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A contribution to: On Forgetting

Edited by Alma Prelec and Emily Di Dodo

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 17

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  Beginning with Kundera’s declaration ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, this article asks why, amongst a rash of anniversaries, Lamartine’s groundbreaking 1820 Méditations poétiques went virtually unremembered, and probes the implications of memory and forgetting for our futures. Finding a first reason in Lamartine’s association with failure, it links that failure with Lamartine’s great, if transient, political success, which gave a template for poètes maudits from Baudelaire onwards — something reflected by Flaubert’s derisory picture of Lamartine’s political and poetic agency in L’Education sentimentale. Spotlighting something Flaubert neglects, it finds oblivion in Lamartine’s genotype, in the earthly transience of the Christian, of little account against celestial transcendence, situating this, like Lamartine himself and subsequently Pierre Nora, in the lieu de mémoire — here, Lamartine’s house at Milly. Noting that Lamartine is seemingly the more forgotten for having more lieux de mémoire, memorial properties, than more remembered contemporaries, it attributes this to their being in private (albeit welcoming) rather than public hands, and to Lamartine’s own introspection and inwardness. Tensions between public and private, poetry and politics, are shown to be present since the beginning of Lamartine’s career, and have recurrently marked his work’s reception ever since. Taking as a litmus test his 1818 drama Saül, it juxtaposes Des Cognets’s 1918 centenary edition with Barrès’s 1914 polemic L’Abdication du poète to give contrasting readings of Lamartine’s drama and politico-poetic world-view: for Barrès, too ready to compromise doctrine for politics; for the more scholarly Des Cognets, revealing poetry-politics conflicts inherent in Lamartine’s make-up and his work. If oblivion is perhaps inevitable fate for those too prominent or controversial in their own time, Lamartine’s latent assimilation as one of the great uncommemorated, and unread, may give us pause, if memory is indeed our chief defence against oppression.

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