Neural Pluralism and Cultural Memory in Eliot's The Waste Land and Akhmatova's Requiem

Abstract

Cultural memory, like personal memory, appears normatively to recall what sustains and protects established identities, consolidating self-models and intentionality relations useful for future flourishing as valorized within a given society. But literary art, by calling attention to details resistant to overly homogenizing interpretative schemas, exerts an effect upon cultural memory analogous to that of ongoing sensory input upon predictive perception. Still, even when critical or subversive, literary art commonly seeks to delineate, and so simulate and “remember,” sustainable worlds of meaning and purpose. Radical historical trauma, however, tears apart such worlds, challenging both the enactive and predictive value of any such “remembering.” Although high literature always seeks to enable reconnections as well as undo facile homogenizations, experiences of historical trauma may induce in cultures no less than in individuals an inability to imagine a future credible or worthy enough to desire. As a consequence, a deadly pall is cast over emotional life, threatening psychic and moral breakdown, or something akin to communal catatonia. When addressing such circumstances, literary art confronts the task of making, in however a fragmentary, uncertain way, its “undoing” of delusively fictive, self-serving aspects of personal and cultural memory nonetheless suggestive of possibilities for rebuilding and reconnection. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem (1935–1961), two modernist poems composed of allusion-laden lyrical-elegiac fragments, at once project implied narratives and probe the reparability of cultural memory in the wake of historical moral traumas precipitated by World War One and the Stalinist terror, respectively.