A primer for forgetting Getting past the past

Lewis Hyde, 1945-

Book - 2019

"We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we can store, the quality of what's preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear--be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness--but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth? Lewis Hyde's A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing t...he potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a creative and political force. It also turns inward, using the author's own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil. Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced."--Page [2] of cover.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Lewis Hyde, 1945- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
372 pages illustrations ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [343]-357) and index.
ISBN
9780374237219
  • What this is
  • Notebook I: myth
  • Notebook II: self
  • Notebook III: nation
  • Notebook IV: creator.
Review by Choice Review

Also author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (CH, Jun'11, 48-5414) and other works, Hyde (for many years a distinguished professor of creative writing) offers a lyrical, thoughtful exploration of memory and forgetting, of how and why nations and persons try to live beyond both their individual and collective pasts. The author admits his own mother's struggle with dementia shaped the book. Rather than make a sustained, linear argument, Hyde chose to make the book a series of short stories, reflections, and meditations on art and history. That format allows him to make certain arguments very clear. Hyde structures the volume in four "notebooks" devoted to myth, self, nation, and creation. Each of these notebooks opens with aphorisms that give key points in a more concentrated form. The notebook on myth focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on themes drawn from Greek and European myths (others are mentioned in passing). The remaining notebooks look at, among other things, the way the self relates to the past and the role of memory and forgetting in art. Hyde provides photographs and works of art to further his reflections. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Aaron Wesley Klink, Duke University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

Poet-essayist Hyde (Common as Air, 2010) celebrates forgetting as a force for creative potency, personal growth, and social justice, and in doing so reminds us of his talent for intellectual synthesis and his restless, contrarian spirit. The ancients, suggests Hyde, understood that memory and forgetting are mutually dependent; according to Plato, we spend our lives trying to recover that which we once knew, before birth. Nietzsche famously viewed amnesia as an unburdening from the weight of history. We, too, might recognize that beneficent forgetting, while not a substitute for forgiveness or an excuse to ignore past injustice, permits us to heal emotional wounds, repair damaged interpersonal relationships, and make meaningful art. We see this dynamic at work in post-conflict reconciliation processes and in friendships between crime victims and perpetrators. It is an essential ingredient in the patriotism that binds disparate populations. But Hyde's thesis less a structured argument than an aggregation of loosely related anecdotes and observations, collected scrapbook-style transcends simple polemic. Rather, in the way of Zen Buddhism, it's an invitation to forget our very selves so that we might finally see the universe clearly. And alongside all of the bright-burning erudition, there is a very moving personal angle: his mother's progressive dementia and the prospect of his own.--Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this delicate, allusive thought experiment, literary critic Hyde (The Gift) probes the idea of forgetting as a positive act. He ponders three major themes: ways to release a personal trauma, as in the story of an African-American man who publicly accepted a plea for forgiveness from one of his brother's Klansmen killers; ways of moving past collective traumas, such as through the amnesty for atrocities granted through post-apartheid South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the act of self-forgetting, "a technique to help us shed... the mind's buffering blubber of routine." Hyde draws on widely varied references, including Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, literary luminaries that include Nabokov and Borges, and, most fruitfully, classical literature-he compares the avenging Furies of ancient Greek tragedy to the "restless, intrusive Unforgettable" of America's history of racial violence. Venturing outside Western culture, he also finds a luminous truth in the Buddhist notion that real awakening comes when one forgets everything but the present moment. An elegant exercise in philosophy and form, Hyde's meditation on forgetting as an act of clarity offers stimulating contemplation of the odd paradox that "memory and oblivion... cannot function unless they work together." (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Transformation, creativity, and philosophical liberation all may involve relinquishing memory.While many people try brain games, exercise, and food supplements in hopes of preventing memory loss, MacArthur fellow Hyde (Creative Writing/Kenyon Coll.; Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, 2010, etc.) inquires into the power of forgetting. Declaring himself "weary of argument, tired of striving for mastery, of marshaling the evidence, of drilling down to bedrock to anchor every claim, of inventing transitions to mask the jumpiness of my mind," he instead gives free rein to that inspired jumpiness by juxtaposing anecdotes, stories, meditations, and aphorisms about the meaning of forgetfulness. Illustrated with artwork from an imaginary Museum of Forgetting, the author's collage of entries comes from a rich trove of philosophy, mythology, ancient and modern literature, religion, psychology, art, and history as well as his own life, including witnessing his mother's dementia. Forgetting, he discovers, does not necessarily imply loss. For Emerson, "self-forgetting" was essential for personal self-renewal and cultural reinvention. Philologist Ernest Renan believed that collective amnesia contributed to "the essence of a nation." Robert E. Lee advised his contemporaries "to obliterate the marks of civil strife and commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered" in order to move into the future. Amnestiesjudicial forgettingappear in nations recovering from the trauma of war or human rights abuses. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission requires a detailed recollection of crimes as part of an amnesty petition that, if granted, serves the state as "a cold forgetting, expedient and instrumental." Public monuments, Hyde asserts, "often become invisible," so that people "can turn away from the past." Considering the connection of memory to creativity, the author finds that many artists, composers, and writers seek "the delight or anxiety of fresh perception" rather than "the comfort or dullness of the habitual." "Remembering betrays Nature," wrote the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. "Because yesterday's Nature is not Nature. / What's past is nothing and remembering is not seeing." Amnesia, nostalgia, forgiveness, retribution, and the mining of memory in psychoanalysisHyde considers all these and more.An eclectic and insightful miscellany of playful, spirited, provocative reflections. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.