspended time and time yet to happen. And, if one admits the hypothesis that 'our relationship with ~e passes essentially through oblivion, one will be less surprised that I am now suggesting another one: ethnology, the local theories of time it has collected or reconstructed, the testimonies and reflections it has somehow or other managed to gather together, put figures of oblivion in a prominent place. Of these figures it could be said thit they have ~arrative virtue (they help time to be lived as a story) ~nd that, on these grounds, they are configurations of time, in the words of Paul Ricoeur.

Our practical life, our everyday life, individual and collective, both private and public, is concerned with these forms of oblivion. First we shall mention them by sticking to the purely descriptive level so that, in the end, we can ask ourselves the following question: from the co~posite of these reflections, which have bearing on the use of time than on time as such-from these indirect and pragmatic reflections, could we draw . "


something resembling wisdom, an art of living, even

a morality? The answer, if we find it, will have every chance of telling us something-not about those who will have asked the question (the "others"), even if through an intermediaty, but about those who will have attempted to answer it: ourselves.

.... ,.

life as a narrative

L

As a preliminary to the study of the forms of oblivion, I would like to say a few words about the subtle con

ne7tions realttY- and fictjpn .!!l.~.i.q.t;!llo-' and to express a few reservations about the manner in which we specialists in human and social sciences usually approach this subjecr. This manner translates the unilaterality of our point of view-not to be confused with ethnocentrism or egocentrism: it may even be exactly the opposite. For example, when we are ethnologists we can be tempted into thinking that the others, those whom we are observing, live a kind of fiction to which we do not subscribe but which we do study: essentially, it is precisely to study it that we have gone to Africa, Amazonia, and Oceania-to study a particular fiction in a particular place. But careful! It is a double fiction and the person who sees only one side of it runs the risk of having illusions and of theorizing for nothing. It is double in a very simple sense: it has its rules, its syntax,

29

I.

30 life as a narrative

and it materializes into lived narratives, stories, and

dramas to be followed from day to day. AnJifthere is ~

a good chance that one might again find something of

the rules and the syntax in the unfolding of the events

(despite the exceptions and transgressions that are the other rule of the practice), one can safely bet that from

the syntax one will never be able to deduce the infinite

variety of stories that more or less respect it. At this

point an ambiguity slips in. Paul Ricoeur is greatly

enticed by the analyses of an anthropologist such as

Clifford Geertz.1 Indeed, these analyses emphasize the

wealth of symbolic mediations that organize practice

in a given cultural milieu. Ricoeur is enticed because

ethnology thus seems to furnish him with particularly

clear examples of immanent symbolism in the practical

field, which fadlitates and commands the narration

that may be drawn from or inspired by it: if the action

can be recounted, "it is because it has already been ar

ticulated in signs, rules, and norms" (1: ll3). Up to this point we have nothing to say. Clifford

Geertz discusses culture as a system of symbols that are

in perpetual interaction. And in this definition Paul

Ricoeur finds support for his own definition of what he

calls mimesis I: to imitate or represent the action (which

arises from mimesis II) one needs to "pre-understand

how it is with human behavior: its semantics, its sym

bolism, its temporality" (125). In fact, literature "would be forever incomprehensible if it did not delineate what

in human action already makes an appearance" (125).

Where, then, is the ambiguity? On both sides, it

seems to me. Geertz, when speaking of a culture as

!"·, •. :~·I;u;\:ML 2

life as a narrative 31

text, rather describes syntax (pretext or context); and

Ricoeur, who, by making mimesis I into the prerequisite

for mimesis IL seems to exclude the possibility that life

is lived and not merely written like a fiction, that in

some way mimesis I and mimesis II can be implied one from the other.

I fully understand that Geertz is interested in sym

bolism and Ricoeur in literature but, in doing so, they

forget or set aside something of the "practical field"

they want to analyze hermeneutically. Ricoeur describes

very well the progression of the interpretive approach,

characteristic of symbolist or "comprehensive" anthro

pology. A symbolic system (read: a culture) provides

"a context of description for specific actions." Through

symbolic convention, a gesture, an attitude may be un

derstood in this or that way. And it is because symbols

are useful to the internal interpretation of the action

that they may in turn be interpreted; thus, the symbolic

brings a readability to the action. But where "symbolic

mediations" are concerned, Ricoeur speaks precisely of

texture and not of text. He notes at the same time that

the "texture" of the action could not be associated with

the text the ethnologist writes "with ideas, on nomologi

cal principles that are the contribution peculiar to sci

ence itself and that, consequently, may not be confused

with the categories under which a culture understands

itself" (ll5). However, he then adds that one may well

speak of the action itself as a "quasi text" to the extent

that the symbols, serving as internal interpretants to

the action, "provide the rules of meaning according

to which such a behavior may be interpreted" (here

£ - Ii $

2 @i

32 Life as a narrative

we should read: interpreted from the outside-by the ethnologist).

\Vhat remains is that this "quasi text" looks more like a dictionary-a" directory" Ricoeur himselfwritesthan like an actual text. More precisely, it would not be a text unless the practices observed by the ethnologist

in one way or another never recounted anything but culture. This hyperculturalist hypothesis of an integral and reciprocal transparency between sociery, culture,

and individuals would not be supported by anyone today and, undoubtedly, not by Geertz either. It alone, though, would give coherence to the theory of culture as a text taken, if I dare say so, literally.

. Let us now get back to Paul Ricoeur for a moment and to his outline of the three mimeses, of which I shall quite crudely recall the total method: mimesis I is, so to speak, a "self-mimesis," the various symbolic

mediations that render action possible and thinkable within a given world; mimesis II is the world of the scene of intrigue and tale, "narrative configurations" that place the world in historical accounts or in tales of fiction; mimesis III is "the interaction of the world of the text and of the world of the listener or the reader"

(136). I would now like to dwell a bit on the difficulty I mentioned a little earlier. Does the real life we live and

of which we are witnesses every day-whether we are ethnologists or not, psychologists or not, hermeneuts or not-not present itself as a tracery of stories, intrigues, and events that involve the private or public sphere, which we tell each other with greater or lesser talent

and conviction ("Listen, you're not going to believe me,

Life as a narrative 33

but something wild happened to me ... ")? An analysis

of the symbolic type will very obviously be incapable of exhausting or even approaching such complexity and such movement. On the other hand, all the features by which Ricoeur characterizes the operation of setting the plot that allows one to pass from mimesis I to mimesis II, from social life to literary narrative, would be just as applicable to the scenarios oflife lived, which are, furthermore, constantly the objects of spontaneous tales by those who live them, and of more elaborate accounts (televised reports or newspaper articles) by those who observe and comment upon them. Ricoeur is perfectly well aware of this and notes besides that the understanding of the action is not content to explore the conceptual network and the symbolic mediations of the action, but that it goes "so far as to recognize temporal structures in the action that call for narration." But his aim is the na1'rative as such and the game, the role, and the status of time in this tale even more so. From this point of view, he remains more interested in examining how human time is configured or reconfigured in literary narrative than in working the inverse path. It seems to me that is the reason why he does not linger on the reference to Geertz, of which he retains only the initial inspiration, and not without adding a few touches to it (in his eyes, historians, because they tell stories, are

captivating in a different way!). It is also the reason why he does not push the analysis of the temporal charac

teristics of the action "to the point where one would be within one's right to speak of a pre-narrative structure

of the temporal experience, as suggested by our familiar

!2

~ ..


way of speaking of stories that happen to us or stories in which we are involved, or quite simply the story of a life" (118).

The unilaterality of the ethnologist's or the philosopher's point of view is very obvious here: if we define others as living a kind of fiction (in which, let us not forget, a multiplicity of strange characters appear: gods, spirits, sorcerers ... ), we thereby define ourselves as objective observers, at the very most careful not to let ourselves be carried offinto the stories of others, not to let a

role be imposed upon us; in doing so we do not think of the fictions we ourselves are living. If we devote ourselves to the study of the narrative, we sanction a point

of view from which we analyze the modalities of exploration and of exploitation of life through the narrative, but we deliberately ignore the modalities through which life itself, individual and collective life, is constructed as

fiction in the broad sense (not as fiction opposite to the truth of the narrative the historians claim to be "true,"

but as narration, a scenario that obeys a certain num

ber of formal rules). The principal operative of setting individual and collective life into "fiction" is oblivion.

What I now want to study-study or, at least, grapple with-are the modalities of oblivion, the staging and the implementation that "mold" time in life itself in order to make a kind of tale out of it that those who live it tell each other at the same time that they are living it.

The word fiction remains disconcerting, despite all

the precautions one might take. Not only, as Ricoeur indicates, because it can be used in the broad sense of


"narrative configurations" or in the restricted sense of an "untrue" tale, but also because today we are living more and more in a world invaded by images and fic

tion, but this time it is a fiction that has no nameable author. The category of author in the audiovisual arena has long been specified, diversified, and restricted all at the same time. (For example, a distinction is made between the script writer and the director of the film,

not to mention all those who contribute to the creation very directly under different titles.) But this phenome

non became more pronounced and its nature changed from the moment the "product" (whether audiovisual

or literary, for the audiovisual has no lrumopoly on new production techniques) was serialized by teams applying proven formulas, sometimes not without talent (that is another question), or experimenting with others ... From there it is only one step, frequently taken, to the

cloning of serials of all kinds. I do not want to dwell on the notion of author here, but simply to suggest that the multiplying of images, the increasing popularity of publicity and tourism, and the fictionalizing of geographic space make the use of the term fiction even more difficult today. For, far from being limited to Ricoeur's "narrative configurations," whether "true" or not, historical or romantic, it risks being applied more each day to the relationship each one of us sustains with

others, the world, and history, through images. Now "fiction," the "fictionalizing" of which I, for

my part, am thinking is the opposite of the "fictional

whole" that threatens us, corresponds far more to the "pre-narrative structure" Ricoeur mentions and about


which I simply want to suggest that it sets the real itself

in a temporal, diachronic, and dramatic form, prior to its possible role in the elaboration of a narrative "imitating" the reaL

The ethnologist is a little like Jean Ie Bon at Poitiers: he has to watch both his and his left flank. I

have hardly begun to speak of pre-narrative structure in order to seek its trace and its Hlustration in the ethnographic data that might be available to me, when I

thought I could see my ethnological superego frown: let us say, my most attentive colleagues frown. If I claim

that others are living in a fiction-moreover, in their fiction-and I place myself by definition outside of that fiction, outside of all fiction even, because I claim to be developing "documents," as Bataille said, by transcribing what I have under my eyes, am I not then em

phasizing the noncontemporaneity of the observer and the observed, of the ethnologist and the informer? This is preciselywhatJohannes Fabian assailed and the trace

of which is found in all anthropological literature. 2 In short, am I not contributing to the reproduction and

amplification of ethnographic fiction? It is true that, in the situation of traditional ethno

graphic investigation, the investigator and those investigated are not situated in the same time, are not literally contemporaries. investigator has a ptoject of shorter or longer duration (articles, a book ... ) and a presentthe present, provisionally put at the service of the project, that constitutes the very time of the investigation. The investigated, from his side, whatever his role in the

launching of a project that he contributes to launching,

!i3


has only a vague idea of it at best. When the investigator and his informer eat together or are worried about the storm that is brewing, they inscribe themselves into the same duration and this synchronicity brings sharing: the sharing of food, the sharing of preoccupations. As soon as it comes ro their "work," it takes a different

direction. The ethnologist seems to treat his informer as the depository of a total and collective memory (encompassing the past, myths, institutions, and the vocabulary of the group), but this apparentideal of exhaustiveness is an Hlusion. The former applies himself to collecting in

dications likely to give him ideas or to confirm those he already has, always with to a preeXiSting corpus of texts and theories-the existing ethnology-which

he is supposed to know, illustrate, complete, or discuss. The latter believes that, with the help of a few elders or some specialists, he is providing the investigator with

the history of his group, as he sees it. Later on, in written form, the ethnologist will draw attention to the fact that this "history" issues from a short genealogical memory and quickly rumbles into a mythic evocation of ancestors and origins-and a few local theories (of sickness,

of the person, of initiation ... ). These constitute in his /'lJ eyes a veritable body of knowledge, the expression of a permanent wisdom and of an effective power, whereas

the ethnologist is more likely to see in this a "belief I system," even if it means questioning himself about this term, without the misunderstanding ever really d d-,.t,b4 being clarified. An incident may occasionally attest r1

- ~S''''''lV\ to this, fOr example, when villagers excuse themselves . for not being able to deliver the ultimate "secret" of an

i< l'


initiation ritual to an ethnologist who has no need of it but out of politeness will express his understanding and regret. The information from the informer constitutes for the ethnologist the primary material of a reelaboration that it will tum into a science, whereas in the eyes of the informer the ethnologist is witness to an ancient knowledge that is still operationaL Furthermore, it happens that, during the time of the investigation, both of them forget the noise and the interference sparked by an

actuality that is nevertheless more intrusive every day. But the fiction of others changes meaning from the

moment that we become aware that we are all living fictions. If I manage to get rid of the "point of view's unilaterality," the fact that others are living in a "fiction"

in a "narrative," let us say, in order to do away with ambiguity-it seems to me that this will contribute to bringing them closer to me and me closer to them, because I too am living in fiction and narrative. At bottom, it is my idea that, through the questions they ask me and the change of framework they impose upon me, others help me to become aware of the narrative dimension of every existence, mine as well as theirs, and that this awareness definitively prevents me from assigning them to a time ("mythical" or "magical") that is fundamentally different from mine. Surely, our fictions are different, but that is the general rule: no individual

fiction is rigorously contemporary to another (everyone has his or her past and expectations) and the differences brought about by the investigative situation and the culture are a matter of degree, not of nature.

f f

l


How could we doubt that we live several tales simul

taneously? We know quite well that we playa different role in each of these tales and that we do not always play the good part. Furthermore, we know quite well that some of them are more intimate than others, are more personal for us. We do not always resist the desire to

reinterpret them, remodel them, in order to adapt them to the one we are in the process of living. Sometimes they even inspire us to want to keep a journal, that is, to

make a true text out of it, a narrative of which we can measure day after day all that it holds for us in the way of good and bad surprises by counting the blank pages we have not yet filled. In either case, written or not, these tales are always (even when they are not "fabrications," "products of the imagination," "exaggerations" likely to arouse smiles from other witnesses) the fruit of memory and oblivion, of a work of composition and

recomposition that translates the tension exerted by the expectation of the future upon the interpretation of

the past. Moreover, we are and are not the author of these

tales, for we sometimes have the feeling of being caught in someone else's text and of following or being subjected to its development without being able to intervene. Being captured by someone else's tale may have an emotional relationship as its ftamework and object:

love, jealousy, anger, or pity. But more often it is the result of the encounter between two different levels of narrative: thus the story of an individual may fall over (it may even topple over into death), because it is caught


up in history, following the declaration of a war, for example. Of course, there are intermediary levels between the intimate and the historical levels (that of universal history in the process of being made and told): family history, professional history, the news, local news items, politics, sports. These srories can be powerful enough to go to our head, send us into the street to holler our joy or our sorrow because "our" candidate has won the elections, because a soccer team has won the World

Cup, because a princess has died. I don't put these events on the same level, I am only emphasizing that each one of is inserted into a tale that involves us, because it constitutes our version of the facts. We have

our place therein, however minimal or passive it may

be, just as thousands or millions of other individuals have their place in the version they develop-and, from

this point of view, it matters little that all these versions are inHuenced, shaped, sometimes even dictated by official speeches or the media.

Because of the extremely variable scope of the number of individuals they involve, these tales could be arranged according to a segmentary logic of the kind once studied by British anthropologists in Africa. These are distinct segments on a certain social level (segments of lineage) that are linked to another level of social activity

(lineage regroups lineage segments and sets itself apart from other lineages) and units peculiar to this level combine on another level in order to define superior units (the dan groups lineages together and sets itself

apart from other dans). A narrative may involve a single individual: a passion is sometimes lived in solitude, in

ltfe as a narrative 41

blindness; it has the of distancing the others, aU the others and sometimes even the object of the passion when it is not shared. Let us listen to what Stendhal tells us in his Promenades dans Rome about Roman songs and their melancholy: "For me, what is touching in it is the music, imprinted with such a profound passion and so little concerned with its neighbor that it becomes tedious because of it. What does the neighbor matter to the impassioned man? All he sees in nature is the unfaithfulness of his mistress and his own despair." It may be hoped that this impassioned individual, deaf

and blind to everything that is not the tale of his own unhappiness, will find his spirits and his freedom back again to be involved in other tales. These would be

tales that are shared, more collective, unified, or at the very least interwoven, possibly structured by a common calendar (such as the athletic calendar that reproduces

the cyclical character of the chrono-meteorological calendar and of the Christian calendar with its seasons, its

openings and closings, its holidays, and its quasi liturgy). The soccer lover lives in the expectation of the ups and downs and the events of the championship story. When I say that he lives in this expectation, I mean

it in the strongest sense of the word: this adventure is a part of his life and essentially exists as a told to oneself or to others-which, of course, does not mean that the soccer lover does not also live other stories, that he is not interested in his family, in his profession, or in politics, for example. All these "intermediary" tales (intermediary between what comes under the private

sphere and what is linked to the greater society) have a

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point in common: they fascinate those they involve (the soccer lovers, colleagues at the office, the activists in a party) and are entirely indifferent to those they do not involve-those who do not have this author-character relationship with them that defines the "commitment." In these cases, the exteriority of the look and of the ear can be total and absolute: "You know, all that stuff is

Greek to me! ... " Another tongue, another language, another tale, it all comes to the same thing. On the other hand, a major event or one presented as such, a collective threat, or a great societal question may raise the level of involvement considerably-and, consequently, the level of the collective identity of the authors-characters involved.

Moreover, the mechanical logic of the segmentary model (which, sociologically, has never been anything but a tool for describing lineage and clan societies, though sometimes a contested tool) does not exactly apply to the sequence of the levels of narration I have JUSt outlined. For the author-character is, at every level

. of the narrative, involved both individually and collectively. He is individually involved because the plurality

of the tales in which he is engaged affects each one of them (one does not watch a soccer match with the same pleasure when one has been threatened with a lay-off), and besides, the story of his life is not made up of a superimposing of tales, but cuts right through them with an original and idiosyncratic line. And he is collectively involved, for, however solitary his path may be,

he is at least haunted by the presence of the other in the form of a regret or a certain nostalgia. Thus, in a differ-

1


ent way but always indicated, the presence of another or others is as obvious on the level of the most intimate tale as is that of the single individual on the most inclusive level of the plural or collective tale. Perhaps it is even the game of referral that shows itselfin every type of narrative (confession, confidences, comments made after drinking, being called as a witness) through which, from time to time, an individual feels the need to recapitulate his existence, to tell his life, to give it some coherence: the play between the "distentio" and the "intentio" of the

mind divided between memory, attention, and expectation, to use the Augustinian terms on which Ricoeur commented, or, more simply, between the discord of singular times and the expected concordance of their reconciliation in narratives with several voices.

What the ethnologist is confronted with, then, when he lands-amid a foreign group, are first of all narratives of this kind, narratives with variable implications that he tries to understand linguistically (most often with the help of an interpreter, at least in the begin

ning). Then he tries to understand them in their double dimension of specific and singular discourses that raise

general and collective questions. In this respect, I don't believe that it is more difficult for a newcomer, stranger to both milieus, either to understand a sick African villager who mentions the series of attacks of which he thinks his family has made him the object, the list of remedies to which he has had recourse, the healers he has consulted, and possibly the dreamlike episodes that for him have the value of a diagnosis, or to follow the statements of a young company executive describing


the difficult relationships he is having with his sub

ordinates and with his immediate superior, his career

strategy, the training he has been made to take in order

to maintain his morale as a fighter, and the neworgani

zation chart the management has put in place. I do not

mean to compare these pronouncements from the point of view of their credibility (of the more or less rational

context in which they are inserted or of their practical

efficiency), but to remember that they both correspond

to an analysis of reality, clarified in a narrative that

simultaneously puts into play an individual story and

collective references. In either case, I see no inconve

nience whatsoever in considering that the observer is

recording "fictions," "narrations" that are quite foreign

to him, but the reasons of which he can penetrate.

The expression "participatory ethnology" has no other

meaning and presupposes no kind of mystical fusion

with others. One can enter into the reasons of an indi

vidual or a collectivity without confusing oneself with them. When, with regard to acts of "sorcery," Evans

Pritchard confessed that he had managed to reason in r the terms of his Ashanti interlocutors, he was doing

nothing other than designating his familiarity with a

I specific rhetoric and grammar and his understanding

of tales that implemented them.

I Of course, one may assume that the fact of record-

ing other people's tales, of "participating" in their "fic

tions," does not happen without having an effect on

the life of the observer and on his own "fictions." The

narratives of either cannot coexist without influencing

each other or, more precisely, without reshaping each

t;}? life as a narrative 45 r? '" '-'", f..v'"

, other's tales. This is true of ethnological investigation,

from which neither those who were its object nor he or

she who prompted it ever come out unscathed. After

wards they will not quite have the same life as before;

to be more precise, everything they will have to live and

to say will in one way or another integrate the plurality

of the narratives produced on that occasion. On a wider

scale, this is true for the conflictual encounters between

collectivities-phenomena of colonization-of which

we know quite well that one of the consequences is the

production of new tales, both on the individual and on

the collective level. Today we are beginning to under

stand (to the greatest dread of racists of any feather)

that in the long run these will perhaps transform the

lives and the tales of the former colonizers as much as

those of the formerly colonized. This is how the history

of art, and especially of music, attains a global level of

implication that has perhaps no precedent in the his

tory of humanity. Before tackling the question of the role of oblivion

in the configurations of lives in the process of bein&

told (life-narratives that are being lived while being told

within the continuity of consciousness-weich does not

prevent those who are "living their lives" from telling it

to others also), I w~uld like to come back to the notion

of fiction, or rather, to reflect on the connection be

tween the narrative dimension of existence, which I just

mentioned briefly, the tales in the most current sense

of the term (recounted or written accounts), and that

specific category of tales that Jean-Fran<;:ois Lyotard has

referred to as "great tales." These are the modern myths

2 'h'

!iiJ


of the future that, befure they too become obsolete, seem to echo the first "great tales," those myths that concern themselves with the origins of nature, the birth of humanity, or the founding of cities.

First of all, an assessment that is also a contradiction: it is through fiction that one leaves myth. JeanPierre Vernant embarks on this theme when he notes that over time the Greeks adhered all the more strongly to their religion insofar as they perceived it through works that were fiction in their own eyes-the epic, tragedy.3 First orally transmitted, then in written form, the tales of the myths aroused a belief "of the kind one grants to a tale of which one knows it is only a tale."

r This is a belief that is at once distanced and strong, to

L the extent that the transformation of the myth (imply

ing its ~ial oblivio::) presents itself as the expression of a collective memory that binds the group together. We thus see dearly how tales of fiction take their dis-tance from the myths in which their origin nonetheless resides, and how in some way they themselves from

religion by reproducing it. Walter Benjamin alluded to this "taking distance" by remarking that the fairy tale "shows us the first steps taken by mankind to dispel mythic nightmares."" He observed that it was in the fairy tale that characters such as the "innocent," "the

younger brother," the traveler, and the sage appeared, who, by using ruse and insolence in turn, keep the violence of Nature in check and succeed in making her their accomplice. The paradox of a novelist such as Joseph Conrad is that he succeeds in inventing a narrator (or rather a double narrator, for Marlow is the narrator-

a :4 aza ! &


hero in a tale within the tale, while the narrator of the total account remains anonymous), a double narrator, then, who has us go back in the opposite direction into the "heart of darkness," the mythical nightmare, the "horror" that Kurtz-the hero who confronted the

primal savagery-mentions in a last gasp. It is ttue that the account of this return to the myth is precisely the story of Marlow'; trip there and his return; Marlow escapes the nightmare, while its victim, Kurtz, is inca

pable of saying anything about it. For his part, Propp confirmed in his Morphologie du conte5-noted by Ricoeur6-that the tale was the transformation (trans

formation: the mixture of remembrance and oblivion) of religion: "A culture dies, a religion dies, and their contents are transformed into a tale" (131). But, in fact,

it is not a question of an operation in two times: death of .religion, birth of the tale _This dual opposition, that

had been of interest to the College of Sociology and especially to Guastalla, Caillois, and de Rougemont, should be understood not as a product ofhi;rorical contingencies, nor as a corruption of the myth thereby

en!ailing it.:'. replacem'ent by li.t~J!!!!re, but ~s a p!::!e

a.~!:L~£le i~~.:::hl effec£;)t is 'perhaps every religion's

~~:in¥~ be. re£roduced only .~I.s~an~ ItS ~:t~, tecause t1;is destin~ e;~tia!!l:2~~: What the Greek e~mple suggests is that religi~ is develo£ed .only by banishing the myth through the tale, that reiigious development itself summons a profusi~f tales which, taking religion as object or pretext,~g";ssively chang;;its moda11Ues ~~Th;;~ tales th~-;:~~fve;"b-;;lo~ro-Jif~~;Tir;;;ry g;nres-epic,

JUd


tale, tragedy ... -that one might be tempted to situate closer or farther from the myths to which they refer. But it should be taken into account that they also extend themselves into more speculative, historical, or

philosophical works that show the distance from the original myth even more, even if those works stem from religious apologetics.

The first, and in my opinion incontestable, teaching of ethnology is that intimate narratives with which individual and personal lives are identified play the same role in this regard as do literary tales that fall under specific genres. All ethnologists who have worked with diviners or healers cultured enough to cite fragments

of myths to support their practice and simultaneously producing a medical diagnosis and a mythical exegesis have been able to note that those pronouncements of theirs that corresponded to an important episode in the life of the consultant could, by the very fact of this simultaneity, enrich the reference myth with annotations and unpublished developments. When, early in the morning, the shaman of a Native American group reports the adventures of the night's pathways he organized in order to meet gods and the dead and to pursue hidden human souls, his tale adds something to the common mythic representation. Michel Leiris gives a very interesting description ()f individuals possessed by the zar in Ethiopia? He notes, on the one hand, that the main zar of an individual, the one who possesses him

most frequently, has been chosen because he resembled him (thus, it is the zar who "resembles his horse" and

not the reverse). On the other hand, all that can befall

tt tit


this individual during the possession (and thus the zar

incarnated within him) can later be found again in the tales of mythmaking that concern the zar. That is when

the individual story comes back into the myth. Some "syncretic" cults, the ".Afro-Brazilian" kind,

illustrate this release of the myth through the tale in a particularly clear way. These cults, indeed, adapt themselves to the pre~ent, to circumstances and requirements of the present. At the same time, they still refer more or

less distinctly to a distant past, to origins, by evoking a few mythic figures linked to forest, water, sky, and earth ... Ultimately, in the Brazilian umbanda or in the cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela, for example, one Sees "strata" of characters intervene who all have more or less the same function (possessing a human and speaking through his or her mouth) without having the same status; divinities of nature, heroes from history like Bolivar, and recent stars in public life (an artist or a physician). The distance taken from the original myth, which furthermore is the object of diverse and confusing versions, is then expressed by the fact that, progressively, the most ancient figures no longer "descend," no longer "possess" human beings, no longer

speak through their mouths. At the cost of some simplifications, one might suggest that the more the cult's

goal is to produce and master the tales people make out of theirdaily misfortunes, the more the possessing powers (those who respond to them) grow scarce and approach the topicality of the present. Thus, the myth leaves through the cult and the latter is summarized more and more by tales that deal with the everyday. At

Ii i r· .


the end of the process, all that would remain present are patients talking about their misery and consultants listening to them in silence and sometimes, only sometimes, answering them.

Closer to us, examples are legion of the influence that, in the end, the multitude of lives lived and feelings

singularly expressed can have on the weightiest dogmas. Undoubtedly, there is no history of religions today (including the monotheistic ones) that should not first take ' into consideration the two phenomena that the supermodern, present "acceleration" causes to converge in a totally new way: setting the tale and individualization.

Up until no~Thave tried to show that the narrative dimension must be taken into consideration when one is interested in history, in the short and the long term. In this regard, I have taken the example of what one

might.call the paradox of religion, ::hish ~ like i!;S: na£Eatlve development to suppress its mythica ongm. Finally, I reminded the reader that this narrative de

velopment concern's not only sanctioned literary forms but also the tales that border each individual duration, each life in the process of being lived and being told. Thus, the paradox of religion would proceed from the

work of mourning and of oblivion carried out by the tale ~n the myth. In other words, every religion could be

. defined, from that angle, as a religion "of the end of r,:!igion," to pick up on the expression Marcel Gauchet ~erved for what he considers as the C'fltistian excep': tion in his book Le Desenchantement du monde. 8

To conclud;'= do ~edare ask the questi;;n of "great tales"? Are they dead? Are they really dead? In order


to respond, we would, as in a song of Reggiani, first have to find the body, know where it has been placed. Where to look for it? In the libraries? In the archives of the Communist or other parties? Or else in the manuals of political economy, since there were and perhaps still are great liberal tales as well? I shall only mention here those myths of the future which, since the Age of

Enlightenment and the Revolution, have marked the history of humanity with the seal of hope, of progress, or of horror, to make a brief allusion to the connection that the "life-tales" of individuals maintain with the great tales that claim universality. The history of ideas, in all its forms, does not know the former and is only interested in the latter. The myths of the future, though, have been lived by millions of individuals who believed in them, as they say, but who have above all

created a personal idea of the meaning they should be given. Thereby they have even chosen to construct and also to interpret a part of their own life, to integrate the mythic theme into the score of their existence (the musical metaphor lends itself well to the evocation of life as a tale, with its changes in key, mode, and tempo). Through their millions of "little tales" they have weighed down on the meaning of the great tale with its global claim; they have taken it out of its gangue, pounded it, split it up. Many of them have not had to go back on their opinion at the moment of disillusion: their own tale was not in question. And, in my opinion, this is what will always distinguish the history of communism from that of fascism: the fictions of the one are not those of the other, and that difference is

-, ,~~~~~~~~~..",p,m,,?}i"!I!II!iiji.' --.-,_:: __ 2_-.' .: _:., .. It .a •• I,IL ZUliEl, diSI:a .• 212, ___ .n ___ s •..• S X'


blindingly obvious as soon as one pays attention to indi

vidual fictions, to the individual lives that dare or dare

not to be told . ..r.he fascist has no memory. He learns

nothing. That also means that he forgets nothing, and

that he lives in the perpetual present of his obsessions. Many former communists have evoked the past of their

illusion. Do we never hear the voice of others?

the three figures of oblivion

'~~"""-~~=-O-,-"'-~~~="'9-9'e1,,',""!!!,,,,*mdJI!IlIl,iiI\lI'JiJ ___ •• i'i IZ •••••• ,I! ."i.al" •••••••••••• ,11 ••• 1 I, •• Z ••••••• ii·<

The memory of the past, the expectation of the future, and the attention to the pre;;;;:t~rdain ;;;0;( ot"i:'hegreit African rites, ~which ·ili~;"~;~~~ill~" eke as syste~intended for thinking and managing time. If we try to distinguish among these rites, as I believe is possible, according to whether they set the past, the present, or the future as object of priority, it will not surprise us, despite everything, to spot overlapping areas there (and thus areas of ambivalence and ambiguity).

No dimension of time can be thought about by forgetting the others, and rites are exemplary of the tension

be.nveen memory and expectation mat characterizes the present, to the extent that it organizes the passage from a befure to an after, of which it is at once the interpreter and the landmark.

Three "figures" or forms of oblivion can be seen in certain rites that I shall qualifY as emblematic for this reason.

55

" 56 the three figures of oblivion ",ji t'

The first is that of the return, whose first ambition

is t~a I~st past again by forgetting the present-as well as the immediate past with which it tends to· be confused-in order to reestablish a continuity with the older past, to eliminate the "compound" past to the advantage of a "simple" past.

Possession is the emblematic institution of the return: in Africa as in America, he who, according to a variety of ritual forms, has been possessed by a spirit, an

ancestor, or a god DJJJ,gt,iorget this episode as soon as it is finished. It is the presence of another within him,or of another self, that is then erased from his consciousness, but the others, who surround him, have witnessed this and have sometimes been the beneficiaries of "ilie -message delivered by the possessing power through the mouth of the possessed. As for the possessed one, he "reenters himself' or "finds his own spirit again"-all expressions of our daily language that literally apply to

the description of the "return" of the possessed. The second figure is that ofru;p7ime) whose first

~bition is to "fin<;.i..m<:.J2resent by ~vlsi~nally cutting

if oFf from the past ~~<:J!!!!!!~-,~!!4> more pr~-;;rsely, l:r forgetting the future inasmuch as the latter is idemified with the return of the East. The rites that stage this

, suspension of time emblematically correspond to interregnum and sometimes off-season periods. The sexual or social reversal that on these occasions is often played (in the theatrical sense of the term) demonstrates their exceptional and, in some way, temporary character. The person who plays the inverted role (a woman imitating a man, a slave proclaiming himself to be king) plays at

the three figures of oblivion 57

abolishing the presence of that same character in himself and it is not ruled out that he gets hooked into the

role: he is no 10nS!!,j,¥hat,hE"::~ji!!..4.he forge,ts wha!_ he wiiibecome again (the same one) or will become for t~~ (a-d~ body, in the case of the slave wit; ~o follow the fate of the deceased king). The

spspense corresponds 'So a be,:;utification of the ere~~nt moment that can only be c;>£E!!sss"d o~e fu~!!:re pe:::: f~"At least I will have lived that").

The third is that of the beginning or, shall we say,

the rebeginning (and it is understood that the latter term

indicates the complete opposite of a repetition: a ~ i~ationl e pre lX re- imp y~g ~ at from th:n on, a'same life may have several begmmngs). It asptres to find the future again b for1;jetting, the past,...!2.. create tIle con . tions for a new birth that, by definition, opens

up into every~~ut favoring a single 0Iie'. The emblematic ritual form of the begmnmg or the relleginning would be the ~ioq that, under variable modalities, is alwayS"presented as procreation and birth. What is then, at the moment when a new awareness ~ time emerges, erased or forgotten is ~imulta;e~~..2:he , a"'~~'inicia;e-;;-:r;;nger is and.!h~ one he is not ret,

the same one and the other within ,[U.E1.:-The future to '''''llil~>··'-·:;··''_)I_---\''''''-''''- ... ,

bet;{ind does not yet have a shape, or more precisely, it

has the inceptive shape of the present. Finally, oblivion is always conjugated in the present:

the continued present ("I have come back"), the pres

ent form of the present perfect, which-in Frenchsignificantly uses the auxiliary to be ("I am come back"),

a verb indicating the state of being; the pure present,

58 the three figures of oblivion

the pure present of the moment ("I am here"); the inchoative present that opens up onto the future ("I am going to leave"). We could just as well say that, where ~livion is concerned, all tenses are present tenses, because the past gets lost in it or finds itself again, and the future is only sketched out in it. These figures-which have a bit of a family look about them, which resemble each other, which may sometimes be confused, because all three of them are daughters of oblivion-also find themselves in our lives again, insofar as our lives are aware of themselves, and in our books, insofar as our books speak of our lives.

Still, two details are to be mentioned before thus

widening our field of reflection. . The "figures of oblivion" and the "emblematic"

institutions that illustrate them are ambivalent: they count at once for a collective and for individuals. Posses---sion, role-reversal rituals, and initiations are social events, - --_.,-.., but at the same time they are individual tests. Social time and individual duration are taken in hand, "worked," shaped by the same rites. But for that very reason, their collective and individual meanings do not necessarily coincide. The collectivity remembers the episodes of the possession; the possessed individual must forget them. The rites of role reversal are lived as "outside of duration" by those who are its principal actOrs, but they

are only a sequence in a drama for those who organize and control its unfolding. Initiation is lived one time only by the initiate, as an inaugural moment, unspoken and irreversible, but later on, having become witnesses

to the initiation of others, the initiate and his compan-


ions will be more sensitive to the recurrent quality of the event, as were those who attended their initiation. This ambivalence has its limits, however: the rite is most often celebrated in an emotional atmosphere that brings celebrants and attendees dose; moreover, every ritual celebration is an inaugural one and a successful rite always has an inchoative value: it opens or reopens the future. The oblivion of the present, the future, and the

past:""~hi~j~" t~~_g.u~~g.~~a,,~h~·Qi[i~7i;~~~~(~n .~hat 0(i~divi.4\lals, but, in the ritual context, it is,~,"~,.",-, .. ".,_., contagious. '~Th;;;~ond remark we could make on this matter

tOuches on the notion of the individual and puts the preceding opposition (collectivitylindividual) into perspective. What every ritual scenario shows us, in fact, is

that k!!dividual identity. is consttucted at the same ~e as the relationship to and thtOugh others. The "figures of~bii;i~~~pla;yiiitIiis'regard: possession gives the possessed an increased identity in the eyes of the others; role-reversal rites are quite obviously marks of sexual or sociopolitical identity, e;en to the extent

that they stage an ~sire to be marked by it; initiation brings social status to the initiate and creates solidarity between those "promoted." The connection to time is always thought of in the singular-plural. This

mean:stliat one should be ~~·k~~ in ~;der t~ fo~g~r: whicl;i; to say in o~d~~~i~="-.·"·'·r-=·~'"·~hv'-'

",_ ..... "'".,~y,~:..-lI ••• '0iiI' ..

It was in Africa that I had my most powerful experience with return. I lived there for several years, then came back to France. Thereafter, I would always go back, at


regular intervals, for stays of a few months at a time.

The arrival at the coastal airport, bordered by a lagoon and tropical forests, has always given or imposed the same sensations on me: the burni ng moisture of the air that would hit me in the face and the smell of red earth that would grab me by the throat. The brutality of this reception, from which there was no means of escape, had no equal except for the ease with which I adapted to it. I adapted to it by immediately getting into a bath, believe me, right away finding the warmth of my friends again, the voices and the music of the "local" French language, the sounds and colors, the necessities of the moment ("Where are you taking me to dinner?"),

and the worries of the day before disappeared, as if I had left yesterday behind, in effect, and corne back to my place (horne, sweet horne!) with the smiling absentmindedness of habit. The profound charm that Africa always has in my eyes is linked to this enormous and overflowing power of welcome, which survives the past, age, friends who are gone, and which offers the loyal traveler the appeal of a sustained present.

Some travelers by vocation manage their geographic assets with forethought. They try to put something aside for the future; a few terrae incognitae, a few places to canvass, which they keep an eye on while waiting to set foot there one day. They leave themselves some future emotions. But often these are the same ones who

reserve other places for the pleasures of the return and who attempt to keep a few pieces of the past intact to be continued, to be completed, a few alternative presents,

a few unchanged settings for a few parallel lives.


They know perfectly well that these different lives are not really parallel and that, by passing from one protected youth to another, from one continent to another, they won't stop aging, but it is enough for them that these lives are intertwined with sufficient flexibility or linked with a loose enough bond for them to be able to have the illusion of warding off the flow of time, by

moving around in space. What matters to them is the bliss, or rather the in

stant, at the moment that they leave the plane, greeted by the steward and the hostesses-much like the possessed who comes OlJt of his state of possession under the tender and watchful eye of his assistants-to slip into a past they already do not remember having left,

and they feel irresistibly happy.

Still, nothing is more difficult to accomplish than a re

turn; for that one needs great power of oblivion: not to --- .. ~

succeed in forgetting one's recent past .<?r~ the other's re-c;;:rt past is to £rohibit oneself from catching uE! with the anterior past. Ulysses found only his dog; for the rest, the suitors remain too present, even when dead, and one can

bet that Penelope has greater power of oblivion than her husband, greater technique as well because she spent entire days and nights diverting the course of time, making and undoing her work. Ulysses has lived too much and is too resentful for his return not to be mostly geographic,

for him not to find it tOO difficult to slip back into the rediscovered continuity of time.

The novel of impossible oblivion and unfulfilled return, the novel of desire for vengeance, was written


by Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo resplendently and tragically illustrates the inability of the vengeful heroes to pick up the thread of time again. In fact, this inability is what defines them; it flows from their desire for action, profoundly contradictory for all that he claims to find the ancient past again by castigating those who have distorted, corrupted, and diverted it, in short by pursuing and reinforcing the image of a more recent past.

I read The Count of Monte Cristo again during my last summer vacation~thereby relinking myself with a very distant past that I would not know how to date, but the existence of which I do not doubt (the episodes of the tale are authentic: I recognize them, "identify" them, as they say in police investigations). The shadow btought along from childhood thus gives my "rereading" the cozy comfort of habit without taking away the charm of the unexpected. Rereading is reliving without -~icipatio~culti.::.at~ the impression of the deja vu without the relinquishment of seeing; it come, as if the

re;;ading restored the sweetness of the return and the delights of the expectation to us at one and the same time,

since oblivion of the plot vanishes only with the rhythm of rereading.

Edmond Dantes did not forgive; one understands him, even if one might be tempted to think that his insolent luck and his unforeseen fortune could have made him more lenient. But he is obsessed with the past. And that

is precisely his second misfortune: in search of memory, all he finds is oblivion. First of all, the oblivion of oth-


ers. Nobody recognizes him (except Mercedes, but that is another story); besides, he himself does not want to be recognized~not right away. Masked, he moves forward. With regard to the deep dark past, his mask is the sign of an attempt at anachronistic irruption. The memOFY of the person who goes back in time in order to "settle his accounts" stops at the first offense, the

"deadline" that forms a screen for the other past. In that respect, the story of Edmond Dantes is tragic;

he wants the same thing and its opposite: remembrance and vengeance, the before and the, afte~nse. 'He is not certain tha; vengeance was the first object of his desire. The accumulation of masks (because Dantes

presents himself now as Monte Cristo, then as the Abbot Busoni, and then again as Lord Wilmore) rather increases the risk of being unmasked: it is almost an admission

or a cry. Across all the characters he plays, with a very effec

tive power of conviction, he is trying perhaps more or less consciously to have the actor behind the mask and the person behind the actor be known (when he speaks to Mercedes, notably, all his sentences are allusive), but this double game is contradictory. For the only thing the masked Monte Cristo does is to accept his role in the human comedy that the life of his former companions, who have also been transformed, has become. He comes to rip off their masks (by denouncing the criminal

judge, the ennobled commoner, the poor man turned rich, the patriotic traitor ... ), but if he keeps his, it is because it is stuck to his skin and because, if he were to take it off, as he does with his victims' masks, he would


only find another mask. Perhaps that would be the mask of suffering or of rage, but in no case would it be the vanished mask of his youth. Certainly, vengeance (a dish that is eaten cold, as everyone knows) is not complete until the one who is taking revenge manages to be recognized by the one who had offended him and

him to state his name. But, as soon as the name is spoken, the offender disappears. From the point of view of distant memory (and of the desire for return

that would want to link it to the present), The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel of exhaustion. From the mo

ment the count leaves to meet his past, everything is erased and everything dies: his victims, of course, but also his memories, his love, and, in the end, even his

desire for vengeance. All that is left for him to do is to himself scarce.

Alexandre Dumas presents the whole of this drama as a kind of catharsis (freed from his past, Edmond will find another love and another life). But this cathartic

is perhaps only an illusion: the Count of Monte Cristo is incapable of forgetring one past in order to find the other. He is a possessed person enclosed in his possession. He incarnates the ethnologically monstrous

figure of possession without oblivion. He sees again the places of his first past, but his heart is not in it anymore: "nothing reminded Dantes anymore of his father's apartment: it was no longer the same paper; all the furniture, Edmond's childhood friends, present in his memory in every detail, had disappeared. Only the walls were the same."!

2


Are the old furniture and the paper alone the issue? Ifwe were to have any doubt on this subject, the different way in which Monte Cristo and Mercedes express themselves would tend to confirm it. Mercedes recognizes Edmond easily, for she has never forgorten him. Mercedes is Penelope with slightly less strength of soul or stubbornness: she gave in to her suitor. But if Monte Cristo is so cold toward her, even when he knows and judges her to be innocent, it is because within his deep

est self (there where the encounter of the disjointed times of a life could take place) he does not really rec

ognize her: "Mercedes is dead, madame," Monte Cristo says,

"and I no longer know anyone by that name." "Mercedes lives, sir, and Mercedes remembers ... "2

These words must be taken literally. Monte Cristo

knows who Madame de Montcerf is (that is all he even thinks about), but with these features he does nOt rec

ognize Mercedes any more than he manages to imagine the person he was himself, Edmond, in another time and another life. Mercedes is not mistaken here. She does

not doubt herself, but prefers to say herself what he will not dare say and what she does not want to hear: she has aged ("Edmond," she continued, "you will see that even

if my face has grown pale, my eyes have lost their luster, and my beaury is gone, that if Mercedes no longer looks like herself as far as her features are concerned, you will see that her heart is still the same! ... ").3 Nevertheless,

she knows very well that the man to whom she is speaking is incapable of forgetting Monte Cristo in order to

,! JJ Ii za iiJiSii . t 2»i"


become Edmond again: "Monte Cristo took her hand

and kissed it respectfully; but she herself felt that this kiss held no ardor, like the one the count might have placed on the marble hand of the statue of a saint."4

The destiny of poor Mercedes, who can no longer think of her son without murmuring the name of the man who is not his father (Edmond! Edmond!), is obviously not to be envied. Much could be said about the pleasure Alexandre Dumas takes in allowing his hero to

depart toward new horizons, while he assigns the heroine to remain at home (in the bedtoom of her virtual and deceased father-in-law, who is no longer). Perhaps Monte Cristo is right; and surely Mercedes is wrong. But if I am dwelling on Dumas's novel, it is first of all to show that he speaks of everything except the return: Mercedes has

not really left and Edmond will never come back. They are both missing a partner. For the score of the return

has to be played by several, and at least by two, people. Most tales of return speak of its impossibility, and the

powerlessness of space confronted with time; but they make us measure past time by absence (the lost connection), and in the end they recount nothing more than

the passage from nostalgia to solitude. I remember that, as a child raised a Christian, I was

always disappointed when the tesurrection of Christ was

mentioned. We had heard so many details of his death struggle and his death, of the betrayal by some and the cowardice of others, that we were aspiring to something like the return of Zorro: a flamboyant Christ, whip in hand, who would come to teach the Hebrews and the

Romans how to live with a conqueror's laugh. Nothing


like that, of course, ever happened if ohe is to believe

the Gospels. Christ made only episodic and discreet reappearances. His companions were hesitant in recognizing him. What to say? In the face of the tragic

/ account of the road to Calvary, that of the resurrection did not measure up. They tried very hard to make us understand that the return of Christ, reserved for a few privileged witnesses, was in some way a confirmation for them and a test: Christ was passing the baton over to

the Holy Spirit, as we would say in sports language. If, in spite of it all, I was disappointed by this story, even if it was presented as the story of a beginning (which indeed it was, and they certainly explained that to us),

it was because I could not help myself from hearing it as an ending without further right of appeal. Of course, it was the beginning of another story, but it was the end of the one I had imagined based on the fragments I had been told on Sundays, which spoke of friendship, encounters, justice, and which, for that brief moment of

my childhood, I had taken for a tale of adventure. Conceived as a novel (and, indeed, it has provided

the outline for numerous novels), the story of Christ, like

that of Edmond Dantes, puts the discordance of time

on stage-the finished time of tragedy and the continued time of the return. On the level of the novel, this

discordance is resolved only by death or departure-the failure of the return and the birth of remembrance. On the level of religion, another continuity is confirmed or the same continuity is confirmed on a different plane (Christ, one will say, continues to live in the church and inside each Christian person), but this displacement


itself poses a few narrative problems: it is difficult to be made into a tale.

From the novelistic point of view, Proust is the op

posite of Dumas. If the Count of Monte Cristo, seeking memory, finds nothing but oblivion, the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past finds memory again while he is looking for oblivion. This last confirmation, I admit, does not go without saying. It proceeds from a vision of the Remembrance that favors some of its perspectives. Time regained is a regained impression (an

old impression); and, as Paul Ricoeur notes, to be re---------. gained the impression "must first be lost as an immediate p~ prisoner of its exterior object.") The experience o'finvoluntary memory (;:-l1avor;two unequal stones in

the street) is the proof of the person's sustained identity, bur this proof can only be administered after oblivion.

Also, the regained impression would be elusive and the return illusory if literature, by making it its object, did not identify itself in it. After all is said and done, the

only realiry of the return is literature as Proust defined it, as "the joy of the real regained." This formula is

picked up again by Paul Ricoeur,6 and the most recent critics have generally defined Remembrance as a novel of vocation; it is in the writing that the regained impression endures and finds its meaning.

But the writing-and the return to oneself that it allows the author-is born from a double oblivion: the oblivion of the first impression later regained, but also,

in the moment in which this comes back, the contingent oblivion of all that it is not, and notably of the period in which it was itselflost and forgotten. This intermediary

I J


time, which for the narrator of Remembrance is that of the quest, of preparation, is also the time in which he was continuously divided between the fear of oblivion, identified with death, and that of remembrance, identi

fied with suffering. That is the paradox of the narrative of vocation,

the tale of a genesis that he necessarily begins when everything has been accomplished: everything he describes takes on meaning only in the final events that are

at the same time its origin. The paradox here is all the more subtle in that the figure of the return, principle and end of the work, proceeds, on the existential and literary plane, from a simultaneous dread of oblivion and of memory. A dread of oblivion and of the future that places love under the sign of death, for one day the one who loves will no longer love and for him that

will be like a "kind of death." A dread of remembrance and of the past that places love under the sign of fear, for retrospective jealousy will never stop deciphering the indications of betrayal and unhappiness. Only the

literary return to the past anterior, aroused by the experience of involuntary memory, allows the narrator to

bypass and appease this double dread, ro regain the old past, that is to say to forget death and fear by escaping from the other pasts. For the rest, when the narrator recounts his return to the places of his childhood, to

Combray (chapter 4 of Albertine disparue [The Sweet

Cheat Gone]), he presents his experience as disappointing, compromised by the burdensome presence of an en

tire intermediary past: "1 was saddened to see how little I was reliving my earlier years. I found the Vivo nne


thin and ugly on the edge of the towpath. Not that I was noticing very great material inaccuracies in what I was remembering. But separated from the places I happened to be crossing again through a wholly different life, there was between them and me not even that intimacy from which the immediate, delicious, and total deflagration of remembrance is born, even before one has noticed it ... "7 Soul-searching is very much a literary figure of oblivion-and of memory.

Because every tragedy can be transformed into melodrama and vice versa, it has been possible for comic authors to exploit the figure of return. One may remember Fernandel who, in Fran[ois Ier, incarnated a poor man made miserable by his wife, his mother-in-law, and his boss. Fortunately, a magician he happened to meet had him take a potion and under its power he found himself transported to the court of Fran<;:ois rer, where his judicious use of the Petit Larousse illustre earned him a solid reputation as diviner and the benevolent attention of the ladies. When the potion stopped working, he came back to himself: to Paris, and to the twentieth century, and at the same time regained the ordinary torments of everyday banality. He was forever persuading the magician to send him back to where his real life was, the one had loved living. His wish was satisfied and his sensational return ("Here r am again!") to the court of Fran<;:ois rer was most delightfuL

In a film with Charlie Chaplin, the mechanism of the return is more complicated. Charlie, poor and homeless, meets a rich drunkard who has him move in and treats him like a prince with great warmth and kind-

"'~'."T' : n itt '''iiI'''~' , t

I the three figures of oblivion 71

ness. Unfortunately, this man who is so generous when he is drunk loses any memory of his drunken state when he sobers up; he also changes personality: hard and brittle, he has Charlie thrown out into the street. But, miraculously, as soon as he gets drunk again, he remembers the previous binges, welcomes Charlie warmly, takes him back in ... and the story begins all over again. The comic effect stems from the fact that Charlie, who has a continuous memory of these events, never knows when he meets him whether he is dealing with his

bosom buddy or with his class enemy. .:<)( What is difficult to think about is the continuity ';'" \l.Y" I.,:;

behind thetlgure of return. The dis~ntinuities oflived [C~' ,<tiJc~:"" duration generally prohibit an integral r~nin[!?~ "'~/./ one has left, a icking up o' here one left them "-r ~~~a regaining of an . . __ . _r._ ~-J~~\7 movies tell us that one needs iliehelp ota:pOW;n or of \ tvt:;;x complete drunhnness:-H~perience<rthiT"'iliead0/ r willaG;";dci"the power of sensations that, taking a hold/' of the person coming back to places where he has lived, give him the feeling he had never left them: smells and burns of the tropics, or sometimes on the beach, when the body takes shape again under the sand's embrace, the familiar murmur of an eternal summer. It is not altogether the" deflagration of remembrances" of which Proust speaks that is at work here: it is a short-circuit of the same order, in the sense that it passes through the body and the senses and is born from the contact made between two separate peflo(fs but produced in the very praces meniselves, associating them with the evidence of

<i time retaIned mor~ega~ --------------.

72 the three of oblivion

to Proust in a passage in his Notes sur Ies Orisa et Vodun

in which he speaks about the treatment to which the young initiates are subjected:8 their ritual "being pur to death" is accompanied by such a forceful attack on their senses (notably on their hearing, by the beating of drums in rhythms that are peculiar to the occasion) that

they regain its presence throughout their existence with an always fierce emotion as soon as the drums of new initiations sound.

With this example one sees the figures of return

and beginning combine: for, if the initiation is lived as a birth by the initiates, over rime it becomes the guarantor of return and remembrances. But the feeling of return is then consolidated and maintained by the identity of the places, the social symbolism, and the permanence of the rituaL

An imermediary case between that of the Proustian rerum (in which the "deflagration of the remembrance" is presented as the origin and the material of

literary inspiration) and that of the existential rerurn to the places themselves (thanks to strong sensations) would be that of the consumers of literature or of im

ages who like to reread books or see films again. The pleasure of the return, in these areas, is also linked to

fragments (such and such a passage, such and such an appearance) that take place, like other remembrances, and are exposed to the same risks in our imagination. It happens that we do not again find the lines we had loved, or that they seem to have lost something of their initial charm; scenes that fascinated us in certain "cult"

films sometimes give us quite a bit of trouble when we


wanr to describe them precisely, but they are never

theless present, insistent, and friendly in our memory: Ingrid Bergman's first appearance in Casablanca . .. or von Stroheim's geranium in Grand Illusion.

These fictional scenes dive into our real life, slip in like remembrances in the same capacity as those we have lived, and it is certainly true that, in some way, we have indeed lived them. And it is exactly in that capicity, when they come back (when we see them again

instead of imagining them) that they can puzzle us, disappoinr us, because time has passed and we do not see them with the same eyes, unless-most often the privilege of literature or movie enthusiasts who never stop reading and rereading, seeing and seeing again, with the same intensity-the miraculous feeling of continuity mingles with our rediscoveries, our surprises, and

our remembrances. Music (which frequently plays a major role in our perception of the film image) is, more

than any other art perhaps, in its various forms, apt to bring those it takes by surprise back toward shores they do not always recognize very well but of which they are suddenly, thanks to the music, sure to have known and loved once, before leaving them. The re

frain, the old tune, the melody of the "three lillie notes" the song mentions, have that re-creative ability; that poetic power-independent of musical genres, excepr that "popular" music has the widest audience and therefore offers a much more diverse and extensive humanity than the specialized music-loving public the possibiliry of feeling subtle adaptability of time, the feeling of

"srrange familiaritY' {unheimliche} that Freud associates


with repetition, but about which we have learned with

Proust that, in its most felicitous forms, being more

familiar than strange, it may also be aroused by the

obviousness of the return.

To tell the truth, in this kind of artistic emotion the figure of return is not present by itself; it is mixed

with that of suspension (of the moment in which the

thought of future and past is erased) and sometimes

also with that of the rebeginning, as if the certainty of

existing by onesel£ through the experience of the return

to onesel£ were reopening the doors of the possible.

Rilre, ephemeral, unstable, the figure of return is fortunately reversible. Q~nfficantly;'"individuals and cultures, taking cognizance of the intrinsic dif

ficulties in the act of coming back, imagine it achieved.

The ideas of resemblance and rebirth are the result of

this reversal: from the birth of a new human being on,

we look at his body, and a little later in his personality,

for traits that could translate the return of another in

him. That is some of what we are looking for when,

viewing some of the family photos that are piling up

in our drawers, we believe that in the features of some

close ancestors we are finding those that remind us of

the face or the silhouette of their descendants ("Look

at that picture of YOut father: your son, when he smiles,

is his spitting image!"). Behin~:,ery~ac~?..o~'Y!"\C~l.~t of resemblance a theory of descendance and lineage is o~~~~ le~~" ;y~~;~aticd~-a~c~;di;gw the

societies and e~~'Th~~'h-;~~~m~'whattk ~~e·~ffect as

the experience of involuntary memory: it consolidates

individual identity, the sense of identity, but by anchor-


ing it in the proclaimed evidence of a heritage. From

this point of view, one may also distinguish between

theories (African ones, for example) that postulate that

an element of the person is transmitted to one of his

descendants (according to m9dalities that vary from one culture to another)-theories that are very close to a

materialist concept of heredity-and theories that, fol

lowing the example of the myth ofEr in Plato's Republic, speak of successive reincarnations of a same soul, of

a metempsychosis. Plato's spiritualism, insofar as can

be inferred from the conclusive myth of The Republic, places the return not under the sign of heredity, but

under that of the free choice of souls.

In all these cases of the figure, m~mory and oblivion

are involved. It is by recollectinK theWy, th~ ~~ntenance, and the character of the dead that §£.~£l~lists of Afri~;;:~-~'i~-~al can find on the body of a newborn

o~NltromtEie behavior of the adolescent the trace

~ dead have imprint~d there. The example of the

possession by the zar: as"I~i;is studied it, invertS this

connection: the principal zar of an initiate is chosen be

cause he resembles the latter in certain features. In both

cases (life conceived of as possession by the dead, and

possession conceived of as incarnation of the spirit), the

distinction between same and other is retained, but

~ the same time it is put into perspective and made

dialectical: it is only one aspect, one component of the

constituent plurality of every single person. In Plato, in

the outlook of the myth of Er, the individual being is

one (it is a "soul"), but he escapes from repetition only

through oblivion: at the conclusion of the journey in;o

l~,._,

J j


Hell, if each one chooses his new life, it is not so new.

("For this sight was worth seeing, he said, how the dif

ferent souls chose their lives, a pitiable sight, and ri

diculous, and very strange. They mostly chose accord

ing to their experience in the former life.")9 Were it not

for the change in bodily encl.osure and for oblivion (for

~ , the souls )Jillst drink the water of Lethe before coming

..l{p,.j>'j b~k to earth and,...£ften being too thirsty, they com

(JY~L:;; ,tfJ pletely lose al~ me~ory of .their earl~er Ii~e), every life .;!" , .... wo~d repeat Itself llldefinltely and Idenncally. Proust

:).~ .)' I is sensitive to the pagan ViSiOn of the return through

p,,(-descendancy. If Gilberte, in Time Regained, resembles

"'t'l...' ~ her mother feature by feature, it is because individuals,

";'I,~ ~ as they age, show family traits that had remained in-

l.;i { visible in their faces until then, as invisible as the inner

parts of a seed tha~evelop on the outside only with

time. ut these per~anent features of deSc:~ are not incompatible with the always threatened desire ;

j for singular identity, the desire for an individuality to I which only the body has the key, because it contains the /

hours of the past, and now and then still reve~lf-.!

ossessed by the childhood that inhabits it. (

"Oh, time, suspend your flight!" "I'd I " T· "b chI ?" ove to, says Ime, ut ror ow ong.

I remember this playful response to the Lamartinian

remark, but I no longer know to whom to attribute it.

Gide, perhaps? I leafed through Paludes without finding

a trace of it and am beginning to wonder if the profes

sor of literature from whose mouth I remember having

heard this "literary quotation" did not invent it him-

t II U" ;;


self, after alL Funny and inaccurate, this quotation. For

suspended time is precisely what cannot be measured.

Therein even lies'its charm.

I discovered the grace of suspended time once when

reading Stendhal and, up to now, no rereading seems to

have weakened it for me. At age eighteen, I saw Mme

de Chasteller with the same eyes as Lucien Leuwen

did, and with my two heroes I suffered the setbacks

that the jealous malignancy of the province imposed

on them. Most often, their relationship was snared in

the time of others and affected by their action (Lucien

and Mme de Chasteller would see each other, yearn for

ttust and sincerity, have doubts, move away, come across

each other again, then move away once more: it was the

time of agitation, malicious gossip, suspicion, drama, and

melodrama). But sometimes their relationship would free

itself from all this and quiet down into the miraculous

transparency of the moment: and then it was, indeed,

as if time were standing stilL (Every night Lucien

would come and sit on a stone opposite the shuttered

window of Mme de Chasteller's bedroom, while she,

behind her closed shutters, would observe him in si

lence. During two walks taken in the early evening in

the woods of the Chasseur vert, a cafe in the vicinity

of Nancy where German horns were playing Mozart,

they would understand each other without speaking, or

barely speaking, except when, in the end, time reassert

ed its rights and let the threat of the next day emerge:

"When we are back in Nancy, when the vanities of life

have clutched you again, all you will see in me is the

little second lieutenant.")l0 For Stendhal, happiness lies


very much in the moment, but in the moment shared, in the harmony of being with the beloved in order not to think anymore of the day before or the day after, in the deliverance from the antagonistic relationship with others, which Fabrice del Dongo and Julien Sorel never feel as strongly as when they are in their prison cell.

Without a doubt, and almost paradoxically, the

Stendhalian heroes find another form of happiness in action (and in the rebeginnings of which action is the opportunity). But, however much they aspire to love and friendship, they always remain tempted to grasp a few moments of grace from the social time of intrigue and self-interest. Thus, they find again the misgiving that La Boetie expresses in his Discours de La servitude

voLontaire: "What anguish, what martyrdom, oh God! To be occupied day and night with pleasing a man, and

with mistrusting him more than any other person in the world. Always to be watching like a hawk, to have one's ear sharpened, in order to see where the blow will come from, to uncover the traps, to feel the expression of one's rivals, to discern the traitor."ll

\ .. ,.-. Loy~lty and cons~anqare th~~hsto~e of tru~ \ .... fnendshlp for La Boetle, as they are the obsesslOn or the II \ ideal of the Stendhalian lovers, and both of them as-~ sume a kind of halting of time, or at the very least ofits

t destructive action, an agreement of beings bypassing all \ that separates them through oblivion, the momentary )

I. oblivion of the times that do not concern their recip-\ ..--* ~cal relationship:Jr"aouble ~oncordance of the be~ngs o~rdance of tImes, one could say, smce the agreement of the beings presupposes the constancy

Ztt a: ; $ aM


of each: how many lovers suffer from not having loved each other in the same way at the same moment, and these discrepancies are precisely what causi;f'he twists

I and turns, the salt, and the sadness of what have since then been called love stones . ..

One of the effects of concorqg.nce, on the contrary, is that the ~;~ps and that in this intervening period, this interval between a past and a future both kept at a distance, the individuals no longer resemble themselves; they are as different from what they were the day before as from what they will become again the next day. One might think and suggest that it is more readily in these rare moments that their nature truly is expressed, but "true nature" is precisely what does not

often have the freedom to express itself in its pure state. Exceptional moments are needed for this, collected out

of themselves, pieces of pure present time. In the rolereversal rites studied by the ethnologists, the roles acted are blatant with truth, or, more exactly, those who play them truly say what is in their heart: women protest the arrogant and slightly ridiculous vanity of men, and slaves the arbitrary brutality of their masters. These moments of truth have another objective and are siruated in a different context than the moments of Stendhalian happiness, bur, from the point of view of time and truth, they

are of the same nature: in the rare minutes in which they surrender themselves lovingly to the gaze of the other, Stendhal's heroes strive above all else to shed their social role, to show themselves to be absolutely different from what they ordinarily seem to be. As in certain African rites when the slave, the king's double, would follow him

jill

--~--·----·-~~--------"",!,!,,!_$_t _______________________ _


into the grave after having taken his place for a short while, at the horizon of this exceptional condition, death sometimes awaits them: foiled in The Charterhouse of Parma, achieved in The Red and the Black. As if, at the end of the lovers' duel, something of the lost intirnacy

whose trace Georges Ba~.9J!Kfl!.. ~e k,a: toi:i:rurin A.:Zt:ec ritual and sacrifice would emerg~::._

In fiction as in social life, do not the respite, the pause imply this shedding of everyday presentation?

Image of a western: it is always under the threat of death, at night, preceding the last fight (at night, when the cries and chants of Indian warriors resound), that the coarse captain of the cavalry confesses his feelings to the woman he has treated until then with the coldness his role and dury required of him. In war films or, more recently, in films of catastrophes, the American cinema is crazy about these moments of expectation and fear (suspense then almost identified with anxiety), in which we see the characters, for better or worse, reveal the

naked truth of the human beneath the faded finery of social presentation. In social life itself (the 1968 psychodrama being of paradigmatic value in this regard), is it

not true that a single day of a strike or of atmospheric pollution is enough for the city to take on an air of celebration, despite the annoyances, as if one part of its inhabitants (and too bad for the others) suddenly were liberated enthusiastically from its customary norms?

What fiction makes possible, in~~ineluding that offered by the reading a solitary individual does, is to forget oneself to forget ~fthinking o(onesci? as u~d~7ili.e sign of repetition:-The the~;ticians

.. ------... -,'>-.-----,-,~


of literature have certainly observed that the tenses of the narrative were past tenses ("Once upon a time there was ... ") and that the "switch" from the everyday thus obtained worked to the advantage of the reader's "relaxation." But does this "relaxation" itself not pass through the momentary abandonment of all or part of one's social identity? Is not literary fiction (like celebration and love), in this sense, always virtually subversive?

We are all sensitive to the splendors of beginnings, to the rare quality of those moments when the present is

freed from the past without as yet letting anything shine through of the future that sets it into motion. Beyond their sadness and desolation, what is fascinating about

the shapeless scenery of the most developed urban life (airports, parking lots, cement-covered squares where anonymous silhouettes pass each other without stopping) is their unconscious resemblance to the almost abstract, barely outlined spaces of courtly romances. This scenery is analogous to that against whose background Don Juan moves around in search of an encounter that will once again make him succumb to the "charm of budding inclinations." If one day we should lose this dark desire for encounter and renewal that moves us now and then, would we not be dead without realizing

it, before our time, thereby taking away from death itself the poetic power that is attached to everything we can "see coming" from afar?

When I was twenty, I loved Julien Gracq unconditionally. And ifI am not so sure today that two or three of his early novels are not somewhat "dated," some of


his pages, old or more recent, have, in my view, retained

their power to evoke moments and spaces through the feelings they arouse. The miracle, then (which is why these pages have not aged), is born from the encounter they allow, today like yesterday, between experiences that are singular and distanced from each other, and that, in the eyes of the reader, the writing brings closer.

That is the "small miracle" that Christian Metz mentioned in regard to certain cinematographic images, in

which the spectator thinks he finds images again that are "usually interior"-a miracle, he says, whose efrect is to break a "very common solitude."12 There are pages

and images that lead us quite naturally to believe that we could have written them or, at the very least, that we would have liked to be their author. If Proust, more than anyone else, has us share the experience of the re

turn, and Stendhal that of the suspense, Gracq, closest to us, is the one who links us to the experience of the beginning.

He calls this experience of beginning the "journey"; but, in using this word, he is thinking primarily of the "departure," nOt of exploration or disorientation: "It is

above all a question of leaving, as Baudelaire knew very welL It is about very uncertain journeys, departures that

,are so much departures that no arrival could ever disclaim them .... " In this text, "Les yeux bien ouverts" (Eyes wide open], broadcast on radio and then picked up in the collection Priftrences, the example given is that of the launching of an ocean liner: "When the last jacks are lifted, the hull begins to slide incredibly slowly, to the point where one wonders fOr quite a while whether she is


moving or not ... That would make me understand a little, so to speak, what moves me especially in the feeling of departure. All of a sudden, one would feel, one

would see that there was an extraordinary pressure behind this almost millimeter by millimeter departure." Gracq's speaker concludes this passage of the interview with a felicitous phrase: "In short, the feeling of the casting off, rather than that of the destination."13

The rite, in its most general aspect, once it is achieved with fervor and does not slide into boredom of fur

mal repetition, also has something of that "castingoff" quality. It makes one think of the preparations for a departure: it is organized, perfected, requires time.

The metaphor of the journey is often linked to it, sometimes coupled with that of death. The purpose of the symbolic "putting to death" of the initiate or

of the slave incorporated into a new lineage in West Africa was the birth into a new life. We also know

that rite passes through sacrifice, that the connection with ancestors and gods, which always has something of a journey (possession, descent of the gods, shamanic journey, dream), is sometimes a bloody connection. At

the end of the rite, it is necessary that everything can "recommence," under penalty of failure. Whoever al

lows for the idea of beginning must also allow for that of the end; as for the forgetting of the past, necessary for every true rebeginning, it is incompatible with any prefiguration of the future. And the necessity of this fundamental uncertainty explains perhaps that death itself,

at the end of a reversal attested to in every culture, may also be conceived of as a rebeginning. Obviously, the


whole problem is to know whether there is any sense

in questioning the nature of death. But for the person

who truly wants to try to conceive of death, it lets itself

be defined only by what it shares with birth: the un

known. Baudelaire once more: "Oh death, old Captain, it is time, let us raise the

anchor!"

!

a duty to forget

A certain ambiguity is attached to the expression a C< duty to remember," so often used today. First of all,

those who are subjected to this duty are obviously those who have not been direct witnesses or victims of the events of which one intends to preserve the memory. It is very clear that those who survived the Holocaust or the horror of the camps do not need to be reminded of their duty to remember. On the contrary, perhaps their

--=:...--

duty has been to survive the memory, to esca e, as far as they are concerned, from e ever asting presence ot'

a~ipco?lm_ui~.hli,~~ln~Y"di:ildh~;JT;:as struck by my grandfather's reluctance to mention life in the trenches, and it seemed to me that I could recognize the trace of that same conviction in the restraint of the survivors of the death camps, in the long delay necessary for those who finally chose to speak of what they had lived. This is the conviction that those who have not been victims of the horror cannot imagine it,

87

88 a duty to forget

no matter how willing and compassionate they are. But

also that those who were subjected to it, if they want to live again and not just survive, must be able to do their

share of forgetting, become mindless, in the Pascalian sense, in order to find faith in the everyday again and

mastery over their time. The dury of memory is the duty of the descen

dants, and it has two aspects: remembrance and vigilance. Vigilance is the actualization of remembrance,

the effort to imagine in the present what might resemble the past, or better (but only the survivors could do it and their numbers are decreasing every day), to remember the past as a present, to return to it to find

the hideous shape of the unspeakable again in the banalities of ordinary mediocrity. Now, official memory needs monuments; it beautifies death and horror. The beautiful cemeteries of Normandy (to say nothing of the various convents, chapels, or museums that will

perhaps one day take the place of the concentration camps entirely) align their tombs all along the intertwined pathways. Nobody could say that this arranged beauty is not moving, but the emotion it arouses is born from the harmony of forms, from the' impressive

spectacle of the army of the dead immobilized in the white crosses standing at attention. Sometimes, among the oldest visitors, it is born from the image they associ

ate with it of a relative or companions who disappeared

more than half a century ago. It does not evoke the raging battles, nor the fear of the men, nothing of

what would actually restore some of the past realisti

cally lived by the soldiers buried in the Normandy soil.

a duty to forget 89

The very ones who fought by their sides cannot hope to find the vanished evidence for one moment, except on condition of forgetting the geometric splendor of the great military cemeteries and the long years across which the images, the events, and the stories have been

accumulating in their memory.

Memory and ~b!!::~~.~u.w;LtQ.gf;,rhiff .. ,,,~~~,,~.~!~~t;:~: essary 'fur the ~fi ;';'se of time. Surely, Montaigne tells u;; .. everythmg lias its season," and it is undoubtedly

neither wise nor useful to not want to "be one's age." But

it is even more vain to play with it, to identify oneseifby it, to alienate oneself from it, to stop by the edge of the road, somewhere between the nostalgia for a truncated

or tricked past and the horror of a futureless future~ would plead here against the haughty melancholy of

~ifl~_stoRPed in their track, for the active modesty of movement, of exercise, of the mind's gymnastics. We ----.-- --- --~~~~ would try to encourage those who intend to struggle against the hardening of the imagination (it threatens all of us) to not forget to forget in order to lose neither

memory nor curiosity. Oblivion brings us back to the present, even if it

is conjugated in every tense: in the future, to live the beginning; in the present, to live the moment; in the past, to lYe t e retur . n every case, in order not to be

repeated. We must forget in order to remain present,

forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain

faithfuL

Ie $ :a

, -

notes

foreword

1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, His Memory: from Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1998),135.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (New York: Macmillan Library of Liberal Arts, 1985),8.

memory and oblivion

1. Georges Devereux, Ethnopsychiatrie des Indiens mohaves [Mohave Ethnopsychiatry: The Psychic Disturbances of an Indian Tribe] (Paris: Editions Synthelabo, 1996).

2. J.-B. Pontalis, Ce temps qui ne passe pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

life as a narrative

1. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et recit (Paris: Points Seuil, 1983). 2. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Others (New York: Colum

bia University Press, 1983). 3. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Seuil,

1996). 4. Walter Benjamin, «Le Narrateur. Re£lexions sur I'reuvre de

91

92 notes

Nicolas Leskov,» in RLIstelli raconte ... et autres rt!cits (Paris: Seuil, 1987).

5. V.]. Propp, Morphologie du conte (Pads: Seuil, 1970). 6. Ricoeur, Temps et recit, 2: 78. 7. Michel Leiris, "La possession et ses aspects thearraux chez

les Ethiopiens de Gondar," in Miroir de f'Afrique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

8. Marcel Gauchet, Le Desenchantement du monde [The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion} (Paris: Gallirnard, 1985).

the three figures of oblivion

L Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1973), 1: 327-

2. Ibid., 3: 221. 3. Ibid., 280. 4. Ibid., 52l. 5. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et rich (Paris: Points Seuil, 1983),

2: 28t. 6. Ibid., 283. 7. Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (Paris: Folio-Gallimard,

1992),268. 8. Pierre Verger, Notes sur fe cufte des Orisa et Vodun it Bahia,

fa baie de tous lei saints, au Bresil et it fancienne cote des esclaves en Afrique (Dakar: lFAN, 1957).

9. Plato, The Republic, book 10, in Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W H. D. Rouse (New York: Mentor Books, 1956),420.

10. Srendhal, Lucien Leuwen (Paris: Folio-Gal/imard, 1986), 1: 348.

11. Etienne de La Boetie, Discours de fa servimde vofontaire (Paris: Mille er une Nuirs, 1997),47.

12. Christian Met'l, Le Signifiant imaginaire (Paris: Bourgois, 1993), 167.

13. Julien Prtforences (Paris: Corti, 1961), 61.

Marc Auge, an anthropologist trained in French universities, has studied and written copiously on North

African cultures. While teaching and leading seminars at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, he has authored numerous studies of contemporary cultures, including La Traversee du Luxembourg, Domaines

et chateaux, Non-lieux: introduction a fanthropologie de

la surmoderniti, and Un ethnologue dans le metro, translated into English as In the Metro and published by the University of Minnesota Press.

MaTjolijn de Jager is a literary translator who works from French and Dutch. Her particular interests are Francophone African literature and women's writing. She teaches literary translation at New York University.

James E. Young is professor and chair of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts,

Amherst. He is the author of At Memory's Edge and The Texture of Memory.

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