A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

by Lewis Hyde

“One of our true superstars of nonfiction” (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World, offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche.

We live in a culture that prizes memory—how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear—be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness—but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth?

A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a creative and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil.

Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Essays, History, Self Help, Writing

385 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 18, 2019

Reviews

[Antigone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lewis Hyde - essayist, poet, and author of (most notably) Trickster Makes This World and The Gift - produces as a change of pace "a thought experiment" on the needfulness of forgetting. Although he does not express it outright, the reader is left with the sense that this project was provoked by his experience of his mother's dementia and the struggle many children go through to lift the condition into meaning; the irony of attempting to locate reason upon its rather crafty escape.

Resembling a notebook filled with random thought, Hyde sets out to make the case for the importance of memory's loss; how certain amnesias strengthen focus, assist in the survival of severe trauma, and provide in selected instances the only road to forgiveness. The material is highly-referenced and draws deep from several wells, among which include the Greeks, the Arabs, Buddhism, Emerson, Pierre Janet, Nabokov, Proust, and historical incident - chiefly racial violence in the South (the Civil Rights Era) and the West (the Sand Creek Massacre). Brief mention is made of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but I didn't feel he'd finished processing this.

In fact, I feel the work loses its way at the mid-point, perhaps embracing this necessity of forgetting to the degree that its author instinctively misplaces the coordinates of his journey. We reach a juncture in the closing pages of his section on Creation that concludes: Writing damages forgetfulness - and so, perhaps, he is bowing to newly-found truths that change his course and completely lift him off the page. It may be that he is choosing to forget not only his aim, but his book...and then his reader as well. One cannot know.

I may not be ready to forget quite this much.

[محمد خالد شريف · Rating 3 out of 5]

لا أظن أنه يُمكننا أن نضع كتاب "أدب النسيان: ثقافة تجاوز الماضي" للكاتب "لويس هايد" داخل إطار واحد من فروع الأدب أو الكتابة، فالكتاب يُعيد تعريف النسيان بل ويدعي بأن للنسيان أهمية هائلة، تساعدنا على المضي قدماً في الحياة، ومن خلال موضوعات مختلفة من الأساطير اليونانية، والأحداث الحقيقية التي تحمل وزناً هائلاً بداخل المجتمع الأمريكي، وقضايا شائكة، وتفاصيل شخصية ودقيقة كمرض والدته بالزهايمر، كل ذلك وأكتر موضوعين بشكل مرتب إلى حداً ما بداخل ضفتي هذا الكتاب.

أظن أنه يجب عليك أن تقرأ هذا الكتاب على مهل، ودون تسرع، فموضوعاته هائلة ومتشعبة، ولكن السبب الأكثر أهمية من ذلك، هو الفلسفة التي يطرحها "هايد" مع كل عنوان وحكاية، فكرة تُثير فيك تساؤلات وتُجيب عن تساؤلات أخرى، بمعنى أكثر دقة يجب أن نأخذ بنصيحة الكاتب وننسى أننا نقرأ هذا الكتاب عن عمد، ونعود لنتذكره من فترة لأخرى، لأنني أدعي أن أقصر الطرق للتذكر هي النسيان.

أثناء قراءة هذا الكتاب، ستعيد إكتشاف النسيان بل ويُعاد تعريفه بالنسبة إليك، ستنظر إليه بطريقة مختلفة، وأنه ليس سيئاً أن ننسى، بل على العكس، أحياناً، يجب علينا أن ننسى، لكي نتقدم إلى الأمام، وبكل تأكيد هذا تلخيص مُجحف للكتاب، فهو يحتوي على عدد هائل من الأفكار والفلسفات المختلفة، يصعب أن تُختزل في بضع كلمات، فقط تمنيت لو كانت طريقة تقسيم الفصول أكثر ترتيباً، شعرت بأن الترتيب يحمل ترتيب عشوائي منظم، وربما كان ذلك تأكيداً على ما أسلفت الذكر أنك تحتاج لتقرأ هذا الكتاب على مهل ودون تسرع أو الشعور بالحاجة الشديدة لإنهاء الكتاب.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

not really sure about the lukewarm takes, I thought this was excellent. The format is certainly unusual for a work of nonfiction - it sort of imitates (to me) David Markson’s “This Is Not a Novel” series, and the format itself is a practice of memory and forgetting. Some of the takes were definitely more interesting than others, but it’s an incredible new way of writing, this probably means I have to go and read The Gift now.

One of my great regrets in reading this is not taking Prof Hyde’s creative nonfiction class in college. Stupid Pete!

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most intellectually stimulating books I've read in a long while; it put me back in the days when I was a philosophy student, thinking always about big, overarching, challenging ideas. Lewis Hyde, I learned, is among other things a poet, and this is evident in the mode in which the book is written: short "essays" anywhere from a third of a page to six pages (the book, and thus the pages, are small) clustered together in sections titled Myth, Self, Nation and Creation (my favorite). They are not so much essays as ruminations on forgetting and the role it has played or plays in each of these arenas. But they are not really just ruminations either, because Hyde has obviously done a lot of research to support his thinking--either that or he's really knowledgeable. So, what you have here is philosophical/poetical thought clusters all related to each other by the theme of forgetting. Hyde is neither for nor against forgetting; he simply shares thoughts and information on the role of forgetting in history, creativity, and personal/psychological experience. In the Nation section, Hyde explores whether forgetting has a beneficial role to play in the cases of US lynchings, the Holocaust and the treatment of Native Americans and, if so, what shape that takes. Personally, I have lately been thinking about the meaning of the oft-maligned nostalgia and sentimentality. As I approach my mid-60's, I realize that the value to me of memories rooted in my past is that they are integrative, gathering back up into the folds of my skirt past experiences that have fallen away and become lost and hidden and giving me a feeling of my whole self, over time, suddenly reintegrated and restored, if only for a moment. Hyde spends several pages writing about Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which I only struggled through in French; I think I might get a lot out of reading it again, this time in English and with over 40 years more of life experience under my belt. Finally, I also personally connected to Hyde's sad, brief references to his mother's dementia, which were very thinly sprinkled throughout the book. I got the feeling that their minimization reflected how painful it is for Hyde to recall these incidents and how frightened he is to think that he might be facing the same fate. A Primer for Forgetting has a lot to offer both your head and your heart.

[Philip Yancey]

The author of "The Gift" gives us a fascinating exploration of our leaky minds, and dozens of other meditations on life and humanity. Unique style, much wisdom.

[hayatem · Rating 5 out of 5]

" تقر البنية المجزأة لكل كتاب نقرأ حياة ثانية مركبة، وبشكل عام، بأن لكل شيء آخر حياة ثانية مركبة أيضاً، لأننا مخلوقات متقطعة مبعثرة في الزمن، ولا يمكن لمعنى وجودنا أن يوجد إلا في الخيال." — لويس هايد.

كتاب جمع هايد عبره مادته أفكار من تأملات مبعثرة لفترات زمنية مختلفة و مجزأة، لشخوص ومواقف وأحداث تاريخيّة، وثقافيّة، وشخصية - ذاتية، وأخرى في سياقات مختلفة الصور، ل يبني ذاكرة من ثنايا النسيان!

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art is my favorite book on the once-fashionable subject of “creativity.” It’s a sparkling example of what it claims to analyze, playful, wide-ranging, trangressive, inventive. Lewis Hyde’s new book is quite different — it’s an extended meditation on the ethics of remembering/forgetting, a collage of history, mythology, anthropology and imagination. The apparently simple question: what does it mean to remember? Or to forget? becomes an invocation to reflection, shifting from philosophical perplexity to something more troubling — the crimes of history, individual and collective. The dominant mood (at least for me as I was reading) is grief, compounded of confusion and anger and, occasionally, insight.

Hyde’s style of reflection is in the American mode, echoes of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman sound across the pages. While he reflects on the historical situations of South Africa or Serbia or Spain, the episodes that pack the most punch belong to the American experience: the Civil War; the legacy of Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights; the genocide against Native Americans. Even today — at least in my experience — most Americans have not come to terms with these aspects of our history. Hyde explores what happens when we try. The results are hardly encouraging. Individuals may be permitted to forgive and forget; a society must aim for justice and remembrance, and only then does it deserve the right to forget, to invent itself anew.

This isn’t a book to hurry through and it will disappoint those who try. Those readers willing to wander and linger within Hyde’s always interesting circles of thought, to remain within complexities without demanding a simple solution, will be richly rewarded.

[Ebtihal Salman · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب ممتع وغني ومتنوع بالأفكار التي يربطها بفكرة (النسيان) عبر فصول قصيرة تجعل طي الصفحات سلسا. الترجمة ممتازة.

[Veronica Ciastko · Rating 5 out of 5]

really good. sometimes this book was a little heady but the great thing is that it's just these little vignettes so if one doesn't make sense, the next one probably will. i dogeared nearly half the book for quotes/ideas i wanted to write down. there's so much good stuff to uncover in here about memory, time, God, and the human condition. after reading one of the sections i laid on my bed and listened to a song that feels viscerally attached to a moment in time almost 10 years ago and i felt really comforted by hyde's ideas; that time is one big soup, all swirling around and happening at once, that nothing is really gone and that forgetting is okay, that when we mark a grave we can go back to it but we don't have to. this book was a beautiful way to round out a bizarre and confounding year.

[Kent Winward · Rating 3 out of 5]

It might have been four stars, but I forgot.

This was an interesting exercise in collage. You can access things differently through this type of impressionistic snippet writing. I enjoy David Shields takes more, but both seem to be cut from a similar genre that has emerged to address this current technological thrust that makes everything, including this review a pebble into the roaring river of content. Contrast this with all the things we cannot forget and that is the sense I pulled from Hyde's work.

[Reham Almutairi رهام المطيري · Rating 2 out of 5]

ممل بشكل فظيع! قد تكون الترجمة، وقد يكون الأصل نفسه!

[Scott Eggerding · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself reading this book slowly. I kept it by my stationary bike, reading 8-10 pages a day. The only problem is I couldn’t get a sustained workout in—I kept stopping to highlight passages or write notes. I’ve spent a number of years researching the literary structures of memory and invented memory. Never did I consider the importance and value of forgetting. I expect I will pick this book up again and read it through with an entirely new perspective and context. This is one of those books that presents its thesis very plainly, deliberately, and with a wide range of examples. So very satisfying!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If there is a ‘work of forgetting,’ it has to involve claiming or creating agency such that you, the people saddled with history, can work on the past rather than have the past work on you. When it comes to collective memory — the kind that calls for a national historic site — you can’t begin to remember in a way that allows you to forget until the collective itself recognizes and responds to the history at hand. Only then can you both claim an identity as your own and enjoy the privilege of forgetting about it. There is no self-forgetting without self.”

[Somebody · Rating 3 out of 5]

"التفسير المباشر يعتِّم نور الاشياء، اما الامتناع عن التفسير فيسمح للعناصر بالتألق"
كتاب جميل يجبرنا الكاتب بإسلوبه- مقتطفات وحلقات متفرقة- على نسيان كم هو جميل ولماذا هو جميل!
الحيرة (الجميلة) هي ما اصابني بعد قراءة هذا الكتاب لدرجة انني محتار بين تقييمه ٣ او ٤ نجوم. نعم هناك اجزاء اعجبتني اكثر من اخرى لكن الكتاب- عن قصد- يريد ان يزرع في ذهنك الغرابة والدهشة حتى بدون ان تعرف السبب. الترجمة ممتازة ووافرة 👍

[James Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book, a fun and insightful read. An episodic discourse on what it means to forget, remember, and live in between these two states of forgetting and remembering - to just be, and to be well, significant and effective in our humanness.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another sui generis work from Hyde. It's an eposidic book consisting of a variety of “entries” in four categories: Myth, Self, Nation, and Creation. There are themes, but essentially it’s an excellent collage about our experiences with time and memory.

[Robert Case · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating exploration of memory, myth, and culture.

[Agnes DiPietrantonio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry but I lost interest half way through. Maybe it was the querky format

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating

[jazzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the unusual form of this book, not only because it plays with the reader's forgetfulness (and memory) but also functions well as a primer to many, mostly unfamiliar, ways of thinking about the relationship between memory and forgetting and their derivatives. Next time I pick up the book, I think I will turn to a random page, read its entry, and deep dive into the subject matter!

[Mahra Al Marar · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب رائع، فعلاً يستحق القراءه.

[Arabelle Sicardi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and bookmarked so many different pages. Something I'll be returning to for years to come, I think.

[Mark Plakias · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book for many reasons, and at times, magical. That said, not everyone will have the patience for its journal-like construction, and be open enough to the deep currents Hyde is tapping into. The book is built of notes, generated by quotations he has come across in his voluminous reading of the canon of western literature -- from Plato to Proust. These page-length micro-essays are grouped into 4 or 5 main chapters, the first of which is Myth. So its the topic of Forgetting in the context of our most ancient myths. This works out to be a fascinating set of meditations on what happens when we die and what the process of forgetting is before we come back again -- great stuff. The more timely part is about the role of amnesia -- including legislated amnesia encoded in laws -- in healing social and political wounds. Given the bleeding car-wreck that is America today, these examples, drawn from ancient Greece to apartheid South Africa, are thought-provoking, at the least, and deeply optimistic at their best. Asa I said, the format is by nature a bit meandering, but in a good way, like a creek on hot summer day, moving slowly, but inexorably, toward to larger summation.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which is more of collection of mini-essays than a continuous narrative, looks at the function of forgetting in human society. We might think that memory and remembering are far more important to us, but Lewis Hyde shows us how many things we need to forget in order to be able to live with other people, to tell a coherent story, to simply get on with things. In the Hyde style that I love, he uses stories and examples from ancient and modern civilizations, literature, and his own life to illustrate.

I was sceptical about the form of the book at first. I prefer longer narratives to short vignettes--I like to have time to orient myself in a piece of writing, and it's hard to do that if the piece is too short. However, in the sections on Myth, Self, Nation, and Creation, the page-long reflections are interrelated if not continuous, so I never felt myself floundering to understand where I was in the process of the book.

Aphorisms accompany each section. There is a good sized bibliography and an index. I came away from this book with a new appreciation for forgetting in all its forms: allowing old stories to change, leaving details out to allow a particular story to emerge, letting things go that no longer serve any use, and more. The copy I read was from a library, but I am going to buy one for myself.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book held me rapt as it developed its themes of memory and forgetting. Some of the themes were more developed and others were tantalizingly fragmentary. Because a number of other authors and thinkers have plumbed these depths, this work surveys their thoughts and presents them at points in the ongoing presentation that help to build understanding. The apparent paradox of this book is that it is more about remembering than about forgetting. But it makes the critical point that memory is sculpted by selective forgetting. All in all, I thought this work had much to offer in terms of understanding the human condition (indeed, the human story).

[James Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read. It addresses the problems of commemorating and forgetting for mostly political purposes. Rather than a narrative, it is a series of vignettes and commentaries. To begin with I found the style a bit irritating, as though he couldn't be bothered to put it all together into anything. But after awhile I got more used to it. And by the end he offered an explanation for the style which seemed plausible.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nearly perfect book. I did not especially like the subtitle "Getting Past the Past" which makes it sound like a self-help book when in fact it's just a beautiful musing on the nature of memory and forgetting. It gets a bit weedy at times but otherwise is so profound and thought-provoking.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an intriguing book that opened up multiple avenues of thought about the nature of memory and the value of forgetting. Each page centers on a different quote, engages with a different thinker, on the subject of the interplay between memory and forgetting.

It's not a continuous narrative or argument, it's a collage in which the meanings of each entry speak to the others. Arranged into four sections--Myth, The Self, Nations, and Creation, Hyde uses thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt.

I thought I would be most intrigued with Creation, on the importance of forgetting in art--there was a terrific entry about re-reading--the first time you read, you're encountering all the surprises and shocks and turns, freshly. The second time, it's memory kicking in, where you'll now notice the structure of the book, the techniques, because you're. no longer dazzled by the novelty. The third time is the most interesting, as it becomes a dance between what you know and wanting that freshness anew, pretending it's the first time, so a willing forgetfulness...

Yet, it was not the Creation section, but Myth and Nation which I found most interesting and generative of new ideas--an encounter that's always a great pleasure.

There's much talk of Mnemosyne, Memory, the mother of Muses, in Western thought. Memory as the origin of culture--but in the Myth section, it's the Furies which capture Hyde's attention. The Furies don't forget, they're called the Unforgettable. The source of generational war and implacable payback. I found the idea--which heavily resonates in Nation as well as in Self--of the wound that keeps wounding itself for the continuation of a certain identity around vengeance, to be astonishingly useful. "Nothing good happens when unforgettable Furies make revenge the ideal you can't get out of your head. Or when memories of injury stoke an endless civil war."

Memory fixates us in the past, where forgetting allows movement in the present. The book specifically addresses the issue of forgiveness-is it about forgetting or 'forgetting'--agreeing that we're going to forget. The oddness of remembering to forget. The way the losers of war tend to remember while the winners memorialize and then forget. What is necessary for forgiveness and reconciliation--examining what happens after great wars, great bloodshed. But also on the personal level. Literally putting the dead to rest. "One way to bring a traumatic memory to rest is to create a symbol, a... grave marker. Once a grave has been marked, you can visit it, but you don't have to."

I'm taken by the idea 'a proper burial' as essential to the process, both its aspect of memory/memorial and in forgetting/moving on--so important, not only literally, but symbolically. The significance of writing as committing acts to memory, permanently, fixed, while in oral culture, memory is allowed to shift and change, forgetting certain aspects and accentuating others, so that the 'memory' of an event changes to reflect the concerns of the current people. The idea of the statute of limitations being the written culture's attempt at doing the same.

I'm always on the hunt for a new idea, and this book brims with it.

[Saswati Saha Mitra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde is a book very close to my heart. As a person, I am notoriously forgetful and I have been called out for it so much that I often wonder is this a problem with me.

And then along came this book whose very premise is forgetfulness is essential for survival! How else can the Jews get past the holocaust or rape victims survive their trauma, if not by forgetting?

The short passages from philosophy, history, myths, religious texts and science are woven in symbiotically in a form of associative collage and the pages flow and pause, giving the reader, the scope to contemplate the depth of this position.

There’s no creativity or political freedom without the associated ability to forget the past. Forgetfulness sets us free to envision new possibilities.

While leveraging experts, Hyde also weaves in the story of his mother losing her memory and the impact of this on him and his family. It’s so subtle that you almost miss it but his remembrance of his family life
gives the book its personal touch.

Given the fragments of contemplation, sometimes the book can feel a bit uneven. Passages around how native Americans were massacred and then easily submerged in a quest for new history in the US, are hard to take in side by side with philosophy. There’s a certain awkwardness and it probably comes from our own sense of unease with the realisation that forgetting does not equal to effacing a truth. Forgetting is the choice to be resilient and move forward. Effacing is denying something the right to exist. Now that’s truly inspiring!

A strong non fiction book when you need a break from fiction and long paragraphs. Thank god this book justifies all my forgetfulness!

[ariana · Rating 4 out of 5]

TL;DR: A good read. Once I got adjusted to the “episodic form,” I found plenty of cerebral musings, meditations, revelations and considerations on the matter of memory.


——

“Unless we kill a book by committing it to memory, active imagination (‘memory and oblivion, we call that imagination’) will make for us the book that is our book. The episodic form acknowledges the collaged afterlife of anything we read — or of any life, for that matter, for we too are discontinuous creatures, scattered in time, the meaning of our existence something we can only imagine.”

— Lewis Hyde

——

In A Primer for Forgetting, Hyde collects a handful of small bites — from diverse perspectives — on memory and forgetfulness, illuminated by his own experience witnessing his mother’s dementia.

He moves from the inner and personal (eg. grief from personal loss) to the collective (eg. tense racial and religious histories), loosely exploring ways that different people and cultures approach memory and its constituents: truth, forgiveness, justice, past, present, future &c.

I appreciated the way that Hyde dealt with the historical memory topic. I was holding my breath and hoping that he wouldn’t oversimplify that. Assumably, his experience in civil rights work guided how he approached this, and I was glad that he considered the complexities involved with memory of collective historical trauma.

Overall, I found this book to be relevant and resourceful in many ways. Challenging, too, especially for me in terms of memory and personal grief, memory and collective historical trauma.

I took one star, because the very beginning and ending chapters fell a bit more flat in tone / intrigue than the middle. The ending also had unhelpful repetition, instead of building upon thoughts as the middle sections did.