Amnesia and the Nation: History, Forgetting, and James Joyce by Vincent J. Cheng (review)

In the "Afterword" to Amnesia and Nation: History, Forgetting, and James Joyce, Vincent J. Cheng looks back on his discussion of complex relationships between remembering and forgetting reflected in literature, culture, and history. His study raises a number of formidable questions about truth and fact, remembrance, interpretation, and fabrication. The value of Cheng's book comes from the fact that its content reaches far beyond the scope of literary analyses and examines broad socio-political and cultural realities of the post-truth era ushered by the global rise of right-wing and separatist ideologies of the mid-2010s. Questions about what/how to remember and what/how to forget are particularly important in the "post-Trump world—one which blithely substitutes 'alternative facts' for any inconvenient truths and which willfully distorts facts and history to fit one's own purpose" (150). In such a world, writes Cheng, "we need to be ever more vigilant that manipulative and self-serving distortions involved in both remembering and forgetting cannot be tolerated and will be recognized as the willful creation of very dangerous fictions" (150). Nations have, indeed, always created fictions, some less and some more dangerous—nightmares from which many of them have yet to awake, and nightmares into which the new ones walk with eyes wide open.¹

Since his important 1995 book, Joyce, Race, and Empire, Cheng has continued to work with issues of nation, culture, and identity, contributing to other recent books on the subject.² The present book is the newest iteration of these interests; it reworks some of the earlier scholarship into the new configuration that spans the writings of James Joyce, Milan Kundera, and William Faulkner, with detours to novels by Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy. In exploring their works, Cheng studies the relationships between memory, history, and the nation in relation to the roles that forgetting and amnesia play in "forming national identities and histories" (vii). And while, in the binary of "memory/forgetting," amnesia is regarded in negative terms, Cheng makes amnesia a central focus of his study by asserting the "desirability or usefulness of forgetting" (vii). The book draws from thinkers who have addressed the dichotomy of amnesia and remembering: the Russian psychologist Alexander Romanovitch Luria³ and the Jewish philosopher and historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,⁴ in addition to sorties into the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Noting the growing interest in the "science of forgetting," especially as put forward by Edward S. Casey, Anne Whitehead, and Paul Connerton,⁵ Cheng offers an overview of some of the recent scholarship in the field of memory studies, much of it spurred by scientific research into Alzheimer's disease, trauma, truth and reconciliation movements, and monuments and memorials (5).

Cheng moves to literature and the activity of reading, "a form of mental voyaging" (10) that fulfills a desire to forget the present, not unlike the desire to forget the past that stimulates what Cheng calls "'amnesia fantasies,' an urge to forget that allows for the creation of alternative possibilities to fill the vacuum" (10). Writing and the narrative of reconstruction, are, therefore, predicated on the dynamics of remembering and forgetting that underlie "the logic of textuality," a concept advanced by John Frow that Cheng employs to buttress his premise that memory and forgetting are "both immediately connected to imagination, narrative, and desire" (10).⁶ Because the time of textuality is non-linear and subject to analeptic and proleptic molding, the past is always in the process of being written, its truth(s) and meaning(s) always subject to retroactive and repeated re-construction(s) in the continuous retroactive dynamics of re-envisioning.

Cheng explores these issues in chapter 2 through the lenses of Freud and Nietzsche as a segue, first, to Joyce and Kundera, then to Ford, Fitzgerald, and, finally, to Percy. For Cheng, Stephen Dedalus's nightmare...