Memory is a complex, problematic thing. It mediates our access to the past - whether that past is our own, our nation's or something else. It also helps constitute our identity, as we sort through what we remember and re-arrange it to make sense of our experiences and who we are.What does it mean, then, when an historian's memory fails?
In a great article in today's Herald, the memory of the late, great Manning Clark is subjected to examination. According to his biographer, Mark McKenna, Clark's oft-repeated claim that he arrived in Hitler's Germany on the morning of Kristallnacht, 1938, is in fact false. His future wife Dymphna was there, but he reached Germany two weeks after that event.
Why does this apparent lapse of memory (or this evidence of deliberate deceit) matter now? For some, it matters because it raises the question of Clark's personal credibilty. Clark was a defender of the Whitlam Government, a suspected communist, and an antagonist of Geoffrey Blainey's in round one of Australia's 'History Wars'. If he is shown to have deliberately mislead us on this, then why should we trust him - or even listen to him - on anything else?
In my view, the issue matters more for our idea of what history is, and for how we envision the past. Clark claimed that his experience of Kristallnacht confronted him with the fruits of human evil. His sense of the struggle between good and evil - a struggle usually fought out within individual human souls - later animated his History of Australia and informed his vision of Australia's past. His deep sense of moral drama underpinned his presentation of 'history as parable,' in which the moral meaning is perhaps more important that historical 'facts'. Clark's idea of history matters because, in a variety of ways, it has shaped how Australia's history has been and still is told. His memory matters, because it has shaped ours.
(Read the full SMH article on 'Manning Clark's fraud' here.)
3 comments:
Thanks for this thoughtful reflection, Meredith - having quite recently finished A Quest for Grace, where Clark writes about Kristalnacht, I was taken aback by this revelation. It raises interesting questions for me about our ability/tendency as human beings to create stories out of our lives - I do think for Clark the 'experience' of Kristalnacht (which in fact he seems to have heard about from his fiancee) fitted beautifully into the story of his life and work which he had constructed. I doubt he was consciously lying - I think we all have this tendency to craft our past within a particular narrative, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes dangerously. This has relevance for your point about his accounts of Australian history - powerful narratives in which the moral meaning of the narrative is perhaps more important than the accuracy of details. I will be interested to see what responses to this appear in the media - perhaps you could write something?
Clark is fascinating isn't he - I am really looking forward to McKenna's biography. It makes me wonder if there might just be a big gap between what historians think they are doing when they write history, and what their readers assume they are doing. I guess Clark did most of his writing in the period before historians came clean on that kind of stuff and embraced more self conscious ways of writing history.
Like you, I doubt Clark was malicious or deliberately misleading in writing about his presence in Germany on the morning of Kristallnacht. I was interested to read that McKenna has moved away from his initial interpretaion of the discrepancy as conscious and misleading - i generally prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. And McKenna's idea that Clark's claim can be understood best as an example of 'self-mythologising' - rather than an outright lie - is more interesting too.
And the whole thing about 'moral truth' (often contrasted with 'factural truth') raises a heap of issues about how we in the present are connected to the past (including by means of our reflections on it, the stories we make about it, the meanings we draw from it)...
By the way, I haven't been to the Mitchell recently - but i haven't forgotten your request! Will hopefully get there this week :-)
a big gap between what historians think they are doing when they write history, and what their readers assume they are doing.
They're all like Indiana Jones, right?
Post a Comment