Victoria Baena

The November 1951 issue of The Harvard Advocate addressed a single theme: William Faulkner. Reviews, essays, and excerpts from dissertations crowded the now-yellowed pages of the magazine, tackling everything from the author’s novels to his childhood. Two names in particular jump out from the list of contributors: Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. The Advocate editors were eager to milk this literary windfall, placing their names in bold print on the cover of the issue, and noting their “gracious acknowledgment” to contributors including Camus and Mann “for making this issue possible.” In the Contributors’ Notes, the two are described as follows:

The caravan was burning. What would later be called a tragedy was still, for now, just a fire.  With a flicker of orange and a tiny *pop *the paper celluloid flowers burst, sold so cheaply and aflame so easily.  These would not make it to their marketplace, the Parisian cemeteries. Django was late coming back from a gig, so his wife Florine had stayed up waiting. She distracted herself with her work.



 



 



How banal are the beginnings of disasters: a guitar discarded on a table; a hand rising fatigued to a forehead and then back to the table in a gesture never completed. A candle knocked over and a world alit.



 



The caravan burned—the lace curtains curling up and gone, the cast-iron stove swallowed in a bang—but Django and Florine would emerge alive though not unscathed. Important possessions were lost: a guitar, three suitcases, some rings. A small wardrobe and two charred fingers. It was 1928 and Django Reinhardt was eighteen, married, Manouche -- a French gypsy. He lived in the outskirts of Paris among other Manouche, also called Romani, and he played a secondhand banjo-guitar.



 



Music was his livelihood and had been since he was thirteen. *Musette *was his preferred style: a form traditionally played by gypsies that had begun to gain currency in French dance halls beginning in the 1880s. By World War II it had become the most popular dance style in France. It also proved attractive to those upper-class rebels itching for a way out of boxed-in waltzes and ballroom steps. More daring Parisian élites began to turn to smaller, smokier establishments in the Latin Quarter, like Django’s on Rue Monge, where Italian Gypsy Vetese Guérino had agreed to mentor the budding young musician.



 



2010 marked the centenary of Reinhardt’s birth. It was celebrated by a plaza created in his name in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, where rue Binet intersects the Avenue de la porte de Clignancourt—approximately at the site of the burning caravan. Today he is hailed as the only European to have reached the level of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He was the European star of jazz. At the time, though, the fire in his caravan left him with severe burns on his right side from knee to waist, which would require over a year of recovery. In addition, the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand were mutilated.  The doctors said he would never play guitar again.



 



 



 



It is more precise to call Django Reinhardt the European “king of jazz,” as *Le Monde* once dubbed him, rather than a merely French jazz star. Reinhardt’s entrance into the Parisian music scene was due more to chance than to intent. He was born Jean Reinhardt, in his parents’ caravan in Liberchies, Belgium, the Romani patron saint Sara-la-Kâli perched on the center wall. The family spent some time in Paris when he was quite young, but after his father abandoned the family, the mother led him and his brother through Nice to Italy, from Corsica to Algeria, before making their way back to Paris. In this his story mirrors that of many other Romani, and of the Romani people in general, condemned to an itinerant lifestyle for nearly a millennium. They are believed to have originated in India, according to linguistic connections between the Romany and Sanskrit languages. Scholars speculated that they originally formed part of an army of lower-caste Indians, engaged to battle Muslims led by Islamic leader Mahmud of Ghazni, when he invaded India in 1001. Some survivors migrated westward, some to Europe, some to North Africa. Europeans, believing their origin to be Egyptian, called them “gypsies”. European folklore claimed that Gypsies had forged the nails to crucify Jesus. Beginning in France in 1427, they were systematically expelled from European kingdoms, though less frequently granted special status as a people.



Historians have since traced the Reinhardt clan to 18th-century ancestors based in the Rhine River valley. Wanderers like the rest of the Romani, by necessity rather than by choice, his grandparents were forced westward by the Franco-Prussian War. Django Reinhardt, then, held no great patriotic pride for his adopted homeland of France, even as classified as a specific type of gypsy: Manouche, or French Romani. Where then to turn? Manouche poet Sarah Jayat put it succinctly in 1961, in her poem “Django”:



 



Django



Like us



you have no king



no set of rules



but you have a mistress:



Music



 



The musician slipped out of the national *musette* craze without a great struggle, once his accident made those brisk dancing chords impossible. His father had been a professional player of violin, guitar, and piano, touring through Belgium to Corse and Italy, and so the strains of these and of the accompanists’ instruments, the banjo and drums, had framed his son’s earliest memories. Django returned to this in convalescence before stumbling upon the new if remote phenomenon of American jazz. Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues” opened the floodgates, followed by Joe Venuti and Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band. He was particularly struck by Eddie Lang, born Salvatore Massaro in Philadelphia at the turn of the century. Lang’s pioneering guitar style, melding a flatpicking rhythm with a bluesy lead, helped to establish him as the first major jazz guitarist. It is quite likely due to him that Reinhardt abandoned the banjo almost entirely, in exchange for the possibilities of the guitar.



 



Yet a not insubstantial hurdle remained: how to reach the level of his Yankee contemporaries with three-fifths of a right hand. (Critics have never agreed as to what extent the charred fingers were usable, if at all). It was probably inevitable that a new type of music emerge from this arrangement, though its popularity was hardly a given. Jazz scholars speculate that Reinhardt began by using his two functional, curled in fingers to fret notes on the upper two strings—B and E—while he abandoned fretting notes with his burnt fingers entirely, or used them just to play chords. His left hand often muted strings that went unused. Reinhardt only rarely played standard major and minor chords, exchanging them for minor 6, major 6, and major 6/9.



A surprising variety burst forth. “Minor Swing” is a fast-paced jig with a solo characterized by string bends and pull-offs, while the classic “Nuages” (‘Clouds’ in French) shows off his digital dexterity. His phrases tended to rise and fall, ascending over E7, descending over Am6, but ending in a different way each time—improvisation changed up the patterns. Reinhardt mastered what jazz musicians call “encirclement,” approaching a specific chord tone from the chords around, creating chromatic interest for each phrase.



 



This was all mostly idle practice, though, at least for the first few years. Things began to change in 1931 upon a fateful meeting with violinist Stéphanie Grapelli. Grapelli was working in the cabaret scene, taking on gigs for films as a pianist when he needed the extra cash. The two began participating in informal jams together, each finding in the other an ideal complement and a companion in musical taste. Their relationship solidified, the two took their partnership to the next level, establishing the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. Reinhardt’s guitar and Grapelli’s violin sloughed off the need for drums, horns, or piano, which up to that point had been a standard in jazz tunes. Instead they dreamed up *la pompe—*the pump—to give percussive rhythm to their songs. The two rhythm guitars played fast up-down strums followed by a longer down strum, setting a background beat for Reinhardt’s melodic yet still free-swinging phrases.



 



Traditional Gypsy music found its way into the Quintet, inserting chromatic runs and note embellishments played with a varying rhythm. Mixed with African-American “hot” jazz’s elaborated chord forms, bass lines, and percussive pulse, the new “gypsy jazz”—*jazz manouche *in France—struck a minor then major chord in the Parisian jazz scene. Their gigs began to rack in the highest ticket prices throughout Europe: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie were among the Americans lining up to record or play with him. Reinhardt and Grappelli continued to perform together up until September 1939, when Hitler’s invasion into Poland led the two to cut short a London tour. Reinhardt returned to Paris, where he believed he would be safer at a time when Romanis were being targeted by official Nazi policy, less systematically than Jews but substantially all the same. Yet when the city fell to the Germans, Reinhardt stayed. His recordings and performances became a kind of loophole allowing him to escape ethnic “purification.”



 



In occupied France, jazz was officially banned. But an underground record industry continued to boom. The titles of jazz records were often tweaked to hide their origins. Luftwaffe officer Deitrich Schulz-Kohn, known as “Doktor Jazz,” was only one of many German officials to cultivate a not-so-secret admiration of Django. He helped Reinhardt secure gigs throughout Parisian clubs, sometimes bringing along his German comrades. Photographs from the time reveal a slightly jarring image of German soldiers listening enraptured to a Gypsy artist, whose compatriots were perhaps simultaneously being hauled away in cattle cars. “It was really a golden age of swing in Paris,” Michael Dregni, author of the biography *Django, *has said in an interview, “with these gypsies living kind of this grand irony.”



 



 



While Boris Vian is best known today for his novels, the French polymath’s one consistent avocation was that of jazz. Born in 1920 in the well-off Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray, Vian was  involved in the Parisian jazz scene starting in 1937, when he began to play the trumpet and joined the Hot Club de France. He later played in a band with musician Claude Abadou, serving also as conductor at Tabou on Rue Dauphine, or at Club Saint-Germain on Rue Saint-Benoît. His novels (though widely lauded today) were initially met with little enthusiasm and a lukewarm critical reception, leading him to throw himself back into the jazz scene, where he continued to play and critique.



 



Indeed, Vian’s literary side gave him a unique angle from which to deconstruct the allure of jazz in France. He himself was hardly a sober-minded critic: he was apt to wax adoringly of Django Reinhardt among others. In one of his reviews, he wrote, “There are only a few French musicians who are of an equal class as the great American soloists. Django…is one of them.” Yet he also made an attempt to undress this mystique.



 



For the un-indoctrinated masses, Vian wrote in January 1948, jazz was merely the next catchy rhythm, suitable to be paired with a dance for eagerly awaiting youth. For a certain type of child, it could be a snub in the face of more straight-laced parents. It could also, though, serve as a sort of societal metaphor. A materialization of the good life, Vian called it, with all the rules of etiquette bored into any regular cinema-goer: “champagne, whisky soda, plunging necklines, furs—and twenty handsome musicians beating out a refrain, whose words the heroine murmurs half an inch from her beloved.”



 



In this sense, then, jazz was no longer a counter-culture or a sub-culture, something to react against or to. It became something to aspire to: just as Parisian élites hauled *musette *musicians out of their underground dance halls, the expansion of jazz unearthed a musical trend, dusted it off, and framed it prettily.



 



But it was more than this for some. Vian, a purist at heart, considered the noblest followers of jazz to be those who shed the social or cultural trappings surrounding it, yielding only to the sound. Reinhardt, to him, was among those seduced solely by the cascading rhythms and jangling chords of jazz, touched “by the senses, by its intelligence…but who seek to deepen, to understand, to acquaint themselves with it.” Vian admired Reinhardt as one who learned to extract from jazz its true substance, remaining faithful to it as a form, rather than as another sub-cultural trend. In this sense Reinhardt would not be the social warrior that some have tried to make him into, striving to re-appropriate an identity that history had so often trampled upon. Reinhardt was hardly against the popularization of the form he produced; but at the same time he tended to treat it rather myopically, in his intense fervor for the music. “Wine, women, and song,” wrote his biographer Pregni, summing up Reinhardt’s central preoccupations. There was to be no chromatic progression into music’s social ramifications.



 



And yet at the same time gypsy jazz *can* be said to frame a certain mood, urban if not national. The Paris of the thirties was beset by intrigue and uncertainty, a more measured follow-up to the glee of the twenties.  This was coupled with the music scene’s tentative but eager improvisations and experiments. Gypsy jazz twisted all this together with a mix of Romani and American strains, rolling out the red carpet for another postwar trend—rock & roll. Artists from BB King to the Libertines would cite or cover Reinhardt. Some have gone so far to call him the most eminent guitarist, under the headline of “pre-rock & roll.”



 



 



If Reinhardt’s legacy is rock and all its endless permutations, the gypsy jazz form itself has trickled down to the present via different routes. The scene today hovers between mainstream and underground, emerging for events like the centennial of Reinhardt’s birth before dipping back down once again. Saint-Ouen, where his caravan was parked, is home to several bars with *jazz manouche *leaking out the windows. L’Atelier Charonne and other places around Rue Oberkampf have lent a squeakier sheen to the form, surrounded by young grungy-hip nightlife, and charging fixed prices for dinner and a show.



 



On a recent Tuesday night, Rodolphe Raffalli was playing at the Piano Vache in the fifth arrondissement. An institution in the contemporary Parisian jazz guitar scene and a sworn devotee of Reinhardt, Raffalli is heavyset with a sober expression and a ubiquitous post boy cap. He arrived with a partner to play the percussive drum-less background that Reinhardt dreamed up. Posters blanketed the dark oak walls of the venue: “Django: 20 ans forever” or “Death in June: 30th Anniversary Tour.” Patrons shot shot glares at those who whispered or shifted position too loudly. After Raffalli’s first crescendo’ed arpeggio the audience broke into applause. His phrases flowed into each other, though every so often shaken up by an errant twang. An energetic song was followed by a more tranquil one, with a pause between, as Raffalli wiped his brow and replaced his pick, red for yellow.



 



The crowd was not young but not old, the average age hovering around mid-thirties. It was a crowd that knew music, or at least *jazz manouche*, or at least knew that this was worth knowing. There were no furs in the audience or champagne flutes; plenty of skinny jeans and dark t-shirts, however. When it was over there was that one frozen moment, as there is always, as the lights switched back on, before anyone tries or wants to move. A crowd began to gather outside and cigarette smoke gathered around it. A Subway sign flickered wanly across the street and Raffalli prepared to leave, the *manouche *arpeggios barely lingering as he snapped his guitar case shut.    



 



 

Down the passage we did not take



Towards the door we never opened



Into the rose garden. My words echo



Thus, in your mind.



– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets



 



We may therefore conceive God to be the natural maker of the bed, and in a lower sense the carpenter is also the maker; but the painter is rather the imitator of what the other two make; he has to do with a creation which is thrice removed from reality. And the tragic poet is an imitator, and, like every other imitator, is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.



– Socrates, Plato’s Republic



 



The front page of the website for artist Alisdair Hopwood’s False Memory Archive, currently on tour in Edinburgh and soon to arrive at London’s Freud Museum, declares: “WE NEED FALSE MEMORIES.” One could interpret this phrase in one of two ways: the utilitarian—the collective is in need of false memories for its project; or the more abstract—we human beings rely somehow upon a fabricated notion of the past.



The False Memory Archive is based on both principles. As artist-in-residence at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, Hopwood wants to combine the techniques of contemporary art with the latest psychological research. Visitors to his website are invited to type a false memory (“a distorted or entirely invented recollection of an experience”) into a window; the submissions are then collected and arranged into a spare, sleek installation, all black text on white columns and walls. The memories range from the poignantly comic (“I thought that my mother left me for 2 years when I was a child to look for work. I found out in my 20’s that she only was gone for 2 weeks”) to the simply odd (“My mum passed a raw garlic clove from her mouth into mine, in the kitchen”). Others are more uncanny:



 



I remember biting into a mouse when I was four as a child in Indonesia in order to make my brother be quiet. I was sitting outside in the garden making mud pie and he just kept talking. A mouse ran by and I bit into it. Blood filled my mouth and ran down my face. My brother and the rest of my family have assured me this has never happened.



 



For psychologists, this phenomenon is well-known and well-documented. Multiple studies over the past several decades, spearheaded by scholars like Elizabeth Loftus, have confirmed that memory cannot be trusted. Childhood hot-air balloon rides or trips to the mall (with hometown details provided by a family member) can be virtually implanted in a participant’s mind, so that he or she is firmly convinced that the nonexistent event took place. These false memories are known to increase with age, as the knowledge and experience gained by children create a more cohesive and fully integrated network of conceptual representations. Ribot’s Law suggests that older memories are more stable, since the more a memory is revisited, the more it is consolidated into other, overlapping recollections. But a recent experiment in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology examined an exception to the law, finding that false memories based on images or scenes rather than vocabulary are more easily implanted in children than in adults. At all ages, most signs show memory as functioning less as a camcorder—press play and the scene unfolds, just as it was experienced—than as the concentric ripples formed by a pebble dropped in a pond, expanding, loosening, and eventually colliding with obstacles that interrupt and warp its tidy path.



Common sense still might seem to challenge these findings. The reliance on eyewitness testimony in courts has failed to ebb, even with initiatives like the Innocence Project, which have sought to expose and overturn false convictions based on witnesses that turn out to have misremembered a crucial scene. But in its revisionist account psychology has mirrored a recent literary trend. The slim memory novel has come to dominate lists and awards: a kind of novel increasingly concerned with the causes and consequences of, and opportunities resulting from, a faulty interpretation of the past. The narrator of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, claims near the start to be recalling “approximate memories which time has deformed into certainties.” Some reviewers criticized the novel for a myopic thematization of memory. Qualifications abound: “That was my reading then of what was happening at the time. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” The novel is strongest when it departs from such commentary to return to the story, centered around one crucial misremembering during the narrator’s adolescence. Given the blandness of the narrator’s present he returns to the trotted-over, if still enigmatic, past, when his first girlfriend, Veronica, left him for his first true friend, Adrian. Tony, the protagonist, subsequently dashed off a spiteful later to Adrian, before learning weeks later that Adrian committed suicide. Adrian, with a kind of clever, slightly irritating intellect, had been the center of Tony’s group at school; he would ignore a history teacher’s questions before responding to his admonitions with, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” The rest of the novel relives, reinterprets, and ultimately revises this event, which ends up as an airtight example of Adrian’s dashed-off response.



Barnes’ novel extends the terms of Hopwood’s project—applying false memories to the very nature of memory. It takes its place among other recent fiction dealing not only with fickle memories of events but with the fickleness of interpretation at the moment in which a memory is created. Alice McDermott’s Someone, published last fall, is composed of a series of memories of an Irish Catholic woman. Her memories are simultaneously unique and undifferentiable; “Someone” could be anyone, but is christened in this case with capitalization and choice. Selection, indeed, is what structures and limits the book, the chosen memories unfolding in a loose narrative, in quiet scenes. It is the conscious selection of memory, rather than the phenomenon of memory itself, that creates or imposes meaning upon a life.



As a character in the short story “What is Remembered” by Alice Munro (another memory-driven author celebrated this past year) thinks, “The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything—and, by remember, she meant experience it in her mind, one more time—then store it away forever.” But memory, she learns, doesn’t work like that. A brief affair with a doctor who later dies in a plane crash resurfaces again and again, in later years, and yet never in its entirety. Instead she hears a scrap of a phrase, or catches a glance between a couple: “She would keep picking up things she’d missed, and these would still jolt her.” Never, in these recollections, can she remember what the doctor looked like.



 



**



 



These characters’ failures to recall, coupled with earnest appeals to remember, are troubling on a deeper level because they come to challenge or at least call attention to the central conceit of storytelling: “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” What else is fiction but an attempt to implant false memories in a reader by constructing a make-believe world? Of course, this conceit is no secret to most; the phenomenon is as old as the novel itself. Long before the modernists began a concerted attempt at laying bare the device—think of Georges Braque’s trompe-l’oeil nail in Violin and Palette, a reminder that the painting is only just that—storytellers questioned and played with the terms of this deception. Literary scholars like E.C. Riley have argued that the emerging genre of the novel at the end of the16th century, under Cervantes’ revolutionary aegis, was host to a particular vulnerability of the status of truth and fiction. Poetry had shed the necessary trappings of truth-telling and instead it was the novel that would come to concern itself with the role. Books in this genre—Don Quixote is a prime example—would often be framed as a memoir, or as a series of documents collected and arranged by an author who claimed only the role of editor. (Such a conceit would persist: Robinson Crusoe, after all, was structured as an unwieldy autobiography, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque….) Yet even Cervantes would tug against the truth-telling dictate throughout the Quixote. He played on cultural prejudices in creating a fictitious “author” of the text, Cide Hamate Benengeli, an Arab and thus thought to be wily and dishonest. And Don Quixote’s mad attempts to become a hero, his tendency to read danger and adventure into a windmill or a procession of nuns, come from his firm conviction in the verisimilitude of the books of caballería that he has spent his entire life reading—books that similarly position themselves as fact. His is little different from Tony’s fear in The Sense of an Ending—“that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”



In Part I, Book IV of the Quixote, the priest holds his audience enraptured by reading a story: El curioso impertinente. In this, one of many stories-within-a-story, the friendship of two young caballeros, Anselmo and Lothario, is tested when the latter asks his friend to court his own lover. The test of loyalty backfires and the majority of the characters end up dead, or at least distraught.



“There’s something of the impossible in it,” says the priest, closing the book, “but in what refers to the way of telling it, it doesn’t disappoint.” This is the first case of many in which style clambers up and over “truth,” in which the artifice of storytelling—the construction of false memories—is privileged over a one-to-one adherence to reported fact. “Fictitious stories are good and delightful to the extent that they approach the truth or the semblance of it,” the priest later proclaims in Part II. But the novel seems to hint that his is an antiquated, even reactionary approach to literature. In the famous book-burning scene, Quixote’s loyal friend Cardenio begs the priest not to hurl into the fire all the hero’s books that are not true. Even while admitting their unworthiness astride the pillar of Truth, he appeals, instead, to style—to beauty—as a justification for longevity. Beauty is truth, truth beauty: The artist’s trump card has long been to elide the difference between the two.



 



**



 



The malleable boundaries between truth and fiction are belied, today, by the distinction and codification of separate genres: between “fiction,” for instance, and “memoir.” But the debate has never really gone away. Part of the appeal of Hopwood’s project is the interest, the shock, at realizing the possibility of false memories: a possibility we nevertheless act out on our own. For Hopwood, this reaction has an ethical dimension. “If we accept that autobiographical memory is a ‘creative act’ and that the fictive plays an important role in understanding the formation of a subjective truth,” he has said, “then how can we attempt to objectively identify and challenge pathological delusions, misinformation and damaging myths?” What is the difference, he seems to be asking, between the fundamental blur between truth and fiction, and the calculating attempt to manipulate those categories for a particular political or social purpose? On the one hand, of course, the “narrative moment” continues to envelop the academy, starting from the assumption that history itself is a narrative, that personal misremembering is paralleled by social forgetfulness that scholars should still try to remedy, all the while acknowledging the partiality and contingency of their own efforts. But on the other hand, we place such a premium, still, on truth-telling, on integrity. It is a commonplace to note that a writer who has something to say would, 50 years ago, have written a novel; today, he writes a memoir. According to Nielsen Bookscan, there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of memoirs published since 2004. Despite a possible understanding that Truth is gone and no replacement (happiness? community?) has yet taken the crown, we yearn nevertheless for “real” stories, for true tales. And when they turn out to be false, we are hurt, and angry—as in the revelation that James Frey had fabricated parts of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, embellishing details of criminal action and jail time. Amid the frantic Oprah invites and dis-invites and publishers’ waverings lay deeper and more unsettling questions regarding the integrity of those who use their own past as material. At the time, Michiko Kakutani argued that the affair signaled the seedy underside of the postmodernist move toward skepticism, toward questioning the authority of narrative, firmly established over in the deconstructionist camp. See what happens when you poke holes in capital-T Truth? she seemed to be pointing out. Without a single overarching narrative a certain responsibility to facts was lost; Frey could justify his actions by maintaining that what he wrote about felt true. He could claim, disingenuously, that it was true somehow in another, greater way.



Kakutani’s analysis is overly simplistic. Few would claim that memoir is no more than a simple compendium of listable, checkable facts, just as few would deny that fiction draws on the author’s life. Certain kinds of fabrication are accepted as a matter of course. And this has been true long before the deconstructionist turn; Rousseau’s Confessions are packed with self-conscious claims to truth-telling along with stories told in such detail that some fabrication is undeniable. Memoirs and biographies are full of long, quoted, dubiously accurate dialogue uttered years or decades before publication. It would seem that what scholar of journalism Norman Sims has called the “reality boundary” is more akin to, to borrow a phrase from the scholarship of imperialism, a permeable and malleable “contact zone.” And in some cases—though, crucially, not others—the reader accepts this willing suspension.



But Kakutani is on to something when she bemoans the single narrative’s fragmentation into multiple truths. Frey’s justification for fabricating elements of his own life was based on a tale of suffering, in a book centered around addiction and recovery. It is a similar argument to that of Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried, which distinguishes “happening-truth,” the facts on the ground as the narrator fights in Vietnam, from “story-truth,” the constructed narrative that somehow becomes truer than the grouping of facts in its ability to help in the recovery from trauma or in dealing with horrific events. O’Brien’s book toggles between the two. Can we equate different kinds of suffering—slaughter in Vietnam and drug and alcohol addiction? Can we distinguish them? In any case, The Things They Carried is—how significantly?—a collection of short stories.



Once Primo Levi had written Survival in Auschwitz, a memoir of his experiences in a concentration camp during World War II, he found that this was somehow not enough—that he would need to return to it once again through fiction. “The problem of being a counterfeiter, of feeling false, worries me,” he said in an interview once. “There’s a clear difference between telling stories you claim are true, and telling stories like Boccaccio.” But it was a question he would admit he was unable to resolve. Still, though, the incommunicability of Auschwitz, the struggle to fully encapsulate it in prose, is never equal to a denial of Auschwitz. This is, perhaps, the anxiety Kakutani signaled: the possibility of a slippage from questioning the truth of the past, from challenging an authoritative narrative, to denying that horrors took place. And the response—to write fiction out of fact in a way that restores truth to what seems devoid of fact or sense—can seem, as Levi intimated, heretical. The danger, of course, becomes that existing structures of power—the figures, governments, and institutions responsible for transmitting the past—invariably privilege certain of these narratives over others. The multiplication of possible histories, rather than a mounted challenge to History with its own limitations and prejudices as such, becomes itself vulnerable to a hierarchy of validity.



 



**



 



Hopwood’s project is situated firmly within the assumptions of the archival trend. Gaining momentum and credibility, especially since World War II, the archive serves perhaps to counter the shortcomings of narrative proliferation. It proposes an alternative to the memoir, a competing textual form in which to chronicle the past and even its slippery spirit. The installation is not only a compendium of false memories but a false memory archive, one in which they can be stored, searched and, crucially, remembered. Archives, so fraught with controversy and meaning decades ago, have come to be a central part of modern life. On the outskirts of European cities; in the damp basements of municipal courthouses; encased within Google’s whirring steel data repositories in Nevada and Arizona, information is accumulating. The origin of the archive is the anxiety of forgetfulness, of false or lacking memory. And its central question is what to include, and what to leave out—a question so provocative, with so much at stake, that increasingly little is left out at all. The archive, with its material evidence and concrete documentation, might seem to support a single narrative of the past. But as more and more is recorded, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile all the evidence, to funnel all this data into one consistent story. The story fractures, again, into fragments of history, as the archive once again promotes a variety of interpretations on what has gone before. In a way, this process restores agency and importance to lives so casually extinguished. The oral history collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, seeks to record and publish testimonies and interviews with survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. The few available journals or other documents written by African-American slaves accomplish a similar goal. But the process also signals what historian Pierre Nora has called the effect of a new consciousness: “the clearest expression of the terrorism of historicized memory.” With our e-mail histories recorded, centuries of censuses filed, and correspondence sanitized, stored, and uploaded so as not to allow the edges of ancient pages to crumble, it is no longer clear where the archive ends and reality commences. It becomes difficult to separate the significant from the superfluous and, more importantly, to make the active, ethical choice of what to remember and what to allow to slip away.



 



**



 



Kierkegaard believed that a person’s resilience could be measured by what we tend to consider the opposite of memory: the ability to forget. Not by his or her forgetfulness—rather, by the active effort to clip away the unneeded and un-useful. In the process the two become more alike than distinct, and personal identity emerges: “the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world.” To decide what to remember and what to forget becomes another way of deciding what kind of person one would like to be.



If the rise of the archive is linked to the ethical task of preserving forgotten or underrepresented narratives, confirmed through historical rigor and social validation, the personal dimension of truth, fiction, and memory forms a more dialectical relationship. Autobiography and memoir may rest on self-deception, but even memory is similarly vulnerable to mistakes and misinterpretations. And even memory relies upon a construction of the past in which the conventions of style and genre dictate and determine how we talk about ourselves. The participant in the False Memory Project with the mother who left to look for work could employ that event as one example of a broader narrative of a lonely, isolated childhood, which becomes one explanation of a life spent in search of community and companionship. Just as fiction plays with lived memory and forgetfulness, real-life memory draws upon the tools of fiction in both creating and limiting its potential.



In some ways, all identity can be understood as narrative identity. Individuals, strung between contingent “human time” and deep “historical time,” struggle to understand their place and function within their own particular moment; in large part this takes place when historical time becomes human time by being articulated through a narrative mode. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur puts it in Time and Narrative, “Narrative attains its full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” In many ways, this process is a part of life, not just a part of literature: We make sense of and, in a certain sense, construct our own identities by telling ourselves stories about our own lives—making identity mobile rather than fixed. Psychologist Jerome Bruner, who has worked on narrative for decades, goes further. The ways of telling and of conceptualizing, he argues, become so rigid that they end up structuring experience itself—not only guiding the narrative of a life into the present, but also helping to structure it into the future. “In the end,” he has written, “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we tell about our lives.” A life as led becomes no more than a life as told.



 This process is at the center of Hopwood’s False Memory Archive. “What’s interesting is that the submissions become mini-portraits of the person,” he has said, “yet the only thing you are finding out about this person is something that didn’t actually happen.” What he calls a “lovely paradox” actually defines all memories, not just ones that turn out to be false. But the relationship between the two—the indistinct but visible line between stylized memory and falsified events—does tell us something about the possessor of these memories. Perhaps, then, the conscious fabrications of Frey and others frighten us so because they are exaggerated examples of what we all do, constructing narratives that help to explain the past and lay the groundwork for the future. Conscious fabrication is a particularly egregious method of telling a story that reveals who we wish we were, rather than who we are—revealing, too, how the two are not as different as we would so often like to think.



 

On a Sunday evening in June 2005, few pedestrians tread the cobblestone streets of Villa General Belgrano, in Córdoba, Argentina. A hymn wafts up from the church. Several parishioners are beginning to slip out early from mass. No one will notice—only the sloping Bavarian rooftops lining the path back home.The cuckoo clock in the town plaza strikes six.  An elderly couple emerges from Café Rissen, the husband clutching a cane in one hand and his wife’s arm in the other. A chatting group of teenagers weaves around them, released from church, giddy with newfound freedom. Suddenly, they halt, peering through the windowpane of a tourist street shop, intrigued. Exchanging glances, they point at a row of black cotton shirts displayed in the window to passersby. 



The fronts of the t-shirts are imprinted with the figure of an eagle with outspread wings; below it, a white shield enclosing an iron crucifix. Superimposed on this: a cross tilted, its limbs bent, both at a ninety-degree angle—the unmistakable image of a swastika.



The story spreads, percolating first through regional weeklies and then into national media. Mayor Sergio Favot tells Rádio Universidad, “We are evaluating what legal framework we have to intervene.” He admits that within the realm of free speech, intervention has thorny boundaries—though he promises to appease the nationwide cries of condemnation dubbing the town a ‘breeding ground for Nazis.’



“People around here often ask for objects with military motifs of that time,” one store employee tells a reporter, uneasily. “Especially young people.”



One Villa Belgrano resident is not entirely surprised. “Every so often we have these Nazi outbreaks,” she tells the national newspaper *Clarín*. “They just form part of the landscape.”



The landscape of Villa General Belgrano has proved a prime tourist destination in the past few decades. Part of its allure lies in its strange foreignness: it’s easy to imagine the village uprooted from the Bavarian Forest and plunked down in the middle of Córdoba’s sierras, with architecture, language, and cuisine all remaining intact. Its Oktoberfest is the third largest in the world, surpassed only by Munich and Blumenau (in Brazil). German-style gnomes peer out of the kitschy tourist shops lining Calle Salta, one of the town’s main thoroughfares, as visitors meander among stores with names like Edelweiss and Bierkeller. Artificial, perhaps—it recalls the eerie superficiality of Disney World’s Main Street, U.S.A., an attempt to recreate what perhaps never really existed, through the tangible projection of a romantic ideal.



Yet it is not all hollow tackiness. Villa General Belgrano is home to the largest German community in Argentina. German still does mingle with Spanish, though to a decreasing extent, in homes and churches and bars. The town is the unofficial emblem of the entrenched historical ties between Argentina and Germany—a relationship whose existence is undeniable even if its borders have never officially been drawn.



The swastika affair became such a controversy because it exhumed the murky, rank depths of this history, alluded to and appropriated but never fully explored. A statement emblazoned on a t-shirt came to stand for all that still remained to be said.



 



* * *



In 1929, German immigrants Paul Heintze and Jorge Kappuhn were seeking a site for the agricultural cooperative they hoped to establish in the Argentine interior. The sierras of Córdoba proved home to a hospitable climate and largely unclaimed tracts of land—as well as, purportedly, reminding the duo of the Old World landscape they had left behind. A few intrepid families began to trickle in, as word spread through the German-Argentine community centered in Buenos Aires. Yet development remained rudimentary until 1935, when a group of students, along with their teachers and parents, spent a week there on vacation. The idyllic landscape and nostalgic reminders of their native land proved irresistible for the adults. Many of them would return, becoming the 127 pioneering families of Villa General Belgrano, initially christened Villa Calamuchita.



The village’s serene isolation would prove unsustainable, however, as its growth throughout the 1930s paralleled increasing national tensions. Argentina had thrived throughout World War I, using its neutrality to its advantage to become a supplier of food to all sides. But the global depression soon reversed these advances, leading the dictatorship to scramble for a force capable of uniting the nation. In doing so it looked to Europe—initially to the emerging fascist trends of Spain’s Franco regime. Argentine leaders began to consciously renew the language of an ancient Hispanic alliance between the ‘sword and the cross,’ emphasizing the shared customs, language, and history with Spain and the Vatican. The man who would become Argentina’s president and then dictator—Juan Domingo Perón—spent time in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany as a military observer. He was entranced by the ideology and techniques he witnessed there: the idea that the pulsing vagaries of nations as diverse as these could be mastered, subsumed under a single personality. Persecution of the Jews was to Perón a minor offshoot of the political machine and just another means of asserting national power. It was an offshoot his own government had no need to reproduce, with its close ties to the muscle and weight of the Roman Catholic Church. Within the government, then, implicit approval of Nazism became the norm.



Of course, stirrings of disquiet peeked through here and there, among civilians and every so often within the political apparatus—though a strict military hierarchy helped weed out those undesirables. Voices of dissent nevertheless reached a cacophony grating enough to persuade the relatively weak president, Ramón Castillo, to declare Argentina’s neutrality in World War II.



And yet the military leaders who were actually in charge continued to be attracted to the German worldview: its unwavering sense of purpose and righteousness, its willingness to assert its own identity at the expense of any real or perceived threat, disregarding unsavory consequences. As an immigrant nation, Argentina saw in Germany an alternative to the ideology of individuality within pluralism espoused by the United States, for example (even if the latter tended to fall short of its ideals). As a bonus, a pro-Nazi stance would prove strategic to counteract increasing American influence in neighboring Brazil.



Behind the curtain of Argentine neutrality was sprouting an intricate system of official Nazi involvement, as chronicled in Uki Goñi’s book *The Real Odessa*—telegrams promising freedom from arrest for Nazis who found their way to Argentina; the turning of a blind eye in cash-transfers funneled through Buenos Aires; a communication network linking Germany, Spain, and the Vatican to their partner in the South, as Hitler consolidated his strategy of conquest on the eve of World War II.



Into this melee, in December 1939, sailed a vessel bearing Nazi arms, combatants, and a plan of action. The *Admiral Graf Spee*, captained by Hans Langsdorff, reached the Río de la Plata separating Argentina and Uruguay after completing various assignments around the eastern coast of South America. On December 13th, a fleet of British ships—the *Exeter, Ajax,* and *Achilles*—approached the *Graf Spee. *Langsdorff, miscalculating the size of his opponents, was forced to prepare for battle at the last minute. He dealt a fatal blow to the *Exeter*, but the *Graf Spee* suffered 56 deaths and a few dozen injuries. The damage to the ship was severe enough to force it to turn around and limp into the port of Montevideo, where the surviving members of the crew were given 72 hours of amnesty.



British intelligence, meanwhile, managed to sow false reports among Langsdorff and his crew that a massive fleet of British naval forces was fast approaching. On December 19th, the captain made the executive decision to scuttle the *Graf Spee. *He and the approximately hundred and twenty surviving crewmen crossed the Río de la Plata and made it to Buenos Aires, where they were lodged at the Hotel de los Inmigrantes.



The following day, Langsdorff was found dead in his hotel room, wrapped in a German flag, a bullet hole in his forehead. In a note composed to his commander in Germany, he wrote:



*I can now only prove by my death that the fighting services of the Third Reich are ready to die for the honor of the flag … I shall face my fate with firm faith in the cause and the future of the nation and of my Führer.*



He was buried with full military honors in the German section of La Chacarita cemetery.



From there, the contours of the story begin to blur. Records on the subsequent activities of the remainder of the German crew are vague, if they exist at all. Some remained in Uruguay, it is known. Others shed their Nazi uniforms, settling in Buenos Aires, learning Spanish, marrying Argentines, fading into the fabric of a society largely content to overlook the past. Still others, however, had heard rumors of an enclave of other expatriates, couched in scenery familiar and soothing to a homesick exile. These found their way across the pampas, over the sierras, and into what was still known, then, as Villa Calamuchita. 



 



* * *



Seeking the Old World within the New is hardly a novelty in Argentina. Like other American colonies, the original territory was only supposed to be an extension of the Spanish empire and, with it, a continuation of European norms. Even after independence Argentina continued to fashion itself in the image of its Spanish parent. A parallel if derivative identity was carved out of its Jesuit missions, budding aristocracy, and geography soon wiped clean of the nuisance of natives. Today Buenos Aires continues to be known as the ‘Paris of South America.’ Farther down the continent, vacationers flock to the lakeside city of Bariloche for artisan chocolates and skiing, in the ‘Switzerland of Patagonia.’ It comes as no surprise, then, that when President Perón sought to consolidate power and ensure blind faith to a creed, he looked across the Atlantic, appropriating the power of spectacle and the hypnosis of dogma already present in Nazi Germany.



In 1996, Argentine journalist Uki Goñi was conducting research for an unprecedented book on official Argentine-Nazi ties. Several times he sought access to documentation on postwar German immigration. He was told that the documents were classified, or that they had been misplaced. When he returned later that year, he learned that all midcentury immigration files were no longer in existence. They had been burned in a bonfire late at night, in his absence, in the vacant space behind the Hotel de los Inmigrantes—the same place where Hans Langdorff had ended his own life fifty years before. The final embers had already faded to black, the charred remains of damning evidence dispatched to the wind.



Goñi still managed to write the book. *The Real Odessa—*the title based on a fictional account of ex-Nazis smuggling their comrades to South America—was an indictment far more damning of the Argentine government itself. It was not ex-Nazis, Goñi revealed, but Argentines in power who had facilitated the escape of war criminals to Argentina following World War II.  A network stretching through Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Vatican had enabled the safe passage of men like Thilo Martens, a millionaire who arranged cash-transfers between Nazis; Fritz Thyssen, a German industrial magnate who had bankrolled Hitler’s rise; and most infamously, Adolf Eichmann, the brain behind the ‘Final Solution.’ Perón sent agents—including Catholic bishops—to Europe to smuggle the Germans back to Buenos Aires, often assisted by the manufacture of falsified Red Cross passports.



Perón was appalled by the sense of righteous justice sweeping the Allied nations after the defeat of Germany. Always partial to the glory of battle, the sheen of soldiers’ medals, he saw in military action a type of transcendental honor, and in war an ethical set of boundaries that failed to apply in peacetime. The idea that military officers should be held responsible for their actions, should be considered ‘war criminals,’ was anathema to his very worldview.



*“In Nuremberg at that time,” *he said regarding the trials,* “something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity.”*



Welcoming ex-Nazis to Argentina became, for Perón, a means of asserting infallibility: not of political institutions but rather of the officials constituting them. Such a plan was inextricably bound to the vision of his own leadership in Argentina. It was a vision defined by the assumption that a single personality could and must determine the course of a nation, that this personality was himself, and that what some might call crimes against humanity could be incorporated into a broader, ultimately benevolent purpose: the good of the nation.



The clenched fist, the chanted hymn, the rallying speech proclaimed from the balcony of the presidential palace—all were fascist tactics watered down. Some German methods were modified. Instead of drawing power from the persecution of Jews, Perón concentrated elsewhere, on the power of and alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. Argentina has never been a particularly devout country in practice; but its profound attachment to religious iconography—in rosaries, statues, portraits of saints—found a secular parallel, here, in the symbols of the nationalist parade. All would, Perón hoped, weave together a national narrative, in which he would play a privileged role.



 



* * *



In most cases, the Nazis who had escaped to Argentina lived quietly, apart from politics or world affairs. Many Argentines probably never knew their pasts. Some may have suspected but said nothing; others prone to talk were swiftly silenced. And gradually the past was forgotten, or rather patched up, its stitches thick but haphazard.



In 1943, in Villa Calamuchita, an Argentine flag was thrown into the town plaza. It had been lit afire and it burned to shreds. Three sailors from the *Graf Spee* were accused, but never tried. In response, the provincial legislature decided to change the town’s name to Villa General Belgrano in honor of a 19th-century national figure—a military hero, and the creator of the Argentine flag. And in time the old name was covered over, as was the reason for changing it.



The Nazi connections, rhetorical strategies, and iconographies adopted by Argentina were hardly on the same scale as the horrors of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany. It is easy to dismiss them as the fancies of an authoritarian-minded president, fancies that would fade with him and with time. But a quarter-century later, under a military dictatorship, such themes would reappear. 30,000 left-wing or suspected left-wing citizens would face repression, torture, or assassination—and few would dare to speak out. Argentina’s *Guerra Sucia, *then*—*its “Dirty War”—has roots in a less systematic relationship: the disfiguration of the country’s failure to stare its old demons in the face.



Today the traces of these old wounds, of uneasy partnerships, find their manifestation no longer in physical evidence or a militant nationalism but in the persistence of a national mood. “I come from a sad country,” Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges once said. In his writings he returned often to Buenos Aires, the city of his birth, retracing the certain broodiness—the subtle but pervasive melancholy—that to him continued to lurk beneath its surface: “Always with a blue-washed wall, the shade/Of a fig tree, and a sidewalk of broken concrete.”



That poem, “The Cyclical Night,” continues:



* *



*This, here is Buenos Aires. Time, which brings*



*Either love or money to men, hands on to me*



*Only this withered rose, this empty tracery*



*Of streets with names recurring from the past …*



*Squares weighed down by a night in no one’s care*



*Are the vast patios of an empty palace*



*And the single-minded streets creating space*



*Are corridors for sleep and nameless fear. *



 



There is more in the Argentine past, the national icon suggests, than is allowed to be said—and thus allowed to be truly forgotten. Memory becomes crucial but easily subversive, vulnerable to so many cinders. Today the twice-named village retains the ghost presence of Nazi alignment: emptily tracing the streets, its names and its past recurring.



 

 



*When I consider how my light is spent

**Ere half my days in this dark world and wide*



- John Milton



On the banks of the Charles there are faded wooden benches. They face the river and its red brick bridges, and they face away from Cambridge—towards Boston, and the sea. In February 1968, a foot of snow has fallen and the benches are nearly submerged, their porous planks sealing in the winter chill. Here on one of these benches Jorge Luis Borges sits down. In February 1969 he will sit down here again, in his story “The Other,” and a younger Borges will walk over and join him on the bench, thinking he is in Geneva in 1919. In the story, the younger Borges will dream their conversation; the older Borges will live it. 



Borges is in Cambridge to talk about poetry. The Argentine writer has been chosen to deliver the 1968 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. The lectures will be recorded and shelved in the University Archives, where they will remain for thirty-two years until someone finds them in a forgotten dusty corner, when they will be transcribed, and published, and reviewed in the New York Times. “The unhurried flow and warmth of these talks produce a sense of intimacy,” Micaela Kramer will write. 



Intimacy is a challenge in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, which seats over one thousand in darkpaneled pews set back from the stage. Borges is small and seems even smaller in this room, as he walks in and ascends the stage, cane in hand, dressed all in gray. He grips the sides of the lectern. “I would like to give you fair warning”, he says, “of what to expect—or, rather, of what not to expect—from me.” His English is faultless, if formal; his voice hoists up the end of his phrases, pausing between them, garnishing their words with a slightly rolled r. He admits from the start that he has no grand revelations and that he can only offer to the audience his perplexities and his doubts. He quotes Stevenson, Chesterton, Milton, and Homer. The citations are from his memory, because he has no notes. He has no notes because, in 1968, Borges is blind. 



*For others there remains the universe, 

**In my half-light: the habit of my verse. *



1955, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Outside the Casa Rosada, where Evita had addressed her adoring crowds, those same crowds in the same plaza rioted. Her husband Perón had fallen into disfavor and one dictatorship was replacing another. Borges’ job (if he had kept it) was that of a poultry inspector. This was thanks to Perón, who had promoted him from his position as librarian, in return for Borges’ politics. In 1955, with Perón in hiding, he was offered a new position: director of the National Library of Argentina. They never officially fired the previous Peronist director, who continued to come to work, sitting perhaps in the reading room organizing copies of La Nación in reverse chronological order, until one day he stopped showing up. 



There were nine hundred thousand books in the library, so approximately infinity (nine hundred thousand and one is one way express the infinite). They were there but out of reach because 1955 was the year Borges’ blindness accelerated and his gate of surveillance swung shut. 



From his “Poem of the Gifts”: “No one should read self-pity or reproach / into this statement of the majesty / of God; who with such splendid irony / granted me books and blindness at one touch.” Nine hundred thousand books—nine hundred thousand gifts—and only their outlines were discernible. When Borges was a child he lived not in Buenos Aires’ suburbs, with its legends and local color, but on the other side of his suburban house’s speared fence: in a garden, and in a library, full of unlimited texts. Eden had been gained through his position and now is lost to his possession. It is enough to make someone go mad. 



In an interview with the Paris Review, years later, Borges would quote Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line. He would talk about the unreality of real life, the futility of realism: the idea that even when trying to write realistically about the  world, a story becomes a fantasy, because the world itself is fantastic.



The story of Borges’ blindness might as well be one of his fictions. Borges does not see Cambridge like others do. Its curved squares and fragmented campuses, whatever the weather, are framed in tinted mist. Black and red evade him; blue is seeping out slowly; little by little only a faded yellow remains. His daily trek from 22 Concord Avenue to the white-washed Radcliffe library, his accompanied walks from Sanders to the Charles, can be no more than a theater for conversation and for thought. Clasping his palms together, Borges talks in his second lecture about metaphor, about the movement from the language of Muses to the discourse of the subconscious.  “Rather uncouth,” he says of the latter. “Still, we have to put up with the mythology of our time.” His audience laughs and so for a moment gains a face.



Blindness is more than a nuisance for Borges: it is a literary and a metaphysical problem. Already in 1929, in the poetry collection  Fervor de Buenos Aires, it is more the reader than the writer who is the key to any progression towards truth. “If the pages of this book consent to some pleasing verse, forgive me, reader, the discourtesy of having usurped it,” the “To the Reader” section states. “It is a chance and trivial circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises, and I their composer.” His essay “Kafka and his Predecessors” posits the reader’s powerful agency: each reader brings to a text his own inventory of previous readings, and in doing so shapes the text itself. The meaning of a poem by Browning is inevitably changed after we have read Kafka; Kafka—or rather the reader of Kafka—might follow Browning chronologically, but still through interpretation creates the poet and his verse. Instead of a linear chronology of literary history,  we have an infinite multiplication of texts and possible readings, each of which inflects what we have read before. 



All texts are wholly original, then—and yet, in a sense, none of them are. This is because all stories have already been told, only to be retold again and again. In one of Borges’ very short stories, Caesar’s death—Et tu, Brute?—is echoed centuries later and leagues away by an Argentine  gaucho stabbed on the plains, who proclaims as he dies: Pero, che? Borges, a multilingual and vociferous reader, finds such implausible connections more easily and is both awed and overwhelmed by them: this is why he will never write a novel, why his stories become increasingly brief. They are rewritings, translations, rather than being the things themselves. “Perhaps the history of the universe is the history of the diverse intonations of a few metaphors,” he writes in “Pascal’s Sphere”—metaphors to be reshuffled and adorned by new writers. The more one reads, though, the better one will perceive those few main stories couching and underlying the rest. It is the reader, not the writer, who creates literature, who brings it to life—and who ensures its continuation. “One reads what one likes,” Borges says in his third lecture, “yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.” And the reader, exempt from this gulf, is happier for it.



“I think of myself as being essentially a reader,” says Borges in his final Cambridge lecture, “The Poet’s Creed.” Borges’ creed is not much more or less than this. What happens, then, when his identity as reader is undermined—when he can no longer make out the words on a page? 



Borges’ blindness is not a surprise. It ran in his family: his father and his grandfather had both gone blind by middle age; his great-grandfather was subject to one of the first British eye operations.  “It was a slow, summer twilight,” he will say. “There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it.” In blindness he writes in meter again, freed by the confines of classical rhythm, which is easier to remember than free verse. He writes letters, still, to friends like Victoria Ocampo, with whom he had founded the magazine  Sur in the thirties. Some are preserved within manila folders at Harvard’s Houghton Library: a careful slanting print of the early years and a Spanish sprinkled with anglicisms (“roundabout”; “groping our way”), is replaced by the seventies with a wild, nearly unintelligible cursive. In his Cambridge lectures he cites Homer, Milton; in other speeches he recalls other blind writers—James Joyce, William Prescott, the French-Argentine historian Paul Groussac who preceded him at the National Library. He can do this thanks in part to his memory: meeting a Romanian man in Paris, he quotes to him an eight-verse poem, in Romanian, that a young war veteran had composed and recited to him in Geneva fifty years before. Borges did not speak Romanian. In a certain way blindness is his heritage.



This is not to deny that it was excruciating to him. When Borges first went blind he would dream about reading, nightmares of black and red characters proliferating into long unreadable sequences and then curling back in on themselves. He wrote poems about this “hollow gloom,” strung uneasily somewhere between darkness and light.  He missed the darkness, which is denied to a blind man, for whom eyes open and close on an identical scene. From “History of the Night”: “To think that night would not exist / without those tenuous instruments, the eyes.” 



But since he realized he would lose his sight, when he was young, he had time to work through the idea from the start. Blindness is more than biographical in Borges’ poems and stories. Always inevitable, it becomes less a chronological life event and more inscribed in his very person. It is a trait similar to his love of encyclopedias or skill for foreign languages: a trope that lends itself to his fictions more than arising from his biography. Blindness is to be found between the lines of Borges’ earliest poems. Even in Fervor de Buenos Aires, sprinkled with the “local color” that will later embarrass him, there is a sense of uncertainty as to the boundaries between the self and what it sees. Dawn in Buenos Aires becomes “that tremendous conjecture / of Schopenhauer and Berkeley / Which declares the world / An activity of the mind.” In “Caminata” the suggestion is more direct: “I am the only spectator of this street, / if I stopped watching it, it would die.” Such idealism will be diluted later, as Borges actually goes blind and the world he no longer sees comes to seem more real. But as a younger man, there is both a fear of blindness and a doubt regarding the reaches of sight. 



Later, in 1960, “The Witness” meditates on seeing and blindness and the limits of both. When a Saxon man, the last to have seen the pagan rites of Woden, is dead, the rites themselves will die too: so one thing or infinity things die with each person’s death, bound within their sight, and blinded by their loss. And then “Simplicity”: 



*It opens, the gate to the garden With the docility of a page 

**That frequent devotion questions

**And inside, my gaze

**Has no need to fix on objects

**That already exist, exact in memory*



Fear of the unknown has surrendered to acceptance of a reality that has no need of sight; that in a sense renders all blind, because it exists independently—real only in memory. “I live in memory,” he says—that is the imagination, for him: memory, or a peculiar intermingling of memory and oblivion, which creates scenes more attune to reality than those of his or anyone’s eyes. All Borges’ fictions are no more than verbal constructs: they are detached from reality by the same speared fence that cut off his childhood library from the gauchos outside. But there is the hope that the gap between writing and reality, though unbridgeable, can ultimately be obliquely approached. A reader can sidle up closer to it through past readings, through the memory of reading. “I do not know if that geography is important,” he writes in a letter to Victoria Ocampo: “my most vivid memory of Lugano is the passionate reading of De Quincey’s vision.” Reading, sight, and memory become a circular process, fortified and fused by the art of telling stories. 



When Borges is in Cambridge he visits the homes of Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emily Dickinson. “Friends seemed to multiply in Cambridge,” he will later say to a translator. When he is in Cambridge, in the fall, before the benches by the Charles trap the winter chill in them, he will write “New England—1967.”



*The forms in my dreams have changed;

**now there are red houses side by side

**and the delicate bronze of the leaves

**and chaste winter and pious wood,

**as on the seventh day, the world **is good.

In the twilight there persists

**what’s almost non-existent, bold, sad,

**an ancient murmur of Bibles, war,

**soon (they say) the first snow will fall

**and America waits for me on every corner…*



The red that escapes his sight still populates his memory, as Borges reads Cambridge through history and through books. A Puritan heritage modulates the noises in its streets (an ancient murmur at twilight recalls the seventh day). Emerson too is here in the delicate bronze of the leaves—“Nature” paints them bronze, animates the faded yellow. Perhaps, even, there is the mortal dread of Moby Dick, a futile summoning-up of the non-existent in the middle of what’s there. In New England, in 1967, these all are ways of reading Cambridge, all results of reading poetry. Borges sees it as perhaps only a blind man can.

Mykola Kulish, Ukraine’s most famous 20th-century playwright, was known for his formal experimentation and dismissal of contemporary conceits. He was also among many Ukrainian writers forced to couch any reference to Ukrainian national identity in a teleology of socialist revolution, culminating, inevitably, in a Bolshevik victory. 



Kulish was able to find loopholes in devices of characterization, setting, and allusion all the same. In Kulish’s 1930 play, Sonata Pathétique, neither Soviet triumph nor pure Ukrainian nationalism is fully exempt from satire, as Kulish pokes fun at the national cult of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, widely considered to be the founder of modern Ukrainian literature and language. The work is centered around the conflicts between Ukrainian and Russian forces following the 1917 Russian Revolution. In Act Four, a conversation takes place between nostalgic retiree Ivan Stupay-Stupanenko and his daughter, strong- willed Ukrainian nationalist Maryna, as the Bolsheviks march into their sleepy provincial town: 



Stupay (tries to uncover the window): I’ll go to meet them!

Maryna: They’ll kill you.

Stupay: I have arms. 



Maryna: What arms?

Stupay: The Ukrainian language.

Maryna: A language is only persuasive when it’s backed by weapons.

Stupay I will meet them and remind them of Shevchenko’s sacred words: “Embrace,

my brethren, the smallest one.”

Maryna: Who will you remind of it? The Bolsheviks? The bandits? The bloodthirsty barbarians who are destroying our loftiest ideals? (She covers the window.) 



Unlike Maryna, Stupay is consumed by an overwhelmingly romantic, ethnic, and ultimately antiquated conception of Ukraine. For him, Shevchenko and his language are the only hope for national regeneration: “Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Ukrainians swore before Shevchenko’s picture not to lay down their hands until Ukraine is restored to full freedom. I swear it, too!” Maryna counters such idealism with a more pragmatic approach: the idea that military might holds the key to national defense. The nar- rative warps the attitudes of both into alternatives that are, at best, vaguely unsatisfying. Neither proves a fully suitable emblem around which a divided nation could rally. 



** 



Earlier this spring, Ukrainians celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of their national poet, Sevchenko. The deteriorating relations be- tween Russia and Ukraine, having lowered to a simmer in the Western media, flared up again briefly here and there. Clashes between Russian nationalists and those opposed to secession interrupted commemorative rallies in Sevastopol, while Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a crowd around the Shevchenko statue in Kiev that they wouldn’t “budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land.” 



Confusion concerning Ukraine’s borders—political and otherwise—is, of course, hardly new. Generations of Ukrainian writers have so com- fortably plodded the terrain of riot and revolution between Russia and Ukraine that the genre—a particular kind of Soviet historical epic—has become a reliable trope. Yet the elevation of Shevchenko as a symbol of a single, united Ukraine belies, as the process of canonization tends to do, the complexities and contradictions that have characterized the country since long before its official birth, long before even the establishment of the Ukrainian language. Sonata Pathétique, in which Ukrainian nationalists, Red Army Bolsheviks, and Russian autocrats collide to the variously steady and frantic tempos of Beethoven’s sonata, is an eerily prescient reminder of these contradictions. 



It was only in 1905 that the Russian Academy of Sciences officially declared Ukrainian to be a language rather than a dialect, thus ending over half a century of linguistic and cultural suppression. Among the Russian literati of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the country was a provincial outpost surrounding the cosmopolitan (though certainly not “Ukrainian”) Kiev. This prejudice eased only with the official establishment of Ukraine as one of the founding SSRs in 1922, after what is now widely considered a civil war between Russia and the Ukraine from 1918 to 1920. Now, for the first time, Ukrainian literature was part of a state enterprise. The early Soviet policy of korenizatsiia encouraged this status, seeking to promote (and monitor) ethnic nationalism, local language, and national literary activity in what historian Terry Martin has called “The Affirmative Action Empire.” A brief but powerful flowering of Ukrainian literature and culture ensued. 



In 1926, riding high on the literary nationalist wave, Kulish helped to found VAPLITE, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature—a writers’ union that aligned itself officially with communism but took an ironic, often comic, and subtly subversive approach to literature through its magazine The Literary Fair. Kulish himself had fought for the Russian Army in World War I before joining the Bolsheviks. But by the late 1920s, he had become more interested in the question of national communism. How could Ukraine embrace the values emanating from Moscow while still cultivating its own literary tradition? 



Kulish’s Sonata Pathétique was a response to such a challenge, as well as to the prevailing examples of nationalist theater in Ukraine and Russia. Ironically, given the radical politics of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita— which was not to be published until long after Bulgakov’s death—one of these examples was Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins, a play about the White Guard, the Russians intellectuals of the Tsarist Army, which ran regularly in Moscow from 1926 to 1941, and which Stalin himself was reputed to have seen more than 20 times. Kulish took offense at Bulgakov’s characterization of the Ukrainian national forces as anarchic and unmotivated. And he was impatient with the requirements of socialist realism emanating from the Moscow Art Theatre, where Bulgakov staged his work. These requirements would ultimately harden into policy, responsible for a crackdown on modernist experimentation in Ukraine and elsewhere beginning in the early 1930s. 



While he still could, Kulish challenged Bulgakov’s argument through an expressionist rather 



than realist frame, seeking to probe the limits of modernism by folding a different work of art—a musical score, no less—into a theatrical piece. The “early legato of a hoarse cock” presages the capture of Russian soldier Georges by Ukrainian nationalists; the accompaniment to the grave section becomes a fugue of Easter bells as the protagonist, the poet Ilko Yuha, anxiously awaits the return of Maryna, whom he loves. Sometimes the echoes are explicit in the stage directions: “(He can almost hear the sound of horses’ hooves as an echo of the Pathétique).” 



** 



While far from the most appealing character in Sonata Pathétique, the plucky, headstrong Mary- na is probably the most interesting. She uses the love of Ilko—who is gradually converted to Bolshevism, but who, in one scene, proclaims “the way of love!” over “the way of revolution!”—just as she uses the admiration of André, a member of the White Army, to further her own goals of an independent Ukrainian state. These manipulations backfire: by the end, Ilko feels so betrayed that he hands her over to the triumphant Bolshevik forces. 



Of course, history had already intervened in sup- port of Soviet victory. And the success of socialism had to be certain for the play to have any hope of being staged at all. As it was, Kulish was unable to publish it in Ukraine. But Sonata Pathétique went on to be staged in Moscow to an initially favorable response, eventually expanding into regional cities like Omsk and Korsk. By late 1932, though, the Ukrainian literary renaissance had ended. The official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, wrote a scathing review of the play based mainly on his condemnation of it as “nationalist.” 



Kulish would go on to be arrested in the purges and would die in a concentration camp, either in 1937 or 1942—the official historical record unravels, here, into uneasy ambiguity. 



Historian Timothy Snyder has called the contested terrains of Eastern Europe the Bloodlands. The mass killings from 1930 to 1945, he has argued, which we tend to associate with the images of Auschwitz and gas chambers and Stalin’s gulags, were part of a broader, more sustained process of murder. 10 million civilians who never entered concentration camps were shot, deliberately starved (beginning with Ukraine in 1930), or gassed in killing centers unrelated to work and death camps. By the time of Auschwitz’s greatest efficiency in 1943, a vast percentage of the in- habitants of these lands, Jewish and non-Jewish, had been killed. Trampled over by the massive violence, famines, and purges of Stalin’s regime, only to be re-trodden by the genocidal and environmental ravages of Hitler’s empire, in-between lands like Ukraine were condemned to near-annihilation. The search for Ukrainian identity was subsumed under the daily, yearly battle over Ukrainian lives—a battle that Kulish himself lost. 



After being suppressed by Soviet censorship, Sonata Pathétique would not be heard of again until the mid- to late-1980s. It was only with Ukrainian independence in 1990 that a full edition of Kulish’s works would be published, emerging from the rubble of what in some ways had been a lost, foreshortened century. Its reissue kickstarted an- other chapter in the process of national identity and definition whose competing partisans have yet to come to accord. 



Pathos in Ukrainian—?????—means both what it does in English, and also something like “the essence of things.” The structure of theater and music might impose a kind of aesthetic unity, then, for a people and in a land where real, lived unity—or even the freedom to pursue it—has long been elusive. 



“Well, I’ve risen,” declares Stupay as he emerges into the streets of battle toward the end of Sonata Pathétique. “But I don’t know which side I should join.” 



(He thinks and hesitates). Neither this side nor that. (The bullets whizz by.) Wait. There are Ukrainians on both sides. What are you doing? Let me think! 



 



And as Stupay bends to the ground, still undecided, a bullet strikes him in the chest. He falls, his own vision for Ukraine extinguished between the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag and the bright crimson of the Reds. “I suggested red, yellow and blue stripes,” he’d said, “but they won’t listen to me.”