Volume 35, Number 19 · December 8, 1988
Thanks for the Memory
By Francis Haskell
Les lieux de mémoire
edited by Pierre Nora
Gallimard, 2,613 pp., fr960
Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830–1848
by Michael Marrinan
Yale University Press, 472 pp., $45.00
The inscription on a fine statuette in one of the Egyptian rooms in the Metropolitan Museum tells us that it had been set up by Ahmose in honor of his father, Harnofer the Prophet of Amun in Karnak, 'that his name may live.' That hope has not been quite forlorn, for any visitor to the Metropolitan may now consult the helpful label (which could, of course, only be compiled because Egyptian script was deciphered early in the last century), and he will then surely find himself wondering for an instant or two about the priest Harnofer, who lived in Karnak more than two thousand years ago. That the struggle to stave off oblivion has again and again provided a powerful impulse for the creation of monuments of all kinds is well known, but cultural historians have paid surprisingly little serious attention to the many other steps taken to preserve—and also to destroy—what men and women have wanted to retain of their creations, their customs, their beliefs, even their appearances. Vague references are made to 'folk memories' (with their often sinister overtones), but the actual mechanisms that have come into being to record such memories have not been much discussed except in special cases. Nor has the problem often been studied imaginatively from the other end, so to speak. Just what of the past has been kept alive in the consciousness of later generations—and at what cost?
Review, 3783 words
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