Fugitive pieces

Omid Shams

Milan Koundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting has a short real story which can

perfectly describe the quiddity of literature.

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in

Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. 

Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and

Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.

The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where

Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people.  On that balcony the history of

Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and

museums.

Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made

him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the

balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat

on Gottwald’s head.

Literature is just like the Clementis’ hat. It tells the story of vanished voices and forgotten faces.

That is why the literature is always referring to something else. As well as Clementis’ hat

literature is much more than itself. It is a narrator of what which no longer exists. Literature is

the people’s last hope against forgetting. In suppression, execution and genocide the main issue

is the concept of forgetting.

In Ann Michael’s novel, the attempts of two main characters are to struggle against this

forgetting: Jacob Beaer, a poet who lost his parents and his sister in Nazi attack when he was 13

and then he moved to Canad with Athos his savior, and Ben a young Jewish professor who was

born in Canada and his parents are Holocaust survivors.

Wisely she distinguishes between the history and memory as the amoral and moral concepts.

 As Jakob puts it in the novel:

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is

what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the

administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned,

read aloud in the synagogue. (138)

                                                                                                          

Memory is nourished from the reality but it is not limited to it. Memory is not remembering the

events but remaking them and living them again and again. Memory selects the events and

arranges them in an emotional and moral order. Memory is based on details which are not

important for the history but for the person who remembers: “spray of buttons, little white teeth”

these details are what history forgets and memory remembers. That is why “every moment is two

moments”. This is exactly the same function of literature. Literature is always about the details.

Details which are not important as subject of the event. But they are the witnesses of the event.

They are narrators of the event that also narrate the emotional aspect of event. The event is

absent in such details but they recall it and only by their recall we can feel the flesh and blood of

the reality. Literature is memory because it deals with the details and rejects the incompleteness

of historical generalized chronology. Memory is moral since it reveals the standpoint toward the

reality. Whatever is omitted and vanished in history, as a senseless narrative of generalized

reality, will be revived in memory and literature. Hence memory’s narrative is much more real

than history. Real event never happens as it is narrated in history. It happens in and through the

details. However, memory is an incomplete narrative as well. It is limited to the point of view

and the range of vision and hearing.

This is what Jakob suffers from. He has not a clear memory of his family’s last moments but

some noises and images and finally the dead bodies of his parents. He also has no clear

memories of his family before the catastrophe but few memories of his mother and little more of

her sister, Bella.

Then everything he sees and experiences in his life after his loss recalls and reflects the

vague image of the past. He lives in his personal Holocaust in his present life because there is no

difference between the past and present for one who escaped from a nightmare but left and lost

everything he had in that nightmare. Everything in present recalls the memories of past in order

to complete the missing pieces of a puzzle:

Every moment is two moments.

Alex’s hairbrush propped on the sink: Bella’s brush….Bella writing on my back: Alex’s touch

during the night...I have nothing that belonged to my parents, barely any knowledge of their

lives. Of Bella’s belongings, I have…piano works that suddenly recover me; Bella’s music from a

phonograph overheard in a shop, from an open window on a summer day, or from a car

radio…. (140-41)

Koundera says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

At the end Jacob reject the Alexandra’s solution which is “forgetting the past” but he regain his

tranquility with Michaela who listens to his fears and let him “tell” his story.

Through telling the story of a human catastrophe Ann Michael reaches to the point that if there is

a necessity for literature, in contrast with Adorno’s belief, it is definitely after Auschwitz.