The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
to current military strategies of "low intensity warfare" as much as to the
role of memory in the cultural constitution of the authority of the modern
State. After all, who benefits from studies of the poor, especially from their
resistance? The objects of study or the CIA? And surely there is more than
an uncomfortable grain of truth in the assertion that in studying other
o
Jo
people's resistance, heroic or Brechtian, one is substituting for one's own
sense of inadequacy? For all the talk of giving voice to the forgotten of
history, to the oppressed, and the marginal, it is of course painfully obvious
that the screen onto which these voices are projected is already fixed—and
that it is this screen, not the voices, where the greatest resistance lies, which
is why something more is required than the injunction to study up instead
of down, or to study the political economy of the world system rather than
local meanings. For what such simplistic injunctions overlook is precisely
our profound entanglement and indeed self-constituting implication in that
screen of interpretation which in itself is the great arena where world history,
in its violence as in its easy harmonies, in its sexualities and National-State
formations, folds into rules of customarv sense.
Yet I do not think, just as Hegel in his parable of the Master and the
Slave did not think, that such scrutiny can be undertaken alone. To assume
it could, would be to fly in the face of what I take to be axiomatic as to the
dependence of being on other. What is more, there are too many ghosts to
be settled, too much violent history to be reworked, which is why I have
tonight felt impelled to invoke two powerful images of constructed Others
whose place in fashioning universal history has been profound beyond
words—namely, the woman as mother, embodiment of memory and the
people, and the Indian as healer of the American project. In invoking their
presence I have not tried to speak for them, whatever that might mean. Nor
have I made it my goal to carry out what in Anthropology and History is called
contextualization and thereby "explain" them, whatever that might mean.
What I have tried to allow is for their voices to create in the context of our
hearing contradictory images, dialectical images I will call them, in which their
attempts to redress the use of themselves as mnemonics for the vast projects
of building other selves, white male selves. Nation-States, and America itself,
bring our own expectations and understandings to a momentary standstill—
and thereby present us with the opportunity, if not the necessity, to commence
the long overdue discovering of the New World in place of its invention.
AN AUSTRALIAN HERO
This is a type of fairy tale, a very modern one to be sure, which engages
with a point of view laid out by Walter Benjamin fifty years ago concerning
the function of the fairy tale in combating the forces of mythology. In his
essay on "The Storyteller," Benjamin says that the fairy tale tells us of the
earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which
myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool, the tale shows us
how mankind can act dumb before the myth, and the wisest thing it teaches
is to meet the forces of the mythical world with courage, high spirits, and
cunning—the characteristics, by and large, that Benjamin singled out as
making up the hero of a Brecht play. Think of Mother Courage and of Galy
Gay, let alone of the Good Soldier Schweik of whom Brecht was so fond.
Of course, these are hardly heroes in either the classical or the modern
sense, but then maybe our sense of "tragedy" with which the hero is so
intertwined gives us too mythic a sense of evil which it is nowadays the task
of the ordinary person—the Brechtian "hero"—to suffer as an everyday
occurrence.
The hero I want to tell you about is an Australian man, old, rather deaf
and with poor eyesight, who came from the bush and served as a horseman
and then in the trenches with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,
the ANZACS, in WWI. The tale he tells is worth retelling. I think, because
of what it may teach us about ways to deflate the heroism that is used by
the state to invigorate if not invent traditions that make for a culture of
nationalism—a culture, of course, that once set, becomes a powerful tool
53