Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture

Theatres of Memory

Theatres of Memory

Past and Present in

Contemporary Culture

RAPHAEL SAMUEL

This revised paperback edition first published by Verso 2012

© Alison Light 2012

First published by Verso 1994

First published in paperback by Verso 1996

Foreword © Bill Schwarz 2012

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Contents

Foreword by Bill Schwarz

Preface: Memory Work

Acknowledgements for Illustrations

INTRODUCTION

Unofficial Knowledge

PART I Retrochic

Retrofitting

Retrochic

The Return to Brick

PART II Resurrectionism

Resurrectionism

Living History

PART III Heritage

Semantics

Genealogies

Sociology

PART IV Flogging a Dead Horse

Heritage-baiting

Pedagogies

Politics

PART V Old Photographs

The Eye of History

The Discovery of Old Photographs

Dreamscapes

Scopophilia

PART VI Costume Drama

Modern Gothic: The Elephant Man

Doing the Lambeth Walk

Docklands Dickens

‘Who Calls So Loud?’ Dickens on Stage and Screen

AFTERWORD

Hybrids

Index

Foreword

‘At Camden Lock…the past has almost caught up with the present.’ RAPHAEL SAMUEL, THEATRES OF MEMORY

Theatres of Memory, at once labyrinthine and circuitous yet crafted as a self-consciously ‘open text’, sets out with determination to reanimate the historical imagination for our own times. In doing so the book is punctuated by periodic broadsides and many hostages are taken, from both the right and the left. The text endeavours to subvert closure, even if it is not quite so open as it seeks to proclaim. It appears to assume a life of its own, impelled by the enthusiasms and diatribes that jump across its pages.

This is a book that works to minimize, at every point, the gap between the author and the printed word and between the printed word and the reader. Page by page the reader is exhorted to participate in the dramas it enacts: the writing dazzles and cajoles, explains and reveals, denounces and condemns, proffering tantalizing glimpses of the author’s own self-hood that historians are so often determined to conceal. It’s difficult to imagine anyone emerging unscathed from the experience of reading this book, such is the force of its argumentation, the vibrancy of the prose and the passions that drive it. There is an indefatigable quality that serves in equal measure to seduce and to mesmerize. And the tempo is so fast-paced – notwithstanding the various repetitions, detours and false trails – it is little wonder that, despite the vigilance of the writing, curious paradoxes lurk in its undergrowth.

Raphael Samuel devoted Promethean energies to revitalizing the practice of history and, as is evident from Theatres of Memory, he represented something akin to a permanent revolution in the field: whenever he sensed an orthodoxy settling, or when he believed that professional norms prevailed, he felt compelled to set in train a counteroffensive, commanding the resources, not of the big battalions, but of the guerrilla.

It’s thus entirely appropriate that the project is launched with a sustained critique of the conventional production of historical knowledge. ‘The starting point of Theatres of Memory…is that history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian’s invention.’ The argument is thereafter powerfully mobilized, deriving from an acute appreciation of the social relations that underwrite the constitution of historical knowledge.

To suppose that history is the product only of the socially accredited elites who write the academic articles and monographs, who compose the reviews and who are installed in the university departments and research institutes, is to ignore the greater mass who labour to make the past known: the ranks of librarians, archivists and schoolteachers, and the sizeable if shifting and relatively inchoate gatherings of amateurs. It’s a book about history in which historians, or the fortunate amongst them, feature only in walk-on roles, as subaltern spear-carriers for those who make history, as an imaginative enterprise, happen.

Samuel believed it necessary to understand the forms of knowledge which this social division of intellectual labour generates. Professional history, in this schema, is – exactly that – a discipline, a species of intellectual life bequeathed by the forces of modernity. In its own particular way, it is an embodiment of social and epistemological authority. Samuel contends, however, that history, more broadly conceived, is a discursive field riven by antagonism. In addition, he argues, the intellectual procedures of what passes as history, tout court, create a way of knowing that is predisposed to the ‘occult’ and is driven as much by professional interests as by an open, overriding spirit of inquiry. In laying bare the contradictory forces that underwrite the modern practice of history the author reveals a paradox. Samuel himself was drawn to the lure of the occult. The footnote, for example, that defining sign of professional mastery of the discipline, was also for him – as for many of us – a technique to be cherished, a means by which secondary, subtextual sorties on many fronts, could be conducted. Yet this ambivalence on his part only attests further to the essentially contradictory forms of historical knowledge that imprint themselves deep in our own collective mentalities.

In an elegant, radical rendition, Theatres of Memory reverses the protocols of mainstream historiography and implores us to consider the degree of artifice that allows historical narrative to work, even as it masquerades as supremely Rankean. In the introduction, in a rare engagement with Freud, Samuel delivers the provocation that the discipline of history subjects itself to all manner of repression such that it functions as a screen memory, displacing what is significant and divesting itself of all that is dynamic. The finished product of the academic historical imagination, even as it is polished and with all potential loose ends cut and tied, resembles nothing more than Freud’s ‘dream-thoughts’, the chaos of the lived condensed and displaced into a unitary narrative of explanation.

Whatever claims may be made on its behalf, historical narrative indulges in all manner of ‘make-believe’, and is given to a genteel ‘dressing up’. Even when truest to its own protocols it nonetheless is vulnerable to the ‘interception of meaning’ (pp. 434–5). Turning inside-out the entire tradition of modern historiography, Samuel avers that it is not history that can grasp all that is most distinctively human about the social world but its putatively disreputable counterparts: memory and those modes of thought which stay close to the lived relations of the everyday.

He presents these framing arguments with verve. Looking back across the interval of time since the manuscript was drafted his position has now, perhaps, become more readily accepted in the common currency of intellectual debate. History is inescapably subject to the imperatives of narrativization, for good and ill. Yet Samuel signals a recognition of the complex conceptual and ethical dilemmas that necessarily accompany the commitment to producing public stories and that seek to uncover the connections between the past and the present.

As readers of Theatres of Memory will know, or will discover if they come to it for the first time, Samuel is less preoccupied with the procedures of mainstream or professional history. Rather he is engaged by the ‘unofficial knowledges’ that give form to the popular articulations of the past and the present. And this is precisely where the ‘memory’ of the title operates most forcefully.

Since his break from official communism in 1956, Raphael Samuel consistently strove to situate himself as a figure who listened to the voice of the oppressed (of ‘the people’), as the tireless agent for the democratization of historical practice, in every department, and as a thinker who harboured deep suspicions of the legitimacy of all external sources of authority. This commitment to the democratization of the historical imagination required that he attend both to the forms of knowledge that comprised the complex, varied and mobile topographies of history, high and low alike, and – as a materialist – to the social divisions of intellectual labour on which these variant histories were based.

Over the years he fashioned his interventions with great intelligence, and as he did so, he fashioned, too, his own self. The person and the agitator–historian merged into a single being. Like many of his political generation, he dedicated himself to telling the story of those who had been denied historical representation, a matter which he took to be no more, and no less, than a necessary democratic duty. He embarked, with a singular ingenuity, on the creation of alternative networks for the collective production of historical knowledge, most evident in the History Workshop movement of the late sixties and seventies: collective, partisan, and spurning the social conventions which habitually accompanied (and accompany) the colloquia of established, accredited historians. However, toward the end of his life, as can be seen in Theatres of Memory, he came to be more touched by the growing presentiment that the discipline of history was unusually prone to incubate within itself modalities of power and authority.

This notion of a disciplinary dimension to history, the imprimatur of its claims to a place within the hierarchy of social knowledges, is often stated in Theatres of Memory, but never fully investigated. Perhaps, for Samuel, this was so self-evident that he saw no reason for it to detain either him or his readers. I’m less persuaded, however: not of the fact that this is so, but of the political and intellectual consequences which follow. In any case, for the most part he was conspicuously less drawn to the business of critique than he was to the sensibilities of enthusiasm. This created the opportunity for him to signal the vernacular mapping of an alternative continent of history, which established historians, by virtue of their training in the mysteries of the profession, were liable to disown, or prove incapable of even seeing.

Samuel was always on the lookout for new ways of imagining the connections between the past and the present that worked to unsettle the absolutism of the written word. Theatres of Memory represents a sustained endeavour to seek out such new forms, in visual representations and in the practices of popular performance, where the past is dramatized in the present. At various moments the spirit of earlier traditions of agitprop presses in close, in which the conventions of play served to undermine the diktats of the reality principle. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill hover over these pages or – perhaps more accurately – it is the English, indigenous forms represented by Joan Littlewood that are most deeply evident. Either way, Samuel was keen to embrace the notion that the narrative exemplars of ‘magical realism’ might allow a more subversive and turbulent inhabiting of the past to struggle into existence (see pp. 429–30).

To think in this manner led him to address questions not only of history, conventionally understood, but also of past historical consciousness, as it’s been lived in all its multiple registers. In a winning, incisive formulation, he states that ‘our understanding of the historical past is constructed not so much in the light of documentary evidence, but rather of the symbolic space or imaginative categories into which representations are fitted’ (pp. 381–2). The mass of the population do not experience history, either as agents or as its recorders, in the way that historians do when they create a historical narrative: neither, as it happens, for the greater part of their lives, do historians. It thus becomes historians, of all stripes, in Samuel’s words, to search out the ‘dialectical relationship between the imaginary and the real’ (p. 246). ‘The sense of the past’, he announces at the start of the book, ‘at any given point in time, is quite as much a matter of history as what happened in it’. He completes the sentence, in a more quizzical tone, stating: ‘if the argument of Theatres of Memory is right, the two are indivisible’ (p. 15).

The subjunctive seems to be inviting the reader to reflect on this point, and to ask whether Theatres of Memory is indeed right. Predictably perhaps, the answer to the question cannot be clear-cut, for everything turns on the ambiguity contained within the notoriously tricky term ‘history’, and where the indivisibility is to fall. If it does so from the vantage of the historical agents themselves (the makers of history), this has to be right, as their ‘sense of the past’ does indeed constitute part of what the historical past is, and how it is worked through. If the vantage is that of the historian (the recorder of history), the issue is more problematic, for the historian, at some point, is required to discriminate between the historical consciousness of past historical actors, on the one hand, and the job of historical explanation, on the other. If they fuse indivisibly into the single phenomenon, the need for historical argument and explanation dissolves: all that is required is to reproduce the accumulated voices of past generations, in a great, amorphous cacophony.

Of course, historians need to understand the voices of the past, to listen to them and to inhabit them. But at the same time it is equally necessary to acknowledge that the voice of the historical actors and the voice of the historian remain distinct. Their respective temporal locations are in part what the historical imagination is about. But in Theatres of Memory, Samuel appears to be reluctant to press this differentiation too hard. Indeed there is a sense in which he seems content deliberately to let ambiguity run through his prose. There is a logic here. The drive of his argument is to subvert the epistemological privileging which is commonly accorded to history and to view it as subject to the same artifice as any other competing version of the past. He relished a future where historians would feel obliged to release themselves from the desire to collude with what he took to be their overbearingly narcissistic cosmos.

This is the import – the serious import – of the passing references to the figure of the historian, consumed equally by ridiculous pretension, cabbalistic ritual and by cutthroat competition, that come straight out of the traditions of the English campus novel. This is the import too of designating the practice of history as the equivalent of a vast screen-memory, dependent on make-believe and dressing-up. Indeed, there are moments when Samuel appears to be insisting that vernacular histories, in general, possess a deeper reach into the past than their professional counterparts.

It’s difficult to know how to respond to these propositions, for it’s difficult to decide how far Samuel himself was prepared to take them. Like all of us, he speaks in different tongues in different contexts, shaped in part by which antagonists he has in his sights at any given moment. His determination to champion the epistemological value of particular vernacular forms, as they bring the past into the present, is often beautifully achieved, and we can all think of occasions when, far removed from the institutions of academic or professional history, we have gained new knowledge of how the past operates in the present. This leaves us conscious – all too conscious – of our own intellectual poverty as historians.

This is one of the costs we, as historians, are obliged to bear. Of the many hundreds of narratives we encounter in our professional lives, some we rate and some we don’t. In some their authors are conscious of the conceptual problems involved in making a historical narrative, and in some they aren’t. Some take us somewhere new, while many don’t. But precious few of us – and revealingly not Raphael Samuel for one – have proved to be so despairing of the epistemological predicament we face that we give up, renouncing forever the possibility of creating new knowledge, however imperfect we know our efforts to be. Against the odds, we press on.

Raphael was an astute reader of philosophy, well versed in the sub-discipline of the philosophy of history. He had been formed in the postwar years by the emergent Marxist–annaliste paradigms in historiography that emphasized the moment of abstraction in the composition of historical narratives: that is, the moment of distanciation from the lived realities, in which order, form and argument rework the chaos of the past and transform it into history. In such a view, abstraction was conceived neither as the starting point, nor as the end point, but as a necessary staging post by which thought itself could become properly concrete. In many of his essays, it is possible to detect the moments of theorization through which his formulations had moved, and if these remain visible in the final version only as traces, all to the good.

However, Samuel was also peculiarly attuned to the violence of abstraction, which he believed to be not unconnected to the will for mastery on the part of the historian. In this lies an overriding dilemma of contemporary historical practice: the need, on the one hand, to maintain the moment of abstraction while, on the other, remaining true to the voices of the historical past. Invariably, when obliged to address this problem, such as in the early pages of Theatres of Memory, Samuel would invoke the dialectic in order to capture something of this necessary tension. In doing so, he recognized his early tutoring in Marxism. But such an approach also served him well.

Yet as the densely printed pages of Theatres of Memory accumulate, his commitments to dialectical thought lessen. We lose sight of the contradictory properties of professional history and his arguments become more polemical. He gets caught in the undertow of his own prose. The popular becomes more heavily valorized and the professional more caricatured. The one feeds off the other, such that the criterion of the historian’s proximity to the voice of the past comes, in the final reckoning, to be definitive.

For sure, it’s in the moment of abstraction that the potential dangers which derive from the will to mastery, encoded in a profoundly masculine manner, lie in wait at every step. But this is also where historical narratives become historical, and where historical contention, including political debate about the power of the past in contemporary life, becomes possible. If these contradictory foundations of historical inquiry slip from view, as I think they begin to in parts of Theatres of Memory, complexity evaporates and, in its place, rudimentary oppositions insinuate themselves.

These arguments about the workings of the historical imagination are likely to remain unresolved for a long while yet. The indisputable virtue of Theatres of Memory is not only the human passion and the intelligence with which Samuel presents his case, but also the very nature of the case he advances. His are tough, powerful, unsettling views, which need to be heard, and which require his readers to reflect with unusual diligence on their own practice.

The positions adumbrated in the book are, as one would expect, inseparable from the rhetorical drive which carries them; as the tempo of Samuel’s engagement with adversaries quickens, so his commitments assume sharper hue. The principal shift occurs in the innocuously entitled section ‘Sociology’, which prepares the ground for Part IV which immediately follows – ‘Flogging a Dead Horse’ – where he makes no attempt to disguise or temper the affront he experienced when faced with those he designated the ‘heritage-baiters’ (p. 259ff). This phrase I thought unfortunate at the time, and I still do.

When it was first published in 1994 his reading of the politics of heritage, which I see as a secondary matter, came to dominate discussion of the book. In France at the same time, as Pierre Nora and his colleagues were recording the amplification of social institutions devoted to the creation of new public memories – Les lieux de mémoire – so in England heritage was subject to a vast inflation, and the cause of mounting controversy.

A body of opinion had emerged, largely from the left, which linked – on the one hand – an ideological impetus in the preservation movement and (more broadly) in the practices of heritage to – on the other hand – the politics of Thatcherism and to the emergent neoliberal endeavour to recast public and private life in Britain. This dismissal of the heritage industry as the preserve of the conservative and parochial touched a raw nerve in Raphael Samuel and he moved to the offensive, propelled by an anger which he felt no compunction to conceal. Those in his sights were named the ‘heritage-baiters’ and were branded as metropolitan intellectuals, given to a deep-seated literary snobbery. They were aficionados of ‘Cultural Studies’, whose ‘vocation’ it was to ‘unmask’ all manner of ‘tutelary complexes’ (p. 260).

I remember being aggrieved by these words when I first read them, for cultural studies had done much to form me and the last thing any of us needed at the time was – another – recycled bout of demonization. This was particularly so in this instance for, in my view, Samuel was more naturally an ally rather than an enemy. Yet the invocation of cultural studies that appears here is little more than a sign, standing in for a disciplinary formation bent on imposing the authority of the abstracted, soulless intellectual.

Whenever Samuel felt he was confronted by hypostatized thought, whether (as he saw it) in the older idiom of history or in the newer idiom of cultural studies, he knew where his allegiances lay: with the human energies and emotions which made history move, with the actual women and men who pushed and pulled against the tide of history and who, in the most unpromising circumstances, gave free rein to independent thought, producing as they went along new knowledge.

It was in this light that he understood the new practices of heritage in the 1970s and 1980s, masterminded by ‘madcap enthusiasts’ and ‘magpie collectors’ who, wittingly or not, were drawing on long historical traditions of popular attachments to the past (p. 274). These practitioners of heritage were, he maintained, closer to the ground than their overly cerebral critics, improvising a ‘polyglot’ culture, and – in their identifications with vernacular cultures – professing ways of knowing the movements of history from which their professional counterparts, if they possessed the wherewithal, could learn much (p. 282).

When the critics of heritage first got going they were seeking to mount a conjunctural argument, supplying a necessary cultural dimension to the readings of Thatcherism. This seemed to me then, as it still does, an entirely legitimate way to proceed. Inevitably, perhaps, the initial formulations, in their bid to impress their point, bent the stick too far, underestimating the plurality of the new social initiatives that had arrived under the name of heritage.

Raphael was surely right to insist that the Brideshead Revisited invocation of the English past was, in the 1990s, only one amongst a much broader repertoire, and maybe not dominant. Indeed, he was probably correct in his supposition that ‘The new version of the national past, notwithstanding the efforts of the National Trust to promote a country-house version of Englishness, is inconceivably more democratic than earlier ones, offering more points of access to ordinary people, and a wider form of belonging’ (p. 160). To many of us at the time, bracing ourselves against the ill winds of an unwelcome historical turn, it didn’t seem like that at all. In retrospect, though, there is reason to think Samuel provided the more persuasive reading.

Yet returning to Theatres of Memory after many years I find it strange, given the vehemence of his offensive against the critics of heritage, how various sections of the book make common cause with his adversaries. ‘It is for anyone, like the present writer’, he says, ‘who is a socialist, an unfortunate fact that these resurrectionary enthusiasms, emanating very often from do-it-yourself historical projects, popular in their sympathies and very often radical in their ancestry or provenance…have been subject to Conservative appropriations, and have strengthened the Right rather than the Left in British politics’ (p. 162).

In discussing at some length two movies of the time, The Elephant Man and Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit, his outrage is uncompromising. He indicts the former for ‘the way it travestied history’, asking that we might ‘pause to wonder what other atrocities are passed off in the name of authenticity’ (pp. 381, 388). And concerning the film of Little Dorrit, he took exception to the manner in which the poor were ‘sanitized’ and the rich ‘glamorized’, complaining that to watch the film was to witness the ‘fetishization of period effects’, and concluding that it corresponded symbolically to the social mentalities from which arose the new, corporate London Docklands. Indeed he thought it appropriate to coin a specific term to catch the novelty of this correspondence: ‘Docklands Dickens’ (pp. 404, 409, 441).

In themselves these responses seem to me both right and uncontentious. But in the context of the overall arguments which Samuel makes his own in the book they do much to qualify the exuberance of his primary, unbending defence of the virtues of an intrinsically popular historical consciousness. Even though he initially sets out his stall by recognizing, formally, that heritage is allied to neither left nor right, the rhetorical power of his positions soon takes command, and in contrast to the lifeless imperatives of conventional history, it is difficult not to interpret Samuel as other than heritage’s zealous advocate.

Yet while lauding the ‘promiscuity’ of heritage for its capacities to fuse together discourses which conventionally remain divided, and for its playful disregard for the niceties of mainstream historical narrative, the historical ‘travesties’ perpetrated by The Elephant Man generate in Samuel, not admiration, as we might have been led to expect, but feelings of resentment. As the book nears its end it ceases to be clear on what grounds the artefacts of heritage are to be judged. At one point he defends heritage (in general) against the charge that it seeks to ‘commodify the past’ (p. 259). But in his invocation of ‘Docklands Dickens’, a symbolic formation that he concedes is sustained by its ‘fetishization of period effects’, isn’t this exactly what is occurring?

When Samuel comes first to introduce heritage, he does so in spirited, imaginative prose. ‘Heritage is a nomadic term’, he writes, ‘which travels easily, and puts down roots – or bivouacs – in seemingly quite unpromising terrain…It sets up residence in streets broad and narrow, royal palaces and railway sidings, canalside walks and town hall squares. It stages its spectacles in a promiscuous variety of venues, turning maltings into concert-halls, warehouses into studio flats. It attaches itself to an astonishing variety of material artefacts’ (p. 205). Although some confusion underwrites the observation – it is unclear whether it is the name or the phenomenon itself which boasts these powers – this is a striking reading, in which heritage becomes the subject of its own doings.

It is heritage itself, unaided by do-it-yourself agents, or indeed by any agents at all, which possesses the supernatural properties to infiltrate indiscriminately any corner of society, and to recast social relations in its own image. Heritage, here, ‘animates the inanimate’ (p. 113). This is writing which – consciously I’m sure – echoes Marx, or Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, when they sought to represent the inexhaustible capacities of capital, and to dwell on the phantom lives of commodified exchange.

Twenty years on, the phenomenon which Raphael Samuel first glimpsed is indubitably now all about us, animating the inanimate, staging its own spectacles, transforming the world (remorselessly) in its own image, and (equally remorselessly) reproducing in its interstices – cheek by jowl with the ubiquitous landscapes of retrochic – counter-worlds where economic immiseration deforms, day by day, human life.

Heritage, in Theatres of Memory, has many personas. It is in part the inspiration of the ‘madcap enthusiasts’ and ‘magpie collectors’, the very antithesis of capital accumulation. It is, in minor key as I read it, the synecdoche for the brute power of social relations which constrain at every move the possibilities for human agency. But it also signifies the capacious practices of memory.

Memory, too, is presented in multiple guises. It functions as a form of knowledge, vernacular in the sense that it inescapably belongs to us all, without arcane requirements which over time need to be learned and mastered. It jams together, in unpredictable conjunctions, past and present, producing the mental means which allow us to navigate the world. Memory simultaneously operates as the ally and the adversary of history, and Samuel determines to retrieve the procedures of earlier times, before history became history, and to draw them back into an alliance. Memory, as he puts it,

so far from being merely a passive receptacle or storage system, an image bank of the past, is rather an active, shaping force…it is dynamic – what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as important as what it remembers – and…it is dialectically related to historical thought, rather than being some negative other to it. (p. xxiii)

With an eye to the long duration, he suggests that the principal intellectual debt for contemporary practices of memory is owed to Romanticism, citing particularly Wordsworth and Scott, rather than its possible alternative contenders – which he chooses to identify as Renaissance science or Greek mnemonics. These postulates are of deep interest and significance. They are also testament to the degree to which the terrain of memory scholarship – or memory studies, as it now seems to have become – has been transformed in the years since the book was first published.

Theatres of Memory arrived just as the boom in academic encounters with memory was beginning to coalesce. The emphasis of the early titles fell on the impossibilities of memory, as a kind of ontological phenomenon, in some respects deriving from the theorizations of the period devoted to postmodernism. This approach held for a while, but then appeared to shift quite quickly to readings in which the traumatic components of memory came to the fore.

These pointed not only to genocides, the Holocaust pre-eminently, and to social catastrophes on the larger historical canvas but also to something darker within the modern self. The launching of various truth and reconciliation commissions triggered much important scholarly reflection on the vicissitudes of public and private memories, and psychoanalysis provided a conceptual means by which these pressing, difficult questions could fruitfully be developed.

Samuel’s determination to think of memory as a distinct form of knowledge, against which more codified branches of intellectual life could be judged, doesn’t really conform to thinking of this sort, but the unfashionable nature of such an approach could well prove to be its virtue. At one point he does confess to his desire to see a historiography ‘alert to memory’s shadows – those sleeping images which spring to life unbidden, and serve as ghostly sentinels of our thought’ (p. 27). However, this isn’t a line of thought he chooses to pursue. Memory here is at one with heritage, inseparable from lived experience and largely conceived as an antidote to a means of knowing from which all vitality has been hammered out.

Memory appears in another slightly different guise too, announced in the epigraph by Faulkner to the preface: ‘The past is not dead. It is not even past yet.’ In the context of Raphael’s book, this is intriguing as it opens up another entire dimension, which poses important intellectual problems for historians. This is dominated by the question of temporality: first, by the need to elaborate a methodological means to grasp the multiplicity and coexistence of different temporalities in the constitution of any single historical moment; and second, by asking what is particular to the idea, specifically, of historical time, and formulating how historical time is to be differentiated from other temporalities, or indeed to ponder whether it should be.

This whole problematic is signalled in the subtitle carried by the first volume of Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. Indeed one way of reading the volume is as a vast, textured, ethnographic mosaic of the past-in-the-present. Samuel’s observation on the plural temporalities of Camden Lock – which I have here as my epigraph – I favour over the oft-quoted line from Faulkner. For, while recognizing the necessary coexistence of past and present, the epigraph alludes to the continuing disjunctions of contending times, in which nothing is ever quite in its rightful place and in which the uncanny properties of memory accumulate.

Raphael chose not to confront conceptually these questions about historical time, at least in neither of the two volumes that we possess, and it doesn’t look as if the third and closing volume was designed in such a way as to deal with them. In fact in this first volume memory works as the cipher by which these questions concerning temporality, central to the operations of the historical imagination, come to be addressed. Since Theatres of Memory appeared this has become an increasingly common tactic amongst historians. I’m uncertain about the wisdom of this move. Memory does indeed represent one mechanism by which the past enters the present; but it is not clear if it’s the only one. Whether their conflation helps or hinders historical interpretation remains, as I see things, an open, unresolved matter.

Having said that, the most impressive historical discussions of collective memory in the past two decades or so have been those studies which have provided conjunctural accounts of the movements of memory-formations: their creation as distinct, observable phenomena with a discernible social charge, their reconfiguration through time, leading to their final dissolution or consequent social marginalization.

To come to memories with these issues in mind is to be aware of memory as a determinate, social phenomenon, in which its own particular rules and syntax are located, and with its own generic forms. It allows us to think of memories as possessing a history rather than as an abstract, amorphous entity existing entirely free from any social moorings. Moreover, these histories of memories seek, not so much to unravel the mysteries of ‘the past’ in the present, in its singular impossible entirety, as to uncover the role in the present of particular, determinate pasts.

Yet this isn’t quite how Raphael proceeds in Theatres of Memory. Against all appearances the book barely makes any attempt to offer a conjunctural analysis, in which the historical present gives shape to the object of study and in which attention is paid to how particular pasts work their way into, and organize, the present. Those pasts in this present. On the contrary his historical method, in this volume, is very different. Raphael opts for what he terms a ‘genealogical’ approach. This requires of him that he tracks back through the filaments of the past the origins of all the manifestations of the past-in-the-present which he alights upon. This is a method, it has to be said, which gives full vent to Raphael’s irrepressible historical curiosity. All the many crosscurrents of the past which give life to the present, in their infinite multiplicity, possess an equal claim on his, and on the reader’s, attention. Nothing need be excluded. Everything from the past, whatever its particular provenance, calls for inclusion. The entire past, in this rendition, is animated, and clamours for attention. This is a method which carries within itself an inflationary drive. There are always more byways and curios to track. The past-in-the-present loses its determinations and becomes increasingly arbitrary, and ever more formless.

These are matters of temperament as much as they are conceptual or methodological. In truth, as I turn the pages of Theatres of Memory, any reservations I have come and go. Sometimes they mount up, while sometimes they disappear altogether. Going back to it in these past weeks I have been conscious of the privilege which it – the book, the artefact – bestows. It allows a dialogue between the living and dead to be rekindled. Inevitably the dialogue is a touch one-sided. But Raphael’s voice from the past still bears an uncanny vitality.

Bill Schwarz, 2012

Preface: Memory Work

‘The past is not dead. It is not even past yet.’

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Memory, according to the ancient Greeks, was the precondition of human thought. Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was also the goddess of wisdom, the mother of the muses (conceived in the nights she passed with Zeus on Mount Helikon), and therefore in the last analysis the progenitor of all the arts and sciences, among them history (Clio was one of her nine children). By the same token mnemonics, the science of recollection allegedly discovered by the poet Simonides of Ceos, was the basis of the learning process. Aristotle gave it a no less privileged place in the disciplines of thought. He distinguished between conscious and unconscious memory, calling the first – the memory which comes unbidden to the surface – mneme; and the second, the deliberate act of recollection, anamnesis. What Frances Yates, its first historian, called The Art of Memory, was taken over intact by the Romans. For St Augustine at the end of the Empire, as earlier for Cicero, memory was the mother of all the pedagogies and the fons et origo of thought. In a well-known passage of the Confessions he likens it to a ‘vast hall’ or ‘palace’ in which ‘the whole treasure of our perception and experience is laid up’. The art of memory was revived by the medieval schoolmen (there is an authoritative statement of it by St Thomas Aquinas); and it had a last great flowering in the Renaissance, when it gave an occult underpinning (Frances Yates argues) to both art and science.

The ‘art of memory’ as it is practised today, whether in psychoanalysis, oral history, or ‘heritage’, arguably owes more to the Romantic movement in poetry and painting than it does to Greek mnemonics or Renaissance science. The ‘spots of time’ in Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written above Tintern Abbey’ or the commemorative passion of his essay on epitaphs are here more germane than Rosicrucian rhetoric or Hermetic iconography. Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders and his Waverley novels, Heart of Midlothian in particular, bringing folk speech and folk ways into the very heart of historical narrative, would be another crucial set of texts. Still more pertinent would be the notion of ‘resurrectionism’ developed, in the 1840s, by the social-romantic French historian, Jules Michelet, a history which aimed to give a voice to the voiceless and speak to the fallen dead. E.P. Thompson’s notion of history as a gigantic act of reparation, rescuing the defeated from the ‘enormous condescension’ of posterity, could be said to fall within this ambit. So also do those ‘hands-on’ museum exhibits, which use animatronics to simulate the sights and sounds of the past and turn material artefacts or relics into ‘living history’ displays.

The art of memory, as it was practised in the ancient world, was a pictorial art, focusing not on words but on images. It treated sight as primary. It put the visual first. Outward signs were needed if memories were to be retained and retrieved: ‘Something is not secure enough by hearing, but it is made firm by seeing.’ The primacy of the visual was even more apparent in the Middle Ages, when images were systematically mobilized to fix sacred narrative in the minds of the unlettered and when emblems, such as pilgrims’ badges or the heraldic devices adopted as a measure of genealogical descent, were a kind of universal currency. Mary Carruthers, in her very interesting book on medieval memory, argues that the illuminated manuscript, the stained-glass window and the church gargoyle were all there, in the first place, because of their mnemonic usefulness, and that it was by the exploitation of ‘synaesthesia’ – the appeal to all the senses – that religious propaganda was effective.

In Simonides’ mnemonics, place was coeval with imagery as a focus of memory-work. This had nothing to do with the anthropomorphizing of landscape, as in romantic ecology; nor yet with that sense of territorial belonging which underpins a modern politics of identity and the swelling literature on ‘roots’. It involved rather a species of mental mapping in which space rather than time provided the significant markers, and ideal qualities were given symbolic abodes. Less abstractly, memory places were represented by sarcophagi and shrines, the sites of the earliest form of historical record. Mnemonic landscape was quite fundamental to the Western Christendom of the Middle Ages, with its far-flung network of pilgrim routes and landmarks – ‘grottoes, springs, and mountains’ – conveniently sited for commemorative worship. Sacred geography, secularized in the service of the state, was to play an even more vital part in nation-building and the geopolitics of colonial expansion.

In the Renaissance ‘theatre of memory’, wonderfully described by Frances Yates in her book, sacred geometry took the place of sacred geography. Here the act of recollection was conceptualized as a kind of ascent to the stars. In the Hermetic–Cabbalistic tradition of occult science, the theatre was built up layer by layer, like a pyramid, to capture the astral currents pouring down from above and use them for life and health. It also uncovered the hidden harmony between the earthly and the transcendental spheres. The tower – square or rounded – was crucial for the Rosicrucians, as it is in Tarot cards, since the bearers of enlightenment were cast in the role of visionaries: the higher they could mount the further they could see. Likewise the lofty designs of Giulio Camillo – the most famous of the Renaissance memory theatres, and among the originals, it has been argued, for Shakespeare’s ‘Globe’ – offered (in Frances Yates’s words) ‘a vision of the world and of the nature of things seen from a height, from the stars themselves and even from the supercelestial founts of wisdom beyond them’ (p. 148).

The romantic ‘theatre of memory’ was altogether more introspective, not scaling the heights but following the inner light. It was uninterested in the cosmos, but focused instead on the family circle and the individual self. Its landscapes of the mind or memory places were, as often as not, like those of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, the childhood home. Romanticism built on time’s ruins. Its idea of memory was premised on a sense of loss. It divorced memory-work from any claim to science, assigning it instead to the realm of the intuitive and the instinctual. It pictured the mind not as a watchtower but as a labyrinth, a subterranean place full of contrived corridors and hidden passages. Instead of anamnesis, the recollection that resulted from memory-training and conscious acts of will, imaginative weight fell on what Proust called ‘involuntary memory’ – the sleeping traumas which spring to life in time of crisis.

It is perhaps a legacy of Romanticism that memory and history are so often placed in opposite camps. The first, according to Maurice Halbwachs, one of its more impressive twentieth-century delineators, is primitive and instinctual; the second self-conscious. The first comes naturally to the mind, the second is the product of analysis and reflection. Memory was subjective, a plaything of the emotions, indulging its caprices, wallowing in its own warmth; history, in principle at least, was objective, taking abstract reason as its guide and submitting its findings to empirical proof. Where memory can only work in terms of concrete images, history has the power of abstraction. Where memory is time-warped, history is linear and progressive. History began when memory faded. Jacques Le Goff, in History and Memory, barely modifies these antinomies. ‘Just as the past is not history but the object of history, so memory is not history, but one of its objects and an elementary level of its development.’ (p. 129)

It is the argument of Theatres of Memory, as it is of a great deal of contemporary ethnography, that memory, so far from being merely a passive receptacle or storage system, an image bank of the past, is rather an active, shaping force; that it is dynamic – what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as important as what it remembers – and that it is dialectically related to historical thought, rather than being some kind of negative other to it. What Aristotle called anamnesis, the conscious act of recollection, was an intellectual labour very much akin to that of the historian: a matter of quotation, imitation, borrowing and assimilation. After its own fashion it was a way of constructing knowledge.

It is also my argument that memory is historically conditioned, changing colour and shape according to the emergencies of the moment; that so far from being handed down in the timeless form of ‘tradition’ it is progressively altered from generation to generation. It bears the impress of experience, in however mediated a way. It is stamped with the ruling passions of its time. Like history, memory is inherently revisionist and never more chameleon than when it appears to stay the same.

On the other side of the divide, history involves a series of erasures, emendations and amalgamations quite similar to those which Freud sets out in his account of ‘screen memories’, where the unconscious mind, splitting, telescoping, displacing and projecting, transposes incidents from one time register to another and materializes thought in imagery. On the one hand, history splinters and divides what in the original may have presented itself as a whole, abstracting here a nugget of descriptive detail, there a memorable scene. On the other hand, history composites. It integrates what in the original may have been divergent, synthesizes different classes of information, and plays different orders of experience against one another. It brings the half-forgotten back to life, very much in the manner of dream-thoughts. And it creates a consecutive narrative out of fragments, imposing order on chaos, and producing images far clearer than any reality could be.

Theatres of Memory is meant to be an open text, one which can be read by different readers in different ways and used for different purposes. But without wanting to claim too much for these volumes, or to force a unity which they do not have, it seems worth pointing out that the essays return again and again to the idea of history as an organic form of knowledge, and one whose sources are promiscuous, drawing not only on real-life experience but also memory and myth, fantasy and desire; not only the chronological past of the documentary record but also the timeless one of ‘tradition’. This first volume – sub-titled ‘Past and Present in Contemporary Culture’ – is object-centred, and is about the ways in which history is being rewritten and reconceptualized as a result of changes in the environment, innovations in the technologies of retrieval, and democratizations in the production and dissemination of knowledge. The second volume – ‘Island Stories’ – is about the wildly different versions of the national past on offer at any given point in time, depending on whether the optic is that of town or country; centre or periphery; the state or civil society. It begins with a series of pieces on ‘The Spirit of Place’; continues with ‘The War of Ghosts’ (politics and memory in the 1980s); and concludes with a series of arguments on ‘History, the Nation and the Schools’. A final chapter addresses the question of post-colonial history. The third volume, ‘Memory Work’, is about the commemorative arts, and the ways these give expression to the idea of progress, the sense of loss and the glamour of backwardness. It concludes with some chapters on the interplay of memory and myth in oral testimony, drawing, self-critically, on the writer’s own use of it; and argues that subjectivity, like history itself, is socially constructed, a creature or child of its time.

I have relied heavily on oral history for leads on the resurrectionary movements of the last thirty years and thank the following: Patrick Fridenson of Movement Social and Gene Lebovics for guidance on son et lumière; Michael Wildt, Dagmar Engel and Lyndal Roper for ‘barefoot’ historians in Germany; Alessandro Triulzi and Carlo Poni for introducing me to the Museum of Peasant Life in Emilia – one of my starting points for self-critical reflection on the practice of ‘history from below’; Daniel Walkowitz and Eric Foner on public history in the United States; Sallie Purkis, editor of Teaching History, on ‘learning by doing’ in primary schools; Elizabeth Wilson for help on retrochic; Simon Traves, editor at Alan Sutton, for a state of the art account of the local publication of photographs; Ruth Richardson on the Rose Theatre campaign, necrophilia, and Victoriana; Dan Cruikshank, Andrew Saint, Jane Priestman, Jules Lubbock, Ken Powell, Mark Girouard on matters architectural; Su Clifford of ‘Common Ground’ for material on environmentalist campaigns; George Nicholson of the old GLC and Mr Pollard of Westminster City Council for the ‘light up the Thames’ movement of the 1970s; Pippa Hyde of the Council for the Protection of Rural England for anti-ivy campaigning in the 1930s; Michael Stratten, programme director at Ironbridge Institute, for guidance round the museum; John Naylor and Brian Southam for the history of Batsford; Peter Addyman, Dominic Tweedie and Linda James for acting as guides at Jorvik and the York Archaeological Society projects; Peter Windett of Crabtree and Evelyn for details of that firm’s global outreach; Su Tahran of ‘American Retro’ for explaining her shop to me; John Seale of ‘Past Times’ for the history of that firm’s growth; Jon Gorman Jr of G and B Arts and Chris Edmonds for material on steam traction rallies; Malcolm Gliksten of Relic Designs for the history of the pub mirror craze, and Richard Gomme of Hugo Russell for showing me round his warehouse – one of the great sources of both pub and flea-market kitsch. On the history of bricks, Bob Lloyd-Jones of the Brick Development Association, B.J. Taylor, managing director of Blockleys, and Sir Andrew Derbyshire, architect of the Hillingdon centre. Georgina Boyes, author of The Imagined Village, Vic Gannon and Alun Howkins, singers and historians, for the second folk song revival; Mr Amos and Les, of LASSCO, for the architectural salvage trade; Denis Severs and Jim Howett for some of its by-ways; Joe Laurie for the Sevington School project; Richard Boston for the cuttings file of his ‘real ale’ campaign in the 1970s; Eileen Carnaffin of Gateshead Public Library for the Derwent Valley Trail; Sarah Quaile of Portsmouth Record Office for materials on the town’s naval memorials; John James of ‘Jason’s Trip’ for the photographs on pages 141 and 142 of this book, and for the hospitality of himself and his family on their boat; Robert Thorne for materials on the London property market; Bill Holbrook of Kentish Ironworks for the early days of stone cleaning; George Matthews, librarian of the Communist Party archive, for the ‘March of History’ brochure reproduced here; Gordon House, Richard Hamilton and Clive Barker for guidance on Pop Art. Jennie Pozzi gave me a fine autobiographical account of the early days of picture research; Audrey Linkman introduced me to the Manchester photographic archive; and Roger Taylor of the National Photographic Museum was a mine of information on photographic retrieval programmes. Peter Gathercole, of Darwin College, Cambridge, has been an excellent guide on matters archaeological; James Mosley, the learned librarian at St Bride’s Institute, was a vade mecum on printed ephemera; David Webb at the Bishopsgate Institute used his librarian’s magic to discover all kinds of out-of-the-way sources, as did David Horsfield of Ruskin College, Oxford; Bernard Nurse, librarian at the Society of Antiquaries, dug out some eighteenth-century conservationists; Malcolm Taylor of Cecil Sharp House produced a complete file of Ethnic and issues of Heritage, the cyclostyled journal of a 1950s folk club. Stella Beddoe of Brighton Art Gallery sent me the excellent material on Henry Willett and his collection of chimney-piece ornaments; Andy Durr introduced me to the world of historical ceramics. Olivier Stockman of Sands Films, in spite of our disagreement about Little Dorrit, was kind enough to help in getting permission to reproduce the still included here. Andrew Byrne of Spitalfields Trust, hunting through debris, came up with the picture which is on the front cover of this book; Jinty Nelson helped me with the Bayeux tapestry.

My students at Ruskin, who originally initiated me into the folklore of British industry, have latterly been my guides to such contemporary mysteries as New Ageism; in particular the megalithic standing stones of Avebury have been made a vivid presence in my thought by Brian Edwards, who has the good fortune to live there. Gareth Stedman Jones, with his Enlightenment suspicion of anything which smacks of the irrational, and his fastidious disdain for what he thinks of as Arts-and-Crafts sentimentality, has been an unspoken point of address in many of the arguments of this book; while at the opposite end of the epistemological spectrum, Anna Davin, a tireless champion of the extra-curricular sources of knowledge, has encouraged me to think of the learning process – what happens to children in the class-room, the street and the home – as a kind of ultimate test of worth. Another invisible point of address in these volumes is postmodernism and the attempt to escape from the abstracted empiricism of social-science history. Here my mentors and fellow-travellers have been Carolyn Steedman, Sally Alexander and Alex Potts, experimenting with new forms of historical narrative, while at the same time trying to keep faith with older ones.

Alison Light was one of my original spurs for undertaking this work, and she has been my wife and long-suffering companion throughout the writing of it, as well as a severe and exemplary critic. John Barrell gave a most helpful critical reading to the pieces on photography; Richard Gott, of the Guardian, Paul Barker of New Society, and Gordon Marsden of History Today were my editors for the pieces on film.

My publishers, Verso, must take the blame, or (if it is to the reader’s taste) the credit, for the fact that a book which began life as a collection of reprinted pieces has now swollen into three volumes which make quite ambitious claims. The bulk of the chapters here, and in the subsequent volumes, were written for Verso, and specifically for my editor there, Lucy Morton. Dealing with a difficult author who alternated between crab-like progress and paralysis, she showed a remarkable tolerance for changes of direction, and by a judicious combination of enthusiasm and criticism contrived both to enlarge and to contain the project. Without her patience and tact, few of the writings in these volumes would have seen the light of day. Dusty Miller, also of Verso, strongly supported the idea of making graphics integral to the book. In these days when conglomerates swallow up everything in sight and independent publishing houses are the exception rather than the rule, it is a pleasure to have a house in Soho where authors can drop in, make themselves a cup of tea, and be assured of someone who really wants to talk about their work.

Spitalfields, London El

November 1994

Acknowledgements for Illustrations

The Death of Harold, from the Bayeux tapestry, eleventh century (page 33). Musee de la Tapisserie. Bayeux/Bridgeman Art Library, London. With special authorization of the city of Bayeux/Giraudon Bridgeman Art Library.

The Practical Householder, November 1956 (page 53).

The Smiths record sleeve (page 108), reproduced by kind permission of Warner Music UK Ltd.

Regents Canal photographs (pages 141–2), courtesy of John James Private Collection.

Flogging a Dead Horse cover (page 258), photograph by Paul Reas, courtesy of Cornerhouse Publications.

Family photographs (page 326), courtesy of Audrey Linkman and Documentary Photography Archive, Manchester.

Photograph of boy navvies (page 327), courtesy of Greater Manchester County Record Office.

Engraving of child labourers (page 327), courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

‘Worktown People’ by Humphrey Spender (page 368), courtesy of Humphrey Spender.

Walker Evans photograph (page 370), courtesy of Walker Evans,

Walker Evans photograph (page 372), courtesy of Walker Evans.

‘The Lambeth Walk’ sheet music cover (page 391), courtesy of The Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection.

Great Expectations still (page 403), courtesy of BFI Stills.

Little Dorrit still (page 408), courtesy of Sands Films and BFI Stills.

Nicholas Nickleby still (page 415). photograph by Clive Davies.

Introduction

Unofficial Knowledge

1 Popular Memory

History, in the hands of the professional historian, is apt to present itself as an esoteric form of knowledge. It fetishizes archive-based research, as it has done ever since the Rankean revolution – or counter-revolution – in scholarship.¹ When matters of interpretation are in dispute, disagreement may turn on such apparently arcane questions as the wording of a coronation oath,² the dating of a royal portrait³ or the correlation of harvest yields with fluctuations in peasant nuptuality.⁴ Argument is embedded in dense thickets of footnotage, and lay readers who attempt to unravel it find themselves enmeshed in a cabbala of acronyms, abbreviations and signs.

The historical discipline encourages inbreeding, introspection, sectarianism. Academic papers are addressed to a relatively narrow circle of fellow-practitioners. In thesis work, the problematic is likely to come from within. Often it is suggested by ‘gaps’ which the young researcher is advised to fill; or else by an established view which he or she is encouraged to challenge. Fashion may direct the gaze of researchers; a new methodology may excite them; or they may stumble on an untapped source. But whatever the particular forms, they will be working within an existing form of inquiry and respecting its limits (however much they chafe). History in any of these cases is its own measure of significance and touchstone of worth.

The Balkanization of the subject and the multiplication of sub-disciplines, a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years, has produced a crop of new specialisms, each with its own society, its schisms and secessions. Intended to take scholarly inquiry into hitherto untravelled terrain, and to create a space for subjects which have been ‘hidden from history’ in the past – as, say, women’s history, ‘folk’ medicine or occult science – it can also have the unintended effect of staking out proprietary claims to knowledge, and locking it up in academic publication and seminar circuits.

The enclosed character of the discipline is nowhere more apparent than in the pages of the learned journals, where young Turks, idolizing and demonizing by turn, topple elders from their pedestals, and Oedipal conflicts are fought out. The mere fact of publication turns the novice at a stroke into an authority, and articles are referred to, within a year of publication, as ‘path-breaking’, ‘seminal’ or ‘classic’. Academic rivals engage in gladiatorial combat, now circling one another warily, now moving in for the kill. In the seminars such conflicts serve the function of blood sports and are followed with bated breath. Surnames quite unknown outside a coven of initiates become shorthand expressions for arguments, and are bandied back and forth as if they were household words.

These autarchic tendencies are reflected in a quite tribal sense of who is, and who is not a historian. Biographers do not count, either because their subjects are literary rather than historical, or because they opt for narrative rather than analysis. Antiquarians, to judge by the frequency with which the ‘ism’ is used in a pejorative sense, are a different species-being, though they were the pioneers of record-based research in the New Learning of late Elizabethan England and the ‘discovery’ of Anglo-Saxon history.⁵ Local historians are disqualified by their parochial outlook from being more than second-class citizens. Oral history is