The Past

The past is confusing. Our memories are unreliable reporters of even recent occurrences. The reconstructions we summon may be embroidered with self serving decoration, regrets, or harsh judgement according to our mood, but seldom do they reveal the dispassionate truth. Dates too are especially squishy, decades sliding back and forth like days, not months or years. We are careless archaeologists unearthing memory's artifacts without regard for their provenance. Hardest of all to capture are emotions, wisps of thought that might reveal what we or others may have felt.

What spurred these observations is a novel--What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan, and by a recent journey through my email archives. As to the latter, a search for a message of some years past that I thought might be lost forever led me down the rabbit hole. I might have been saved had I avoided opening several other messages along the way but curiosity prevailed and before too long, like Alice, I was conjuring recollections trying to place electronic shards in some recognizable time and space. While some emails were plain enough, receipts, itineraries, transmittals that I had saved for who knows what reason, others were cryptic, and carried the scent of something I could not quite place.

The more occult exchanges seemed burdened with a weight, as if specters attended them but I could not capture precisely what. I could not summon the circumstances that would have resulted in what had been said. I was forced to move on hoping that some Proustian epiphany would resolve the accretions of time and reveal the answer. But such was not the case, and I was left uneasy by the mystery. There are times when we cannot know what we know. In my troubled state of mind I gave up and turned to the aforementioned novel selected by my book club for next month's gathering. Let me say at the outset that I admire this book greatly and McEwan has long been a favorite. I do not wish to do it an injustice by attempting to synopsize it here but a brief outline is necessary to explain where it led me.

If you have ever read a work of historical fiction you will understand the author's clever invention. Typically we are transported to events of the past populated by authentic figures and events that are slyly woven into new cloth with the introduction of invented characters and happenings. The conceit places the fiction in a believable context allowing us to entertain an alternative outcome. Some writers who attempt this form are scholarly, taking pains where possible to reveal what is fact and what threads are of a new fabric. Others are less interested in preserving the history, it is there solely as a prop.

McEwan has invented a very different historical fiction--one that concerns a future vaguely 100 + years from the present rather than the past. Gradually we learn that this future is dystopian, a product of war, climate catastrophe and other calamities that have vastly reduced the human population leaving them isolated on island remains of what were once the great continents, with limited ability to travel except at great cost and risk. The narrator is a scholar who teaches an undergraduate course on the literature of the 1990's to the 2030's. His thesis and primary area of study concern an eminent poet of that era whose life he has rigorously studied.

A pivotal event in the poet's life and work occurs at a birthday party for his wife set in 2014, attended by friends and colleagues. The poet has composed an epic work as a gift to his wife. It is his crowning achievement but we learn that the poem was never published and has seemingly disappeared leading to great speculation, even conspiracy theories. In this future, technology has managed to preserve almost every electronic exchange of the past and supplemented by collections at a handful of libraries and museums this body of information constitutes the entire knowledge and history of the human race.

Although it is in violation of his scholarly protocols, the narrator attempts to construct a plausible narrative from fragments of emails, journals, social media posts and remembered accounts of the evening. Justifying the narrator's unorthodox assertion of feelings, thoughts and memories McEwan plays a neat trick, a sleight of hand that introduces underlying ambiguities and unrevealed emotions which paint a decidedly different and in some cases far less flattering picture of the events that transpired and the true feelings of those in attendance.

By setting his historical fiction in the future McEwan also has free reign to comment on the consequences of our present day. The future become prelude to the present, revealing the forgeries we commit when we exhume the past. McEwan prophesies a bleak future should we fail to turn away from our destructive nature even as he casts doubt on the reliability of our accounts of the past. In Proust's words: “........nothing has survived of these long-discarded, far away memories, everything has been disintegrated; forms - and that of this little shell-like pastry, so richly sensual under its strict and pious folds - that were abolished or lie dormant have lost the expansive force that allows them to unite with our consciousness.” The past you see is not quite what it seems to be.