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Richard Rechtman

Has anybody has ever lived The Big Story the way it is written in books and printed for collective memory? Of course not. It does not exist. History, with a capital “H,” is just an artifact to build a collective story that never actually happened that way for the individual. Of course, each individual participates and contributes to The Big Story. Each experience possesses elements of The Big Story. But the way each one lives it remains a purely subjective experience that, sometimes, has very little in common with what we call The Big Story. It is possible to understand and write The Big Story precisely because science has been able to extract out the singular and subjective experience of major events.

Thanks to research in history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and so on for bringing us an understanding of our collective past, and sometimes our present. There is no better way to describe how we proceed to grasp this sense of collective destiny than Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concluding remarks of The Naked Man, the fourth volume of The Mythologiques. What he says about myth and its complex relationship with subjectivity can be extrapolated to collective memory and to The Big Story. Both are individual, complex expressions, but they become collective through the process of erasing all individual subjectivity. If myth exists and spreads over time, Lévi-Strauss writes, it is not so much because it was invented by Man or someone, as great as he or she could be. On the contrary, it is the narrative form that owes nothing to an enlightened or poetic consciousness—that is, to the expression of a subjectivity (Rechtman 1996). Myth is precisely different from other oral or literary narrative forms. It derives its permanence from internal logic alone, not emotional or semantic involvement, which is otherwise attached to these forms. Lévi-Strauss explains this masterfully by emphasizing that every myth has its origin in an individual creation, but “to pass to the state of myth,” he adds, “it is precisely necessary that a creation does not remain individual and loses, during this promotion, the essential factors due to the probability that would initially impede it and that one could attribute to the temperament, talent, imagination and personal experiences of its author” (Lévi-Strauss 1971, 559). We could replace myth by The Big Story and then get a clear definition of the process through which a sense of collective memory is created. Collective memory is much less the product of individual consciousness than the narrative framework that allows each individual to format his or her unique experience in accordance with that of his or her home group. And this is precisely what we do as researchers: we try to discover how people interact with the collective narrative of The Big Story or collective memory and then express their own destiny through this pattern. But in ordinary life, this is not the way it really works.

In real life, people do not make a clear hierarchy between what affects them in ordinary life for inner reasons and what affects them as a consequence of what we call The Big Story until long after the fact.

Other than in literature, this issue has been neglected in academic studies, especially in social sciences, for many different reasons. Obviously, from an empirical point of view, it is quite difficult to get sufficient data to document the oscillation in the ordinary between personal or idiosyncratic feelings, preoccupations, fears, and anxiety and those that could be connected to major events in collective life. The descent into the ordinary, to borrow Veena Das’s concept, is probably the most powerful tool to get in touch with this discrete reality of everyday life (Das 2007; Das 2015a). But even with the utmost sensitivity to others, to their forms of life, and whatever the length of time one could spend with others, one could never get as close as to one’s own inner reality. And this is exactly the purpose of this amazing book Seeing Like a Child. It is nothing less than Clara Han’s challenge to reach this otherwise elusive ordinary reality.

Seeing Like a Child is a moving account of what should be named as an unexpected voice from a confirmed researcher. It is much more a kind of automemory, than an autobiography. It shows how life between two very different worlds is crossed by an inner exile that truly exists but without the vocabulary or the facts to express it. Just as if something is missing, but without the memory of what it was. A pure blank, I should say. Clara’s writing is like a journey into the deepest lack that leaves a blank in a child’s memory. We travel with her, without knowing where she will go or what she will find. That is the challenge of this journey. From the United States to Korea, by asking questions, sharing intimate moments, and visiting unknown relatives, she is not only searching for historical facts that are still missing in her memory, she is searching for feelings, impressions, smells, and attitudes that could organically fit what she perceived when she was young, but without having the knowledge to name them at that time.

Here, the usual questions—where do I come from, who am I, why am I here and not elsewhere, where does my family come from—take a very singular and specific resonance because they are objectively unsolved questions. They are material facts and not just imaginary fantasy. But even if the facts are missing, the fantasy keeps on searching for reality. That is the main difference with what Freud calls “Family Romance.” It does not mean that there is no Family Romance among second or third generations of refugees. There is, of course. But this very specific context of exile gives an accent of reality to this neurotic search. Children born from an anonymous sperm donor also have a fantasy of a Family Romance, but when it occurs, it has a particular coloration that results more or less directly from this knowledge of an origin by assisted reproductive technology, which has something to do with the medical reality of their procreation. Discovering this reality (i.e., the biological father is an anonymous sperm donor) does not change the need of a fantasy of a Family Romance. In a Family Romance, children usually invent other parents for themselves, most of the time richer and smarter than their own. Medical insemination does not suppress the fantasy; rather, it gives a possible reality. The difference remains in the fact that while it remains a fantasy, it looks even more like a possible reality. The usual enigma of the origin of oneself is replaced by a pseudocertitude. For example: Who do I come from? Is my father really my father? Is my mother my real mother or am I born from someone else who has been hidden from me? These become obsolete questions since the child knows that these parents are not his or her biological parents. The reality of medically assisted procreation does not stifle the fantasy of the Family Romance. The child born from medically assisted procreation knows that these parents are not his biological parents, but that does not prevent him from dreaming that he has had others even more famous than his own. That is the only difference with the ordinary neurotic: this knowledge on their origin probably makes the fantasy last, but it does not produce it.

In the case of exile, one could find something quite similar. It is not the origin of life but the origin of the family that is questioned. Who were they before, why did they escape, what have they done, were they heroes or victims, have they done something wrong, or is it their family that has done something wrong? So many questions that the ordinary neurotic does not generally ask, at least not in this way. This is because the second-generation child may want to find the truth and then explore the past to fill the lacking information.

In this respect, Clara Han is not searching for facts or to obtain a full family history. She is trying to give an account of what her eyes at the time could have seen and how those impressions can, nowadays, be connected to an emotional reality rather than a historical reality.

This is probably the point where the singular history crosses The Big Story. In this case, when one does not know the reason why one is here and not elsewhere, it is not just a neurotic question (like we all share), it is often a political reality that has projected this family to where they are. A political history that belongs to previous generations but affects subsequent generations, even long after the fact. This could be the definition of exile for the second and third generations: they are overwhelmed by The Big Story that leaves traces and scars, but not the memory of the facts, only feelings, emotions, sensations, or all kinds of unqualified anxiety.

This is exactly the path Clara asks us to follow with her. Step by step, she rediscovers her family, her language, the habits of her parents’ country of origin. Little by little, we perceive how The Big Story had transformed their own world and how it has distilled habits in her parents, habits that are otherwise incomprehensible.

In her search through her missing past world, she is looking for all kind of traces, even though she knows that none could restore the whole narrative of the past. So instead of presenting a full account rebuilt by mixing academic knowledge, fragments of memories, après-coup reconstruction, she gives us a fragment of her own reality, of her own subjectivity, just as it comes to her during this journey through her past.

Here, subjectivity is less the psychological assumption of a “self-consciousness” than the strange feeling of being absolutely sure that she is the one who is affected by what is happening, without knowing what this “she,” or should I say “I,” really means.

This artifact is probably the best way, even the only one, to get in touch with the ordinary, and to write it just as it comes, like the anthropologist exploring an undiscovered country with the main difference that, in this case, the field is her own family. Being part of the ethnographic scene but not the focus point, almost as if she were only wide-open eyes, seeing what is there and what is hidden.

Writing a book like this opens at least three major theoretical perspectives.

First of all, seeing the world like a child means trying to write from this singular experience. It supposes writing without the deepness of history, without knowing what will be important later and what will be considered as the premise of the future. It means writing as the present emerges before any awareness. This has something to do with children’s cognitive mind, of course, but this also happens in many other contexts of life, even if children give the usual illustration. In other words, writing without anticipation of the future deepness of history could be the paradigmatic definition of writing the ordinary. Writing without knowing the end of the story, without knowing which place each event will take in the full story. Writing just like things were perceived at the very moment they emerged. But what does it mean, for example, to live in a society where commemoration and memories are key points? What does it mean for people who lose memory, like Clara’s father, or like a child who does not live through memory? The answer lays probably in the second consequence: writing in the first person.

Seeing Like a Child is less a personal journey through intimate thoughts written in the first person than an essay on what it means to say “I” instead of “we” or “us” and what doing so changes for anthropology. As I said before, the use of the first person is not the premise of a self-consciousness. It is just the statement of an irreducible subjectivity that stems from the simple fact of saying “I.” The one who says “I” simply claims that the subjectivity that appears only belongs to the one saying “I,” but without any qualification of who or what is this first person. A purely grammatical subjectivity completely connected to the linguistic reality that nobody can say “I” instead of me. If someone wishes to use this first person (mine) to pretend to talk as if she were me, it would be her own subjectivity. So, for me, each time someone says “I” it only means “he” or “she.” This is exactly what Émile Benveniste demonstrates in his famous paper on subjectivity in language (Benveniste 1966). This perspective has further consequences, in particular on the qualification of subjectivity and its possible disappearance, especially with death. In his book Donner la mort (Giving death), Jacques Derrida underlines the fact that “nobody can die instead of me,” which defines the paradigmatic radicality of subjectivity.¹ It means that in facing death nobody can replace me (Derrida 1999). The first person is coextensive with a grammatical subjectivity that precedes any self-consciousness. In other words, before being able to recognize that Ego is me, one has to say “I.” The syntagma “I am me” corresponds to the declarative statement of a subjectivity that is nothing else than the possibility that the one who says “I” is me.

In ordinary life, the first person and Ego are intimately connected and, in fact, substitutable. Furthermore, in English the use of “I” and “me” defines indifferently the subject of the enunciation and the object of the statement.

In this regard, death introduces a radical separation between these two forms. The grammatical expression of subjectivity, the pronoun “I,” always disappears before self-consciousness. As human beings, we lose the capacity of saying “I” before having the knowledge of this loss. Death is then a pure and radical experience of subjectivity, in the fact that no one else can have this experience for me. At the very moment of the end of my life, the first person always disappears before me. I will never be able to say “I am dead.” Death is then the real disappearance of the subjectivity, while Ego will never be able to know that. There is no self-consciousness of death, because the subject of the enunciation (“I”) always disappears before the object of the statement (“me”). Freud expresses this paradox through this classic formula: “There is no possible representation of one own’s death” (Freud 1989 [1915]). In other words, Ego will never have any knowledge of the reality of its disappearance and will not have any representation of this paradoxical reality.

But what happens when self-consciousness is not already there or disappears before the subject of enunciation? According to the previous definition, as far as “I,” the first person as a subject, is present, it is not death, rather a form of life different from the usual one. In other words, what is a life with no awareness of the past and, moreover, no need to refer to any kind of personal or collective past, although the subject of the enunciation is still present: an “I” with no “me.”

This issue leads to the third consequence raised by Clara Han’s book. It is about memory and our modern sense of identity in relation to this oscillation between the subject of the enunciation (“I”) and the object, the self-consciousness as a social construction. If the paradox between the first person as subject of enunciation and object of the statement defines all human being, it has some exceptions. In childhood, for instance, the self-consciousness is less a process of knowledge than a kind of performative declaration of the first person. “Seeing like a child” is therefore a way to express the existence of a first person, Clara Han’s “I,” at a time where memory, history, and even past were not required to define Ego. This is the strong affirmation of a grammatical subjectivity that can be read throughout the book. It is a way to question the need of a past history and, furthermore, of a memory to qualify the modern subject, which is in fact only a social construction. For children, saying “I” is clearly sufficient to have the sense of being. There is no need at this age for any other construction of an inner psychological reality, and especially no need for them to have the knowledge of a personal or family past history.

Aging and dementia share quite the same relationship with memory and past history. This is the reason why Clara’s book is so powerful in its attempt to demonstrate, and perform at the same time, how we, in our modern world, associate self-consciousness, identity, memory, and personal and collective past history.

In dementia, at the opposite of biological death, where “I” (the subject of the enunciation) disappears before “me” (the self-consciousness), here “me” disappears while “I” is still there. It could be the paradigmatic definition of social death in our modern language. A pure Subject of enunciation with no self-consciousness because there is no more memory.

Through the metaphor of seeing like a child, Clara Han reveals like no one before her the strength of this social construction between identity, memory, and self-consciousness in ordinary life.