Postcard #22

Normandy Ghosts

Those who come to Normandy tend to say, at some point, that it is “a place haunted by history”. A cliché, I know. George Orwell called the cliché a “dying metaphor” that has lost its “evocative power”. Hannah Arendt said clichés are “conventional, standardized codes” that serve, in the main, as a defense against reality. Orwell and Arendt are right, of course. Yet Terrence Malick, referring to the voice-over narration of one of his film characters, stated that “when people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make people laughable; it’s something tender about them.” (See my A time of clichés)

Without taking issue with Orwell or Arendt, I confess to a longstanding soft spot for Malick’s view. It is our vulnerability as humans that sometimes causes us to reach for a cliché, a shorthand,  worn-out line yet a comforting truth of sorts, that we believe to be shared by others. We repeat clichés for the ‘camaraderie of understanding’ they seem to promise.

Normandy is haunted in the usual sense, by old European places – churches, abbeys, castle ruins, the Bayeux tapestry, but also by the more recent history of the D-Day landings. That the French retained the original allied code names given to the landing beaches, that they erected monuments, war memorials, and museums, maintained military cemeteries, and named streets and cafés after generals – all this weighs upon visitors to Normandy, generally producing the cliché with which I began. It is a place haunted by history. I come here expecting ghosts. But this time, something occurred to make the haunting different from previous visits.

We arrived as night fell. We’d had car trouble on the road. The house is in the countryside in the area known as Contentin in Basse-Normandie. The nearest town is Picauville, to the west of Sainte-Mère-Église. The next morning, unable to drive anywhere until the mechanic examined the car, I decided to walk into Picauville. The sun shone warmly for a late November day and I set out in good spirits, happy as always to be in France.

I had not gone a half mile down the lane when I came upon this set of old farm buildings.

I was thinking about the flat-shaped pumpkin and wondering about Halloween in France when I noticed a small American flag flapping in the breeze on the roadside of the old grange. It was attached to a commemorative plaque, something you find in all kinds of surprising locations around Normandy towns.

Why did this plaque cause me to shudder? I suppose I hadn’t expected one so immediately upon setting out for my walk. My mind had not fully arrived in France. It was on English time. But the more important reason was the rural setting of this particular commemoration. I couldn’t help but wonder if people noticed it anymore.

I walked over to it. I read the narrative, so persistent in these parts, that they “gave their lives for freedom.” Here is a cliché harder to accept without qualification. Yes, it delivers a comforting truth of sorts, given the facts of the Normandy landings. But it is also close to Hannah Arendt’s definition: a code that elides numerous ‘realities’. How each soldier died, the bloody facts of it, what he thought, believed, feared, desired. What the enemy soldier thought, believed, feared, and desired. What about the farm’s inhabitants? The grief of families and whole towns. Did ‘dying for freedom’ enter any minds during the minutes of these deaths?

How simple and innocent our questions become when death is at the heart of them. How humbled we are, the humans. I could almost feel myself falling into childhood there, alone on that spot. So, I read what mattered most, the names of the soldiers who had died in this place. I looked up and down the narrow road, void of cars and houses. I stood there a long time. I realized I was waiting.

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A disorder of thoughts followed, yet each the same in one aspect: they reminded me of Jacques Derrida’s borrowing from Shakespeare:

“The time is out of joint.” (Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 1993)

As I waited motionless on the Normandy road, my time was out of joint. It was as if my pasts and the futures of my pasts (in other words, my later pasts) were dancing in and out of the present.

First, the tiny fluttering flag. I’ve never been a flag waver. My patriotism, such as it is, finds James Baldwin’s approach more amenable than flags and anthems: a deep love of my country, and I assure you, mine is deep, “insists on the right to criticize her...” (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955). I left America at the age of eighteen, spending five years in France, then the next decades back and forth between England and the U.S. As of now, I have lived more years of my life outside America than in it. I can recall – like it was yesterday – the first time I saw how terribly naïve we Americans tend to be. A fellow university student asked me in French how it felt to come from a feared or hated nation. He did not ask it with animosity, or any personal criticism directed at me. No, he was careful to make a distinction between the U.S. government and its people. But he signaled something I did not know way back then. Not everybody thought the U.S. was a grand and wonderful and respectful-of-other-nations kind of place. Our culture, our music, film, and literature - these were and still are loved and admired. Our politics, less so. During the following years, I gradually learned why. More specifically, I learned about U.S. foreign policy since the period of the Second World War.

So, here was this tiny U.S. flag down a lane in Normandy. With its plaque a reminder of a time before, the year 1944. A year when I would likely not have been asked the question my fellow student would put to me later, in the early 1970s. I’ve had this experience before, having crossed northern France many times since those student days, only to meet old people with war memories who wanted to thank me because I was American, and Americans had liberated their towns. Each of these occasions came as a poignant surprise that brought tears, together with a longing for us to be seen as the “good guys” and sadness that it should ever be otherwise and that the world has not remained peaceful.

“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly.” (Derrida, Spectres of Marx)

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So, there was this moment about the flag. Then, I thought about my father. He landed in Normandy, not in the first terrifying wave of June 6, 1944, but soon after. He was part of the reinforcements and supplies that followed. I know very little of his experiences in Normandy, only that he was here for a while, then stationed in Paris after its liberation.

My heart ached for him there on that road. I wanted to bring him back to life, find him waiting – always in the same spot - in the little local airport in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I got off planes to visit my parents in their later years. If I could hear his voice again and watch him move through the world with astonishing joy and competence even as he lost his sight. If I could speak French with him over a glass of Burgundy like we used to do. I wondered if his ghost might be present right now, at this very time and place: me standing before a memorial to twenty-one dead soldiers. Had he passed this way in 1944? Could I be, at this moment, standing in faint imprints made by my father’s footsteps? Had he left a residue on these immediate surroundings, as he had left a residue in me?

It was as if all my fathers returned at once: the high school basketball star I could only imagine from old photos, the soldier-father before my birth, the father-father, strong and loving, of my childhood. Then, the fading father of my adulthood. The dead father of today. His ages, my ages. It was as if they lost linearity and came back now in a mass to unsettle me, give me hope, withdraw, and leave me lonely. The road where I stood, halfway to Picauville, was teeming with fathers and ages.

“The time is out of joint… Old age or youth – one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age.” (Derrida)

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Okay, I am being fanciful with Derrida’s text about ghosts, but my humble defense is I am certainly not the first to do so. Spectres of Marx (1993), originally composed for a conference on the future of Marxism, takes as its initial point of reference the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” In 1993, the apparent defeat of most historical forms of Marxism seemed complete. But Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ proposed the historical promise of Marxism (and our unknown futures) as persistent hauntings of the late-capitalist present. Derrida’s ghosts were a “seething presence acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.” (A. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2008). Derrida’s ghosts offered an “address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future.” (C. Davis, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms, 2005)

And the text lends itself to meanderings such as mine:

“…this being-with spectres would also be a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations… It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it… no ethics… seems possible… that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer, or for those who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.” (Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 1993)

In hauntology then, we are asked to resist our usual attempts to sever our present from its spectral pasts and futures, to see the traces of each one in the others and bring them into hopeful interplay. The current state of our world, with extinction threatened for so many beings including, ultimately, ourselves and our planet, makes Derrida’s vision all the more pressing.

A ghost is “what makes the present waver…Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist… all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity…” (Fredric Jameson, Marx’s Purloined Letter, 1999)

So now, we might interrogate those old clichés – notions of place haunted by history, dying for freedom, and no doubt many more – by giving greater presence to beings that died and beings yet to come. Derrida introduces his piece with this tantalizing line: “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says, I would like to learn to live finally.”

He continues:

“If it – learning to live – remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone…The time of the ‘learning to live’… would amount to this: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship… of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them… the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” (Derrida, 1993)

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The time is out of joint; O curs'd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

Nay come, let’s go together.

(Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5)