Does keeping memories and images of the past alive block us from taking an unobstructed look at the present? I would think that the answer to this is clearly no, but it is the question raised in a post by Philip Hoare at Comment is Free. Taking off from Steven Spielberg's War Horse and the BBC's Birdsong (neither of which I've seen, save for the first 10 minutes of the latter), Hoare asks if the First World War has 'become a kind of eternal martial fantasy'. He thinks it extraordinary that nearly 100 years later that war 'has yet to end, at least as far as our collective imagination is concerned', and writes towards the end of his post:
Perhaps that is the necessary distance we create to separate ourselves from the wars we are still conducting.
In the south-west, as elsewhere, a new generation is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Our fictional wars allow us to ignore such realities. Are we still suffering a collective shell shock, using fiction to obscure, as much as reveal, the past? Is it guilt that prevents us dealing with our sense of national memory? Does such a thing even exist?
It is certainly true that reviving the past in literature or film can be done badly, just as it can be done well. It is also true that myth-making about the past can help to hide some of the features of the past rather than illuminating them. But, otherwise, Hoare's questions and assertions seem to me to be extravagant.
In general, it is all but impossible, I would have thought, simply to blank out the past; we are obliged to remember and try to digest it in situating ourselves in the present and for the future. And in particular, when there is an event of the scale and traumatic consequence of the First World War, it is surely important for us to return to it and review what we think and feel about it. Finally, the memory of past wars in itself has no bearing on how present ones are thought about: it could be used to encourage people to ignore these and their consequences; but it can also be used for the opposite purpose - or quite independently, leaving perceptions of the present unaffected one way or another. It's not as if WWI has never been de-romanticized. It is also disputable how far the realities of present warfare are being ignored.
