English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews



 

Listening to History         

Tzvetan Todorov. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Trans. David Bellos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. 376 pp. $29.95.

By Nessa Cronin, Centre for Irish Studies,National University of Ireland, Galway

 

            This review was written a few short weeks after the Madrid bombings, the anniversary of the war in Iraq, and the ten year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, when there are posters everywhere in the London underground warning of bags without owners. With the angel of history, contemporary concerns include concerns of the past. Tzvetan Todorov’s Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a book about the past century aimed at the general reader as opposed to the specialist. Originally published in 2000 under the title M้moire du  mal. Tentation du bien. Enqu๊te sur le si่cle, the English edition has a new preface which includes thoughts on September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. Todorov writes that his focus in this book is on totalitarianism as manifested in Communism and Nazism and the relation of  these two ideologies to science and humanism. He explicitly states in the prologue that this is not another history, as it is not the facts of history that concern him but their meaning. He wants to “think about the twentieth century as a writer concerned with understanding the age in which he lives.”

            Hope and Memory is concerned with the past as memory and how that past lives on into the present. In writing that history is a selection of the past, Todorov explains that this is a process which involves establishing the facts, placing those facts into context, and finally examining how such facts come to be employed and read as history. He argues that he writes as a “critical humanist,” however one suspects that there is more humanism than real criticism being employed here. The problem with such a process is twofold. First, Todorov never seems to question the apparent objectivity purported by such historical fact-finding missions, nor does he envisage the possibility that facts are recovered/constructed in accordance to the frame of reference that uncovers them. Different frames of questioning will uncover different facts. In addition, the relation of facts to “truth” and what that truth means is not fully explicated in detail. Todorov's second, and perhaps more fundamental, omission is that he is not clear about what  determines the content of our memory, and inversely, what determines the content of our forgetting? And as history is a selection of facts, the question is what determines this selection on both private and public levels of memory and forgetting.

            Todorov asserts that international terrorism is not about a Huntingdon “clash of civilizations” (that essentializing and reductive term), as he reads the Al Qaeda network as separate from and not representative of any type of Islam. However, in completely divorcing Al Qaeda from a religion that they constantly invoke, Todorov does not give sufficient room to explore the point that if Al Qaeda is not primarily an Islamic group then why it is seen to appropriate the discourse of Islam for its purposes (whether religious or political or a mixture of both). In arguing that the attacks “showed the increasing power of individuals and small groups,” Todorov points out that the difference between this war and the conventional type is that these individuals are without territory, and are thus, stateless. However, the point may also be made that Todorov is looking only at one kind of state (physical) whereas the members of Al Qaeda are fighting from an ideological position for the brotherhood/state of Islam (religious, pan-national).

            Indeed, such either/or extremes are what Todorov claims to be moving away from in this investigation, but he seems to slip into such binaries in several moments in the book. One other such moment is the frequent invocation of “evil” as a descriptive term for totalitarian regimes. Todorov writes early on that reason must be maintained as a tool in order to avoid falling into the trap of calling certain acts “barbarous” or an expression of madness, thus eliding any element of responsibility from such acts. While such terms “have high emotive power,” Todorov writes that they “are poor tools for description,” and so it is puzzling as to why he would continue to use such terminology in an analysis that purports sensibility to such language. He acknowledges that such instances of evil, while not “absolute,” remain within the realms of rationality as “all actions, even the worst of them, have their reason.” Yet, the constant use of “evil” seems to work against his argument, invoking a religious discourse that by definition operates within belief systems, not reason, and a morally relative discourse that is dependent on socio-temporal context. It is confusing to read a book that constantly calls for analysis and recognition of what Levi called the “grey area” between good and evil, when it constantly employs Manichaean opposites as points of reference. We are reminded how one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, but the opportunity for developing the implications for such a position is missed.

            In a consideration of what history is and consists of, Todorov has included personal histories from the twentieth century. Each chapter concludes with a vignette from Todorov’s “portrait gallery,” a gallery that explores the lives and testimonies of six individuals who experienced totalitarianism: Margarete Buber-Neumann, Vasily Grossman, David Rousset, Primo Levi, Romain Gary, and Germaine Tillion. The portraits form some of the strongest material in Hope and Memory and testify to the strength of people under severe conditions. As Buber-Neumann writes , “knowing you were needed by another human being was what gave you the greatest strength in the camp.”

            While Todorov is severe in his criticism of totalitarian regimes, he is not critical enough of democratic ones. The alignment of capitalism with neo-liberal democracies and how sometimes democracies employ the tools of totalitarianism is not fully explored. When one hears terms of “collateral damage” to describe the illegal killing of civilians in war one immediately thinks back to former political euphemisms, such as “the final solution” and “special treatment.” One point that should have been included in this discussion of the modern democracy is the increasing role and power of the arms industry to influence (if not dictate) foreign policies. Nor is it clear how totalitarianism is different from the authoritarian or the despotic. While he makes some very valid and interesting points about totalitarian regimes, none of it strikes one as being very new. Democracy, he rightly argues, when forced upon one at the barrel of a gun is not democracy.

            The one point that Todorov constantly emphasizes in this book is the hopelessness of violence, and thus that dialogue is the only tool for hope and understanding. But what happens when people really speak a completely different language as witnessed in the controversy surrounding the wearing of the hijab in France? The answer to that, one may argue, is what is happening on the world stage right now. In addition, how are the events of this violent century to be read as “lessons?” Indeed, these are primarily lessons from the west (most of the book is concerned with Europe), and so who is to teach and who is to learn? Todorov writes that “the past has lessons for the present, but we must be prepared to hear them.” Observing events of 2004 alone would not make one very hopeful for such object lessons in history. In hearing, we need to speak and comprehend a common language. Without this, in remembering more we end up hoping for less. Primo Levi wrote about lack of understanding and lack of care with respect to the killing fields of Cambodia, “It is our own fault if we know so little about it. It’s our fault, because we could have been better readers. . . . We didn’t do so out of mental laziness, and because we prefer a quiet life.” The virtue of Hope and Memory is the acknowledgement that, throughout history, lives have always been disrupted, and that knowledge and understanding—the only hopeful lights that can shine (however dimly)—are especially needed in this dark time.