People who are not embarrassed to admit having read and enjoyed Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain probably aren’t squeamish either about swimming in public pools. Regrettably, I can’t lay claim to either set. Nonetheless, if you think about it long enough (which could be my problem), the literary example of Hans Castorp can be swapped out with relative ease for other instances illustrating the shared predicament of our modern condition.

In the novel, the hapless Hans requires a materially evident support in the person of the seductive, mysterious Claudia Chaucat, whose character we come to recognize as representing an enclosed, ‘fated’ mind, one that has already been written. By way of her and what is thereby seen or ‘revealed,’ Hans is able to reason and to infer, perhaps even to predict with a restored confidence. Evidently, this is a way of knowing that lends certainty and cohesion to much of modern thought. Who knew. Have I mentioned this takes place in a sanatorium?

If Mann’s novel raises an eyebrow on what is otherwise accorded a high cultural value, the difference must consist in the means of attaining certainty in knowledge, since the questionable part is in coming to learn that Hans is compromised in meaningful creative ability. The certainty of mind-sense attained in this manner is then seen as consolatory and comes to signify decay, degeneracy, and weakness of mind. More, it’s held to be suited to a type of consciousness that’s merely what is available to all as property in common (Bergson). One hasn’t the ability to defend it as ‘intellectual property.’

Which brings me to my question. Is there a qualitative difference, a necessary distinction between the recollections of an individual and consciousness that is public property, accessible to all? Where does the written past belonging to the commons leave off and writing as invention begin? While Hindu astrology seems to thrive on the blurring of these lines (indeed, horoscopes in general), the problem itself and ways to overcome it seems to be a preoccupation in much of the Western literary canon. In his prefatory remarks on poetics, Tzvetan Todorov gives the example of Henry James, whose later prose he says displays a preference for abstract nouns where the subjects of his sentences should be. The substitution of any and all things for some particular thing is recognized in Todorov as a writing technique that (after Mallarme) “mimics state religion,” specifically the practice of naming and shaming no one individual but a universalizing indictment under whose umbrella the individual is simultaneously condemned in a collective attenuation and yet absolved personally. The outcome amounts to a kind of collective self-censorship in which none have the power to speak in a way that will change their situatedness. Mann presents this modern condition as one whose cause is owing to an erasure or streamlining of the past so that alternative outcomes are obscured or made less apparent to the mind in comparison to what is made plain to the eyes.

This way of coming into knowing, as by following the movement of a starlet across the silver screen, has been directly compared to ideology as commodity, a piece of work complete unto itself like a thing which can be read in terms of the past, a mind that has been written. It is what’s set in opposition to actual poesis and poetic activity.

Yet one of the practical functions of mass cinema is in facilitating a kind of forgetting by way of distraction. There needs to be some forgetting of the past in order for change to occur, for there to be a future. This might be already reflected in the similarity between the roots of the Bengali words meaning ‘to forget’ and ‘future’.

Where forgetting is not a sign of mental weakness but rather understood as serving a productive function is touched on in William Radice within the context of phonological decay – in which speech is ‘eroded’ of phonemic distinctions while the (Sanskritic) script remains essentially the same. Radice writes: “‘Decay’ is of course a rather loaded word; one could say the evolution of Bengali is a purification and improvement rather than a decline…One might wish that the writing system had been similarly simplified: but as with English spelling, to reform it would be to sever the language from its history” (2003, 12).

Then, another question: what part of the past will you forget and who is to make that determination for you? One possible answer stems from a reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The narrator observes:

“…the general laws of memory…are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us…Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged” (“Place-names, the place”).

Here it seems that forgetting doesn’t require a deliberate act but happens on its own, because the memory was not considered important. If the memory is put further from the ground of being, then there is greater freedom to function. But this kind of falling off of certain memories or passive forgetting should give a constituted past without added or intervening effort to forget, not one in which an individual or third party actively constitutes the past. Which is to say, if one isn’t in need of an external aid or support to help forget what isn’t important, then what kind of forgetting is it that mass cinema and pop culture in general promote if not a forgetting of individual creativity and invention? A similar conclusion is reached by Susan Stanford Friedman in “Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Feminist Theory and Poetic Practice.”

Citing Leo Bersani, Friedman warns against narratives that are “inherently authoritarian, allied to the state through its connection to mimesis and subject to perpetual disruptions from unruly desires” (1998, 233). Nonetheless, Friedman comes to advocate a place for narrative in women’s writing, particularly in the context of ethnic and marginalized women writers who use the narrative form to preserve stories of how one escapes, of how one survives. At the same time, she echoes her reservations by citing what Virginia Woolf in “Modern Fiction” termed the “‘tyranny of plot…in the accepted manner,’” “that is, narrative conventions that replicate the ideological scripts of the social order” (234).

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