The Guardian (28/Mar/2009) - Laws of forgetting

(c) The Guardian (28/Mar/2009)

Laws of forgetting

I came back home the other week to discover it was spring in London. The suddenly balmy city was a haven of parks, and outdoor drinking. But what I most wanted to do wasn't to enjoy the wan sunlight. No, I wanted to sit in the dark. I wanted to retreat to the darkness of cinemas. I wanted to be back in Paris, the city of cinemas.

Only in Paris, on a Monday afternoon, can you see Jean-Luc Godard's history of the cinema: Histoire(s) du cinéma. And only in Paris would you turn up and discover that a hundred other people have also considered this a cool way of spending a sunny Monday afternoon. Perhaps this was a tragic effect of the financial crisis, I thought, as I looked around at the packed audience. Or, more probably, perhaps this was just the freak seriousness of Paris.

And so I sat and tried to understand what Godard wanted to explain about the history of cinema. But I have to admit, very little of it has survived in my memory. In fact, the only moment that comes back to me now (I was tired, I was ill, I was hungover, I was bored) is when Godard talks about memory while describing the art of Alfred Hitchcock. "We've forgotten," he says, "why Joan Fontaine leans over the cliff and why Joel McCrea went off to Holland": yes, we've forgotten why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates motel. But, he goes on, we remember a handbag, a coach in the desert, a glass of milk, a hairbrush. Or a line of bottles, a pair of glasses, a music score.

But I think I only remember this now because, a few days later, I happened to read an old interview with Godard in which he recalled his ambivalent feelings about Hitchcock: "I often wonder about the shots which one remembers of films. With Hitchcock one remembers shots of objects or landscapes, the windmill, the key, the glass of milk." And as I read this, I remembered his list in the film, and finally thought that maybe I understood Godard's conclusion - that with these shots of objects, Hitchcock had succeeded where Alexander, Napoleon and Julius Caesar had failed. He had taken control of the universe. These random shots that Godard remembered represented the essence of Hitchcock's forms.

I remembered this, and began to worry. I'm not sure I'm as hopeful as Godard. I'm not sure I believe that the scraps which survive are the key to an artist's oeuvre. I thought about all the random moments I remembered from books and films, against the infinite detail I had forgotten. And then I remembered another moment about memory, or lack of memory, from Nicholson Baker's great book on John Updike, U & I. The author describes how, in an early story by Updike, "a character leans his forehead against a bookcase, and considers 'all the poetry he had once read evaporating in him, a vast dying sea'". This is a stupendous moment in the story, Baker comments, but also stupendous for him - for this moment's "own plucky ability to stay afloat ... as the rest of the story and almost all of literature capsizes and decays in deep corrosive oceans of totalled recall". Totalled recall! I'll remember that. But Baker continues: "I remember almost nothing of what I read. What once was Portrait of a Lady is now for me only a plaid lap-blanket bobbing on the waves; Anna Karenina survives as a picnic basket containing a single jar of honey; Pnin is a submerged aquamarine bowl ... " This domestic truthfulness creates avant-garde conclusions. Because, Baker decides, it is this "vast dying sea" of the once read that "is the most important feature of all reading lives". And its symbol is the random detail.

But then, we should pause on Baker's qualification: "the once read". He's right: nearly everything we read, we read only once. That's how most culture is experienced. Which is why culture exists as a series of hopeless uninformed conversations, based on random details. But Baker, after all, is also an admirer of Nabokov, who formulated the principle of rereading: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader." And so, following Baker, following Nabokov, I can invent this new hypothesis: rereading is a joyful falsification of the false image of a book that we have in our minds. Rereading replaces random details with truthful forms.

But no: maybe the problem is worse than that. Maybe even rereading is subject to the same law of forgetting. Let's put this in some kind of ranking order. Godard seems happy with his memory. Baker seems embarrassed but hopeful. Milan Kundera, my final example, is utterly despondent.

Kundera once said that since no novelist ever wrote more than three great books, and since most people never read the complete works even of authors they adore, it followed that no novelist should write more than seven books. Seven would be quite enough to exhaust the most ardent admirer, and include the three possible masterpieces. Anything else was just vanity. But Kundera is the great analyst of forgetting. In the final chapter of The Curtain, he describes in detail the constant process by which novels are forgotten, even as they are being read (a passage I must have been thinking of when I mentioned this worry in my first column here, but which I didn't acknowledge because I had forgotten it). Our forgetting is so absolute, Kundera writes, that in talking to a friend about a novel, "we will find that our memories have retained only a few shreds of the text and have reconstructed very different books for each of us".

Even when we reread a book, there is no reason why what we remember will represent a work's true value. We are far too egotistical for that. (Think of Godard - I remember only a couple of his beloved shots from Hitchcock because, in the end, these memories are just Godard's.) And yet a novelist, Kundera argues, has to ignore this. A novelist must "build his novel as an indestructible castle of the unforgettable, even though he knows that his reader will only ramble through it distractedly, rapidly, forgetfully, and never inhabit it".

And then, as I write out that sad proud line of Kundera's, my own memory comes up with something else from Godard's history of the cinema: an applauding twin. An intertitle, in white block Helvetica capitals:

WHY DO SIMPLE WHEN YOU CAN DO COMPLICATED?

Despite our impossible memories, that seems worth remembering.