Augé Oblivion

foreword
James E. Young
In "Funes, His Memory," Jorge Luis Borges's extraordi-
nary fable about a young man with "perfect memory,"
we learn that in forgetting nothing, we cannot know
the meaning of anyr!ling we've remeI]J.bered. More to
the point, in forgetting nothing, we make no sense of
anything. "With one look," Borges's narrator tells us,
"you and I perceive three wine glasses on a table; Funes
perceived every grape that had been pressed into the
wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He
knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on
the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare
them in his memory with the veins in the marbled bind-
ing of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers
of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve
of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories
simple-every visual image was linked to muscular sen-
sations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to
reconstruct every d r e a ~ every daydream he had ever
VlZ
viii foreword
had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire
day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each re-
construction had itself taken an entire day."1 Think of
it, if nothing gets len out, if it all gets remembered, the
perfect memory of a day takes exactly a day to recon-
struct, second by second by second. The problem is, as
Ireneo Funes tells our narrator, "My memory, sir, is like
a garbage heap." Not only does every remembered past
moment displace the present lived moment, substitut-
ing memory fo;:}ife itself, but .
is-Dei-space' whIch .. of
what one has remembered.
......,,,,,"---
In his sublime essay Oblivion, Marc Auge seems
to have picked up where Borges has left off Part in-
quiry into his own practices of ethnographic investiga-
tion, part meditation on what he calls the "forms of
oblivion," Auge's amazing essay isat heart a ruminative
reflection on culture itself, on the "fictions" by which
culture tells and thereby constitutes itself Coming as
it does from one of the world's great philosophical eth-
nographers, this may not be surprising, but what Auge
tells us about memory as defined against forgetting is
extraordinarily surprising-and altogether compelling,
as counterintuitive as it may be.
lt may be a truism that forgetting is as integral to
memory as death is to life, as Auge tells us, part and
parcel of that phenomenon it seemingly negates. But
nobody I know has examined the logic of oblivion's con-
stitutive role in memory as insightfully, suggestively, or
poetically as Auge does in these pages. "The definition
of oblivion as loss of remembrance takes on another
foreword ix
meaning as soon as one perceives it as a component of
memory itself," he writes. Why is this so? "It is quite
clear that our memory would be 'saturated' rapidly if
we had to preserve every image of our childhood, espe-
cially those of our earliest childhood," he answers, per-
haps with Borges's Funes in mind. "But what is interest-
ing is that which remains. AnA what remains ... is the
of an erosion caused bX oblivion. Memories are
craned by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are cre-
ated by the sea." Or, as he puts it even more succinctly,
"oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance
is its product."
What, then, are the "fOrms of oblivion"? CitingJ.-B.
Pontalis's exquisite adumbrations of the role repression
plays in remembrance, Auge suggests that what is in-
scribed in the mind "is not the remembrance but the
traces, the signs of the ab;-nce." Without oblivion, with-
out forgetting, these traces remain indistinguishable
from eacll other and therefore meaningless. Oblivion
throws relief, allows them to emerge as nug-
ou;"remembrances ar; shaped
by that which we have forgotten, the forms of oblivion
are knowable by that which we have remembered. In
the end, Auge posits what he calls three "figures" or
"forms of oblivion," which he finds in both literature
and field study. The first is the return to an ancient past
by forgetting the present or recent past; the second em-
blematic form of oblivion is a suspension of time that
cuts the present moment off from both the past and the
future; and the third form of oblivion is what he calls
the rebeginning, or starting over, which he describes
x foreword
as a radical inauguration, a birth of a new future that
can take place only by forgetting what came before it.
Like other Continental philosophers of his gen-
eration, Marc Auge finds himself in an ongoing con-
versation with most of the past century's great phenome-
nological thinkers and critics-from Paul Ricoeur to
Clifford Geertz, from Freud to Lyotard, J.-B. Pontalis
to Johannes Fabian. Trained as an anthropologist and
ethnographer, Auge is informed by his experiences in the
field and in material culture, but he is never shackled by
them. Instead, together with his readings in hermeneu-
tics, these experiences seem to have awakened in him
a self-awareness that goes beyond mere ethnocentrism
or egocentrism. Here he warns that even ethnologists
"can be tempted into thinking that the others, those
whom we are observing, live a kind of fiction to which
we do not subscribe but which we do study: essentially,
it is precisely to study it that we have gone to Africa,
Amazonia, and Oceania-to study a particular fiction
in a particular place. But careful! It is a double fiction
and the person who sees only one side of it runs the
risk of having illusions and of theorizing for nothing."
That is, in defining "others" as living a kind of fiction,
we risk ignoring the necessary fictions by which we live
and study the lives of others.
In the exposition of these terms that follows, Auge
simultaneously enacts and explicates the process by which
we come to understand the central role the "forms of
oblivion" play in "the staging and the implementation
that 'mold' time in life itself in order to make a kind
of tale out of it that those who live it tell each other at
foreword xi
the same time that they are living it." In fact, this is as
dose to a perfect working definition of culture as we
may find. Living in the fictions of culture and writ-
ing about them is a double game, of course, as Auge
makes dear. But if we don't acknowledge the rules of
our own fictions and narratives, we ignore half of what
we purport to study, whether it is another culture or our
own history. In either case, ohlivion rerp.ait:s the
center around which memory and knowledge-each an
___ """""="
extension of the other-necessarily congeaL
Ethnographic re;i this essay
for its profound insight into the complex relationship
between ethnologist and subject, between the ethnolo-
gist and his own narratives of mind as he attempts to
discern the narratives of a culture to which he does not
belong. Literary historians can read this essay for the
ways Auge has drawn on theories of time and narra-
tive qy Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur to illuminate
the middle space between living in history and telling
it, between systematizing a and it.
As inspi;;d and instructed by Auge's incisive critique of
ethnological practice as some may be, others of us will re-
main wholly preoccupied by and unable to shake Auge's
startling insights into the role oblivion necessarily plays
in memory itself "One must forget the recent past in
order to find the ancient past again," he says, which is
true enough. But the question augurs its own caveat:
Can we, do we ever, really forget something on our way
to remembering else? Or is it all remembered
in light of everything we ever knew, whether now for-
gotten or remembered?
xii foreword
"We must know the right time to forget as well as
the right time to remember," Nietzsche admonished in
his scathing critique of what he regarded as a rampantly
uncritical nineteenth-century German historicism.
2
Here
again, Auge seems to pick up where others leave off In
his concluding remarks in ''A Duty to Forget," Auge
echoes Nietzsche's case for oblivion and against the
kinds of fixed memory that disable life. But then he
extends this critique by reminding us once again that
because memory and oblivion "stand together," and
"both are necessary for the full use of time," only to-
gether can they enable life. Even survivors of the Nazi
concentration camps, who do not need to be reminded
of their duty to remember, may have the additional duty
to survive memory itself To do this may mean to begin
forgetting, according to Auge, "in order to find faith in
the everyday again and ~ their time." In this
view, the value oflife in itsGuotidian)mfolding and the
meaning we find in such life are animated by a con-
stant, fragile calculus of remembering and forgetting,
a constant tug and pull between memory and oblivion,
each an inverted trace of the other.
"We must forget in order to remain present, forget
in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful,"
Auge concludes. "Faithful to what?" we ask. Faithful to
life in its present, quotidian moment.
oblivion
preface
Oblivion is a necessity both to society and to the indi-
vidual. One must know how to forget in order to taste
the full flavor of the present, of the moment, and of
expectation, bur memory itself needs forgetfulness: one
m.!lst forget the recent past in order to find the cic;nt
past again. That is the principal argument of this book,
'Which therefore is presented as a small treatise on the
..."
use of time.
-- I have this book like a three-lesson course,
but it is not a real course and I do not claim to be
teaching anyone a lesson. This form simply allows me
to address the reader more directly. On a subject such as
this I seek more than the reader's ear: I seek the reader's
complicity. I wish to invite the reader to measure the
greater or lesser accuracy of the suggestions I propose
based on his or her own experience.
The first "lesson" wonders with psychoanalysts about
the notion of "memory traces" and the relationship
3
4 preface
between memory and oblivion. The second enters into
dialogue with anthropologists and philosophers to test
the hypothesis according to which every life is lived like
a narrative. The third, with the help of a few novelists,
attempt;;; state thr:,e
susEension, and starting over.
Finally, because I am an ethnologist, I draw on my
own memories in the field or on ethnological literature
for the material of the questions to which these three
chapters try to respond. Thus, we are really concerned
with an exercise in inverted ethnology; normally speak-
ing, those who are the object of the inquiry come up
with answers but do not ask questions.
memory and oblivion
From the outset, I would like to allow myself a detour,
a few preliminaty considerations that will specify pro-
gressively the terms of the debate I plan to open. In-
deed, first, and without any explanation, I need to say
a few words that are .neither rare nor original, but that
e ~ o d y some formidable pitfalls of thinking. By that I
mean that for centuries these words have been a nap for
multiple and varied thoughts whose colorful, noisy, and
twirling flight risk terrifying the senses and the intel-
lect of the reckless one who would set them free.
In fact, thoughts are set free evety day: professors,
philosophers, high school students or university students
who are writing their dissertations, politicians or jour-
nalists, and still others who spend their time playing
with words often happen to Set thoughts free, whether
by accident or audacity. But thoughts are homebodies
and, even with us, where they became almost domes-
ticated long ago, they retain a small foundation of the
7
8 memory and oblivion
feral. Barely have they stretched their wings and flut-
tered up to the light of day when they rush right back
to the words that give them shelter, protect them, and
conceal them. Perhaps they are birds of night, after all.
That is possible, it is a widespread opinion. It is true,
nevertheless, that the professional thinker, that bird-
catcher of thoughts who became a breeder, first learns to
mistrust them-some of them bite. He learns to track
them down without hurting them, to anesthetize them,
observe them, and follow them with his eyes when he
lets them go. He lets them go to see where they dash
off to, what other thoughts they meet up with, and in
which words they seek refuge, as it is not unusual that
a liberated thought seeks refuge-by mistake, in panic,
or perhaps through affinity-in another word different
from the one in which it used to reside initially. Today,
it is no longer ruled out that thoughts shifting from one
word to another are a more frequent and older phe-
nomenon than was once believed-and, consequently,
independent from the experimental conditions I have
just mentioned.
Ethnology could have informed us in this regard,
for distant societies have been offering the observer an
infinite variety of new words. But this field has long
been, and still is today, more than ever, paralyzed by
an insidious evil: ethnocentrism and, even more so, the
fear of ethnocentrism. Fear of ethnocentrism is respect-
able. It deserves the same respect that it gives others by
postulating that one should not reduce their thoughts,
even if they are savage, to slavery nor assimilate them
memory and oblivion 9
out of disdain for their originality. But sometimes this
fear is a bad counselor: nothing actually tells us that
thoughts born in our dimes have not found shelter
in exotic words, nor conversely, that thoughts having
come from far away have not been concealed within
words familiar to us (we are far from knowing every-
thing about the great migrations of thoughts, despite
some general hypotheses). Neither does anything tell
us-and that is actually the most interesting-that, dif-
ferent as they may be, thoughts sheltered in the words of
others-black, yellow, or red thoughts, the shimmering
of which fascinates or entertains us-are not compa-
rable to those that live in our dimes; better yet, that, as
they stand apart from them and to the vety extent that
they stand apart, they do not have the power to trigger
and awaken them, to make them leave their words as
one sometimes makes a man fly off the handle, as they
say-which is, after all, only one way like any other for
him to open a door and go look elsewhere. Let us not
be afraid of words: we have to make our thoughts angry
and other people's thoughts can help with that!
The best way to crack a word half open in order to
let the thought or thoughts it shelters be revealed (for,
I forgot to point this out, it happens frequently that a
single word gives shelter to a whole range of thoughts,
born of couplings about which we know very little
and which do not necessarily resemble each other very
much) is to try and translate that word.
as everyone to alJ
r;.phy. Every natural language has supplied the world

- ""--.......
with words (the exterior world and the interior world
of the psyche). Here they draw frontiers, but these fi-on-
tiers do not match from one language to another. If
you take one word for another (following a transla-
tion too rapidly produced), you risk being surprised.
The thoughts that inhabited the first word will not
be accustomed to the second; they either have too
much or too little space there. Bad translations are full
of thoughts that overflow, float, or strangle each other
for lack of adequate words, and every good translator
knows that-according to the language in question-it
is absolutely necessary to omit or add words in order to
accommodate the thoughts of others.
The power to prompt these thoughts of others is
quite directly linked to the question of frontiers, to the
question of semantic carving that every language im-
poses on reality. A simple, perhaps simplistic example:
"Wait and hope" was the motto of Edmond Dantes, the
Count of Monte Cristo. In our language-French-we
have learned to make the distinction between waiting
and hoping (even if it sometimes happens that we say
to someone for whom we have been waiting a long
time: "I was hoping!" with a note of affection or irony).
In Castilian, this distinction is not made: waiting is
hoping-an optimistic equation that is overturned, it is
true, or at least modified if I invert the terms: hoping
;, waiting. Th,!act ,omain, ,jut a=ci'ting waiting with J
!:,oping had to be difficult to formulate in the country
that invented classical tragedy. Don Quixote and his
windmills for some, Phaedra and her son-in-law for
others!
II J I
. " .
Some African languages, in which the same word
designates a material substance such as blood and (words
will fail me ... ) an "instance" or a psychic ability, located
right in the head in fact and as likely to leave it as to
come back to it, pose insoluble translation problems. At
the same time, this representation is not as indifferent or
foreign to us, affectively or intellectually, as we might be
tempted, a bit lazily, to assume. One can imagine the in-
terest Freud might have taken in the study of the "sche-
mata" by which several African groups represented the
psychic apparatus well before he did. These heaps of
substantified powers, brought into motion every night
by the magic of dreams, astounded the first observers.
But ethnocentrism (and this is surely the place to con-
demn it), the reductionist ethnocentrism of mission-
aries and ethnologists tainted by psychoanalysis, has
wreaked havoc not so much because one group- used
"guardian angel" to translate what the other labeled
"Superego"-which came from a rather crude approxi-
mation so as to stand out clearly and not be taken at
face value-but because everybody passed over in silence
(or mentioned it as a local curiosity, a "belief," a "super-
stition") the materialism expressed by the dual asso-
smrit
Therein, however, resides the most stimulating aspect
of the thoughts misused by those who are in too much
of a hurry to crack words, those bird-catchers who are
too or too full of themselves.
Yet it is thoughts or others of that kind that
could stimulate our own and energize them. Another
example: that of Native American languages and ideas
for which the adventures of the dream prolong those
of the previous day-thus making the previous day
and the dream a continuous thought called upon to be
the subject of a same account that can be completely
refined only by the person who is strong and lucid
enough to remember in the morning all the details
of his or her nocturnal life. Such, in fact, is the case
for the best-known shamans. A writer such as Georges
Devereux has, with the example of the Mojave Indians,
clearly shown how a thought pattern so different from
ours put our own categories under tension and thereby
offered them a chance to redefine themselves.
l
The experience of dreams lies at the root of the
theory of the universe outlined in the rituals, the behav-
ior, and the intentions of the Mojave Indians. Devereux
draws our attention to the fact that their observation of
dreams is subtle and systematic. It gives its coherence to
their interpretation of ills and troubles they themselves
judge to be deviant. Their intimacy with the dream leads
them to consider the psychic evolution of neurotics and
psychotics as more extreme manifestations of impulses
that are expressed in "normal" dream activity as well.
Europeans are averse to acquiring an awareness of their
own "psychotic core" and the best proof of this is that
they have a tendency to forget their dreams-which is
unthinkable among the Mojave. Certainly, Devereux
recognizes. that, from the point of view of method, the
Mojave have nothing to teach us (for their method is
"supranaturalist" and trusts in a body of myths that ex-
isted before the observation of dreams and deviances).
But, fundamentally, they describe real phenomena from
a "framework of reference" other than Western psy-
chiatry and, at this time when our culture is becoming
standardized, the latter would have everything to gain
from disorientation testing-a test, Devereux suggests,
that should help it to rethink familiar problems in an
unfamiliar setting.
In appearance, then, Devereux's position is para-
doxical, but only in appearance. If he makes use of the
culture of others it is to diffuse the myopia or blindness
that the routine and automatism of our culture might
arouse. But the reasoning could be applied to the Mojave
in the same way. What blinds us !s our
r!,l!...
.. int? ,
perspective has nothing to do
calling rationalism and science into question-quite the
contrary, even if it is true that what we take as science is
not always that. Th of 9!1ture
other (changing the" frame of reference") is basically an
in anticultural ism that in every culture
above all the power it has to destabilize the others.
___ .. ' t . " ,";)
I am now gomg to pronounce some enormous
words: the word oblivion first of all, and those that op-
pose it merely by being linked with it, such as memory
and remembrance; a few others that are harmonics,
deformations, or outgrowths of the first ones more or
less-like pardon, indifference, or negligence on a line with
oblivion, remorse, obsession, or resentment on a line with
memory; and then there are two more words: life and
death, which are the least simple of all because they
are both the most opposed and the closest that might
be conceived, so that it is hardly possible to use one
without thinking of the other. And before we even con-
sider translating them into other languages or finding
them an equivalent in other cultures, they confront us
with the impossibility of ever having the last word, of
ever pronouncing the word of the end, in spite of the
universality they denote.
For a short while we are going to let all these words
divert, crash, link up, or come loose, and then, on the
way, we shall try to subject them to the double test of a
few texts and a few cultures: texts that use them by im-
posing a meaning upon them and cultures that develop
other meanings with words that resemble them.
praise oblivion is not to revile memory;
is it to neglect remembrance, but rather to recognize
the work of oblivion in th; first one and to spot it in
the second. Memory and oblivion in some way have the
same relationship as life and death.
Life and death are defined only in relation to each
other and the omnipresence of sacrifice in human reli-
gions expresses this constraint in a semantic way. The
life of some needs the death of others: this assessment
may be applied in a trivial way to material and physical
facts or may be symbolically represented in complex
constructions. It is the same with what we experience of
the intimate relationship between death and individuali-
ty: being inscribed in time characterizes the individual
from birth to death. The confirmations postulating
that "one always dies alone" or that "death changes
life into destiny" -one almost with the sobriety of a
proverb, the other with the eloquence of a writer who
sometimes is too much of an orator-only repeat this
obvious fact. The definition of death as the horizon of
every individual and distinct life, while obvious, never-
theless takes on another meaning, a more subtle and
more everyday meaning, as soon as one perceives it as
a definition of life itself-of life between two deaths.
So it is with memory and oblivion. Tg,e definiti<?E_
of oblivion as loss of

mem'ol}" itsel-
- Thi; p;;ximity of the two pairs -life and death,
memory and oblivion-is felt, expressed, and even
symbolized everywhere. For many, it is not only of a
metaphoric order (oblivion as a kind of death, life as
remembrances), but it brings conceptions of death into
play (death as another life or death as inherent to life)
that in turn command the roles given to memory and
oblivion: in one case death lies before me and in the
I
the other death lies behind me and I must live m the , __
present without forgetting the it. The
1 ea of salvation, the Christian idea, belongs more to
the first case, and the idea of a return, the pagan idea of
successive reincarnations, belongs to the second: a hope
here and there, a remembrance inform daily existence.
Barely expressed, this confirmation needs to be quali-
fied: collectively and individually, Christians have a past
(sin), while paganism does not know the future.
two ideas are, therefore, not totally irreconcilable and

ties of the future and the confusions of
..
The African societies that I have visited fit the sec-
ond case better: in Togo and Benin, for example, the
vodun gods are most often presented as ancestors, thus
as former people. They call to order those who forget
them, who neglect to make offerings and to make the
sacrifices that are necessary for all vodun gods in order
to allow them to survive in one or the other of their
appearances. For the god is like remembrance: one and
multiple, he bears a name (Hevieso, Sakpata) and sur-
faces in a few myths known by all or by many, bur he
materializes in thousands of appearances, each with its
own history, linked to that of a particular individual, in
the sanle way that each person having lived through a
same event has a memory of it that is both similar and
different.
The return of the ancestors into the lineage or, to
phrase it differently, the substantial kinship of the liv-
ing to the person of their ancestors, the need to correct-
ly fulfill the rites that allow the dead to achieve every
stage of their course, if only to avoid their anticipated,
unexpected, and vengeful return, also illustrates this
attention to the presence of the past and issues forth
from the Sanle logic-the logic of the second case. We
shall try to see later how this second case can ask ques-
tions of the first, in other words how remembrance can
question hope.
Let uS' begin by reflecting on the words themselves.
The Littre defines oblivion as "the loss of remembrance."
This definition is less obvious than it appears--or more
subtle: what we forget is not the thing itself, the "pure
and simple" events as they happened (the "diegesis," in
the language of semioticians), but the remembrance.
The remembrance, what does that mean? Still going by
Littre (it is useful to go back to the dictionary for it lists
the thinking traps of which we spoke earlier), remem-
brance is an "impression": the impression "that remains
in the memory." As for the impression, it is "the effect
exterior objects have on the sense organs."
For this definition what is forgotten is the. event
already dealt with, internal way; hot
aEsolute,
a lirst treatment :.vhich oblivion
is perliaps onl the natural continuation. Of course,
one oes not forget everything. But neither does one
remember everything. Remembering or forgetting is
doing gardener's work, selecting, ptuning. Memories
are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly
eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, trans-
form, flower. Those plants that achieve their destiny,
those flourishing plants have in some way forgotten
themselves in order to transform: between the seeds
or the cuttings from which they were born and what
they have become there is hardly any apparent relation-
ship anymore. In that sense, the flower is the seed's
oblivion (let us remember the verse line of Malherbe
that continues the story: the fruit has gone past
the promise of flowers").
Perhaps the validity of my comparison can be con-
tested and one might object that vegetable transforma-
tions are necessary and expected, that plants do
achieve their destinvbut realize their agm4a. This is not
7he case for remembrances because, in the beginning at
least, they are subjected to the contingency of the event,
to the accidents of existence. Still, let us ask the follow-
ing question: When we know someone well, when we
have already seen that person tested by love, mourning,
or suffering, are We not able to foresee the events, the
types of events that would "have an effect" on him or
her, as they say and as Littre more or less states? And
also the way in which he or she will remember them,
transform, and them as well, or in
the long run forget them? Not to mention those that he
or she will refuse, suppress, deny, put in a corner right
away in order not to think about it anymore? In its final
form, then, the question would be: Is it not true that a
given individual-an individual subjected like all oth-
ers to event and history-has particular and specific
remembrances as well as things forgotten? I shall risk
setting up a formula: tell me what and I will
tell you who you_are.
Perhaps one never knows anyone else well enough
to make this kind of prediction (and yet ... ). But that
is not quite the question. Don't we all have a certain
number of images that stay around in our head, which
we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and
which we can never get rid of because they return in
our sky with the regularity of a comet-torn away also
from a world about which we know almost nothing?
They return more frequently than comets do, in fact.
It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satel-
lites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome:
they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger
our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little
I
as we may care to, as our heart tells us to, we can also
observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize theit shadows,
colors, and relieE Only, they are dead stars: from them
we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty
that we have already seen them, examined them, ques-
tioned them without really understanding the laws that
the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed.
Am I in the process of speaking about childhood
memories? Yes and no: yes, provided that I specify that,
in these terms, sometimes very different phenomena
come together and seem to intermingle; no, to the
extent that, beyond childhood memories, some memo-
ries are found that I would like to call "infantilized."
These are memories worked over by oblivion, aged as
some African statues are artificially aged when they
are briefly buried unde{ground to acquire a patina,
and to the extent that, on this side of these memories,
traces are spotted-what psychoanalysts call mnestic
traces-that for no obvious reason haunt the individu-
al's present but cannot always be assigned to a specific
time and place, enshrined inside the anecdote of an
authenticated remembrance.
Sometimes we are glad to give the patina of days
long gone to rather recent memories, so that they can
be positioned inside anecdotes or detailed accounts,
thereby even giving them a kind of autonomy, of in-
dependence in comparison to the precise chronology.
~ m o r ~ s a smoke-screen memory that glues us" . ch'''':'
to the present and removes that which is too close to ~
give us the illusion or perspective. It makes the most
recent memories blurry and gives them depth. Pontalis,
in his last book,2 quotes Supervielle, who, in Boire it fa
source, cried out: "And you, too, back off! you people
with fine memories. Know that I feel a very special
pleasure in not remembering exact dates." For others,
this subtle shaking up of memory that owes nothing
to accident (a bad memory is maintained, cultivated)
has the effect of throwing a veil of uncertainty over the
movement of if nothing
really is; a bad memory rejuvenates. This
a novel Canard
au sang, an aging but not resigned intellectual who de-
clares: "I am a man between rwo ages, but I have never
known which ones."
It is quite clear that Out memory would be "satu-
rated" rapidly if we had to preserve every image of out
childhood, especially those of out earliest childhood.
But what is interesting is that which remains. And what
we shall come back
to that-what remains is the product of an erosion
caused by oblivion. Memories are crafted by oblivion as
the outlines of the shore are created by the sea.
There, I have changed metaphors. Let us drop, if
I dare say so, my comets and my satellites and let us
think of the ocean. For millennia on end, the ocean has
blindly pursued its work and
those who know how to read, the result (a landscape)
reilly nas to have something to sayaI;OUt die
and weakness of the shore, o{ili--e" nature of its
ari.Cflrs its faults ;:;J.d its fractures, and whatever
too, of the
-- of the ocean; but the strength and the direction of these
pressures also depend on the shapes of the submarine
relief-that extension of the earthly landscape ... On
me whole:ilien, ;omething of the complicity berween
earth and sea, which have both contributed to the
lengthy work of elimination of which the present land-
scape is the result. In order for the marine metaphor to
be more or less to the point, we should mention more
specifically those mushroomed landscapes where, as
on the coast of northern Brittany or in the China Sea,
terresttial fragments-islets, broken rocky masses-
seem to have spread themselves across the sea in such
a way that the gaze of the nonbeliever can ignore their
-_.. -. --
seeming familiarity no more than he can reconstitute
--....:;;;.---....-----... ....'.--"""""'""..........",........,..... ..... .. .., ...,-" ... ..--..
their lost integrEJr.
In short, oblivion is the life force of memory and
remembrance is its product.
The nature and the quality of remembrance thus
produced remain to be pondered. Childhood memo-
ries are similar to ghostly ap-
pearances that, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more
insistently, haunt the common aspect of our existence,
vanished landscapes or faces we sometimes find again
in our dreams as well, incongruous details, surprising
in their apparent insignificance. It is a strange and dis-
appointing experience to go in search of one's oldest
memory. For it is rare that we content ourselves with
allowing images 'to come to us without trying -
someone else's help when that is still possibfe-to
. ---. /"
them, situate them, and link them, in short turn them! c.ce ..L.v;l'
into a narrative.
As soon as one risks making "remembrances" into
a tale by bringing order and clarity to what at first
were merely confused and unique impressions, one
risks never to remember anything but the first tale
or those that followed it. The trouble with childhood
memories is that they are soon reshaped by the tales of
all those who take charge of them: parents or friends
who integrate them into their own legend.
Still, as soon as we distance ourselves from the tale,
as soon as we give up turning what we call "remem-
brances" into a story, we distance ourselves from memory
too perhaps, and it is not certain that the analysand who
works hand in hand with his analyst is the only one or
the main one making an assiduous effort to remember.
Perhaps what he seeks to discover or glimpse is on this
side of all memory. That is what Pontalis suggests, in
any case.
Freud sees psychoanalytic treatment first of all as
a passing thro!$h the "recall" of factual and psychic

events, Pontalis reminds us. But, he wonders, does
repression truly have a bearing on remembrances? To
respond to that question, he wonders first what a re-
membrance is exactly. Is it a reality buried in the
c aur memory that may intact, under the cover
-- -----
of a tactile or taste sensation, as with Proust, stan:ing
a word, a is
the case in treatment? Or is it yet something
else? Pontalis something else. And
to that something else he begins with a first
remark: all our remembrances (even those to which we
are most attached because they moor us to the certainty
of our continuity, our identity) are "screens," not in the
sense that they would conceal older memories, but in
the sense that they "serve as a screen" to "traces" they
both conceal and contain at one and the same time.
These traces are apparently trivial and arise unexpect-
edly in the mind of those who let themselves drift off in
reverie or make the effort of self-analysis: "the pattern
of the wallpaper of their childhood room, the smell of
the parents' bedroom in the morning, a word caught
in passing ... " What is inscribed and stands out, he
continues, "is not the remembrance but the traces, the
signs of the absence." In some way, these traces are dis-
connected from any possible or credible tale; they
Deen freed from the
But what is a trace, a "mnestic trace"? To answer
that new question, Pontalis, by following Freud, suggests
several response components. First of all, he tells us,
memory is plural, there are several "mnestic systems."
In the second place, one should pass from the notion of
trace to that of the traced, the line, the secret and un-
conscious repressed line. Repression does not apply to
the event, to the remembrance, or to the isolated trace
as such, but to the connections between memories or
-
between traces, "connections of which even our rail-
way
(101).
Therefore, Pontalis concludes, one should remember less
but rather make associations, free associations as the
Surrealists tried to do, that is to say "separate the es-
tablished, well-rooted links in order to have other ones
appear that are often dangerous liaisons ... " (102).
From all of this Pontalis is able to deduce a few
prescripts concerning finality and the method of analy-
sis. But one uncertainty remains about the nature of
the place where the path, thus opened, ends up: that is
the place of the "that" (thus named by default: the un-
speakable that). This is the place where the question
the analyst sometimes thinks he hears and the one the
ethnologist also perceives when he observes the relation-
ship of the believer to his "fetish," to his "god-object," is
no longer one of identity but one of existence; no longer
"Who am I?" but "What am I?"
If I have been anxious to thus run through what I
shall call the "Pontalis track"-a bit fast, ro be sure, but
all the way to the end-it is solely to situate the context,
the environment of the questions I would now like to
try and set up, starting with a certain number of ethno-
logical "facts." I will therefore not consider these to be
"facts once and for all," like answers, but like questions,
exactly like questions that are normally not formulated
by the individuals who are the objects of ethnology, in
that they are always in the position of giving answers,
not of asking questions. In this sense, we will in a way
be doing an exercise of inverted ethnology.
Undoubtedly, one could have me note that it is I
who am transforming answers into questions and that
this sleight of hand does not give me the authority to
speak in the name of other people. Taken literally, this
is an irrefutable objection. But that does not in any
way detract from the fact that, put in perspective and
turned back toward us in a sense, put in the interroga-
tive, a certain number of themes not only have meaning
for us, but call for answers from us-themes developed
by anthropology on the basis of answers furnished to
field ethnologists one day by their "informers." These
are serious answers, detailed, and doubtless diverse, for
on the whole not anyone of us has either the same refer-
ences or the same story or quite the same culture.
Let us then state that ethnological literature teaches
us a great deal about the question of time, in any case
enough to question us, that it questions us on the use
we can make of time, each for ourselves or gathered in
more or less ephemeral groups, of time in general, of our
time, of other people's time, of time passing and time
returning, of dying time and time remaining, of sus-
pended time and time yet to happen. And, if one admits
the hypothesis that 'our relationship with passes
essentially through oblivion, one will be less surprised
that I am now suggesting another one: ethnology, the
local theories of time it has collected or reconstructed,
the testimonies and reflections it has somehow or other
managed to gather together, put figures of oblivion in a
prominent place. Of these figures it could be said thit
they have virtue (they help time to be lived as
a story) that, on these grounds, they are configura-
tions of time, in the words of Paul Ricoeur.
Our practical life, our everyday life, individual and
collective, both private and public, is concerned with
these forms of oblivion. First we shall mention them
by sticking to the purely descriptive level so that, in the
end, we can ask ourselves the following question: from
the of these reflections, which have
bearing on the use of time than on time as such-from
these indirect and pragmatic reflections, could we draw
. "
something resembling wisdom, an art of living, even
a morality? The answer, if we find it, will have every
chance of telling us something-not about those who
will have asked the question (the "others"), even if
through an intermediaty, but about those who will have
attempted to answer it: ourselves.
....,.
life as a narrative
L
As a preliminary to the study of the forms of oblivion,
I would like to say a few words about the subtle con-
ne
7
tions realttY- and fictjpn and to express
a few reservations about the manner in which we spe-
cialists in human and social sciences usually approach
this subjecr. This manner translates the unilaterality
of our point of view-not to be confused with ethno-
centrism or egocentrism: it may even be exactly the
opposite. For example, when we are ethnologists we can
be tempted into thinking that the others, those whom
we are observing, live a kind of fiction to which we
do not subscribe but which we do study: essentially,
it is precisely to study it that we have gone to Africa,
Amazonia, and Oceania-to study a particular fiction
in a particular place. But careful! It is a double fiction
and the person who sees only one side of it runs the risk
of having illusions and of theorizing for nothing. It is
double in a very simple sense: it has its rules, its syntax,
29
I.
30 life as a narrative
and it materializes into lived narratives, stories, and
dramas to be followed from day to day. AnJifthere is

a good chance that one might again find something of
the rules and the syntax in the unfolding of the events
(despite the exceptions and transgressions that are the
other rule of the practice), one can safely bet that from
the syntax one will never be able to deduce the infinite
variety of stories that more or less respect it. At this
point an ambiguity slips in. Paul Ricoeur is greatly
enticed by the analyses of an anthropologist such as
Clifford Geertz.
1
Indeed, these analyses emphasize the
wealth of symbolic mediations that organize practice
in a given cultural milieu. Ricoeur is enticed because
ethnology thus seems to furnish him with particularly
clear examples of immanent symbolism in the practical
field, which fadlitates and commands the narration
that may be drawn from or inspired by it: if the action
can be recounted, "it is because it has already been ar-
ticulated in signs, rules, and norms" (1: ll3).
Up to this point we have nothing to say. Clifford
Geertz discusses culture as a system of symbols that are
in perpetual interaction. And in this definition Paul
Ricoeur finds support for his own definition of what he
calls mimesis I: to imitate or represent the action (which
arises from mimesis II) one needs to "pre-understand
how it is with human behavior: its semantics, its sym-
bolism, its temporality" (125). In fact, literature "would
be forever incomprehensible if it did not delineate what
in human action already makes an appearance" (125).
Where, then, is the ambiguity? On both sides, it
seems to me. Geertz, when speaking of a culture as
!", . 2
life as a narrative 31
text, rather describes syntax (pretext or context); and
Ricoeur, who, by making mimesis I into the prerequisite
for mimesis IL seems to exclude the possibility that life
is lived and not merely written like a fiction, that in
some way mimesis I and mimesis II can be implied one
from the other.
I fully understand that Geertz is interested in sym-
bolism and Ricoeur in literature but, in doing so, they
forget or set aside something of the "practical field"
they want to analyze hermeneutically. Ricoeur describes
very well the progression of the interpretive approach,
characteristic of symbolist or "comprehensive" anthro-
pology. A symbolic system (read: a culture) provides
"a context of description for specific actions." Through
symbolic convention, a gesture, an attitude may be un-
derstood in this or that way. And it is because symbols
are useful to the internal interpretation of the action
that they may in turn be interpreted; thus, the symbolic
brings a readability to the action. But where "symbolic
mediations" are concerned, Ricoeur speaks precisely of
texture and not of text. He notes at the same time that
the "texture" of the action could not be associated with
the text the ethnologist writes "with ideas, on nomologi-
cal principles that are the contribution peculiar to sci-
ence itself and that, consequently, may not be confused
with the categories under which a culture understands
itself" (ll5). However, he then adds that one may well
speak of the action itself as a "quasi text" to the extent
that the symbols, serving as internal interpretants to
the action, "provide the rules of meaning according
to which such a behavior may be interpreted" (here
- Ii $
2 @i
32 Life as a narrative
we should read: interpreted from the outside-by the
ethnologist).
\Vhat remains is that this "quasi text" looks more
like a dictionary-a" directory" Ricoeur himselfwrites-
than like an actual text. More precisely, it would not be
a text unless the practices observed by the ethnologist
in one way or another never recounted anything but
culture. This hyperculturalist hypothesis of an integral
and reciprocal transparency between sociery, culture,
and individuals would not be supported by anyone
today and, undoubtedly, not by Geertz either. It alone,
though, would give coherence to the theory of culture
as a text taken, if I dare say so, literally.
. Let us now get back to Paul Ricoeur for a mo-
ment and to his outline of the three mimeses, of which
I shall quite crudely recall the total method: mimesis I
is, so to speak, a "self-mimesis," the various symbolic
mediations that render action possible and thinkable
within a given world; mimesis II is the world of the
scene of intrigue and tale, "narrative configurations"
that place the world in historical accounts or in tales of
fiction; mimesis III is "the interaction of the world of
the text and of the world of the listener or the reader"
(136). I would now like to dwell a bit on the difficulty I
mentioned a little earlier. Does the real life we live and
of which we are witnesses every day-whether we are
ethnologists or not, psychologists or not, hermeneuts or
not-not present itself as a tracery of stories, intrigues,
and events that involve the private or public sphere,
which we tell each other with greater or lesser talent
and conviction ("Listen, you're not going to believe me,
Life as a narrative 33
but something wild happened to me ... ")? An analysis
of the symbolic type will very obviously be incapable of
exhausting or even approaching such complexity and
such movement. On the other hand, all the features by
which Ricoeur characterizes the operation of setting the
plot that allows one to pass from mimesis I to mimesis II,
from social life to literary narrative, would be just as ap-
plicable to the scenarios oflife lived, which are, further-
more, constantly the objects of spontaneous tales by
those who live them, and of more elaborate accounts
(televised reports or newspaper articles) by those who
observe and comment upon them. Ricoeur is perfectly
well aware of this and notes besides that the under-
standing of the action is not content to explore the
conceptual network and the symbolic mediations of the
action, but that it goes "so far as to recognize temporal
structures in the action that call for narration." But his
aim is the na1'rative as such and the game, the role, and
the status of time in this tale even more so. From this
point of view, he remains more interested in examining
how human time is configured or reconfigured in liter-
ary narrative than in working the inverse path. It seems
to me that is the reason why he does not linger on the
reference to Geertz, of which he retains only the initial
inspiration, and not without adding a few touches to
it (in his eyes, historians, because they tell stories, are
captivating in a different way!). It is also the reason why
he does not push the analysis of the temporal charac-
teristics of the action "to the point where one would be
within one's right to speak of a pre-narrative structure
of the temporal experience, as suggested by our familiar
!2
..
way of speaking of stories that happen to us or stories
in which we are involved, or quite simply the story of a
life" (118).
The unilaterality of the ethnologist's or the philoso-
pher's point of view is very obvious here: if we define
others as living a kind of fiction (in which, let us not
forget, a multiplicity of strange characters appear: gods,
spirits, sorcerers ... ), we thereby define ourselves as ob-
jective observers, at the very most careful not to let our-
selves be carried offinto the stories of others, not to let a
role be imposed upon us; in doing so we do not think
of the fictions we ourselves are living. If we devote our-
selves to the study of the narrative, we sanction a point
of view from which we analyze the modalities of explo-
ration and of exploitation of life through the narrative,
but we deliberately ignore the modalities through which
life itself, individual and collective life, is constructed as
fiction in the broad sense (not as fiction opposite to the
truth of the narrative the historians claim to be "true,"
but as narration, a scenario that obeys a certain num-
ber of formal rules). The principal operative of setting
individual and collective life into "fiction" is oblivion.
What I now want to study-study or, at least, grapple
with-are the modalities of oblivion, the staging and
the implementation that "mold" time in life itself in
order to make a kind of tale out of it that those who
live it tell each other at the same time that they are liv-
ing it.
The word fiction remains disconcerting, despite all
the precautions one might take. Not only, as Ricoeur
indicates, because it can be used in the broad sense of
"narrative configurations" or in the restricted sense of
an "untrue" tale, but also because today we are living
more and more in a world invaded by images and fic-
tion, but this time it is a fiction that has no nameable
author. The category of author in the audiovisual arena
has long been specified, diversified, and restricted all
at the same time. (For example, a distinction is made
between the script writer and the director of the film,
not to mention all those who contribute to the creation
very directly under different titles.) But this phenome-
non became more pronounced and its nature changed
from the moment the "product" (whether audiovisual
or literary, for the audiovisual has no lrumopoly on new
production techniques) was serialized by teams apply-
ing proven formulas, sometimes not without talent (that
is another question), or experimenting with others ...
From there it is only one step, frequently taken, to the
cloning of serials of all kinds. I do not want to dwell
on the notion of author here, but simply to suggest
that the multiplying of images, the increasing populari-
ty of publicity and tourism, and the fictionalizing of
geographic space make the use of the term fiction even
more difficult today. For, far from being limited to
Ricoeur's "narrative configurations," whether "true" or
not, historical or romantic, it risks being applied more
each day to the relationship each one of us sustains with
others, the world, and history, through images.
Now "fiction," the "fictionalizing" of which I, for
my part, am thinking is the opposite of the "fictional
whole" that threatens us, corresponds far more to the
"pre-narrative structure" Ricoeur mentions and about
which I simply want to suggest that it sets the real itself
in a temporal, diachronic, and dramatic form, prior to
its possible role in the elaboration of a narrative "imitat-
ing" the reaL
The ethnologist is a little like Jean Ie Bon at Poitiers:
he has to watch both his and his left flank. I
have hardly begun to speak of pre-narrative structure
in order to seek its trace and its Hlustration in the eth-
nographic data that might be available to me, when I
thought I could see my ethnological superego frown:
let us say, my most attentive colleagues frown. If I claim
that others are living in a fiction-moreover, in their
fiction-and I place myself by definition outside of
that fiction, outside of all fiction even, because I claim
to be developing "documents," as Bataille said, by tran-
scribing what I have under my eyes, am I not then em-
phasizing the noncontemporaneity of the observer and
the observed, of the ethnologist and the informer? This
is preciselywhatJohannes Fabian assailed and the trace
of which is found in all anthropological literature.
2
In
short, am I not contributing to the reproduction and
amplification of ethnographic fiction?
It is true that, in the situation of traditional ethno-
graphic investigation, the investigator and those investi-
gated are not situated in the same time, are not literally
contemporaries. investigator has a ptoject of shorter
or longer duration (articles, a book ... ) and a present-
the present, provisionally put at the service of the proj-
ect, that constitutes the very time of the investigation.
The investigated, from his side, whatever his role in the
launching of a project that he contributes to launching,
!i3
has only a vague idea of it at best. When the investiga-
tor and his informer eat together or are worried about
the storm that is brewing, they inscribe themselves into
the same duration and this synchronicity brings shar-
ing: the sharing of food, the sharing of preoccupations.
As soon as it comes ro their "work," it takes a different
direction. The ethnologist seems to treat his informer as
the depository of a total and collective memory (encom-
passing the past, myths, institutions, and the vocabulary
of the group), but this apparentideal of exhaustiveness is
an Hlusion. The former applies himself to collecting in-
dications likely to give him ideas or to confirm those he
already has, always with to a preeXiSting corpus
of texts and theories-the existing ethnology-which
he is supposed to know, illustrate, complete, or discuss.
The latter believes that, with the help of a few elders or
some specialists, he is providing the investigator with
the history of his group, as he sees it. Later on, in written
form, the ethnologist will draw attention to the fact that
this "history" issues from a short genealogical memory
and quickly rumbles into a mythic evocation of ances-
tors and origins-and a few local theories (of sickness,
of the person, of initiation ... ). These constitute in his /'lJ
eyes a veritable body of knowledge, the expression of a
permanent wisdom and of an effective power, whereas
the ethnologist is more likely to see in this a "belief I
system," even if it means questioning himself about
this term, without the misunderstanding ever really d d-,.t,b4
being clarified. An incident may occasionally attest r
1
- ~ S l V \
to this, fOr example, when villagers excuse themselves .
for not being able to deliver the ultimate "secret" of an
i<
l'
initiation ritual to an ethnologist who has no need of it
but out of politeness will express his understanding and
regret. The information from the informer constitutes
for the ethnologist the primary material of a reelabora-
tion that it will tum into a science, whereas in the eyes
of the informer the ethnologist is witness to an ancient
knowledge that is still operationaL Furthermore, it hap-
pens that, during the time of the investigation, both of
them forget the noise and the interference sparked by an
actuality that is nevertheless more intrusive every day.
But the fiction of others changes meaning from the
moment that we become aware that we are all living fic-
tions. If I manage to get rid of the "point of view's uni-
laterality," the fact that others are living in a "fiction"-
in a "narrative," let us say, in order to do away with
ambiguity-it seems to me that this will contribute
to bringing them closer to me and me closer to them,
because I too am living in fiction and narrative. At bot-
tom, it is my idea that, through the questions they ask
me and the change of framework they impose upon me,
others help me to become aware of the narrative dimen-
sion of every existence, mine as well as theirs, and that
this awareness definitively prevents me from assigning
them to a time ("mythical" or "magical") that is fun-
damentally different from mine. Surely, our fictions
are different, but that is the general rule: no individual
fiction is rigorously contemporary to another (everyone
has his or her past and expectations) and the differences
brought about by the investigative situation and the
culture are a matter of degree, not of nature.
f
f
l
How could we doubt that we live several tales simul-
taneously? We know quite well that we playa different
role in each of these tales and that we do not always play
the good part. Furthermore, we know quite well that
some of them are more intimate than others, are more
personal for us. We do not always resist the desire to
reinterpret them, remodel them, in order to adapt them
to the one we are in the process of living. Sometimes
they even inspire us to want to keep a journal, that is, to
make a true text out of it, a narrative of which we can
measure day after day all that it holds for us in the way
of good and bad surprises by counting the blank pages
we have not yet filled. In either case, written or not,
these tales are always (even when they are not "fabrica-
tions," "products of the imagination," "exaggerations"
likely to arouse smiles from other witnesses) the fruit
of memory and oblivion, of a work of composition and
recomposition that translates the tension exerted by the
expectation of the future upon the interpretation of
the past.
Moreover, we are and are not the author of these
tales, for we sometimes have the feeling of being caught
in someone else's text and of following or being sub-
jected to its development without being able to inter-
vene. Being captured by someone else's tale may have
an emotional relationship as its ftamework and object:
love, jealousy, anger, or pity. But more often it is the
result of the encounter between two different levels of
narrative: thus the story of an individual may fall over
(it may even topple over into death), because it is caught
up in history, following the declaration of a war, for ex-
ample. Of course, there are intermediary levels between
the intimate and the historical levels (that of universal
history in the process of being made and told): family
history, professional history, the news, local news items,
politics, sports. These srories can be powerful enough
to go to our head, send us into the street to holler our
joy or our sorrow because "our" candidate has won the
elections, because a soccer team has won the World
Cup, because a princess has died. I don't put these
events on the same level, I am only emphasizing that
each one of is inserted into a tale that involves us,
because it constitutes our version of the facts. We have
our place therein, however minimal or passive it may
be, just as thousands or millions of other individuals
have their place in the version they develop-and, from
this point of view, it matters little that all these versions
are inHuenced, shaped, sometimes even dictated by of-
ficial speeches or the media.
Because of the extremely variable scope of the num-
ber of individuals they involve, these tales could be ar-
ranged according to a segmentary logic of the kind once
studied by British anthropologists in Africa. These are
distinct segments on a certain social level (segments of
lineage) that are linked to another level of social activity
(lineage regroups lineage segments and sets itself apart
from other lineages) and units peculiar to this level
combine on another level in order to define superior
units (the dan groups lineages together and sets itself
apart from other dans). A narrative may involve a single
individual: a passion is sometimes lived in solitude, in
ltfe as a narrative 41
blindness; it has the of distancing the others, aU
the others and sometimes even the object of the passion
when it is not shared. Let us listen to what Stendhal tells
us in his Promenades dans Rome about Roman songs and
their melancholy: "For me, what is touching in it is the
music, imprinted with such a profound passion and
so little concerned with its neighbor that it becomes
tedious because of it. What does the neighbor matter
to the impassioned man? All he sees in nature is the
unfaithfulness of his mistress and his own despair." It
may be hoped that this impassioned individual, deaf
and blind to everything that is not the tale of his own
unhappiness, will find his spirits and his freedom back
again to be involved in other tales. These would be
tales that are shared, more collective, unified, or at the
very least interwoven, possibly structured by a common
calendar (such as the athletic calendar that reproduces
the cyclical character of the chrono-meteorological cal-
endar and of the Christian calendar with its seasons, its
openings and closings, its holidays, and its quasi litur-
gy). The soccer lover lives in the expectation of the ups
and downs and the events of the championship story.
When I say that he lives in this expectation, I mean
it in the strongest sense of the word: this adventure is
a part of his life and essentially exists as a told to
oneself or to others-which, of course, does not mean
that the soccer lover does not also live other stories, that
he is not interested in his family, in his profession, or
in politics, for example. All these "intermediary" tales
(intermediary between what comes under the private
sphere and what is linked to the greater society) have a
__ ................................... ,;;', . - _. .- .
________ "' __ !111. ' lIiSIIII.t______ iZlI!!I!IIIIIII.II!!_p,..IIII.lI!,Ip----------, 4.:.'_JIIII4111. ___ :._;.I_.I011[_""'14 __ ""'"""41l1li4___ _
point in common: they fascinate those they involve (the
soccer lovers, colleagues at the office, the activists in a
party) and are entirely indifferent to those they do not
involve-those who do not have this author-character
relationship with them that defines the "commitment."
In these cases, the exteriority of the look and of the ear
can be total and absolute: "You know, all that stuff is
Greek to me! ... " Another tongue, another language,
another tale, it all comes to the same thing. On the other
hand, a major event or one presented as such, a collective
threat, or a great societal question may raise the level
of involvement considerably-and, consequently, the
level of the collective identity of the authors-characters
involved.
Moreover, the mechanical logic of the segmentary
model (which, sociologically, has never been anything
but a tool for describing lineage and clan societies,
though sometimes a contested tool) does not exactly
apply to the sequence of the levels of narration I have
JUSt outlined. For the author-character is, at every level
. of the narrative, involved both individually and collec-
tively. He is individually involved because the plurality
of the tales in which he is engaged affects each one of
them (one does not watch a soccer match with the same
pleasure when one has been threatened with a lay-off),
and besides, the story of his life is not made up of a
superimposing of tales, but cuts right through them
with an original and idiosyncratic line. And he is col-
lectively involved, for, however solitary his path may be,
he is at least haunted by the presence of the other in the
form of a regret or a certain nostalgia. Thus, in a differ-
1
ent way but always indicated, the presence of another
or others is as obvious on the level of the most intimate
tale as is that of the single individual on the most in-
clusive level of the plural or collective tale. Perhaps it is
even the game of referral that shows itselfin every type of
narrative (confession, confidences, comments made after
drinking, being called as a witness) through which, from
time to time, an individual feels the need to recapitulate
his existence, to tell his life, to give it some coherence:
the play between the "distentio" and the "intentio" of the
mind divided between memory, attention, and expecta-
tion, to use the Augustinian terms on which Ricoeur
commented, or, more simply, between the discord of
singular times and the expected concordance of their
reconciliation in narratives with several voices.
What the ethnologist is confronted with, then,
when he lands-amid a foreign group, are first of all nar-
ratives of this kind, narratives with variable implications
that he tries to understand linguistically (most often
with the help of an interpreter, at least in the begin-
ning). Then he tries to understand them in their double
dimension of specific and singular discourses that raise
general and collective questions. In this respect, I don't
believe that it is more difficult for a newcomer, stranger
to both milieus, either to understand a sick African vil-
lager who mentions the series of attacks of which he
thinks his family has made him the object, the list of
remedies to which he has had recourse, the healers he
has consulted, and possibly the dreamlike episodes that
for him have the value of a diagnosis, or to follow the
statements of a young company executive describing
the difficult relationships he is having with his sub-
ordinates and with his immediate superior, his career
strategy, the training he has been made to take in order
to maintain his morale as a fighter, and the neworgani-
zation chart the management has put in place. I do not
mean to compare these pronouncements from the point
of view of their credibility (of the more or less rational
context in which they are inserted or of their practical
efficiency), but to remember that they both correspond
to an analysis of reality, clarified in a narrative that
simultaneously puts into play an individual story and
collective references. In either case, I see no inconve-
nience whatsoever in considering that the observer is
recording "fictions," "narrations" that are quite foreign
to him, but the reasons of which he can penetrate.
The expression "participatory ethnology" has no other
meaning and presupposes no kind of mystical fusion
with others. One can enter into the reasons of an indi-
vidual or a collectivity without confusing oneself with
them. When, with regard to acts of "sorcery," Evans-
Pritchard confessed that he had managed to reason in
r
the terms of his Ashanti interlocutors, he was doing
nothing other than designating his familiarity with a
I
specific rhetoric and grammar and his understanding
of tales that implemented them.
I Of course, one may assume that the fact of record-
ing other people's tales, of "participating" in their "fic-
tions," does not happen without having an effect on
the life of the observer and on his own "fictions." The
narratives of either cannot coexist without influencing
each other or, more precisely, without reshaping each
t;}?
r? '" '-'",
f..v'"
, other's tales. This is true of ethnological investigation,
from which neither those who were its object nor he or
she who prompted it ever come out unscathed. After-
wards they will not quite have the same life as before;
to be more precise, everything they will have to live and
to say will in one way or another integrate the plurality
of the narratives produced on that occasion. On a wider
scale, this is true for the conflictual encounters between
collectivities-phenomena of colonization-of which
we know quite well that one of the consequences is the
production of new tales, both on the individual and on
the collective level. Today we are beginning to under-
stand (to the greatest dread of racists of any feather)
that in the long run these will perhaps transform the
lives and the tales of the former colonizers as much as
those of the formerly colonized. This is how the history
of art, and especially of music, attains a global level of
implication that has perhaps no precedent in the his-
tory of humanity.
Before tackling the question of the role of oblivion
in the configurations of lives in the process of bein&
told (life-narratives that are being lived while being told
within the continuity of consciousness-weich does not
prevent those who are "living their lives" from telling it
to others also), I w ~ u l like to come back to the notion
of fiction, or rather, to reflect on the connection be-
tween the narrative dimension of existence, which I just
mentioned briefly, the tales in the most current sense
of the term (recounted or written accounts), and that
specific category of tales that Jean-Fran<;:ois Lyotard has
referred to as "great tales." These are the modern myths
2 'h'
!iiJ
of the future that, befure they too become obsolete, seem
to echo the first "great tales," those myths that concern
themselves with the origins of nature, the birth of hu-
manity, or the founding of cities.
First of all, an assessment that is also a contradic-
tion: it is through fiction that one leaves myth. Jean-
Pierre Vernant embarks on this theme when he notes
that over time the Greeks adhered all the more strongly
to their religion insofar as they perceived it through
works that were fiction in their own eyes-the epic,
tragedy.3 First orally transmitted, then in written form,
the tales of the myths aroused a belief "of the kind one
grants to a tale of which one knows it is only a tale."
r This is a belief that is at once distanced and strong, to
L
the extent that the transformation of the myth (imply-
ing its oblivio::) presents itself as the expression
of a collective memory that binds the group together.
We thus see dearly how tales of fiction take their dis-
tance from the myths in which their origin nonetheless
resides, and how in some way they themselves from
religion by reproducing it. Walter Benjamin alluded to
this "taking distance" by remarking that the fairy tale
"shows us the first steps taken by mankind to dispel
mythic nightmares."" He observed that it was in the
fairy tale that characters such as the "innocent," "the
younger brother," the traveler, and the sage appeared,
who, by using ruse and insolence in turn, keep the
violence of Nature in check and succeed in making her
their accomplice. The paradox of a novelist such as Jo-
seph Conrad is that he succeeds in inventing a narrator
(or rather a double narrator, for Marlow is the narrator-
a :4
aza ! &
hero in a tale within the tale, while the narrator of
the total account remains anonymous), a double narra-
tor, then, who has us go back in the opposite direction
into the "heart of darkness," the mythical nightmare,
the "horror" that Kurtz-the hero who confronted the
primal savagery-mentions in a last gasp. It is ttue that
the account of this return to the myth is precisely the
story of Marlow'; trip there and his return; Marlow
escapes the nightmare, while its victim, Kurtz, is inca-
pable of saying anything about it. For his part, Propp
confirmed in his Morphologie du conte
5
-noted by
Ricoeur
6
-that the tale was the transformation (trans-
formation: the mixture of remembrance and oblivion)
of religion: "A culture dies, a religion dies, and their
contents are transformed into a tale" (131). But, in fact,
it is not a question of an operation in two times: death
of .religion, birth of the tale _This dual opposition, that
had been of interest to the College of Sociology and
especially to Guastalla, Caillois, and de Rougemont,
should be understood not as a product ofhi;rorical
contingencies, nor as a corruption of the myth thereby
en!ailing it.:'. replacem'ent by but a p!::!e
effec;)t is 'perhaps every religion's
be. reroduced only ItS
tecause t1;is What the
Greek suggests is that is develoed
.only by banishing the myth through the tale, that
reiigious development itself summons a
tales which, taking religion as object or
g";ssively chang;;its moda11Ues tales
g;nres-epic,
JUd
tale, tragedy ... -that one might be tempted to situate
closer or farther from the myths to which they refer.
But it should be taken into account that they also ex-
tend themselves into more speculative, historical, or
philosophical works that show the distance from the
original myth even more, even if those works stem from
religious apologetics.
The first, and in my opinion incontestable, teach-
ing of ethnology is that intimate narratives with which
individual and personal lives are identified play the same
role in this regard as do literary tales that fall under
specific genres. All ethnologists who have worked with
diviners or healers cultured enough to cite fragments
of myths to support their practice and simultaneously
producing a medical diagnosis and a mythical exegesis
have been able to note that those pronouncements of
theirs that corresponded to an important episode in
the life of the consultant could, by the very fact of this
simultaneity, enrich the reference myth with annota-
tions and unpublished developments. When, early in
the morning, the shaman of a Native American group
reports the adventures of the night's pathways he orga-
nized in order to meet gods and the dead and to pursue
hidden human souls, his tale adds something to the
common mythic representation. Michel Leiris gives a
very interesting description ()f individuals possessed by
the zar in Ethiopia? He notes, on the one hand, that the
main zar of an individual, the one who possesses him
most frequently, has been chosen because he resembled
him (thus, it is the zar who "resembles his horse" and
not the reverse). On the other hand, all that can befall
tt
tit
this individual during the possession (and thus the zar
incarnated within him) can later be found again in the
tales of mythmaking that concern the zar. That is when
the individual story comes back into the myth.
Some "syncretic" cults, the ".Afro-Brazilian" kind,
illustrate this release of the myth through the tale in a
particularly clear way. These cults, indeed, adapt them-
selves to the r e ~ e n t to circumstances and requirements
of the present. At the same time, they still refer more or
less distinctly to a distant past, to origins, by evoking
a few mythic figures linked to forest, water, sky, and
earth ... Ultimately, in the Brazilian umbanda or in the
cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela, for example, one
Sees "strata" of characters intervene who all have more
or less the same function (possessing a human and
speaking through his or her mouth) without having the
same status; divinities of nature, heroes from history
like Bolivar, and recent stars in public life (an artist
or a physician). The distance taken from the original
myth, which furthermore is the object of diverse and
confusing versions, is then expressed by the fact that,
progressively, the most ancient figures no longer "de-
scend," no longer "possess" human beings, no longer
speak through their mouths. At the cost of some sim-
plifications, one might suggest that the more the cult's
goal is to produce and master the tales people make
out of theirdaily misfortunes, the more the possessing
powers (those who respond to them) grow scarce and
approach the topicality of the present. Thus, the myth
leaves through the cult and the latter is summarized
more and more by tales that deal with the everyday. At
Ii i
r .
the end of the process, all that would remain present
are patients talking about their misery and consultants
listening to them in silence and sometimes, only some-
times, answering them.
Closer to us, examples are legion of the influence
that, in the end, the multitude of lives lived and feelings
singularly expressed can have on the weightiest dogmas.
Undoubtedly, there is no history of religions today (in-
cluding the monotheistic ones) that should not first take '
into consideration the two phenomena that the super-
modern, present "acceleration" causes to converge in a
totally new way: setting the tale and individualization.
Up until tried to show that the narrative
dimension must be taken into consideration when one
is interested in history, in the short and the long term.
In this regard, I have taken the example of what one
might.call the paradox of religion, ::hish like i!;S:
naEatlve development to suppress its mythica ongm.
Finally, I reminded the reader that this narrative de-
velopment concern's not only sanctioned literary forms
but also the tales that border each individual duration,
each life in the process of being lived and being told.
Thus, the paradox of religion would proceed from the
work of mourning and of oblivion carried out by the tale
the myth. In other words, every religion could be
. defined, from that angle, as a religion "of the end of
r,:!igion," to pick up on the expression Marcel Gauchet
for what he considers as the C'fltistian excep':
tion in his book Le Desenchantement du monde.
8
To conclud;'= do ask the questi;;n of "great
tales"? Are they dead? Are they really dead? In order
to respond, we would, as in a song of Reggiani, first
have to find the body, know where it has been placed.
Where to look for it? In the libraries? In the archives of
the Communist or other parties? Or else in the manu-
als of political economy, since there were and perhaps
still are great liberal tales as well? I shall only mention
here those myths of the future which, since the Age of
Enlightenment and the Revolution, have marked the
history of humanity with the seal of hope, of progress,
or of horror, to make a brief allusion to the connec-
tion that the "life-tales" of individuals maintain with
the great tales that claim universality. The history of
ideas, in all its forms, does not know the former and is
only interested in the latter. The myths of the future,
though, have been lived by millions of individuals who
believed in them, as they say, but who have above all
created a personal idea of the meaning they should be
given. Thereby they have even chosen to construct and
also to interpret a part of their own life, to integrate
the mythic theme into the score of their existence
(the musical metaphor lends itself well to the evoca-
tion of life as a tale, with its changes in key, mode,
and tempo). Through their millions of "little tales"
they have weighed down on the meaning of the great
tale with its global claim; they have taken it out of its
gangue, pounded it, split it up. Many of them have not
had to go back on their opinion at the moment of dis-
illusion: their own tale was not in question. And, in my
opinion, this is what will always distinguish the history
of communism from that of fascism: the fictions of the
one are not those of the other, and that difference is
-, --.-,_:: __ 2_-.' .: _:., .. It .a I,IL ZUliEl, diSI:a . 212, ___ .n ___ s .. S X'
blindingly obvious as soon as one pays attention to indi-
vidual fictions, to the individual lives that dare or dare
not to be told . ..r.he fascist has no memory. He learns
nothing. That also means that he forgets nothing, and
that he lives in the perpetual present of his obsessions.
Many former communists have evoked the past of their
illusion. Do we never hear the voice of others?
the three figures of oblivion
___ i'i IZ ,I! ."i.al" ,11 1 I, Z ii<
The memory of the past, the expectation of the future,
and the attention to the ;;;0;( ot"i:'hegreit
African rites,
eke as for thinking and managing
time. If we try to distinguish among these rites, as I be-
lieve is possible, according to whether they set the past,
the present, or the future as object of priority, it will not
surprise us, despite everything, to spot overlapping areas
there (and thus areas of ambivalence and ambiguity).
No dimension of time can be thought about by forget-
ting the others, and rites are exemplary of the tension
be.nveen memory and expectation mat characterizes the
present, to the extent that it organizes the passage from a
befure to an after, of which it is at once the interpreter
and the landmark.
Three "figures" or forms of oblivion can be seen in
certain rites that I shall qualifY as emblematic for this
reason.
55
"
56 the three figures of oblivion ",ji
t'
The first is that of the return, whose first ambition
is past again by forgetting the present-as
well as the immediate past with which it tends to be
confused-in order to reestablish a continuity with the
older past, to eliminate the "compound" past to the ad-
vantage of a "simple" past.
Possession is the emblematic institution of the re-
turn: in Africa as in America, he who, according to a
variety of ritual forms, has been possessed by a spirit, an
ancestor, or a god DJJJ,gt,iorget this episode as soon as it
is finished. It is the presence of another within him,or
of another self, that is then erased from his conscious-
ness, but the others, who surround him, have witnessed
this and have sometimes been the beneficiaries of "ilie
-message delivered by the possessing power through the
mouth of the possessed. As for the possessed one, he
"reenters himself' or "finds his own spirit again"-all
expressions of our daily language that literally apply to
the description of the "return" of the possessed.
The second figure is that ofru;p7ime) whose first
is to "fin<;.i..m<:.J2resent by cutting
if oFf from the past more
l:r forgetting the future inasmuch as the latter is idemi-
fied with the return of the East. The rites that stage this
, suspension of time emblematically correspond to inter-
regnum and sometimes off-season periods. The sexual
or social reversal that on these occasions is often played
(in the theatrical sense of the term) demonstrates their
exceptional and, in some way, temporary character. The
person who plays the inverted role (a woman imitating
a man, a slave proclaiming himself to be king) plays at
the three figures of oblivion 57
abolishing the presence of that same character in him-
self and it is not ruled out that he gets hooked into the
role: he is no forge,ts wha!_
he wiiibecome again (the same one) or will become for
body, in the case of the slave wit;
follow the fate of the deceased king). The
spspense corresponds 'So a be,:;utification of the
moment that can only be c;>E!!sss"d pe::::
least I will have lived that").
The third is that of the beginning or, shall we say,
the rebeginning (and it is understood that the latter term
indicates the complete opposite of a repetition: a
e pre lX re- imp at from th:n on,
a'same life may have several begmmngs). It asptres to
find the future again b for1;jetting, the past,...!2.. create
tIle con . tions for a new birth that, by definition, opens
up into favoring a single
0Iie'. The emblematic ritual form of the begmnmg or the
relleginning would be the that, under variable
modalities, is alwayS"presented as procreation and birth.
What is then, at the moment when a new awareness
time emerges, erased or forgotten is ,
is one he is not ret,
the same one and the other within ,[U.E1.:-The future to
...,
bet;{ind does not yet have a shape, or more precisely, it
has the inceptive shape of the present.
Finally, oblivion is always conjugated in the present:
the continued present ("I have come back"), the pres-
ent form of the present perfect, which-in French-
significantly uses the auxiliary to be ("I am come back"),
a verb indicating the state of being; the pure present,
58 the three figures of oblivion
the pure present of the moment ("I am here"); the in-
choative present that opens up onto the future ("I am
going to leave"). We could just as well say that, where
is concerned, all tenses are present tenses, be-
cause the past gets lost in it or finds itself again, and the
future is only sketched out in it. These figures-which
have a bit of a family look about them, which resemble
each other, which may sometimes be confused, because
all three of them are daughters of oblivion-also find
themselves in our lives again, insofar as our lives are
aware of themselves, and in our books, insofar as our
books speak of our lives.
Still, two details are to be mentioned before thus
widening our field of reflection. .
The "figures of oblivion" and the "emblematic"
institutions that illustrate them are ambivalent: they
count at once for a collective and for individuals. Posses-
--
sion, role-reversal rituals, and initiations are social events,
- --_.,-..,
but at the same time they are individual tests. Social time
and individual duration are taken in hand, "worked,"
shaped by the same rites. But for that very reason, their
collective and individual meanings do not necessarily
coincide. The collectivity remembers the episodes of
the possession; the possessed individual must forget
them. The rites of role reversal are lived as "outside of
duration" by those who are its principal actOrs, but they
are only a sequence in a drama for those who organize
and control its unfolding. Initiation is lived one time
only by the initiate, as an inaugural moment, unspoken
and irreversible, but later on, having become witnesses
to the initiation of others, the initiate and his compan-
ions will be more sensitive to the recurrent quality of
the event, as were those who attended their initiation.
This ambivalence has its limits, however: the rite is most
often celebrated in an emotional atmosphere that brings
celebrants and attendees dose; moreover, every ritual
celebration is an inaugural one and a successful rite
always has an inchoative value: it opens or reopens the
future. The oblivion of the present, the future, and the

but, in the ritual context, it .. ".,_.,
contagious.
remark we could make on this matter
tOuches on the notion of the individual and puts the
preceding opposition (collectivitylindividual) into per-
spective. What every ritual scenario shows us, in fact, is
that k!!dividual identity. is consttucted at the same
as the relationship to and thtOugh others. The "figures
possession
gives the possessed an increased identity in the eyes of
the others; role-reversal rites are quite obviously marks
of sexual or sociopolitical identity, e;en to the extent
that they stage an to be marked by it;
initiation brings social status to the initiate and creates
solidarity between those "promoted." The connection
to time is always thought of in the singular-plural. This
mean:stliat one should be in
whicl;i; to say in
",_ ..... '0iiI'..
It was in Africa that I had my most powerful experience
with return. I lived there for several years, then came
back to France. Thereafter, I would always go back, at
regular intervals, for stays of a few months at a time.
The arrival at the coastal airport, bordered by a lagoon
and tropical forests, has always given or imposed the
same sensations on me: the burni ng moisture of the air
that would hit me in the face and the smell of red earth
that would grab me by the throat. The brutality of this
reception, from which there was no means of escape,
had no equal except for the ease with which I adapted
to it. I adapted to it by immediately getting into a
bath, believe me, right away finding the warmth of my
friends again, the voices and the music of the "local"
French language, the sounds and colors, the necessities
of the moment ("Where are you taking me to dinner?"),
and the worries of the day before disappeared, as if I
had left yesterday behind, in effect, and corne back to
my place (horne, sweet horne!) with the smiling absent-
mindedness of habit. The profound charm that Africa
always has in my eyes is linked to this enormous and
overflowing power of welcome, which survives the past,
age, friends who are gone, and which offers the loyal
traveler the appeal of a sustained present.
Some travelers by vocation manage their geograph-
ic assets with forethought. They try to put something
aside for the future; a few terrae incognitae, a few places
to canvass, which they keep an eye on while waiting
to set foot there one day. They leave themselves some
future emotions. But often these are the same ones who
reserve other places for the pleasures of the return and
who attempt to keep a few pieces of the past intact to be
continued, to be completed, a few alternative presents,
a few unchanged settings for a few parallel lives.
They know perfectly well that these different lives
are not really parallel and that, by passing from one
protected youth to another, from one continent to an-
other, they won't stop aging, but it is enough for them
that these lives are intertwined with sufficient flexibility
or linked with a loose enough bond for them to be able
to have the illusion of warding off the flow of time, by
moving around in space.
What matters to them is the bliss, or rather the in-
stant, at the moment that they leave the plane, greeted
by the steward and the hostesses-much like the pos-
sessed who comes OlJt of his state of possession under
the tender and watchful eye of his assistants-to slip
into a past they already do not remember having left,
and they feel irresistibly happy.
Still, nothing is more difficult to accomplish than a re-
turn; for that one needs great power of oblivion: not to
--- .. ~
succeed in forgetting one's recent past < ? r ~ the other's re-
c;;:rt past is to rohibit oneself from catching uE! with the
anterior past. Ulysses found only his dog; for the rest, the
suitors remain too present, even when dead, and one can
bet that Penelope has greater power of oblivion than her
husband, greater technique as well because she spent en-
tire days and nights diverting the course of time, making
and undoing her work. Ulysses has lived too much and is
too resentful for his return not to be mostly geographic,
for him not to find it tOO difficult to slip back into the
rediscovered continuity of time.
The novel of impossible oblivion and unfulfilled
return, the novel of desire for vengeance, was written
by Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo re-
splendently and tragically illustrates the inability of the
vengeful heroes to pick up the thread of time again. In
fact, this inability is what defines them; it flows from
their desire for action, profoundly contradictory for all
that he claims to find the ancient past again by castigat-
ing those who have distorted, corrupted, and diverted
it, in short by pursuing and reinforcing the image of a
more recent past.
I read The Count of Monte Cristo again during my
last summer relinking myself with
a very distant past that I would not know how to date,
but the existence of which I do not doubt (the episodes
of the tale are authentic: I recognize them, "identify"
them, as they say in police investigations). The shadow
btought along from childhood thus gives my "rereading"
the cozy comfort of habit without taking away the
charm of the unexpected. Rereading is reliving without
-
the impression of the deja vu
without the relinquishment of seeing; it come, as if the
re;;ading restored the sweetness of the return and the de-
lights of the expectation to us at one and the same time,
since oblivion of the plot vanishes only with the rhythm
of rereading.
Edmond Dantes did not forgive; one understands him,
even if one might be tempted to think that his insolent
luck and his unforeseen fortune could have made him
more lenient. But he is obsessed with the past. And that
is precisely his second misfortune: in search of memory,
all he finds is oblivion. First of all, the oblivion of oth-
ers. Nobody recognizes him (except Mercedes, but that
is another story); besides, he himself does not want to
be right away. Masked, he moves for-
ward. With regard to the deep dark past, his mask is
the sign of an attempt at anachronistic irruption. The
memOFY of the person who goes back in time in order
to "settle his accounts" stops at the first offense, the
"deadline" that forms a screen for the other past.
In that respect, the story of Edmond Dantes is tragic;
he wants the same thing and its opposite: remembrance
and vengeance, the before and the,
'He is not certain tha; vengeance was the first object of
his desire. The accumulation of masks (because Dantes
presents himself now as Monte Cristo, then as the Abbot
Busoni, and then again as Lord Wilmore) rather increases
the risk of being unmasked: it is almost an admission
or a cry.
Across all the characters he plays, with a very effec-
tive power of conviction, he is trying perhaps more or
less consciously to have the actor behind the mask and
the person behind the actor be known (when he speaks
to Mercedes, notably, all his sentences are allusive), but
this double game is contradictory. For the only thing
the masked Monte Cristo does is to accept his role in
the human comedy that the life of his former compan-
ions, who have also been transformed, has become. He
comes to rip off their masks (by denouncing the criminal
judge, the ennobled commoner, the poor man turned
rich, the patriotic traitor ... ), but if he keeps his, it is
because it is stuck to his skin and because, if he were to
take it off, as he does with his victims' masks, he would
only find another mask. Perhaps that would be the
mask of suffering or of rage, but in no case would it be
the vanished mask of his youth. Certainly, vengeance
(a dish that is eaten cold, as everyone knows) is not
complete until the one who is taking revenge manages
to be recognized by the one who had offended him and
him to state his name. But, as soon as the name
is spoken, the offender disappears. From the point of
view of distant memory (and of the desire for return
that would want to link it to the present), The Count
of Monte Cristo is a novel of exhaustion. From the mo-
ment the count leaves to meet his past, everything is
erased and everything dies: his victims, of course, but
also his memories, his love, and, in the end, even his
desire for vengeance. All that is left for him to do is to
himself scarce.
Alexandre Dumas presents the whole of this drama
as a kind of catharsis (freed from his past, Edmond will
find another love and another life). But this cathartic
is perhaps only an illusion: the Count of Monte
Cristo is incapable of forgetring one past in order to
find the other. He is a possessed person enclosed in his
possession. He incarnates the ethnologically monstrous
figure of possession without oblivion. He sees again
the places of his first past, but his heart is not in it
anymore: "nothing reminded Dantes anymore of his
father's apartment: it was no longer the same paper; all
the furniture, Edmond's childhood friends, present in
his memory in every detail, had disappeared. Only the
walls were the same."!
2
Are the old furniture and the paper alone the issue?
Ifwe were to have any doubt on this subject, the differ-
ent way in which Monte Cristo and Mercedes express
themselves would tend to confirm it. Mercedes recog-
nizes Edmond easily, for she has never forgorten him.
Mercedes is Penelope with slightly less strength of soul
or stubbornness: she gave in to her suitor. But if Monte
Cristo is so cold toward her, even when he knows and
judges her to be innocent, it is because within his deep-
est self (there where the encounter of the disjointed
times of a life could take place) he does not really rec-
ognize her:
"Mercedes is dead, madame," Monte Cristo says,
"and I no longer know anyone by that name."
"Mercedes lives, sir, and Mercedes remembers ... "2
These words must be taken literally. Monte Cristo
knows who Madame de Montcerf is (that is all he even
thinks about), but with these features he does nOt rec-
ognize Mercedes any more than he manages to imagine
the person he was himself, Edmond, in another time and
another life. Mercedes is not mistaken here. She does
not doubt herself, but prefers to say herself what he will
not dare say and what she does not want to hear: she has
aged ("Edmond," she continued, "you will see that even
if my face has grown pale, my eyes have lost their luster,
and my beaury is gone, that if Mercedes no longer looks
like herself as far as her features are concerned, you will
see that her heart is still the same! ... ").3 Nevertheless,
she knows very well that the man to whom she is speak-
ing is incapable of forgetting Monte Cristo in order to
,! JJ Ii za iiJiSii . t 2i"
become Edmond again: "Monte Cristo took her hand
and kissed it respectfully; but she herself felt that this
kiss held no ardor, like the one the count might have
placed on the marble hand of the statue of a saint."4
The destiny of poor Mercedes, who can no longer
think of her son without murmuring the name of the
man who is not his father (Edmond! Edmond!), is obvi-
ously not to be envied. Much could be said about the
pleasure Alexandre Dumas takes in allowing his hero to
depart toward new horizons, while he assigns the heroine
to remain at home (in the bedtoom of her virtual and de-
ceased father-in-law, who is no longer). Perhaps Monte
Cristo is right; and surely Mercedes is wrong. But if I am
dwelling on Dumas's novel, it is first of all to show that
he speaks of everything except the return: Mercedes has
not really left and Edmond will never come back. They
are both missing a partner. For the score of the return
has to be played by several, and at least by two, people.
Most tales of return speak of its impossibility, and the
powerlessness of space confronted with time; but they
make us measure past time by absence (the lost connec-
tion), and in the end they recount nothing more than
the passage from nostalgia to solitude.
I remember that, as a child raised a Christian, I was
always disappointed when the tesurrection of Christ was
mentioned. We had heard so many details of his death
struggle and his death, of the betrayal by some and the
cowardice of others, that we were aspiring to something
like the return of Zorro: a flamboyant Christ, whip in
hand, who would come to teach the Hebrews and the
Romans how to live with a conqueror's laugh. Nothing
like that, of course, ever happened if ohe is to believe
the Gospels. Christ made only episodic and discreet
reappearances. His companions were hesitant in rec-
ognizing him. What to say? In the face of the tragic
/
account of the road to Calvary, that of the resurrection
did not measure up. They tried very hard to make us
understand that the return of Christ, reserved for a few
privileged witnesses, was in some way a confirmation
for them and a test: Christ was passing the baton over to
the Holy Spirit, as we would say in sports language. If,
in spite of it all, I was disappointed by this story, even
if it was presented as the story of a beginning (which
indeed it was, and they certainly explained that to us),
it was because I could not help myself from hearing it
as an ending without further right of appeal. Of course,
it was the beginning of another story, but it was the
end of the one I had imagined based on the fragments
I had been told on Sundays, which spoke of friendship,
encounters, justice, and which, for that brief moment of
my childhood, I had taken for a tale of adventure.
Conceived as a novel (and, indeed, it has provided
the outline for numerous novels), the story of Christ, like
that of Edmond Dantes, puts the discordance of time
on stage-the finished time of tragedy and the contin-
ued time of the return. On the level of the novel, this
discordance is resolved only by death or departure-the
failure of the return and the birth of remembrance. On
the level of religion, another continuity is confirmed or
the same continuity is confirmed on a different plane
(Christ, one will say, continues to live in the church and
inside each Christian person), but this displacement
itself poses a few narrative problems: it is difficult to be
made into a tale.
From the novelistic point of view, Proust is the op-
posite of Dumas. If the Count of Monte Cristo, seek-
ing memory, finds nothing but oblivion, the narrator
of Remembrance of Things Past finds memory again
while he is looking for oblivion. This last confirmation,
I admit, does not go without saying. It proceeds from a
vision of the Remembrance that favors some of its per-
spectives. Time regained is a regained impression (an
old impression); and, as Paul Ricoeur notes, to be re-
--------.
gained the impression "must first be lost as an immediate
~ prisoner of its exterior object.") The experience
o'finvoluntary memory (;:-l1avor;two unequal stones in
the street) is the proof of the person's sustained identity,
bur this proof can only be administered after oblivion.
Also, the regained impression would be elusive and the
return illusory if literature, by making it its object, did
not identify itself in it. After all is said and done, the
only realiry of the return is literature as Proust defined
it, as "the joy of the real regained." This formula is
picked up again by Paul Ricoeur,
6
and the most recent
critics have generally defined Remembrance as a novel
of vocation; it is in the writing that the regained im-
pression endures and finds its meaning.
But the writing-and the return to oneself that it
allows the author-is born from a double oblivion: the
oblivion of the first impression later regained, but also,
in the moment in which this comes back, the contingent
oblivion of all that it is not, and notably of the period in
which it was itselflost and forgotten. This intermediary
I
J
time, which for the narrator of Remembrance is that of
the quest, of preparation, is also the time in which he
was continuously divided between the fear of oblivion,
identified with death, and that of remembrance, identi-
fied with suffering.
That is the paradox of the narrative of vocation,
the tale of a genesis that he necessarily begins when
everything has been accomplished: everything he de-
scribes takes on meaning only in the final events that are
at the same time its origin. The paradox here is all the
more subtle in that the figure of the return, principle
and end of the work, proceeds, on the existential and
literary plane, from a simultaneous dread of oblivion
and of memory. A dread of oblivion and of the future
that places love under the sign of death, for one day
the one who loves will no longer love and for him that
will be like a "kind of death." A dread of remembrance
and of the past that places love under the sign of fear,
for retrospective jealousy will never stop deciphering
the indications of betrayal and unhappiness. Only the
literary return to the past anterior, aroused by the ex-
perience of involuntary memory, allows the narrator to
bypass and appease this double dread, ro regain the old
past, that is to say to forget death and fear by escaping
from the other pasts. For the rest, when the narrator
recounts his return to the places of his childhood, to
Combray (chapter 4 of Albertine disparue [The Sweet
Cheat Gone]), he presents his experience as disappoint-
ing, compromised by the burdensome presence of an en-
tire intermediary past: "1 was saddened to see how little
I was reliving my earlier years. I found the Vivo nne
thin and ugly on the edge of the towpath. Not that I
was noticing very great material inaccuracies in what I
was remembering. But separated from the places I hap-
pened to be crossing again through a wholly different
life, there was between them and me not even that inti-
macy from which the immediate, delicious, and total
deflagration of remembrance is born, even before one
has noticed it ... "7 Soul-searching is very much a liter-
ary figure of oblivion-and of memory.
Because every tragedy can be transformed into melo-
drama and vice versa, it has been possible for comic au-
thors to exploit the figure of return. One may remember
Fernandel who, in Fran[ois Ier, incarnated a poor man
made miserable by his wife, his mother-in-law, and his
boss. Fortunately, a magician he happened to meet had
him take a potion and under its power he found himself
transported to the court of Fran<;:ois r
er
, where his judi-
cious use of the Petit Larousse illustre earned him a solid
reputation as diviner and the benevolent attention of
the ladies. When the potion stopped working, he came
back to himself: to Paris, and to the twentieth century,
and at the same time regained the ordinary torments of
everyday banality. He was forever persuading the ma-
gician to send him back to where his real life was, the
one had loved living. His wish was satisfied and his
sensational return ("Here r am again!") to the court of
Fran<;:ois r
er
was most delightfuL
In a film with Charlie Chaplin, the mechanism of
the return is more complicated. Charlie, poor and home-
less, meets a rich drunkard who has him move in and
treats him like a prince with great warmth and kind-
: n itt ,
t
I
ness. Unfortunately, this man who is so generous when
he is drunk loses any memory of his drunken state
when he sobers up; he also changes personality: hard
and brittle, he has Charlie thrown out into the street.
But, miraculously, as soon as he gets drunk again, he re-
members the previous binges, welcomes Charlie warmly,
takes him back in ... and the story begins all over again.
The comic effect stems from the fact that Charlie, who
has a continuous memory of these events, never knows
when he meets him whether he is dealing with his
bosom buddy or with his class enemy. .:<)(
What is difficult to think about is the continuity ';'" \l.Y" I.,:;
behind thetlgure of return. The oflived
duration generally prohibit an integral
one has left, a icking up o' here one left them "-r
regaining of an . . __ . _r._
movies tell us that one needs iliehelp ota:pOW;n or of \ tvt:;;x
complete
r willaG;";dci"the power of sensations that, taking a hold/'
of the person coming back to places where he has lived,
give him the feeling he had never left them: smells and
burns of the tropics, or sometimes on the beach, when
the body takes shape again under the sand's embrace,
the familiar murmur of an eternal summer. It is not
altogether the" deflagration of remembrances" of which
Proust speaks that is at work here: it is a short-circuit of
the same order, in the sense that it passes through the
body and the senses and is born from the contact made
between two separate peflo(fs but produced in the very
praces meniselves, associating them with the evidence of
<i time retaIned
--------------.
72 the three of oblivion
to Proust in a passage in his Notes sur Ies Orisa et Vodun
in which he speaks about the treatment to which the
young initiates are subjected:
8
their ritual "being pur
to death" is accompanied by such a forceful attack on
their senses (notably on their hearing, by the beating of
drums in rhythms that are peculiar to the occasion) that
they regain its presence throughout their existence with
an always fierce emotion as soon as the drums of new
initiations sound.
With this example one sees the figures of return
and beginning combine: for, if the initiation is lived as a
birth by the initiates, over rime it becomes the guarantor
of return and remembrances. But the feeling of return
is then consolidated and maintained by the identity of
the places, the social symbolism, and the permanence
of the rituaL
An imermediary case between that of the Proust-
ian rerum (in which the "deflagration of the remem-
brance" is presented as the origin and the material of
literary inspiration) and that of the existential rerurn
to the places themselves (thanks to strong sensations)
would be that of the consumers of literature or of im-
ages who like to reread books or see films again. The
pleasure of the return, in these areas, is also linked to
fragments (such and such a passage, such and such an
appearance) that take place, like other remembrances,
and are exposed to the same risks in our imagination.
It happens that we do not again find the lines we had
loved, or that they seem to have lost something of their
initial charm; scenes that fascinated us in certain "cult"
films sometimes give us quite a bit of trouble when we
wanr to describe them precisely, but they are never-
theless present, insistent, and friendly in our memory:
Ingrid Bergman's first appearance in Casablanca . .. or
von Stroheim's geranium in Grand Illusion.
These fictional scenes dive into our real life, slip
in like remembrances in the same capacity as those we
have lived, and it is certainly true that, in some way,
we have indeed lived them. And it is exactly in that ca-
picity, when they come back (when we see them again
instead of imagining them) that they can puzzle us, dis-
appoinr us, because time has passed and we do not see
them with the same eyes, unless-most often the privi-
lege of literature or movie enthusiasts who never stop
reading and rereading, seeing and seeing again, with
the same intensity-the miraculous feeling of continui-
ty mingles with our rediscoveries, our surprises, and
our remembrances. Music (which frequently plays a
major role in our perception of the film image) is, more
than any other art perhaps, in its various forms, apt
to bring those it takes by surprise back toward shores
they do not always recognize very well but of which
they are suddenly, thanks to the music, sure to have
known and loved once, before leaving them. The re-
frain, the old tune, the melody of the "three lillie notes"
the song mentions, have that re-creative ability; that po-
etic power-independent of musical genres, excepr that
"popular" music has the widest audience and therefore
offers a much more diverse and extensive humanity than
the specialized music-loving public the possibiliry of
feeling subtle adaptability of time, the feeling of
"srrange familiaritY' {unheimliche} that Freud associates
with repetition, but about which we have learned with
Proust that, in its most felicitous forms, being more
familiar than strange, it may also be aroused by the
obviousness of the return.
To tell the truth, in this kind of artistic emotion
the figure of return is not present by itself; it is mixed
with that of suspension (of the moment in which the
thought of future and past is erased) and sometimes
also with that of the rebeginning, as if the certainty of
existing by onesel through the experience of the return
to onesel were reopening the doors of the possible.
Rilre, ephemeral, unstable, the figure of return is
fortunately reversible.
als and cultures, taking cognizance of the intrinsic dif-
ficulties in the act of coming back, imagine it achieved.
The ideas of resemblance and rebirth are the result of
this reversal: from the birth of a new human being on,
we look at his body, and a little later in his personality,
for traits that could translate the return of another in
him. That is some of what we are looking for when,
viewing some of the family photos that are piling up
in our drawers, we believe that in the features of some
close ancestors we are finding those that remind us of
the face or the silhouette of their descendants ("Look
at that picture of YOut father: your son, when he smiles,
is his spitting image!").
of resemblance a theory of descendance and lineage is
the
societies and as
the experience of involuntary memory: it consolidates
individual identity, the sense of identity, but by anchor-
ing it in the proclaimed evidence of a heritage. From
this point of view, one may also distinguish between
theories (African ones, for example) that postulate that
an element of the person is transmitted to one of his
descendants (according to m9dalities that vary from
one culture to another)-theories that are very close to a
materialist concept of heredity-and theories that, fol-
lowing the example of the myth ofEr in Plato's Republic,
speak of successive reincarnations of a same soul, of
a metempsychosis. Plato's spiritualism, insofar as can
be inferred from the conclusive myth of The Republic,
places the return not under the sign of heredity, but
under that of the free choice of souls.
In all these cases of the figure, and oblivion
are involved. It is by recollectinK theWy,
nance, and the character of the dead that
of can find on the body of a newborn
behavior of the adolescent the trace
dead have there. The example of the
possession by the zar: studied it, invertS this
connection: the principal zar of an initiate is chosen be-
cause he resembles the latter in certain features. In both
cases (life conceived of as possession by the dead, and
possession conceived of as incarnation of the spirit), the
distinction between same and other is retained, but
the same time it is put into perspective and made
dialectical: it is only one aspect, one component of the
constituent plurality of every single person. In Plato, in
the outlook of the myth of Er, the individual being is
one (it is a "soul"), but he escapes from repetition only
through oblivion: at the conclusion of the journey in;o

J j
Hell, if each one chooses his new life, it is not so new.
("For this sight was worth seeing, he said, how the dif-
ferent souls chose their lives, a pitiable sight, and ri-
diculous, and very strange. They mostly chose accord-
ing to their experience in the former life.")9 Were it not
for the change in bodily encl.osure and for oblivion (for
, the souls )Jillst drink the water of Lethe before coming
..l{p,.j>'j to earth and,...ften being too thirsty, they com-
,tfJ pletely lose of .their every life
.;!" , .... repeat Itself llldefinltely and Idenncally. Proust
.)' I is sensitive to the pagan ViSiOn of the return through
p,,(-descendancy. If Gilberte, in Time Regained, resembles
"'t'l...' her mother feature by feature, it is because individuals,
as they age, show family traits that had remained in-
l.;i { visible in their faces until then, as invisible as the inner
parts of a seed on the outside only with
time. ut these features of
are not incompatible with the always threatened desire ;
j
for singular identity, the desire for an individuality to I
which only the body has the key, because it contains the /
hours of the past, and now and then still
ossessed by the childhood that inhabits it. (
"Oh, time, suspend your flight!"
"I'd I " T "b chI ?" ove to, says Ime, ut ror ow ong.
I remember this playful response to the Lamartinian
remark, but I no longer know to whom to attribute it.
Gide, perhaps? I leafed through Paludes without finding
a trace of it and am beginning to wonder if the profes-
sor of literature from whose mouth I remember having
heard this "literary quotation" did not invent it him-
t II U"
;;
self, after alL Funny and inaccurate, this quotation. For
suspended time is precisely what cannot be measured.
Therein even lies'its charm.
I discovered the grace of suspended time once when
reading Stendhal and, up to now, no rereading seems to
have weakened it for me. At age eighteen, I saw Mme
de Chasteller with the same eyes as Lucien Leuwen
did, and with my two heroes I suffered the setbacks
that the jealous malignancy of the province imposed
on them. Most often, their relationship was snared in
the time of others and affected by their action (Lucien
and Mme de Chasteller would see each other, yearn for
ttust and sincerity, have doubts, move away, come across
each other again, then move away once more: it was the
time of agitation, malicious gossip, suspicion, drama, and
melodrama). But sometimes their relationship would free
itself from all this and quiet down into the miraculous
transparency of the moment: and then it was, indeed,
as if time were standing stilL (Every night Lucien
would come and sit on a stone opposite the shuttered
window of Mme de Chasteller's bedroom, while she,
behind her closed shutters, would observe him in si-
lence. During two walks taken in the early evening in
the woods of the Chasseur vert, a cafe in the vicinity
of Nancy where German horns were playing Mozart,
they would understand each other without speaking, or
barely speaking, except when, in the end, time reassert-
ed its rights and let the threat of the next day emerge:
"When we are back in Nancy, when the vanities of life
have clutched you again, all you will see in me is the
little second lieutenant.")l0 For Stendhal, happiness lies
very much in the moment, but in the moment shared,
in the harmony of being with the beloved in order not
to think anymore of the day before or the day after, in
the deliverance from the antagonistic relationship with
others, which Fabrice del Dongo and Julien Sorel never
feel as strongly as when they are in their prison cell.
Without a doubt, and almost paradoxically, the
Stendhalian heroes find another form of happiness in
action (and in the rebeginnings of which action is the
opportunity). But, however much they aspire to love
and friendship, they always remain tempted to grasp a
few moments of grace from the social time of intrigue
and self-interest. Thus, they find again the misgiving
that La Boetie expresses in his Discours de La servitude
voLontaire: "What anguish, what martyrdom, oh God!
To be occupied day and night with pleasing a man, and
with mistrusting him more than any other person in
the world. Always to be watching like a hawk, to have
one's ear sharpened, in order to see where the blow will
come from, to uncover the traps, to feel the expression
of one's rivals, to discern the traitor."ll
\ .. ,.-. and of
\ .... fnendshlp for La Boetle, as they are the obsesslOn or the II
\ ideal of the Stendhalian lovers, and both of them as-
sume a kind of halting of time, or at the very least ofits
t destructive action, an agreement of beings bypassing all
\ that separates them through oblivion, the momentary )
I. oblivion of the times that do not concern their recip-
\ ..--*
relationship:Jr"aouble of the
of tImes, one could say, smce
the agreement of the beings presupposes the constancy
Ztt a: ; $ aM
of each: how many lovers suffer from not having loved
each other in the same way at the same moment, and
these discrepancies are precisely what causi;f'he twists
I
and turns, the salt, and the sadness of what have since
then been called love stones . ..
One of the effects of concorqg.nce, on the contrary,
is that the and that in this intervening pe-
riod, this interval between a past and a future both
kept at a distance, the individuals no longer resemble
themselves; they are as different from what they were
the day before as from what they will become again the
next day. One might think and suggest that it is more
readily in these rare moments that their nature truly is
expressed, but "true nature" is precisely what does not
often have the freedom to express itself in its pure state.
Exceptional moments are needed for this, collected out
of themselves, pieces of pure present time. In the role-
reversal rites studied by the ethnologists, the roles acted
are blatant with truth, or, more exactly, those who play
them truly say what is in their heart: women protest the
arrogant and slightly ridiculous vanity of men, and slaves
the arbitrary brutality of their masters. These moments
of truth have another objective and are siruated in a dif-
ferent context than the moments of Stendhalian happi-
ness, bur, from the point of view of time and truth, they
are of the same nature: in the rare minutes in which they
surrender themselves lovingly to the gaze of the other,
Stendhal's heroes strive above all else to shed their social
role, to show themselves to be absolutely different from
what they ordinarily seem to be. As in certain African
rites when the slave, the king's double, would follow him
jill _______________________ _
into the grave after having taken his place for a short
while, at the horizon of this exceptional condition, death
sometimes awaits them: foiled in The Charterhouse of
Parma, achieved in The Red and the Black. As if, at the
end of the lovers' duel, something of the lost intirnacy
whose trace Georges k,a: toi:i:rurin
A.:Zt:ec ritual and sacrifice would
In fiction as in social life, do not the respite, the
pause imply this shedding of everyday presentation?
Image of a western: it is always under the threat of death,
at night, preceding the last fight (at night, when the
cries and chants of Indian warriors resound), that the
coarse captain of the cavalry confesses his feelings to
the woman he has treated until then with the coldness
his role and dury required of him. In war films or, more
recently, in films of catastrophes, the American cinema
is crazy about these moments of expectation and fear
(suspense then almost identified with anxiety), in which
we see the characters, for better or worse, reveal the
naked truth of the human beneath the faded finery of
social presentation. In social life itself (the 1968 psycho-
drama being of paradigmatic value in this regard), is it
not true that a single day of a strike or of atmospheric
pollution is enough for the city to take on an air of
celebration, despite the annoyances, as if one part of its
inhabitants (and too bad for the others) suddenly were
liberated enthusiastically from its customary norms?
What fiction makes possible,
eluding that offered by the reading a solitary individual
does, is to forget oneself to forget o(one-
sci? as sign of repetition:-The
..------...
of literature have certainly observed that the tenses of
the narrative were past tenses ("Once upon a time there
was ... ") and that the "switch" from the everyday thus
obtained worked to the advantage of the reader's "relaxa-
tion." But does this "relaxation" itself not pass through
the momentary abandonment of all or part of one's so-
cial identity? Is not literary fiction (like celebration and
love), in this sense, always virtually subversive?
We are all sensitive to the splendors of beginnings, to
the rare quality of those moments when the present is
freed from the past without as yet letting anything shine
through of the future that sets it into motion. Beyond
their sadness and desolation, what is fascinating about
the shapeless scenery of the most developed urban life
(airports, parking lots, cement-covered squares where
anonymous silhouettes pass each other without stop-
ping) is their unconscious resemblance to the almost ab-
stract, barely outlined spaces of courtly romances. This
scenery is analogous to that against whose background
Don Juan moves around in search of an encounter that
will once again make him succumb to the "charm of
budding inclinations." If one day we should lose this
dark desire for encounter and renewal that moves us
now and then, would we not be dead without realizing
it, before our time, thereby taking away from death it-
self the poetic power that is attached to everything we
can "see coming" from afar?
When I was twenty, I loved Julien Gracq uncondi-
tionally. And ifI am not so sure today that two or three
of his early novels are not somewhat "dated," some of
his pages, old or more recent, have, in my view, retained
their power to evoke moments and spaces through the
feelings they arouse. The miracle, then (which is why
these pages have not aged), is born from the encounter
they allow, today like yesterday, between experiences
that are singular and distanced from each other, and
that, in the eyes of the reader, the writing brings closer.
That is the "small miracle" that Christian Metz men-
tioned in regard to certain cinematographic images, in
which the spectator thinks he finds images again that
are "usually interior"-a miracle, he says, whose efrect
is to break a "very common solitude."12 There are pages
and images that lead us quite naturally to believe that
we could have written them or, at the very least, that
we would have liked to be their author. If Proust, more
than anyone else, has us share the experience of the re-
turn, and Stendhal that of the suspense, Gracq, closest
to us, is the one who links us to the experience of the
beginning.
He calls this experience of beginning the "journey";
but, in using this word, he is thinking primarily of the
"departure," nOt of exploration or disorientation: "It is
above all a question of leaving, as Baudelaire knew very
welL It is about very uncertain journeys, departures that
,are so much departures that no arrival could ever dis-
claim them .... " In this text, "Les yeux bien ouverts"
(Eyes wide open], broadcast on radio and then picked
up in the collection Priftrences, the example given is that
of the launching of an ocean liner: "When the last jacks
are lifted, the hull begins to slide incredibly slowly, to the
point where one wonders fOr quite a while whether she is
moving or not ... That would make me understand a
little, so to speak, what moves me especially in the feel-
ing of departure. All of a sudden, one would feel, one
would see that there was an extraordinary pressure be-
hind this almost millimeter by millimeter departure."
Gracq's speaker concludes this passage of the interview
with a felicitous phrase: "In short, the feeling of the cast-
ing off, rather than that of the destination."13
The rite, in its most general aspect, once it is achieved
with fervor and does not slide into boredom of fur-
mal repetition, also has something of that "casting-
off" quality. It makes one think of the preparations for
a departure: it is organized, perfected, requires time.
The metaphor of the journey is often linked to it,
sometimes coupled with that of death. The purpose
of the symbolic "putting to death" of the initiate or
of the slave incorporated into a new lineage in West
Africa was the birth into a new life. We also know
that rite passes through sacrifice, that the connection
with ancestors and gods, which always has something
of a journey (possession, descent of the gods, shamanic
journey, dream), is sometimes a bloody connection. At
the end of the rite, it is necessary that everything can
"recommence," under penalty of failure. Whoever al-
lows for the idea of beginning must also allow for that
of the end; as for the forgetting of the past, necessary
for every true rebeginning, it is incompatible with any
prefiguration of the future. And the necessity of this fun-
damental uncertainty explains perhaps that death itself,
at the end of a reversal attested to in every culture, may
also be conceived of as a rebeginning. Obviously, the
whole problem is to know whether there is any sense
in questioning the nature of death. But for the person
who truly wants to try to conceive of death, it lets itself
be defined only by what it shares with birth: the un-
known. Baudelaire once more:
"Oh death, old Captain, it is time, let us raise the
anchor!"
!
a duty to forget
A certain ambiguity is attached to the expression a
C< duty to remember," so often used today. First of all,
those who are subjected to this duty are obviously those
who have not been direct witnesses or victims of the
events of which one intends to preserve the memory. It
is very clear that those who survived the Holocaust or
the horror of the camps do not need to be reminded of
their duty to remember. On the contrary, perhaps their
--=:...--
duty has been to survive the memory, to esca e, as far
as they are concerned, from e ever asting presence ot'

struck by my grandfather's reluctance to mention life
in the trenches, and it seemed to me that I could rec-
ognize the trace of that same conviction in the restraint
of the survivors of the death camps, in the long delay
necessary for those who finally chose to speak of what
they had lived. This is the conviction that those who
have not been victims of the horror cannot imagine it,
87
88 a duty to forget
no matter how willing and compassionate they are. But
also that those who were subjected to it, if they want to
live again and not just survive, must be able to do their
share of forgetting, become mindless, in the Pascalian
sense, in order to find faith in the everyday again and
mastery over their time.
The dury of memory is the duty of the descen-
dants, and it has two aspects: remembrance and vigi-
lance. Vigilance is the actualization of remembrance,
the effort to imagine in the present what might re-
semble the past, or better (but only the survivors could
do it and their numbers are decreasing every day), to
remember the past as a present, to return to it to find
the hideous shape of the unspeakable again in the ba-
nalities of ordinary mediocrity. Now, official memory
needs monuments; it beautifies death and horror. The
beautiful cemeteries of Normandy (to say nothing of
the various convents, chapels, or museums that will
perhaps one day take the place of the concentration
camps entirely) align their tombs all along the inter-
twined pathways. Nobody could say that this arranged
beauty is not moving, but the emotion it arouses is
born from the harmony of forms, from the' impressive
spectacle of the army of the dead immobilized in the
white crosses standing at attention. Sometimes, among
the oldest visitors, it is born from the image they associ-
ate with it of a relative or companions who disappeared
more than half a century ago. It does not evoke the
raging battles, nor the fear of the men, nothing of
what would actually restore some of the past realisti-
cally lived by the soldiers buried in the Normandy soil.
a duty to forget 89
The very ones who fought by their sides cannot hope
to find the vanished evidence for one moment, except
on condition of forgetting the geometric splendor of
the great military cemeteries and the long years across
which the images, the events, and the stories have been
accumulating in their memory.
Memory and ..
essary 'fur the ;';'se of time. Surely, Montaigne tells
u;; .. everythmg lias its season," and it is undoubtedly
neither wise nor useful to not want to "be one's age." But
it is even more vain to play with it, to identify oneseifby
it, to alienate oneself from it, to stop by the edge of the
road, somewhere between the nostalgia for a truncated
or tricked past and the horror of a futureless
would plead here against the haughty melancholy of
in their track, for the active modesty
of movement, of exercise, of the mind's gymnastics. We
----.-- ---
would try to encourage those who intend to struggle
against the hardening of the imagination (it threatens
all of us) to not forget to forget in order to lose neither
memory nor curiosity.
Oblivion brings us back to the present, even if it
is conjugated in every tense: in the future, to live the
beginning; in the present, to live the moment; in the
past, to lYe t e retur . n every case, in order not to be
repeated. We must forget in order to remain present,
forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain
faithfuL
Ie $ :a
, -
notes
foreword
1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, His Memory: from Collected
Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin Books,
1998),135.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (New
York: Macmillan Library of Liberal Arts, 1985),8.
memory and oblivion
1. Georges Devereux, Ethnopsychiatrie des Indiens mohaves
[Mohave Ethnopsychiatry: The Psychic Disturbances of an Indian
Tribe] (Paris: Editions Synthelabo, 1996).
2. J.-B. Pontalis, Ce temps qui ne passe pas (Paris: Gallimard,
1997).
life as a narrative
1. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et recit (Paris: Points Seuil, 1983).
2. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Others (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1983).
3. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Seuil,
1996).
4. Walter Benjamin, Le Narrateur. Relexions sur I'reuvre de
91
92 notes
Nicolas Leskov, in RLIstelli raconte ... et autres rt!cits (Paris: Seuil,
1987).
5. V.]. Propp, Morphologie du conte (Pads: Seuil, 1970).
6. Ricoeur, Temps et recit, 2: 78.
7. Michel Leiris, "La possession et ses aspects thearraux chez
les Ethiopiens de Gondar," in Miroir de f'Afrique (Paris: Gallimard,
1996).
8. Marcel Gauchet, Le Desenchantement du monde [The Dis-
enchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion} (Paris:
Gallirnard, 1985).
the three figures of oblivion
L Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (Paris: Livre
de Poche, 1973), 1: 327-
2. Ibid., 3: 221.
3. Ibid., 280.
4. Ibid., 52l.
5. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et rich (Paris: Points Seuil, 1983),
2: 28t.
6. Ibid., 283.
7. Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (Paris: Folio-Gallimard,
1992),268.
8. Pierre Verger, Notes sur fe cufte des Orisa et Vodun it Bahia,
fa baie de tous lei saints, au Bresil et it fancienne cote des esclaves en
Afrique (Dakar: lFAN, 1957).
9. Plato, The Republic, book 10, in Great Dialogues of Plato,
trans. W H. D. Rouse (New York: Mentor Books, 1956),420.
10. Srendhal, Lucien Leuwen (Paris: Folio-Gal/imard, 1986),
1: 348.
11. Etienne de La Boetie, Discours de fa servimde vofontaire
(Paris: Mille er une Nuirs, 1997),47.
12. Christian Met'l, Le Signifiant imaginaire (Paris: Bourgois,
1993), 167.
13. Julien Prtforences (Paris: Corti, 1961), 61.
Marc Auge, an anthropologist trained in French uni-
versities, has studied and written copiously on North
African cultures. While teaching and leading seminars
at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris,
he has authored numerous studies of contemporary cul-
tures, including La Traversee du Luxembourg, Domaines
et chateaux, Non-lieux: introduction a fanthropologie de
la surmoderniti, and Un ethnologue dans le metro, trans-
lated into English as In the Metro and published by the
University of Minnesota Press.
MaTjolijn de Jager is a literary translator who works from
French and Dutch. Her particular interests are Franco-
phone African literature and women's writing. She
teaches literary translation at New York University.
James E. Young is professor and chair of Judaic and
Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. He is the author of At Memory's Edge and
The Texture of Memory.

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