I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

I remember the clownish, racist governor of Georgia Lester Maddox, who just died. I seem to recall a parody musical of him that played in New York when I was in high school. Can this be true?

Since he too just died (I was surprised that he was alive, and only 78), I am reminded of Leon Uris's Exodus on my downtown grandmother's side-table in her living room. I think he also wrote Topaz, filmed by Hitchcock. Exodus seemed to be a serious book that everyone -- all the Jews of my grandparents' generation -- loved. Not that I recall them ever talking about it. But its hardcover, one-word presence, on display in their rooms, seemed a kind of reminder and testament of Jewish suffering and the nobility of the refugees who made their way to Israel. Leon Uris seemed a name to conjure with: a kind of serious thinker writing a serious historical novel. James Michener had the same effect, but was not quite so important I think for Jewish loyalty to Israel and the very idea of Israel, although The Source certainly contributed to the sense we had of how Jewish exceptionalism might carry over to Israeli exceptionalism. That book Exodus (and the movie made of it) probably plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the cultural image that American Jews, or New York Jews, or New York Jews of a certain age, or even New York Jews of a certain age who never read the book but were impressed by its serenely passionate authoritative bulk had of Israel. It's amazing, now that I think of it, that Uris would have been a generation younger than my grandparents. They must not have thought him a cultural authority -- especially since they knew so much more than I did, knowing many people in Israel (which they; I remember the mailings and receipts from the Jewish National Fund, and the number of tree plantings you could fund). So for them the book must have been more a document of proud achievement, and not of authoritative if novelized history. Or maybe they just never got around to reading it, and its status in my mind as a sort of mythical prop is just my own childish perception of what I took to be a major adult book.

I do remember being surprised about other books -- Herman Wouk's, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s -- that adults I respected (Milton Schubin in particular, though he owned a lot of Wouk, including the non-fictional This is My God more about which another time) turned out to think they were schlocky adolescent works. I didn't know that that's what the taste I preened my adolescent self on came down to.

posted by william 7:22 AM
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