jhg p175 24-04-96 11:00:09

Journal of Historical Geography, 22, 2 (1996) 214–220

Review article

Memories are made of this

Peter Bishop

R S, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994. Pp. xiv+479. £18.95hardback, £13.95 paperback); S S, Landscape and Memory (London:HarperCollins, 1995. Pp. xx+652. £30.00 hardback, £16.99 paperback)

About six years ago I first read of Coleman’s mustard museum in Norwich and that itreceived more visitors than the local fifteenth-century cathedral. The tone of the reportwas one of dismay despite coming from a secular left perspective, but I quite liked theidea of a mustard museum. Coleman’s mustard has a small but significant place amongmy memories (as indeed do cathedrals). In the days before chillis became acceptableat the English table, or before Tandooris became a feature of most localities, mustardwas one of the culinary challenges. Not French mustard but English. The Frenchteacher at my North London High School in the late 1950s, who was otherwise scathingof English cuisine, spoke with quiet praise and surprise about the English custom ofpreparing fresh mustard from powder as the occasion demanded. Prepared mustardswere an object of scorn. For my mother too, hot mustard was an icon of culinaryintensity, a kind of initiatory challenge, and having the top of the head blown off byapplying too much was always a family occasion for mirth and reflection. As withcathedrals, my memories of mustard are not always so benign and can lead into morecomplex and shadowy regions. The dismay about the popularity of the mustard museumas opposed to the cathedral therefore struck me as a symptom of the incredible tanglethat British left-wing politics and cultural studies had got itself into during the Thatcheryears. Why can’t we have cathedrals and mustard? It is precisely this kind of popularmemory, with its challenge to traditional notions of history, museology, politics andidentity that Raphael Samuel has addressed in his recent book, Theatres of Memory.

Samuel’s book certainly passes the mustard test although cathedrals are still used asdatums of authentic monumentality. So, Samuel registers a restrained measure ofdisbelief about a guide to Norwich’s attractions that mentions the mustard museumwhilst entirely leaving out any reference to the cathedral (pp. 153, 167). He also notesthat Durham’s open air museum attracts more visitors than does its cathedral (p. 157).Elsewhere, Samuel mentions that Jim Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachaise cemetery has“far more visitors and flowers than the Mur des Federes where the martyred dead ofthe Paris Commune are buried” (p. 90). Although stated thus without comment one isleft with a lingering suspicion of Samuel’s unease about the respect being shown to thememory of a dead rock musician rather than to that of proto-Socialists killed over acentury ago. Rather unfairly he calls it an example of popular necrophilia, one ofmany such broad, ‘umbrella’, labels which he deploys. Others include ‘retrochic’ and‘resurrectionalism’. They allow Samuel to aggregate vast amounts of disparate materialinto some kind of order and to establish connections that whilst at times are imaginatively

2140305–7488/96/020214+07 $18.00/0 1996 Academic Press Limited

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stimulating, are elsewhere somewhat strained. What is the connection, for example,between organic farmers and a recent set of greeting stamps featuring Dan Dare—thespaceman hero from 1950s comics, or between performances of Baroque music onoriginal instruments and eco-saboteurs from the Earth Liberation Front, or the spreadof wildlife trusts in the 1960s and the rise of new-wave charities such as Oxfam? Simplygrouping them together as examples of ‘resurrectionism’ scarcely suffices althoughpersonally I enjoyed the intuitive challenge. No wonder one reviewer writes of Samuel’s“gleeful . . . indiscriminate eye”; of the book being “torrential with detail” as if Samuel“had emptied a vast database on to the page”.[1]

While Samuel burrows into the bits and pieces, the artifacts and activities, of popularmemory, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory comes from the direction of high artand big history, what one reviewer refers to as ‘the cosmic scope’[2], albeit interwovenwith autobiography. In completely different ways, both of these intriguing books arepart of a crucial shift in perspective. Despite their extraordinarily interesting, variedand rich content, the most important aspect of both books is that they offer areconceptualization not just of history, but of ways of telling about the past, or whatSamuel calls a sense of pastness. He writes: “the sense of the past, at any given pointof time, is quite as much a matter of history as what happened in it . . . the two areindivisible” (p. 15). They each attempt to steer a middle path between a reductivelyanalytical, forensic and judgemental approach to their material and one that just naivelycelebrates plurality and a poetics of difference. Both refuse to simplify and relinquishissues of power. Both are acutely aware, not only of the poetics of politics, but of thepolitics of poetics, of memory-, fantasy- and myth-making. Both are seemingly alwaysalert to democratic possibilities within their material.

A strength of both volumes is that their style matches their content and objective.These are both formidable books—Schama’s attention to detail produces a text that issometimes as dense and fertile as the forests of ‘Lithuania’ he invites us to enter at thevery beginning of his work, or as populated and industrious as the English ‘Greenwood’through which he subsequently journeys, or as fluid as the sacred hydraulics of Bernini’sRome he discusses so eloquently. Samuel’s book is surely less a ‘theatre’ of memorythan, in Schama’s phrase, “a bulging backpack of myth and recollection” (p. 574). Thisdense congruence of style and content perhaps partly explains why each author hasoccasionally to come up for air, to get their bearings against other, more traditional,discourses of historical, or political scholarship. So, after over one hundred pages ofsustained, evocative, almost mytho-poetic, story-telling, Schama asks if it is “possibleto take myth seriously on its own terms, and to respect its coherence and complexity,without becoming morally blinded by its poetic power” (p. 134).

Just a glance at their titles shows that both of these books quite clearly place memoryat the very centre of their concerns. Samuel insists that memory is not simply a “passivereceptacle or storage system, an image bank of the past” but an “active shaping force”(p. x). However, by taking memory seriously both authors have been led inevitably intoan encounter with fantasy and fantasy-making, with myth and myth-making, not asideological screens which mask the truth, nor as consoling retreats into the privatesphere, but as inescapable and often creative social activities. This encounter withfantasy forces a reappraisal of historical truth and truth-making, a redefining not justof history but of history-making as an imaginative process. Samuel calls historypromiscuous, drawing “not only on real-life experience but also memory and myth,fantasy and desire” (p. x).

While neither author takes the encounter with myth and fantasy lightly they eachhave their own doubts about specific aspects of it. At times in his seductively writtenwork Schama is uncomfortable, asking: “how much myth is good for us?” (p. 134) asif it is something we can simply choose, as if myth and fantasy are merely additives toreasoned consciousness. But his whole book belies such a cautionary stance. It preciselysucceeds at the level of myth and fantasy, of memory intertwined with geography. It

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insists that such a geographical sense of pastness lies at the core of identity, bothcultural and individual. Samuel seems not to be worried by myth, perhaps because hisstyle is not as close to it as is Schama’s. So, Samuel confidently focuses on what hecalls significantly “the lower depths—history’s nether-world—where memory and mythintermingle” (p. 6). Such an underworld topography perhaps suggests scholarly history’sunconscious—threatening for some, full of possibilities and liberating for others. ButSamuel becomes uncomfortable with what he calls ‘New Ageism’—an ill-defined symbolof fantasy’s excess, where it cultishly slides over into an ecstatic, simplified, literalism(pp. 107–108, 140–144).

The last two decades have witnessed an often relentless assault, by an influentialnumber of social commentators, on nostalgia, on heritage, on commercialism, ontradition. The supposed domestication of history, the growing popular interest in theprivate world as history, have frequently been seen in terms of a retreat from, or ascompensation for, an unsatisfactory world of the polis, as a failure of political andsocial nerve. Historical ‘traditions’ were invariably exposed as shams, as relativelyrecent and bogus constructions, commemoration viewed as a cheat, as somethingimposed from above, as a form of social control, as sanitized deception. Whilemaintaining a healthy scepticism about anything labelled as ‘ancient’, be they woodlandsof country houses, Samuel explicitly rejects such a single-mindedly reductive line ofscholarship (pp. 17, 261). Schama’s book too, in many ways, is a reaction to suchextremism and his remark that the archaic and ancient beliefs are all around us “ifonly we know where to look for them” (p. 14) would surely make the ‘invention oftradition’ people shudder. Samuel in particular responds to this line of argument—vigorously and convincingly, by shear weight of detail, rather than through theory.

But, it would also be too easy to overlook the extraordinary importance of detailedhistorical (and geographical) studies around issues of ideology and power. Such schol-arship, particularly through the 1980s, provided a welcome relief from the sheerweight of glibly manufactured conservative history that was increasingly being used tomanipulate and obscure other social realities. Also, the demarcation lines betweendifferent kinds of scholarship are not always so easy to define. For example, in hisattempt to distance himself from such seminal studies as On Living in an Old Country(p. 263), Samuel overlooks the care and patience with which Patrick Wright unravelsthe stories, the way that he “treasures the individual case history”.[3] From this perspectiveWright’s book made a substantial contribution precisely to the way history was told.It is certainly important to engage with the implications of commodification, spectacle,tourist history, and so on. Nevertheless, something crucial can so easily be omittedfrom the equation. Condescension can become the order of the day.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, myth, nostalgia and memory, in particular, camein for scathing criticism. For many radical social commentators, memory was only tobe valued if it could be harnessed to an heroic, progressive, visionary future, to whatRobert Hewison called “the fierce spirit of renewal”.[4] At the same time, as if respondingto such excesses, many studies tried to sift through the complexities and contradictionssurrounding preservation, memory and so on.[5] Schama and Samuel, although sometimesnervously, have gone one step further to acknowledge not only the inevitability butalso the desirability of myth and memory in any conceptualisation of history. This isa far cry from Henri Lefevre’s comment that “in the name of memory history has beenabolished”, or from Barthes’ insistence that “Myth deprives the object of which itspeaks of all History”.[6]

Yet also through this same period intensive studies into popular memory were revisingnotions of history, through class- and feminist-oriented research into oral history, intopost-colonial ethnography, into a new museology, into the new pedagogy of ‘livinghistory’. Samuel thoroughly documents the historical trace of these complex strands ata popular level, rather than the scholarly or theoretical debates.

In recent years there has been a shift of focus away from using memory to fill-in

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gaps in documented history, towards an investigation of memory and memory-makingin its own right. What kind of claims can be made for memories? With the gatheringof memories there is now a focus on rhetoric, on the ways the stories are told as wellas on the content. The process of writing is increasingly being recognized as integralto any research and to the construction of knowledge. At one point the books intersectwith Samuel pointing to Schama’s expertise in ‘animated description’ and acknowledginghistorical scholarship itself as a form of resurrectionalism, of bringing the dead to lifethrough various literary devices (p. 197).

The discipline of geography, like history, has been responding to such shifts in there-conceptualization of knowledge and power, representation and image, memory andpopular culture. Careful attention has been given to iconography, to fantasy- and image-making processes, to the historiography of geography, to cultural studies. Geography hasbeen in the forefront of contemporary re-evaluations of museums, theme parks, shoppingcentres, landscapes, suburbs, exhibition centres and so on, those almost theatricalcontexts which are our modern memory-theatres. The impact of global electroniccommunications systems and consumer-orientated societies have forced a revisioningof notions such as place and spatiality. The meaning, reality and status of rhetoric,metaphor and image have become increasingly crucial to cultural geography. While thetwo present volumes do not address theoretical notions of memory, fantasy, image, ornostalgia, perhaps the scope and richness of their rhetoric will inspire this omission tobe corrected. As Kearney puts it, a “new modality of relation between imagination andreality” is urgently needed.[7]

How does each book negotiate this shift in a historical/geographical perspective, inits way of telling and showing? For me one of the most important moments of Schama’simmensely rich study is his 15-page essay on the contemporary German artist AnselmKeifer. This follows an extraordinarily sustained discussion about the place of the forestin German memory, especially in terms of the extermination of the Imperial Romanlegions by Germanic tribes at the Teutoburger wald. Schama paints a compelling pictureof the memory-trace left on German consciousness and history by this ancient event,of German mythographers’ continual compulsion to re-enter the mythic forest, to revisitthe memory-site of the decisive victory. At least this was the case until after World WarII with its legacy of guilt and shame. As Schama puts it: “The long, undeniableconnections between the mythic memory of the forest and militant nationalism havecreated a zone of great moral angst in Germany” (p. 119). Green politics in Germanycontinues to suffer the contradictions and ambiguities of such past connections. Fewnow wish to re-enter the imaginal forest and the result is a kind of denial, a distrustand unwillingness to revisit the historical legacy of myth. Yet, as Schama insists, it isimperative that this terrain of heimat, of blood and soil, of memories and myth, is notleft only to the extremists.

It is in this light that Schama locates Keifer’s re-entry into the German forest, oneof a few “woodland exorcists, determined to track down the ogres of myth in theirown lair” (p. 120). It is Keifer’s willingness to re-present German myth and fantasy,especially from the recent Nazi past, often on large, almost operatic, canvases, whichattracts Schama’s approval. Keifer’s re-entry into the mythic forest points to one ofSchama’s own ways of working such controversial material: “worrying away at thescabs of memory until they revealed open and livid wounds again” (p. 122). Thisapproach is not just naive celebration, but is highly disturbing. We can’t just pick andmix the myths we want, as if from a global supermarket, we have to, for better orworse, re-enter our own, work through them, confront and acknowledge them: “notto take myth seriously in the life of an ostensibly ‘disenchanted’ culture like our ownis actually to impoverish our understanding of our shared world” (p. 134).

However, as already mentioned, Schama harbours an extraordinary suspicion towardsmyth and feels forced to unburden his doubts. He wonders if perhaps he is “doingdirty business with the Devil under the pretense of learned work” (p. 134). But, he

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concludes, we cannot afford to “concede the subject by default to those who have nocritical distance from it all, who apprehend myth not as a historical phenomenon butas an unchallengeable perennial mystery” (p. 134). Inevitably those who embrace mythmore fully than himself become the target of scathing dismissal—Nietzsche, Campbelland, especially, Jung. As someone who has made extensive use of Jung’s work I mustconfess to being tired of these easy, generally unsupported, criticisms. While Jung’swork, as with any body of ideas is problematic and requires careful engagement, ifSchama offers a single reference to Jung’s work, or to any commentary on it, or to anydiscussion about Jung’s political activities then I couldn’t find it. Importantly, such afashionably easy target allows Schama to avoid not only serious engagement with thevast scholarly debates about the nature of myth but, perhaps even more seriously, withthe consequences of reason. It is simply erroneous to blame, as he seems to be doing,anti-democratic phenomena such as Nazi-ism on the compulsive power of myth.

As social theorists from the Frankfurt school to Foucault (with his debt to Nietzsche)have shown, reason too hides its own peculiar form of madness. Certainly fantasy isat work precisely where our beliefs and convictions are most dense, concrete and literal.As Denis Cosgrove insists, even “scientific discourse has always been metaphorical . . .but has proclaimed a privileged ‘truth’ for its metaphors or models in representingreality”.[8] This universalizing of a certain kind of fantasy as reason is what Derridainsightfully calls “white mythology”.[9] Samuel has no qualms in asserting that myth“is immanent in any historical work” (p. 442).

Away from the intensity and particularity of the German struggle over memory,myth, landscape and identity, Schama addresses the broader contemporary crisis ofWestern environmental guilt. He insists that he has no intention of contesting “thereality of this [environmental] crisis. It is, rather, by revealing the richness, antiquity,and complexity of our landscape tradition, to show just how much we stand to lose.Instead of assuming the mutually exclusive character of western culture and nature, Iwant to suggest the strength of the links that have bound them together” (p. 14). Indeed,in such a context Schama actually defends myth and the desirability of its imaginativevitality. He simply refuses to accept that the “entire history of landscape in the West. . . is just a mindless race towards a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth,metaphor and allegory” (p. 14). He also refuses to concede a Rousseauesque notion ofwilderness, insisting that the very notion itself presupposes culture—its naming andframing.

As with the question of finding an appropriate, scholarly, relationship to the rhetoricsof myth and memory as they intertwine with landscape, Schama has no easy answersto its politics, reminding us that forest trampers in Germany during the 1930s (p. 117),like hiking and camping in pre-war Britain as discussed by Samuel (pp. 295–299),cannot be exclusively assigned to either the left or right. For both authors the issue ofgreen politics poses problems and they deal with their discomfort by oversimplifying. ForSchama green politics raises questions about authoritarian solutions versus individualfreedoms, about the spectre of a green fundamentalism. For Samuel the green politicsof rural conservation seems to merge either into a kind of false heritage or into a fuzzynew ageism. But what both authors usefully stress is the way that contemporary radicalgreen politics cuts across traditional party lines. Even more than Schama, Samuelhighlights the difficulties of political categorization regarding memory, myth, nostalgiaand conservation, thus following on from his previous important study, Patriotism.[10]

There are a number of ways that Schama moves towards a poetics of telling.Significantly, elemental headings, reminiscent of Bachelard, are used for each majorsection of the book: wood; water; rock. Speculation is openly acknowledged, impartinga certain porosity to his text. Theory is confined to footnotes. Autobiography is woveninto the text, a move which echoes much contemporary scholarship (including Samuel’s)and which problematizes the author’s place. In many ways Schama’s book, with itshomage to Warburg and its firm use of elemental categories in its organization, is closer

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to the Classic notion of an Art of Memory than is Samuel’s despite the latter’s title.Time and again Schama’s book alights on the sacred dimension of landscape, historyand memory, echoing much earlier studies such as those by Yi-Fu Tuan on geopietyand topophilia.[11]

Samuel too is concerned with revisioning, but from a completely different directionto Schama’s. He clearly acknowledges the development of a new historical perspectivebeing forged through oral histories and memory work, through feminist and gayhistories, through the popularity of family history. In particular he insists that, “historyis being rewritten and reconceptualized as a result of changes in the environment,innovations in the technologies of retrieval, and democratizations in the productionand dissemination of knowledge” (p. xi). While such an acknowledgement is not new,Samuel devotes considerable space to the discussion of media and history, to the senseof pastness conveyed by means of the screen.

In a moment of confession Samuel admits to being pre-televisual for most of his life.Perhaps this present work is something of an atonement. He draws parallels betweenliving history and virtual reality, includes sustained discussions about photography andabout film (with an excellent chapter on The Elephant Man by David Lynch) andseriously calls on us to re-examine the historical potential expressed by television showssuch as the Flintstones and Blackadder—a line of argument that I find irresistible. Hemildly rebukes both himself and the discipline of history for lacking a sustainedengagement with images rather than just with words. Samuel shows how disparatestrands of what he calls “resurrectionary enthusiasms”, each with their own history, allconverge in the 1960s, particularly under the impact of the new techniques of retrievaland display (p. 190), resulting in such forms as television docudramas and cinema-verite. Given such an emphasis on the importance of television and film some ac-knowledgement of the often sophisticated output of media and communication studies,particularly research into the way that audiences engage with various media, couldhave signalled another dimension both to his studies and to historical research ingeneral.

Both authors deliberately use disruptions or dislocations as entry points into the vastamount of material they assemble for their story-telling. Schama focuses on momentswhen “a place suddenly exposes its connections to an ancient and peculiar vision ofthe forest, the mountain, or the river” (p. 16). Particularly important for Samuel arethose shifts from one form of story-telling to another, such as the transposition of bookto film, as discussed in his chapter on Dockland Dickens.

These are works both of deconstruction and of reconstruction. The whole of post-modernism has been dismissed as a form of macro-nostalgia and certainly memory hasthrust itself into the foreground of contemporary concern, with nostalgia as a particularlypressing issue. More importantly, as Samuel points out, the very notions of memoryand nostalgia are changing. Both books offer important, substantive and enjoyablecontributions to understanding and participating in these transformations.

“History has always been a hybrid form of knowledge”, asserts Samuel (p. 443). Thepostmodern response now is to foreground such hybridity, to reveal history’s meta-fictions, its constructions, even its scaffolding. As such he approvingly nods in thedirection of the magical realism of Marquez and Borges (p. 429). Both Theatres ofMemory and Landscape and Memory clearly proclaim and celebrate their hybridity.

University of South Australia

Notes

[1] F. Inglis, Painting the scenery The Times Higher Education Supplement 31 March 1995, 22.[2] J. Elson, The call of nature Time 4 September 1995, 74.[3] S. Bann, On living in a new country, in P. Vergo (Ed), The New Museology (London 1989)

104.[4] R. Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London 1987), 146.

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[5] D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge 1985); D. Lowenthal and M.Binney (Eds), Our Past is Before Us (Why Do We Save It?) (London 1981); R. Lumley(Ed.), The Museum Time-Machine (London 1988); C. Shaw and M. Chase (Eds), TheImagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester 1989).

[6] H. Lefebvre quoted in P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country (London 1985), 243; R.Barthes, Mythologies (St Albans 1972), 151.

[7] R. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (London 1988) 345.[8] D. Cosgrove, Environmental thought and action: pre-modern and post-modern Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series 15 (1990) 344–358.[9] J. Derrida, White Mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy”, in Margins of Philosophy

(Hemel Hempstead 1982) 207–271.[10] R. Samuel (Ed), Patriotism (Andover 1989).[11] Y. Fu Tuan, Topophilia (New Jersey 1974); Y. Tuan, “Geopiety”, in D. Lowenthal and M.

Bowden (Eds), Geographies of the Mind (New York 1976).

Historical Atlas of Canada on the Internet

The Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. II is available on the Internet at the followingaddress: http://www.geog.utoronto.ca/hacdda/hacpage.html.

Canadian Heritage Information Network

On October 1 1995 the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) launched anew service of easy access to Canada’s heritage resources on the Internet (http://www.chin.gc.gc.ca). Canada’s computerized National Inventories contain records re-lating to 25 million objects and 80,000 archaeological sites. The new service makes itpossible to survey Canada’s museum holdings, and find information about its artistsand heritage organizations. Of particular interest is access to current research projects,to heritage-related bibliographies and to the Atlantic Canada Newspaper Survey (pre-1900). For further information, contact CHIN by e-mail at: service@chin.gc.ca.