Brideshead Revisited and the modern historicization of memory
1993; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health
ResumoIn a 1969 article Uses of History in Fiction, based on a panel discussion at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association, C. Van Woodward notes that Over the last two centuries novels have become increasingly saturated with and novelists have been becoming ever more deeply historically conscious. In a sense, all novels are historical novels. They all seek to understand, to describe, to recapture the past, however remote, however recent.(1) Woodward and the other participants in this discussion go on to talk about the relations between storytelling and historiography, examining how both reflect a growing historical consciousness in western society, and how they serve to satisfy a desire for historical understanding. Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited offers an example of this mutual interrelation between fiction and demonstrating how both support each other in accomplishing a very specific and, as critics have seen it, politically charged task, namely the preservation and fictional reconstitution of an aristocratic Catholic heritage in England. Though purely religious and spiritual considerations tend to elide this implicit purpose behind the novel, the task of this essay will be to explicate the ways in which Brideshead is preoccupied with the issue of preserving Catholic identity and Catholic memory. More specifically, it will discuss how the novel is about the decline of a family tradition of and the emergence of an historical subjectivity that prompts individual characters to recapture their past by revisiting or remembering those of memory containing a family history and identity. Sebastian's wish to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy(2) is a perfect example of how sites of function within the text. The term of memory is borrowed from an article by Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire. In this article, Nora develops a philosophical interpretation of what contemporary western society experiences as an increasingly historicized world. Nora states that within modern historical societies, individuals keenly sense their growing distance from traditional societies of the past, with their gradually evolving, self-contained modes of identity realization, resulting in the need to consecrate sites of that provide some sense of connection to a collective heritage of the past: Our interest in lieux de memoire where crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that has been torn--but tom in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de moire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, environments of ... The acceleration of history, then, confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between memory--social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so called primitive or archaic societies--and which is how our hopelessly forgetful modem societies, propelled by change, organize the past.(3) Nora goes on to outline this key distinction between a real or social and the modern transformation of into an historicized memory: Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the present: history is a representation of the past ... it is an intellectual and secular production [that] calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it binds--which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups . …
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