A Turn Toward The Past

Jon Thompson

Department of English
North Carolina State University
jthompson@unity.ncsu.edu

 

 

Forché, Carolyn. The Angel of History. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

 
The title of Carolyn Forché’s newest volume of poetry comes from a famous passage of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which Benjamin considers history’s power to dishevel human order and any human understanding of the past. In section IX, part of which is excerpted as an epigraph to Forché’s volume, Benjamin considers the possibility that this loss also brings about the loss of a present and a future:

 

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

 

Tellingly, this passage from Benjamin’s essay emphasizes the destructive force of history. History here is perceived to be “one single catastrophe,” and “Paradise,” or the dream of utopia, far from being capable of restoring order, only adds to the storm. In subsequent sections of the essay, however, Benjamin insists upon the importance of a “hermeneutic of restoration” as a way of redeeming the past. For him the human imperative is to perform a hermeneutic of restoration as both a critical and social practice. For Benjamin, history can live meaningfully only as a redemptive vision and practice. Otherwise it becomes reified as a dead set of facts. The “weak Messianiac power” of utopianism is its power not only to make sense of the catastrophe of history, but also to redeem history by recasting its losses as part of a teleological journey which ultimately culminates in the establishment of a just social order. In this way, past, present, and future regain their lost connectedness and become part of one seamless, meaningful continuum.

 

It is useful to recall Benjamin’s argument here in order to see how Forché makes use of aspects of it while distancing herself from, or rejecting, others. As in section IX of Benjamin’s essay, in The Angel of History Forché sees history as a catastrophe, particularly twentieth-century history. For her, the decisive moments of our history are its large-scale calamities–World War II, fascism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, Chernobyl. All of these events have a ghost-like presence in Forché’s poetry. Past and present are affiliated through the repeated experience of political trauma. For Forché, as for Fredric Jameson, history is what hurts. Pain is history’s most enduring common denominator. Haunted by the weight of the dead, the volume speaks with a finely elegiac voice that gives it a singular intensity. The characteristic feeling in these poems is one of desolation. This feeling is evident even in relation to events not usually regarded as tragic, such as the fall of the Berlin wall. In these poems, the awareness goes to what Milan Kundera calls “the unbearable lightness of being,” the sense that freedom is, in its own way, as illusory as nonfreedom. So for Forché, the fall of the wall ushers in an age of emptiness, filled only with the wreckage of the real brought about by both totalitarian and “democratic” governments. East and West have finally achieved a state of parity, but it is parity defined by moral nullity:

 

     The homeless squatters passed through the 
     holes into empty communist gardens, and the 
     people from the east passed from their side 
     into a world unbearable to them.

 

Forché’s volume attempts to convey her sense of the catastrophic nature of history formally by relying on poetic fragments. These are then linked together in thematically-related groups around the large-scale calamaties of the twentieth century. The continuity that exists between these poems therefore is ironic–the continuity of discontinuity.

 

The attempt of The Angel of History, as Forché acknowledges in the notes at the end, is to write a polyphonic poetry that breaks with her earlier mode of the first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poetry, a poetry that relies on the staging of multiple voices rather than just one. Indeed, in many of the poems Forché has rendered unknowable at least some of the distinguishing features of her earlier poetry. Here the identity of the speaker and the addressee are frequently ambiguous, as are the events described, the time period, even the physical locations of many of the poems. There is an eerie indeterminacy to all of this. Place, time, and identity fall away or become indistinct. Instead of using the conventions of lyric poetry, Forché orchestrates a variety of voices from the past and present which speak out of a largely decontextualized landscapes of pain. As the reader is led through these twentieth-century badlands, what dominates is the disembodied voice of the speaker-poet, and the odd, frequently grotesque, details here and there that come at the reader with surrealist force. Thus, the poetry is not really polyphonic, for the voice of the poet remains central, and subordinates the other voices to its own. While these voices never contest or displace the central voice of the speaker, the blending of voices and the precise use of horrific detail evoke the nightmarish depths to twentieth-century history. This can be seen in the first two sections of poem IX, in the section entitled “The Recording Angel”:

 

It isn't necessary to explain
The dead girl was thought to be with child
Until it was discovered that her belly had already been cut open
And a man's head placed where the child would have been
The tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb
In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth
And the corpse is never mentioned
In the hours before his empty body was found
It was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of
desiring,
Yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived

Hundreds of small clay heads discovered while planting coffee
A telescope through which it was possible to watch a fly crawling the 
neighbor's roof tiles
The last-minute journey to the border for no reason, the secret house
where sports  
 trophies were kept
That weren't sport's trophies
Someone is trying to kill me, he said. He was always saying this
Oranges turning to glass on the trees, a field strewn with them
In his knapsack a bar of soap, a towel the size of a dinner napkin
A map of the world he has not opened that will one day correspond to the 
world he has  
 seen

 

The tendency of these poems is to generalize the experience of suffering. The various political systems responsible for specific forms of human pain are represented as vague and virtually indistinguishable principles of evil, wreaking death and destruction in the world at large. But there are other poems, arguably the most powerful ones in this collection, where Forché blends surrealistic detail with a more sharply etched evocation of readily recognizable historical situations. The impact can be tremendous, as in this excerpt from “The Garden Shukkei-en” which explores the ethics of using the atom bomb on Hiroshima:

 

     By way of a vanished bridge we cross this river
     as a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain. 

     She has always been afraid to come here. 

     It is the river she most
     remembers, the living
     and the dead both crying for help. 

     A world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation. 

     The matsu trees brush her hair as she passes
     beneath them, as the shining strands of barbed wire. 

     Where this lake is, there was a lake,
     where these black pine grow, there grew black pine. 

     Where there is no teahouse I see a wooden teahouse
     and the corpses of those who slept in it. 

     On the opposite bank of the Ota, a weeping willow
     etches its memory of their faces into the water. 

     Where light touches the face, the character for heart is written. 

     She strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw:
     I was weak and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth 

     Do you think for a moment that we were human beings to them? 

     She comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes.
     Not an angel, but a woman where she once had been, 

     who walks through the garden Shukkei-en
     calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands. 

     Do Americans think of us?

 

In rejecting the interiorities of her earlier, more Romantic poetry, Forché has opened herself more directly to the world of transindividual historical experience. The Angel of History is her most worldly poetic achievement to date. In it, she has freed herself from the solipsistic preoccupations of much contemporary American poetry, which by fetishizing subjectivity, removes the articulation of that subjectivity from the world that surrounds it and shapes it. And like the Latin American and European poets who have apparently influenced her here, she succeeds in linking the destiny of the individual to that of the nation, and the world at large. In giving witness to the atrocities of the twentieth-century, and America’s complicity in many of them, Forché succeeds in questioning the legitimacy of power, and in particular, American power in this century. The tension of these poems is always the tension between the horror of atrocity and the controlled lyrical grace used to evoke it, as in “The Garden Shukkei-en.” This tension establishes an ironic dissonance between life and its representation in art. Although Forché’s poetry accentuates the chasm that separates the two, it also insists that art is only created in the world and, indeed, finally, is sculpted by it.

 

In adopting this subject matter and these poetic strategies, Forché takes a major risk. For in bringing up the question of the legitimacy of power via a poetry of witnessing, she inevitably raises questions about the legitimacy of her own witnessing. What responsibilities does the poet have to human catastrophe? Or alternately, to what extent may the poet distance herself from the horror of history and still remain responsible? And at what point does the witnessing of witnessed–and unwitnessed–human catastrophe pass from poetic and political necessity to the exploitation of the horror for dramatic effect?

 

It is one measure of Forché’s power and skill as a poet that she allows no easy answers to these questions. While The Angel of History repeatedly returns to them–sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not–Forché seems deliberately to run the risk of incurring the charge of exploiting twentieth-century history as the price for witnessing it. There is considerable courage in this–the courage of a poet willing to assume the burden of engaging a history that includes, but transcends, the self. In invoking the example of Walter Benjamin, whose lyric reflections on history exist as a daunting measure for any poet or philosopher, Forché runs a related risk. And although Forché’s work largely manages to fulfill this difficult charge, it still leaves open the question of the sufficiency of conceiving poetry as a means of recording history. Does poetry so conceived offer us too much, or not enough? The poetic sequences that make up The Angel of History respond to this question time and again with a dramatic urgency born of ambivalence. To be sure, Forché’s predicament is not hers alone. It is the predicament of every engaged postmodern poet. Her achievement is to have hammered it into a rare poetry of spareness and elegance and raw power.