of
historical narratives of war. It concludes that at least as far as
the InterWar period in France goes, the schoolteachers were the
creators of history.
The
emphasis that French schoolchildren were exposed to as a result of
the nation's insistance upon memorializing the war through practices
such as Armistice Day, inspired a performance I devised at the end of
the MADE-IN-FRANCE program in June 2012.
The trip
to France was a pretty intense process. From the moment we arrived we
were on the move, straight to final performances which concluded in a
hurried journey back to the US.
The
performance took place on a diagonal from the corner of an old stone
French building that had been transformed into a dance and
performance space. With dim lighting L'entree Deux Guerres exposed
the listenings of a little girl caught up in a historical moment of
war and silences. Inspired by Trisha Brown's Accumulation with
Talking, I interjected random spurts of text such as “Now, Now,
Now” and “This is it! This is it!” This refers to a Trisha
Brown quote that really inspires me and relates to my spirituality:
“Ca
y est, Ca y est, Ca y est Ca y est: C'est tout. C'est tout que je
sais.” in other words:
“This
is it. This is it, this is it this is it: this is everything.”
In
my opinion I see a serious correlation between the views of my
choreographic muses such as Trisha Brown, William Forstyhe, Katie
Martin, Susan Sgorbati, etc. and the buddhist spiritualities which I
have come to follow this past year. **expand and transcribe or insert
forsythe ++ write on dynamics of ambiguity.
NOTE:
the solo was improvised every night. This was the second time that I
have improvised a performance that the audience believes is
structured. I believe this in contrast with the structured
improvisations which have been set such as the Yuna dance and the End
of Time dance (although in the spirit of Trisha Brown, Katie Martin
and William Forsythe often look to be improvised) with actual
improvisation which is coming from the heart.
On
“History and the opposite of forgetting”: the Limits of Memory
and the Lessons of History in Interwar France. By Mona Siegel (p.
770)*
France
in 1923 was obsessed with remembering the First World War. This led
*Gaston Cle/mendot to propose ‘the total suppression of the
teaching of history in primary schools.’ This stems from the common
positivist belief that ‘history is a science capable of narrating
and, consequently, of facilitating human progress.’ When the
overall sentiment of the French nation was “We need to forget,” a
movement arose to conceptualize and implement a ‘unifying national
memory.’ For example, schoolchildren were encouraged* by their
teachers to reflect upon their time spent between the wars through
writing and the arts.
Reading
this article by nite-lite in Me/isey, I began to sense a definite
connection between education, memory, and history. From this I
developed the following research question: Are
history lessons capable of immortalizing war for generations to come?
When
last members of the generation of 1914 began passing away, it became
critical for French educators to shape and define a history of the
war. Much like to the reflective homework assignment previously
mentioned with regards to remembrance of the Great War, French
schoolchildren ‘became active participants in public rituals
commemorating the conflict’. This information sparked my second
research question, What
is the relationship between collective memory and national history?
In
“Les Lieux de Me/moire” *Pierre Nora argues that the connection
between memory and history was disintegrating under the weight of
France’s Interwar period. He held remembrance had become an
introspective act; one that is no longer primarily concerned with
conceptions of national identity. “Memory is always suspect,”
says Nora, “in the eyes of history, whose true mission is to
demolish it, to destroy it.”
During
the Interwar period, scholars began to wonder what kind of impact
cultural artifacts have on individual consciousness. Through analysis
of the way the Great War was represented in public spaces like
schoolyards and by means of holidays and commemorative memorials;
Pierre Nora studies national memory along side historian Henry
Rousso, also of France. Both were in agreement, at the time, that
history is a manipulable foundation holding the stability of national
memory in its great chalk palms. Nora and Rousso were not alone in
suggesting that memory is no more than the definitive, autonomous
action of the individual. Thusly the recollection of each individual
lies within the sociocultural context of one’s first-person
perception and perspectives of their own personal lived experiences.
This
leads me to my fourth question, which asks whether or not
"‘collective memories’ really have such an autonomous
existence, or do Nora and Rousso, among others, overlook
‘the fact that collective memory ultimately is located not in
sites, but in individuals.
This connection to an individuals ability to make sense and/or peace
with the past is at play with the concept of “collective memory”;
in which the accumulation of “*individual recollections and public
representations of the past – shapes a social group’s sense of
shared experience and identity.” The development of which, is “an
ideological process,” wherein “the negotiation of beliefs about
the past entails a fundamental desire to influence power relations in
the present.”
In
the case of Interwar France, what was widely-regarded and
cleverly-disguised as a patriotic period of mourning became a
“secular competition for cultural authority” (p. 774) If history
is the flotsam of individual experience, it would need to be
transmuted by way of reliable and accredited sources. But when the
authority to record the past comes from specialized knowledge, you
end up with a scholastic history that is heavily influenced by the
textbooks of schoolteachers, whose nationalism and acquiescence to
the state is of particularly high demand – especially in close
proximity to periods of war.
Indelible
(adj.) = 1. Impossible to remove, erase, or wash away; permanent 2.
Making a mark not easily erased or washed away 3. Unable to be
forgotten, memorable.
French
children born after 1918 with no personal recollection of the Great
War became the premiere audience for textbooks that made the war so
tangible and alive that they were outselling literature intended for
post-graduate sales and readership. (p. 774) Whether through
narrative, by word of mouth, or in books and on film; the inescapable
visual stimuli of tarnished historic landscapes, unemployable
veterans and grieving loved ones made it so “even the most resonant
of national memories could not withstand the debilitating effects of
the passage of time.” (p. 775) This raises issues of (evocation),
imagination and recreation seeing as “children in Interwar France
were surrounded by artifacts and memories of war, but the artifacts
were not their own creation and the memories were not their own.”
(p. 775) Therefore I ask: how were they to sort out the meaningful
from the mundane? The True from the False? And also: how did war
narratives relate to them, not only as individuals but also as
participants in a national community? (p. 775) Students were expected
not only to “accept shortages and losses of loved ones,” and to
“develop a love of their invaded fatherland” but also to always
put French heroism in contrast with German barbarism when
constructing their own taut and intersectional narratives of the war.
“To
forget German atrocities would be to fail the memory of those who
died for us,” said schoolboy Gaston Mulocheau on April 8, 1918.
Gaston received a spelling assignment with the text – “Villages:
burned, pillaged, alive or deported. The generations of the future
must be impregnated with the lasting thought of the suffering
stoically accepted by the French of today.” (p. 780) It comes as no
surprise then, that Gaston would subsequently remark, “France must
remember.” (p. 781)
National
“concern about the eventual collective memory of the conflict (p.
781) led to the explosion of Leurs
Crimes,
recounts of the atrocities of war committed by the Germans, and the
systematic insemination of a doctrine that warned “forgetfulness
would be complicity.” (p. 779) Nationalistic and militaristic
propaganda distributed through scholastic textbooks and a general
mediatized saturation of war imagery, ritual and rhetoric vowed to
keep the patriotic promise that the children must know and the
children must remember.
In
1914 it was suggested that every school in France “inscribe
somewhere on its walls the names of former students and teachers who
died in the war,” in order to, “comfort families of the
deceased.” Thus the classroom became a sanctuary of remembrance,
intended “to serve as a moral lesson to children who would write,
sing and play in the symbolic presence of the dead.” (p. 782) They
“hung lists of names of the dead in old oak frames, making
makeshift memorials with a tri-color ribbon which make public their
support of the nation’s heroes.
They
didn’t retroactively name it the Great War for nothing: for its
scale and death toll left the French citizenship with the deep and
lingering sensation of mourning and melancholia that often results
from and/or brings about (depending on your discipline) – lapses
and losses of a social group’s individual and collective memory.
This
leads me to ask a question of you: “Of all your memories, which has
left you with the strongest feeling of joy or sadness?"
A
Brief Interruption: “Haunting
You to Change”
In
Ghostly
Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Avery Gordon asks, “What are the alternative stories we ought to
and can write about the relationship among power, knowledge, and
experience?” and “What is it to identify haunting and follow its
trajectory?” (Ghostly Matters, pp. 23-24) In the words of Avery
Gordon, “Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our
will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a
reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as
transformative recognition.” (Ghostly Matters, p.8) Gordon’s
argument is reminiscent of the distinction between mourning and
melancholia that David L. Eng and David Kazanjian make in “Mourning
Remains.” Gordon, Eng, and Kazanjian all suggest that history does
not disappear, it only accumulates.
Eng
and Kazanjian build upon Freud’s conceptualization of “mourning”
and “melancholia,” describing mourning as “a psychic process in
which libido is withdrawn from a lost object. This withdrawal cannot
be enacted at once. Instead, libido is detached bit by bit so that
eventually the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to move
on to invest in new objects.” (Loss, p. 1) This is contrasted with
melancholia, described as “an enduring devotion on the part of the
ego to the lost object. A mourning without end, melancholia results
from the inability to resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated
by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal.” (Loss, p. 3) The
haunting that Avery Gordon discusses in her work is inextricably
linked to this ‘melancholia’ that Eng and Kazanjian describe.
Gordon seeks to create a counter memory in order to overcome systemic
injury. Modernity has brought with it “violence and wounds, and a
case of the haunting reminder of the complex social relations in
which we live.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 25)
Rather
than analyzing the world from the sociological imagination, Gordon
suggests that literature may play a key role in documenting the role
of ghosts and memory. While social science is bound to academia’s
rigid interpretation of facticity, literature has more space to take
into account the human experience of being haunted. Literature has
the power to evoke a universally human feeling in a way that
sociological inquiry does not. “In the twentieth century,
literature has not been restrained by the norms of a professionalized
social science, and thus it often teaches us, through imaginative
design, what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our
given rules of method and modes of apprehension.” (Ghostly Matters,
p. 25)
According
to Gordon, “Haunting is a part of our social world, and
understanding it is essential to grasping the nature of our society
and for changing it.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 27) In this way, the
authors discuss the various ways in which melancholy inspires action.
“Ghostly matters are part of social life,” says Gordon, “If we
want to study social life well, and if in addition we want to
contribute, in however small a measure, to changing it, we must learn
how to identify hauntings and reckon with ghosts, must learn how to
make contact with what is without doubt often painful, difficult and
unsettling.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 23) Gordon, Eng, and Kazanjian
all have a desire to be future-oriented. They beg the question, “What
can we do with loss? And insist, “Ruptures of experience,
witnessing , and truth are, indeed, a starting point for political
activism and transformation.” (Loss, p. 10)
“It
is peace we are celebrating, not the war.”
On
November 11th,
1918 when the guns finally fell silent, the question arose as to how
reconcile with such widespread catastrophe. Are 36,000 monuments
enough to “allow an event, which had monopolized your waking hours
for so long and which still remains present in your thoughts, to
recede into the past, facilitating the appropriation of memories into
discourse? (Pp. 783-784) As the following quote so emphatically
illustrates, “No clear consensus as to the meaning of the Great War
can be derived from these blocks of stone, except for a profound
sadness at the scale of the nation’s loss and a shared sense of
common sacrifice.” (p. 784)
The
slogan of le onze novembre (also known as ‘Armistice Day’) would
have been, “It is peace we are celebrating, not the war.” (p.
785) At its conception, this yearly veteran’s holiday transformed
the commemoration of the dead into a series of rituals involving a
short speech, the laying of flowers at the base of the nearest
monument, a roll call of fallen soldiers from the local area, and a
moment of silence to reflect on the experience of unfathomable loss.
French
schoolchildren between the wars had become the embodiment of the
Nation’s future. (p. 786) Many felt that in order “to avoid the
return of war, future generations” would “have to learn to hate
it.” Le Onze Novembre was intended to “help children realize the
horrors of war and the importance of working to preserve the peace.”
(p. 786) The occupation* and bombings were such traumatic experiences
for those who remembered it that it created a situation in which it
became impossible for students to forget exactly what is that they
“must remember.”
Collective
memory became a vast stone block listing off the cost of victory and
the horrors of war for the nation’s future leaders. “The elders’
memories harbored stubborn silences; they did not necessarily obey
the rules of chronology and they did not always readily mediate
between the personal and the national.” (p. 788) It comes as no
surprise then, that the younger generation born after 1918 would be
haunted by the complexity of a history within which they could no
longer sort the real from the political imaginary. As the Interwar
Period drew to a close and the older generations began to grow older
and pass away, their lived experiences were buried within them. Thus
when memories of November 11th
ceremonies began to systematically replace the reality of the
nation’s tangible lived experiences, the French schoolchildren’s’
fragmented visions of a Great War they had never experienced were all
that remained.
CONCLUSION
Building
upon the previous discussion of the potential transformative nature
of mourning and melancholia, I ask: "Is history a science
capable of narrating and, consequently, of facilitating human
progress?" If the answer is yes, then it would seem appropriate
to conclude that history is in itself a living document that exists
betwixt a constant state of war between nations.
In
order to walk through the evolution of the aforementioned theory,
this paper sought to investigate six research questions:
Q1:
Are history lessons capable of immortalizing war for generations to
come?
Q2:
What is the relationship between collective memory and national
history?
Q3:
Do 'collective memories' really have such an autonomous existence, or
do Pierre Nora and Henry Ruosso, among others, overlook 'the fact
that collective memory ultimately is located not i sites, but in
individuals?"
Q4:
How were the children of Interwar France to sort out the meaningful
from the mundane? The True format he false?
Q5:
How did war narratives relate to the children of the Interwar Period,
not only as individuals but also as participants in a national
community? (p. 775)
To
help facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to this research, this
paper included an article on the phenomenology of mourning and
melancholia. In Ghostly
Matters,
Amy Gordon postulates that the impact and aftermath of trauma in the
form of mourning and/or melancholia may in effect lead to political
transformation. This relates to my current divisional inquiries in
Movement Epistemology, which question the varied implications of
man's ability to engage in the art of action-taking.
In
sum, "the Great War was a national legacy to which all French
children were the rightful heirs." (p. 799)
After
alll…
What
is history of not the act of forgetting?
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