The Muse of History
History is a
nightmare from which I am trying to awake
James Joyce
THE
COMMON EXPERIENCE of the new world, even for its patrician writers whose
veneration of the old is read as idolatory of the mestizo, is colonialism. They
too are victims of tradition, but they remind us of our debt to the great dead,
that those who break a tradition first hold it in awe. They perversely
discourage disfavor, but because their sense of the past is of a timeless, yet
habitable moment, the New World owes them more than it does those who wrestle
with the past, for their veneration subtilizes an arrogance which is tougher
than violent rejection. They know that by openly fighting tradition we
perpetuate it, that revolutionary literature is a filial impulse, and that
maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor.
When
these writers cunningly describe themselves as classicists and pretend an
indifference to change, it is with an irony as true of the colonial anguish as
the fury of the radical. If they appear to be phony aristocrats, it is because
they have gone past the confrontation of history, that Medusa of the New World.
These
writers reject the idea of history as time for its original concept as myth,
the partial recall of the race. For them history is fiction, subject to a
fitful muse, memory. Their philosophy, based on a contempt for historic time,
is revolutionary, for what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity
with the Old. Their vision of man is elemental, a being inhabited by presences,
not a creature chained to his past. Yet the method by which we are taught the
past, the progress from motive to event, is the same by which we read narrative
fiction. In time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject
to invention. The farther the facts, the more history petrifies into myth.
Thus, as we grow older as a race, we grow aware that history is written, that
it is a kind of literature without morality, that in its actuaries the ego of
the race is indissoluble and that everything depends on whether we write this
fiction through the memory of hero or of victim.
In
the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of
recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants
of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters.
Because this literature serves historical truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates
in pathos. The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor
forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force.
This shame and awe of history possess poets of the Third World who think of
language as enslavement and who, in a rage for identity, respect only
incoherence or nostalgia.
The
great poets of the New World, from Whitman to Neruda, reject this sense of
history. Their vision of man in the New World is Adamic. In their exuberance he
is still capable of enormous wonder. Yet he has paid his accounts to Greece and
Rome and walks in a world without monuments and ruins. They exhort him against
the fearful magnet of older civilizations. Even in Borges, where the genius
seems secretive, immured from change, it celebrates an elation which is vulgar
and abrupt, the life of the plains given an instant archaism by the hieratic
style. Violence is felt with the simultaneity of history. So the death of a
gaucho does not merely repeat, but is, the death of Caesar. Fact evaporates
into myth. This is not the jaded cynicism which sees nothing new under the sun,
it is an elation which sees everything as renewed….
New
World poets who see the ‘classic style’ as stasis must see it also as
historical degradation, rejecting it as the language of the master. This
selftorture arises when the poet also sees history as language, when he limits
his memory to the suffering of the victim. Their admirable wish to honor the
degraded ancestor limits their language to phonetic pain, the groan of
suffering, the curse of revenge. The tone of the past becomes an unbearable
burden, for they must abuse the master or hero in his own language, and this
implies self-deceit. Their view of Caliban is of the enraged pupil. They cannot
separate the rage of Caliban from the beauty of his speech when the speeches of
Caliban are equal in their elemental power to those of his tutor. The language
of the torturer mastered by the victim. This is viewed as servitude, not as
victory.
But
who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor
was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently
screaming for pardon or for revenge? The pulse of New World history is the
racing pulse beat of fear, the tiring cycles of stupidity and greed….
In
time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the
New World. That is our inheritance, but to try and understand why this
happened, to condemn or justify is also the method of history, and these
explanations are always the same: This happened because of that, this was
understandable because, and in days men were such. These recriminations
exchanged, the contrition of the master replaces the vengeance of the slave,
and here colonial literature is most pietistic, for it can accuse great art of
feudalism and excuse poor art as suffering. To radical poets poetry seems the
homage of resignation, an essential fatalism. But it is not the pressure of the
past which torments great poets but the weight of the present:
there
are so many dead,
and
so many dikes the red sun breached,
and
so many heads battering hulls
and
so many hands that have closed over kisses
and
so many things that I want to forget.
(Neruda)
The
sense of history in poets lives rawly along their nerves:
My
land without name, without America,
equinoctial
stamen, lance-like purple,
your
aroma rose through my roots
into
the cup I drained, into the most tenuous
word not yet born in my mouth.
(Neruda)
It
is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming the new world
which annihilates history in our great poets, an elation common to all of them,
whether they are aligned by heritage to Crusoe and Prospero or to Friday and
Caliban. They reject ethnic ancestry for faith in elemental man. The vision,
the ‘democratic vista,’ is not metaphorical, it is a social necessity. A
political philosophy rooted in elation would have to accept belief in a second
Adam, the recreation of the entire order, from religion to the simplest
domestic rituals. The myth of the noble savage would not be revived, for that
myth never emanated from the savage but has always been the nostalgia of the
Old World, its longing for innocence. The great poetry of the New World does
not pretend to such innocence, its vision is not naive. Rather, like its
fruits, its savor is a mixture of the acid and the sweet, the apples of its
second Eden have the tartness of experience. In such poetry there is a bitter
memory and it is the bitterness that dries last on the tongue. It is the
acidulous that supplies its energy…. For us in the archipelago the tribal
memory is salted with the bitter memory of migration.
To
such survivors, to all the decimated tribes of the New World who did not suffer
extinction, their degraded arrival must be seen as the beginning, not the end
of our history. The shipwrecks of Crusoe and of the crew in The Tempest are the end of an Old World.
It should matter nothing to the New World if the Old is again determined to
blow itself up, for an obsession with progress is not within the psyche of the
recently enslaved. That is the bitter secret of the apple. The vision of
progress is the rational madness of history seen as sequential time, of a
dominated future. Its imagery is absurd. In the history books the discoverer
sets a shod foot on virgin sand, kneels, and the savage also kneels from his
bushes in awe. Such images are stamped on the colonial memory, such heresy as
the world’s becoming holy from Crusoe’s footprint or the imprint of Columbus’
knee. These blasphemous images fade, because these hieroglyphs of progress are
basically comic. And if the idea of the New and the Old becomes increasingly
absurd, what must happen to our sense of time, what else can happen to history
itself, but that it too is becoming absurd? This is not existentialism. Adamic,
elemental man cannot be existential. His first impulse is not self-indulgence
but awe, and existentialism is simply the myth of the noble savage gone
baroque….
But
to most writers of the archipelago who contemplate only the shipwreck, the New
World offers not elation but cynicism, a despair at the vices of the Old which
they feel must be repeated. Their malaise is an oceanic nostalgia for the older
culture and a melancholy at the new, and this can go as deep as a rejection of
the untamed landscape, a yearning for ruins. To such writers the death of
civilizations is architectural, not spiritual, seeded in their memories is an
imagery of vines ascending broken columns, of dead terraces, of Europe as a
nourishing museum. They believe in the responsibility of tradition, but what
they are in awe of is not tradition, which is alert, alive, simultaneous, but
of history, and the same is true of the new magnifiers of Africa. For these
their deepest loss is of the old gods, the fear that it is worship which has
enslaved progress. Thus the humanism of politics replaces religion. They see
such gods as part of the process of history, subjected like the tribe to cycles
of achievement and despair. Because the Old World concept of God is
anthropomorphic, the New World slave was forced to remake himself in His image,
despite such phrases as ‘God is light, and in Him is no darkness,’ and at this
point of intersecting faiths the enslaved poet and enslaved priest surrendered
their power. But the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning
assimilation of the religion of the Old World. What seemed to be surrender was
redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed the
death of faith, was its rebirth….
I
accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and
to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father,
although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper
‘history,’ for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of
history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to
forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are
anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when
you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave
buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the
slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men,
your fellowman and tribesman not moved or hovering with hesitation about your
common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip,
but to you inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race,
give a strange thanks. I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks
for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves
of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have
placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.
*
From ‘The Muse of History’ in Orde Coombes (ed.) Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods
in the Caribbean New York: Doubleday, 1974. THE MUSE OF HISTORY 371
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