The Insistence of the Past

Abstract

Making sense of the past is a common concern among post-war novelists, especially English ones. In The Situation of the Novel, published in 1970, Bernard Bergonzi argued that, as a result of the uncertainties brought about by recent history, contemporary fiction was poised somewhere ‘between nostalgia and nightmare’, alternatively or simultaneously imagining a brutal apocalyptic future and ‘a vanished era’, most often that of the ‘Edwardian summer’.¹

You’ve killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don’t come for me, I’ll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

I think memory works both ways [in narrative], in that the returns […] are both returns to and returns of: moments when the past seems to come forward, as in the return of the repressed, or when memory takes us back into the past.

Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling