Scan barcode
A review by moonpix
Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama
5.0
The poet John Haines once wrote that “the eternal task of the artist and the poet, the historian and the scholar … is to find the means to reconcile what are two separate and yet inseparable histories, Nature and Culture. To the extent that we can do this, the ‘world’ makes sense to us and can be lived in.” This very long book by Simon Schama is held together by the same central motivation to illuminate how nature and culture are fused together. To this end, Schama argues that these connections are “built from a rich deposit of myths, memories, and obsessions” that endure through time, powerfully shaping our institutions and cultures to this very day. Many of the specific histories Schama chooses to focus on in the book are examples of the influence of cultural ideas of nature, most obviously and consequentially in the role of the landscape in shaping national identity.
An important aspect of his argument is how in the long history of humankind there have been many conflicting myths about the same landscapes, myths that often manifest simultaneously in time. One of the many examples given on the different ways landscapes shape national identity is the cultural memory of mountains, where “the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation of imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peak represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength”. As is often the case with the illogic of ideology, drawing out these contradictions, while important work, does little to dispel their power.
Perhaps this is part of why he argues, most effectively in the masterful section on German postwar painter Anselm Kiefer, that “democracy … averts its face from these myths at its peril. To exercise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range”. The book attempts this difficult task of taking myth seriously while still maintaining a “critical distance” from it, understanding it as a “historical phenomenon” rather than as intrinsic truth.
For Schama, this critical distance means being open about personal influences and biases rather than pretending that they do not exist. While this is first and foremost a general history, Schama often inserts personal stories and impressions of landscapes he has visited or has a special connection to. His analysis is clearly informed by his own Jewish Lithuanian family history, his experiences growing up in Britain, and his relationship to Israel. But even without these biographical insights, it is clear that his understanding of how conflicting myths about national identity can exist simultaneously in the same location is deeply informed by the relationship between Israel and Palestine. In fact, Israeli landscape traditions set the scene for the entire book: they are described in the introduction, where Schama recounts the practice of tree planting in Israel.
He writes of how he participated in this tradition from a distance as a child in Britain, and of its wider religious and cultural roots. But no space is given to the history of the Palestinian people, and the dark side of the practice of tree planting is never fully addressed. In the ethnographer Irus Braverman’s article interviewing those who have participated in and been affected by the tradition, she describes how “nature not only provides Zionist narratives with a temporal bridge between antiquity and modernity but also remakes the landscape in a particular way that excludes the other”. The first aspect of this, the bridge between past and present, is laid out in Schama’s descriptions, where tree planting symbolizes how “the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true national immortality”. But the second aspect of this, the exclusionary remaking of the landscape, is elided. What is not discussed in the book and what I learned on my own is that, as Braverman writes, these pine forests “have provided a green cover to hide the presence of demolished Palestinian villages, thereby preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands after the wars of 1948 and 1967 … eras[ing] any other landscape but itself”. Schama is well aware of the legitimizing power of history and narrative, as well as landscape, and while I largely admire how his descriptive ‘show-don’t-tell’ style demands an active reader willing to make their own connections, to omit this particular context here is a telling misstep.
Edward Said drew on Landscape and Memory in his essay Invention, Memory, and Place, where he wrote that “the unending cultural struggle over territory … necessarily involves overlapping memories, narratives, and physical structures”. This is something Schama is intimately aware of, and it is a theme he returns to again and again, in many different locations and periods. This only makes it more glaring that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, this same struggle is only ever alluded to, never directly addressed. It is hard to criticize a 600+ page book for leaving something out, but this is where I found its largely Western focus most troubling. For while Schama has the lofty goal of treating myth seriously without ever fully giving into its power, one could argue that he has already fallen prey to at least some very potent myths.
In the same essay, Said also wrote that “the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”. If nature and culture are as interconnected as Schama argues they are (and I am inclined to agree in that regard), then these complexities also require the acceptance of the accompanying pluralities of myth and tradition. And if every landscape is pluricultural, then we all must find ways to identify with the landscape without attempting to take ownership over its narratives and its history, as well as its literal geographies.
“It seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.“
An important aspect of his argument is how in the long history of humankind there have been many conflicting myths about the same landscapes, myths that often manifest simultaneously in time. One of the many examples given on the different ways landscapes shape national identity is the cultural memory of mountains, where “the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation of imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peak represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength”. As is often the case with the illogic of ideology, drawing out these contradictions, while important work, does little to dispel their power.
Perhaps this is part of why he argues, most effectively in the masterful section on German postwar painter Anselm Kiefer, that “democracy … averts its face from these myths at its peril. To exercise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range”. The book attempts this difficult task of taking myth seriously while still maintaining a “critical distance” from it, understanding it as a “historical phenomenon” rather than as intrinsic truth.
For Schama, this critical distance means being open about personal influences and biases rather than pretending that they do not exist. While this is first and foremost a general history, Schama often inserts personal stories and impressions of landscapes he has visited or has a special connection to. His analysis is clearly informed by his own Jewish Lithuanian family history, his experiences growing up in Britain, and his relationship to Israel. But even without these biographical insights, it is clear that his understanding of how conflicting myths about national identity can exist simultaneously in the same location is deeply informed by the relationship between Israel and Palestine. In fact, Israeli landscape traditions set the scene for the entire book: they are described in the introduction, where Schama recounts the practice of tree planting in Israel.
He writes of how he participated in this tradition from a distance as a child in Britain, and of its wider religious and cultural roots. But no space is given to the history of the Palestinian people, and the dark side of the practice of tree planting is never fully addressed. In the ethnographer Irus Braverman’s article interviewing those who have participated in and been affected by the tradition, she describes how “nature not only provides Zionist narratives with a temporal bridge between antiquity and modernity but also remakes the landscape in a particular way that excludes the other”. The first aspect of this, the bridge between past and present, is laid out in Schama’s descriptions, where tree planting symbolizes how “the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true national immortality”. But the second aspect of this, the exclusionary remaking of the landscape, is elided. What is not discussed in the book and what I learned on my own is that, as Braverman writes, these pine forests “have provided a green cover to hide the presence of demolished Palestinian villages, thereby preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands after the wars of 1948 and 1967 … eras[ing] any other landscape but itself”. Schama is well aware of the legitimizing power of history and narrative, as well as landscape, and while I largely admire how his descriptive ‘show-don’t-tell’ style demands an active reader willing to make their own connections, to omit this particular context here is a telling misstep.
Edward Said drew on Landscape and Memory in his essay Invention, Memory, and Place, where he wrote that “the unending cultural struggle over territory … necessarily involves overlapping memories, narratives, and physical structures”. This is something Schama is intimately aware of, and it is a theme he returns to again and again, in many different locations and periods. This only makes it more glaring that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, this same struggle is only ever alluded to, never directly addressed. It is hard to criticize a 600+ page book for leaving something out, but this is where I found its largely Western focus most troubling. For while Schama has the lofty goal of treating myth seriously without ever fully giving into its power, one could argue that he has already fallen prey to at least some very potent myths.
In the same essay, Said also wrote that “the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”. If nature and culture are as interconnected as Schama argues they are (and I am inclined to agree in that regard), then these complexities also require the acceptance of the accompanying pluralities of myth and tradition. And if every landscape is pluricultural, then we all must find ways to identify with the landscape without attempting to take ownership over its narratives and its history, as well as its literal geographies.
“It seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.“