In one of his most quoted moments, Karl Marx wrote that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
In his original German, Marx actually said that the past weighs “wie ein alp,” like an Alpine mountain; a more brutal assessment, but less quotable. Seventy years after Marx said (or didn’t quite say) this, an early chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses depicted an awkward exchange between Mr Deasy, an antisemitic British schoolmaster, and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s stand-in, in the course of which Dedalus labels history “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
It’s more than a bit clichéd to point out that history is written by the winners. For Marx though, the structures of capitalism, handed down from the past, constrain all of us. The winners might write history, but Marx did not believe they could ever truly outrun it. Joyce’s view, conversely, was that the true mark of being a winner is the luxury to ignore history. It is the rest of us who are trapped in its nightmares.
To deride militants’ ‘delusions’ is to adopt a presentist smugness, assuming a clarity in hindsight that was never so apparent at the time.
Marx and Joyce both sought to escape from specific histories; Marx was the premier non-Jewish Jew. The grandson of a rabbi, his works were riddled with antisemitic asides, as if he wanted to distance himself from that putative Jewishness. Joyce lived outside of Ireland for most his life, remained uneasy about the essentializing claims of Irish nationalism (and instead, via Ulysses’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, embraced the open-ended identities of diasporic Jews), and yet all his literary works returned to that Irish past he could seemingly never escape.
If…
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Auteur: Aidan Beatty
