2. The Archaeology of a Life
Memory, Traces, and Shifting Strata in Trains of Thought
Victor Brombert’s
autobiographical book Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth
(2002) returns to childhood, exile, war, and the formative years of the reader
and future university teacher. Memory runs through this biographical
trajectory, with its sudden associations, returns, digressions, and
retrospective revisions of the past. The book thus exceeds the conventional
bounds of autobiography: it explores how places, books, images, and experiences
preserve, displace, and transform the successive strata of a life.
An Autobiography on Shifting Ground
The preceding journey
stopped at the threshold of an “archaeology of a life,” the image in which the
elective affinity I felt with Victor Brombert’s way of reading assumed an
almost literal form. We now enter that archaeology itself. Trains of
Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth extends the image across an entire
life. Its material would be sufficient for a large-scale historical narrative:
the childhood of a stateless boy in interwar Europe; Paris in the 1930s; the
collapse of France; displacement and flight to America; the return to Europe
with the American army; Normandy; the liberation of Paris; Germany; and, in the
background, entry into the American academic world. Chronology provides the
unobtrusive framework. Memory provides the movement. It returns, breaks off,
leaves gaps, persists where one might have expected oblivion. The terrain is
familiar to me, except that now reading excavates a life.
An entire journey
vanishes. A smell survives for sixty years. A place returns at different stages
of life; a photograph gives rise to doubt; a book or a painting settles upon an
earlier experience and alters the way it is recalled. Brombert’s autobiography
therefore resembles a site of uneven preservation: its remains belong to
different periods, bear the traces of later interventions, and demand renewed
assessment each time they are encountered. The analogy acquires particular
force because it emerges from the book itself. Reading Stendhal’s Vie de
Henry Brulard in Rome, Brombert would later recognize that Stendhal,
looking from the Gianicolo across the historical strata of the city and the
panorama of his own life, was practising a kind of archaeology of the self. The
image is subsequently transferred to La Muette. There, more than one period of
Brombert’s own life has left its traces.
La Muette and the Truth of the Strata
La Muette condenses this
conception of memory with remarkable economy. Childhood and adolescent
encounters, games, walks, kisses, youthful fantasies: everything is there.
Years later Brombert returns in American military uniform, in the newly
liberated city, and associates the same place with Yvette and with a self
already marked by displacement and war. Much later still, on his way to the
Musée Marmottan, he passes through La Muette once again, carrying with him all
the intervening years, and writes that even the name itself seems like an
archaeological site. Four ages, one place: the schoolboy, the adolescent, the
soldier, and the elderly visitor coexist like successive phases that continue
to lay claim to presence.
Which of these strata
contains the truth? The force of the passage is concentrated in this question.
The return brings more than one self to the surface, and each possesses its own
historical and emotional temperature. The archaeological metaphor becomes more
precise: the search for the past leads not so much to a final restoration as to
the coexistence of successive selves. Strata disappear and re-emerge; they
offer their ruins as material for a new construction. Identity then ceases to
resemble a stable object concealed in the depths. It comes into being between
phases, in the distance and intimacy with which the person who remembers looks
upon the person he once was. One self looks at another. Both say I.
This is why Stendhal
assumes such importance. In Rome in 1950, the young Brombert found in Vie de
Henry Brulard the beauty of remembrance and the fragility of privileged
moments. Many years later, rereading the same pages revealed to him the
distance between living and narrating, as well as the constructed nature of all
autobiography. Archaeology therefore operates in two fields at once: the
material of memory and the work of narration, which retrospectively classifies,
connects, and displays its findings. The find already bears the imprint of the
gaze that brought it to light.
Gaps, Evidence, and the Unreliability of Testimony
In an archaeology of this
kind, loss forms part of the material itself. During the great flight of 1940,
Brombert is unable to retrieve from memory the means by which his family first
travelled from Deauville to Paris. Perhaps they went by train. He offers the
conjecture and leaves it unresolved. In Biarritz he performs the same act of
honesty: he cannot recall where they stayed, nor the precise moment at which
they were reunited with his cousin’s family. What has survived? The small wound
to adolescent vanity, almost comically vivid, when his striking cousin Mousia
showed lively interest in his mother and scarcely any interest in him. History
weighs by one scale. Memory by another.
Excessive vividness
demands even greater self-discipline. During the anxious search for visas in
southwestern France, Brombert remembers the actor Marcel Dalio standing in a
queue. He can almost see the beads of sweat on his forehead. Yet the mature
critical consciousness pauses before its own image and questions whether Dalio
was in fact present in that particular scene. Something Brombert heard later
had probably acquired the vividness of a personal memory. Sensory intensity is
thus separated from historical certainty. Here I recognize the rigour proper to
all serious inquiry: the narrator examines himself as a witness and subjects
his own testimony to the same reservations he would demand of any other source.
This attitude finds an
unexpected echo in his wartime service. As a member of a military intelligence
unit, Brombert gathered information from local inhabitants about German
positions, mined roads, and troop movements. There he learned at first hand the
“unreliability of testimony” produced by fear, incomplete knowledge, confusion,
or simply by the informant’s desire to appear useful. The lesson returns.
German newsreel footage shows an American prisoner who resembles Brombert so
closely that family, friends, and experts become convinced that it is he. It is
someone else. An authentic document has led to a false interpretation. The
image preserved a real moment. The gaze still requires scrutiny.
The Materiality of Memory
Amid great losses,
certain sensations persist with paradoxical force. From the suffocatingly
crowded train crossing Spain towards Madrid as the family attempted to escape
to America, Brombert retained the smell of the compartment: a hothouse of sweat
in the heat. From Deauville in 1939 he retained his night-time walks with Dani,
their joined hands, the smell of her hair. Almost six decades later, it is
still there. Then comes the later knowledge that the young woman and her small
child were murdered at Auschwitz, settling over that first sensory trace and
charging it with a truth unimaginable to the young man who had walked with her
along the beach. Here History acquires its weight through something
infinitesimal and tender: a smell.
The same materiality
reappears on a smaller scale. The tone of his father’s voice. The smell of the
bakery on the way to the lycée. Marbles in his pocket, the damp surface of the
schoolyard, the pressure of the pen on paper, the scratch of the nib, the inkwells,
the coloured sheets of paper on the desk. With affectionate irony, the elderly
scholar wonders whether these very bodily pleasures might explain his enduring
attachment to writing by hand and his reluctance to surrender entirely to the
word processor. An entire writing life may have its roots there, in the sound
of a pen and the pleasures of stationery. A small cause, a long duration.
The memories of war form
another stratigraphy: sharply etched images separated by broad areas of
indistinctness. Brombert describes Normandy as a sequence of overlapping
moments, almost like double-exposed photographs. Fear engraves certain points
deeply while leaving extensive gaps between them. The form of the book
preserves this discontinuity and refuses to smooth war into a sequence of
heroic episodes. The clearest evidence comes with the return home. The grand
scene the young man had imagined for years gives way to embraces, military
bureaucracy, conversations about money, illness, and family obligations. So
simple. So awkward. The mature narrator keeps the dramatic temperature low.
Banality and awkwardness belong to the truth of the scene, while self-irony
protects memory from rhetorical embellishment.
Art within the Stratigraphy
The archaeological image
becomes more complex when Brombert asks what, precisely, returns in each act of
recollection. The event itself? Its image? Or the previous occasions on which
the event has already been remembered? An old photograph may lead to all three.
Old train journeys, meanwhile, have passed through the long workings of
nostalgia, which smooth away boredom, minor anxieties, and imperfections.
Memory returns to the original moment and at the same time to the history of
its previous returns. In material stratigraphy, the archaeologist may hope to
reach a relatively undisturbed earlier layer. In memory, the very act of
searching touches and alters its material. Every recollection leaves a trace.
The later strata consist
to a large extent of books, paintings, cinematic images, and music. Looking at
Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, Brombert experiences waves of recognition:
the painted image retrieves his childhood experience of the station, his tennis
racket, the exhilaration of departure, even his gloom at the prospect of summer
tutoring. The painting enters the earlier experience and gives it new form. In
the devastated Berlin of 1945, Beethoven’s Fidelio provides an even more
concentrated example. The prisoners’ chorus and the word Freiheit become
permanently associated with the camps, the railway cars, and the barbed wire.
From then on, every hearing carries that night within it. Art has entered the
stratigraphy of a life: it rereads experience and, at the same time, receives
from that experience a new meaning.
Depth and
Movement
Archaeology gives Trains
of Thought its depth. Trains give it movement. The title activates the
double meaning of train: a means of transport and a sequence of
thoughts, together with the notions of drawing along, connection, and
conveyance. Brombert observes that digressions can function as connections and
that the traveller through memory often inhabits more than one place at the
same time. The strata reveal how the periods of a life remain embedded within
one another. The trains reveal memory’s continuous movement among them. Depth
and trajectory. The stillness of the trace, the velocity of recollection.
At the end of the
prologue, Brombert declares his preference for “the instability of the
shuttle,” the unstable back-and-forth movement that allows the landscape to
pass by while simultaneously attempting to hold it for a moment. Autobiography
thus becomes a movement among strata, an attempt to preserve the sensations of
past and present in their fluidity. La Muette is childhood, adolescence, war,
late return. The train signifies holidays, flight, rescue, deportation, death.
The same literary page is loved at twenty-seven for one reason and illuminated
at seventy by a different experience of time. Brombert keeps experience in
motion. He postpones definitive explanation because it would immobilize the
living relationship between earlier and later selves.
The most distinctive
feature of this archaeology lies in the position of the excavator. The person
conducting the inquiry belongs to the stratigraphy himself. He has been shaped
by what he remembers, by the earlier narratives of those memories, by the books
he has read in the meantime, by the people who have disappeared, and by what he
learned only much later about their fate. Every new act of recollection adds
its own thin layer to the material. Here the first of the three apprenticeships
takes clear form: Brombert combines precision of attention with caution towards
the image itself. He remembers. He compares. He leaves the gap visible,
acknowledges the retrospective construction of an image, and preserves the low
emotional temperature of a scene that retrospective narration could so easily
embellish. Attention becomes at once a method and an ethic.
As the excavation
proceeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the memory of life
from the memory of the books that have settled upon it. A painting alters the
appearance of an old railway station. A musical phrase carries within it the
Berlin of 1945. A page of Stendhal is illuminated differently when the person
rereading it has already grown old. Somewhere here, within the stratigraphy, a
second biography begins to take shape. It is less spectacular than the story of
displacement and war, yet perhaps no less decisive in shaping a life: it is the
story of a man learning how to read. The archaeology of a life thus becomes, in
the end, an archaeology of reading. One depth opens within another. From the
strata of a life there now emerges the next question: how is a reader made?
Bibliographical Reference
Brombert, Victor. Trains
of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth. New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 2002.
