The Past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

William Faulkner. 

I watched a conversation two nights ago between Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vasquéz at the pretty damned fine Wheeler Centre for Writing, Books and Ideas. The conversation, like their respective novels, revolved around the meeting point between history and memory and the role of the novelist in unravelling what we believe to be true and historical, and what we believe to be subjective and remembered. Vasquéz and Cercas both talked at length (ruing their agreement on ideas and approaches, as they would have preferred to disagree and make the 'show' more fun) about the notion that 'remembering is a moral duty' for a writer and how a novel that treads the path between fiction and non fiction can provide an alternative to the implicit objectivity of official history. Truth and cultural history, they said, can be found in fiction as much as falsity in service of power can be found in non fiction.

Although they explored these ideas by way of Cervantes, Bellow, Stendhal, Roth and Aristotle, for these two writers, their main literary obsession is the landscape of their own country's memory. And, like many countries with turbulent recent histories, the role of remembering in their homelands is intricately intertwined with the practise of making art. In Cercas' Spain and Vasquéz' Colombia, the shadows of civil war, of dictatorships, massacres and violence are heavy shadows that loom over the creative act. It made me reflect that, strangely, in a country such as Australia, where our violence has been carried out, often without military uniforms, without formality, and in the sanctioned space of language, governance, bureacracy, and out of the eyes and minds of the majority of the populace, our creative lives are more often occupied with forgetting than remembrance.

It was Vasquéz, though, that reminded me of the Faulkner quote above from Requiem for a Nun. That "the past is never dead. It's not even past." And these words echo as much for the concerns of the historical novel as for a chump like me interested in the spaces and abysses between humans as expressed in cinema. The ways we continue to live the past - and the echoes of personal and cultural history - in every moment of the present are the greatest complications for our movement into the future. The more we continually revive and resuscitate what has passed - in both shadow and light - the more we see how the past distorts our perception of the lived present. In Australia, a country that fights to live only in the present or in a falsified and nostalgic myth of what we wish we might have been in the past, this act of resuscitation becomes a necessity. There will always be a quiet violence when we try to forget or allow forgetting to happen and it was a small, good thing to be reminded of it by these wandering writers.