The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions

最近看城市論壇裡一個肥仔的發言, 新聞透視中一個支持陳一諤的長毛大學生及有關陳一諤的新聞, 不禁驚嘆"忘記"的威力.

另外在一個朋友的飯局裡, 有個人發表高見說, 如果冇六四,  中國可能沒有今日的經濟發展. 聽得我火都黎埋.   原來真係有人會咁諗,  恐怖.

二十年前我在英國, 屠城後幾個月後有個中國留學生請我到他家看錄影帶: "天安門真相",  大意是講六四軍隊冇殺過人, 是學生打軍隊., 仲叫我們不要相信外國傳媒.

好厲害的""忘記" 機器.  我真希望擁有這種力量,  能令女人忘記我的不忠,  令債主忘記借我的錢.

下面引述我最喜愛的伙作家 Milan Kundera 的一本書 "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"  如何描述忘記的威力,  四十年前在捷克發生的事, 今天在中國正在重演.

Kundera portrays Gustav Husak, Czechoslovakia's seventh president, as"the president of forgetting", the man who led his people away from memory. In 1969, Husak dismissed 145 historians from universities and research institutes. One of these historians, Milan Hubl, dropped by to visit Kundera one day in 1971. Hubl told Havel that "the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory":

Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

This organized, regimented forgetting is one of communism's most haunting legacies. Though Kundera's subject is totalitarianism, he is wary of assertions and prognostications-- "of the words pessimism and optimism". He insists on the right to remain a storyteller as opposed to a prophet. As a novelist, Kundera invents stories, confronts one story with another, and thereby arrives at questions.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.

excerpts from Totalitarianism Today

For instance, the theme of forgetting is masterfully, effortlessly ubiquitous. On the official level, erasure achieves comic effects. The comrade named Clementis who solicitously placed his own cap upon Klement Gottwald's head on the cold day of party annunciation in 1948 was hanged four years later, and airbrushed out of all propaganda photographs, so that "All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head." The president the Russians installed after Dubcek, Gustav Husak "is known as the president of forgetting.." Official forgetting is echoed by the personal struggle of the subjects of so revisable a government to recover lost letters, to remember details that give life emotional continuity. The expatriate native of Prague called Tamina, in the central and perhaps best of these disparate though linked chapters, recites to herself all the pet names by which her dead husband ever had called her, and, less and less able to remember his face, resorts to a desperate exercise: ". . .she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears, and coloring the eyes blue. But all her efforts only went to show that her husband's image had disappeared for good."

As another holdout, Mirek, puts it, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions." He needs to recover some lost letters for quite another reason than Tamina, who wishes to destroy the letters that he, when a party enthusiast, wrote his mistress of those naÔve days, Zdena. She has remained loyal to their youthful orthodoxy, even to supporting the Russian invasion of 1968. But he quite misses the point of her fidelity to the party--that it is fidelity to him and their old love: "What seemed to be political fanaticism was only an excuse, a parable, a manifesto of fidelity, a coded plaint of unrequited love." Throughout these stories of life under Communism, motives are frequently quite mistaken, and emotions of extreme inappropriateness arise. Every life is lobotomized by the severances of tyranny.

by John Updike "Review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"