Introduction
Layers of Time: Life, Death, Memory
As a guest editor of this special issue of Protocols: History and Theory, I have the great pleasure to introduce five essays that will all, each from their own perspective, address the questions of memory, death, and temporal layering in art, literature, and historiography.
We encounter the past through different media, visual and textual. Through those encounters, as Jürgen Pieters shows in the opening essay of this issue, we are, in a way, trying to speak with the dead. Whereas in the days of Petrarch the “conversations with the dead” were seen as a source of wisdom and tranquility, in our contemporary world, as Pieters notes, they are usually marked by mourning and trauma.
In “Dead Men’s Shoes,” Tamsin Spargo describes her encounter with a dead man and her quest of writing his biography from the perspective of a poststructuralist cultural historian. She explains how she, through photographs and written traces, tried to form a picture of someone who was, in his own age, a celebrated criminal, but also explains how she experienced the inevitable loss – how she found his traces disappearing and his figure eventually fading.
In their essay, Robert Crawshaw and Corinne Fowler report on an autobiographical novel of Joe Pemberton and show how it reveals new, unexpected layers of memory from the lives of immigrant families. In the imaginary past of the community, memories and fantasies meet, temporal layers are mixed, and narratives are retold and altered. Literary texts may offer, they argue, new insights into the experience of cultural diversity, not only by their content but by their textual form and poetic innovations.
Moving to the visual arts, Dana Arieli shows various ways in which Israeli artists have commemorated the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Some artists have seen the assassination as a human tragedy and portrayed Rabin as though he was beneath all official positions, such as “an old man with a suit”; others have interpreted the event in the larger context of Jewish history. Through art, private and public memory have been woven into one another.
In my own essay, I compare two ways of approaching the past: a novel and a historiographical essay. Despite the fact that they represent different genres, one fiction, the other non-fiction, I do find their relation to the temporalities of trauma surprisingly similar. Our traumatic past of global violence is not a straight forward, chronological line, but a labyrinth of fragments, a network of different causal chains affecting on each other. And it is our task to find the way out of that labyrinth.
The authors of this issue deal not only with different ways of encountering the past, but they often deal with their own previous writing, thereby adding an extra temporal layer to this issue: Pieters, Spargo, and Arieli all write on the basis of books they have published. They are, at the same time, writers and readers of their own text.
Four of the essays (Pieters, Spargo, Arieli, and Crawshaw & Fowler) are based on papers held at a Special Panel “Layers of Time” that I organized and chaired in the 31st annual conference of IAPL (International Association for Philosophy and Literature) Layering: Textual, Visual, Spatial, Temporal, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, 4–9 June 2007. They are accompanied by a paper that I was writing at the time of our Cyprus-session, and that I later held in the section “Can the arts influence politics?” at the 4th General Conference of ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research), Pisa, Italy, 6–8 September 2007.
Introduction
And this is, more or less, how I introduced our session at Cyprus:
One autumn evening, a year ago, I received sad news. My colleague and friend had died. Just before his death, he had sent me an article for the anthology I was editing. As an editor of his article, there were still some questions that I would have liked to discuss with him – not perhaps in the manner of “editing,” but as an excuse to encounter him again. For example, in the beginning of the article he mentions Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida in the present tense: “Martin Heidegger wants to expose . . .,” “Jacques Derrida agrees partly on this . . . .” My first reaction was to suggest that perhaps we could change the present to the past tense: “Heidegger wanted,” “Derrida agreed,” etc. After all, they had written their texts years ago, and they were both already dead. However, after a while I thought that perhaps the author had good reason for this here: through their texts, Heidegger and Derrida are still speaking to us, or in us, here and now, in the present tense. We have their texts, and by their texts we are still able to somehow evoke their words, their verbal appeal to us.
Never had this obvious but still scandalous truth of writing appeared so strongly to me than when I returned to his text. I realized that I could not force myself to say “He wrote in his article,” in the past tense – for me, he was still speaking, in the present tense, in his text, still committing the act of writing within the very moment that I read his text. In fact, it would have been more natural for me to speak in future tense than in the past tense. After all, the article was still, as we say, forthcoming, on its way to publication. It was still, even though he was dead, more natural for me to say “As he will say in his article” than “as he said in his article.”
Writing (and with “writing” I refer here to all recorded cultural texts – visual arts, music recordings, as well as written texts) always takes place simultaneously in the past, in the present, and in the future. Writing is something that has always taken place; writing is something that takes place only at the moment of reading, here and now; writing is something that is always waiting for future readings, is always to come.
Works of art and other cultural texts are often seen as forming temporal layers in our cultural history. Literature, history, art, film, and other textual artifacts create, year after year, stratifications of collective memory; both as they memorialize and interpret our historical experiences and as they form an archive of their own as our “cultural canon.” From these artifacts we can construct a series of temporal layers, and from these layers we can construct a “history” of our culture as a continuous line of events and epochs that succeed one another. This process is somehow comparable to archaeology: by reading cultural texts, we can dig deeper and deeper into history, finding older and older remnants of what once was.
On the other hand, however, the figure of “layer” can be highly misleading. The figure of “layer” may lead us to believe that literature and art take place in “layers” that have a more or less homogenous existence, or that the layers which come later will necessarily hide the previous ones, consign them to oblivion, or that we could form some kind of neat chronology constituting the “history” of human experience. I don’t think we can. The obvious but scandalous truth of writing, art, and textual representation in general is that these “physical traces” break the diachrony between the past, the present, and the future. To use one of Jacques Derrida’s favorite tropes, pli (fold), temporal layers fold and refold over each other, forming a tortured “culturescape” where sometimes the “new” layers are down and the “old” ones on top, thus making all simple archeological deduction impossible. Tomorrow, I may find myself speaking with someone who has died hundreds of years ago – and finding out that his or her words are more acute and topical than anything I have found from the texts of any contemporary author. Tomorrow, I may find some contemporary text that takes me deeper in time than any “old” text ever has – although the future exists for me only through my experiences of the past. We simply do not know all the things that the past may someday reveal to us.
The event of literature, as well as the event of all reproduced art, is not a moment: it is an event that has already taken place, is taking place, and will take place as long as the text exists. Art is an event and a meta-event. When I read, Virginia Woolf is still writing in me; when I watch movies, Charlie Chaplin is still eating his shoes; when I listen to a CD, I can still hear the effort Jimi Hendrix puts into bending the metal strings of his Stratocaster; when I visit a museum, Vincent van Gogh is still carving his flaming yellow lines into the blue night of Arles.
