“Left to Memory”
“Left to Memory”: Mapping the Forgotten in Leonard Ng’s “Forgotten Roads”
Hui Wong
Abstract
This paper engages with some theoretical work from German Media Studies to articulate the work of remembering in poetry as a “mapping” of loss. Centring Singaporean poet Leonard Ng’s “Forgotten Roads” in this analysis, I explore how the question of what it is that media do, drawn from the theoretical context of cultural techniques, may bear upon literary criticism. Ng’s poem centers the act of remembering thematically, and its reading of it performatively remembers. This act is part of what I call a poetic discourse, which, in this paper, has as its foil legal discourse, the operations of which are considered in Cornelia Vismann’s Files. As Wismann seeks to provide a genealogy of law that demonstrates how legal symbolic discourses cancel the past, I provide Ng’s poetic discourse as an example of a symbolic discourse that recovers and refuses to forget. I conclude by way of a reading of Sigfried Kracauer’s essay “Farewell to the Linden Arcade” to demonstrate that the “poetic” is more of an orientation than a genre.
In 2019, Poetry Festival Singapore published an anthology of poems titled Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore. The text’s performative challenge and task is made known from its title. In Singapore’s bicentennial year (two hundred years after its colonial beginning), Contour intervenes into the histories of its mapping. Contour offers what it terms a “lyric cartography.” How is poetry cartography? What does it mean to map lyrically? Leonard Ng’s poem in this anthology, “Forgotten Roads,” takes these questions on literally: the poem is about roads and maps; it is a lyrical reflection on what maps do in the face of “development” and modernity: “these roads / no longer marked on maps / left to memory and the jungle” (lines 4-6). This paper reads Ng’s poem and the themes contained within it as a starting point to think about what it is that maps, as discursive productions of the domain of state law, do with regard to the maps that one retains in memory. I suggest that Ng’s poem is performative: it is the act of reading that ensures that the forgotten and cancelled under legal discourse continues a symbolic existence that resists the concealment of its disappearance. This paper seeks to explore how in what can be variously considered “mapping” (by which I mean symbolic processes that seek to elide the things they have changed), that which is forgotten can be meditated on to critique the conditions of their loss. This meditation pierces the progress of history toward Walter Benjamin’s angel: it disavows any history that seeks to dispense with historicizing.
Perhaps a place to begin reading the map in Ng’s poem is through Baudrillard’s reading of Borges’ fable of the map that equals the empire. Baudrillard suggests that reading the fable now takes us “full circle”—“it is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory [...] that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map” (1). A Baudrillardian take on the making and forgetting that maps do is that the line between reality and its reference is blurred; mapping in this view bears on Ng’s poem by framing the temporality of mapping. If mapping precedes the territory, indeed engenders it such that lived experience is lived on maps, the forgotten roads “no longer marked on maps” suggests that what is engendered by the map is a relationship to the subject wherein their lived experience is lived on the map itself—in this case, the poem’s speaker is expected to forget the road following the marking of the map, and should they intervene, they intervene on the level of the map.
Baudrillard’s intervention rests on articulations that are supported by references to the time of “today,” presumably in opposition to the “then.” This time of his theory is unclear, though based on his references to McLuhan it might be inferred that electronic media periodizes. But what Baudrillard’s sees as simulation’s colonization of the real that destroys the real—“[i]t is the real, not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours” (1)—remains in an uneasy position insofar as the “we” who is implied in Baudrillard’s “today” also remains un-interrogated. In Baudrillard’s calling upon the “we,” “us,” and “ours” who are all together in hyperreality can be found a universal subject whose subjectivity is ultimately swallowed by the simulacra; the map of the empire supposedly accounts for all of its subjects as well as its sovereign territory.
The uneasiness of a universal subject that I suggest arises here is best addressed through a close-reading of Ng’s poem that asks what it is the poem, as literary practice, does. The movement of the text works in three stanzas: the first, a blooming of the road: “Suddenly they bloom / beneath your feet, / growing away from you / like bamboo—these roads / no longer marked on maps” (lines 1-5)—these are the first half of the lines quoted in this paper’s introduction. Then, the second stanza, a remembering through the play of signs: “But there are always signs. / Ornamental plants. Shattered clumps of asphalt,” (7-8) concluding with a third stanza, which tells a story of the road’s disappearance: “Once a kampong stood here; houses, roads; / then a highway crashed through [...] But this road was left behind / without cables or street lighting, / and the leaves from the trees on either side / have fallen here for decades, have fallen and fallen, / beneath our feet, sinking soft, / leading us nowhere now / except into the past” (10-11; 14-21). The poem’s structure is then one that seeks to contradict itself. By ending on “the past” and beginning with the sudden present-tense “bloom,” the poem enacts a kind of recovery of the very past it is proclaiming has been forgotten (by digging into the past). That is, the poem is performing the act of memory in the face of forgetting.
Is the “us” who is led in the past in Ng’s poem the same “us” to whom Baudrillard refers when he speaks of the “us” “today”? Is the “lyric cartography,” the poetic mapping that Ng offers us, different from the infinite referentiality of that mapping of the hyperreal to which Baudrillard refers? Crucially, on this possible difference, what Ng is trying to refer to is not the real qua something to which a signifier refers, as Baudrillard would have it; rather, Ng’s real is simply that which has been foreclosed by the state’s mapping. Ng’s poetic mapping is not entirely coextensive with Baudrillard, as it suggests that there is still a “real” insofar as there is still a past. However, while Baudrillard operates on a level whose politics seek to universalize and capture every act within the hyperreal, acts that have no time nor history because the hyperreal has swallowed history too, this very same discourse nevertheless suggests that something still remains—hence the “vestiges” of the real, the “desert of the real.” This admission that the “real” remains is a loose thread in Baudrillard that gestures to the possibility of finding a language to describe what is happening on a symbolic level in Ng’s text.
As I have laid it out, the difficulty is now in accounting for the process of mapping and describing how it works as it is embedded in time and history, rather than a description that seeks to swallow all possible discourses under a heading of “simulation.” What Baudrillard gives is the connection between “the real” and the symbolic order of mapping (as well as the imaginary, which for Baudrillard is unsurprisingly also extinguished; for Baudrillard, there is no longer such a thing as an “image” with an imaginary double or phantasm [51]) that provides a way into talking about the connection between poetry, waste, and the various iterations of “the real.” Cornelia Vismann’s genealogy of law brings this connection further. As she explains, “[i]n Roman antiquity a plough was dragged around the yet-to-be-built city to mark the spot where the gate was to be. [...] The gate creates the ager Romanus, the urban area of Rome. With the city the law comes into being. City and law are coextensive” (15); she then references Lacan’s reading of this Roman marking: “In its nature, the door belongs to the symbolic order, and it opens up either on to the real, or the imaginary, we don’t know quite which” (302). For Vismann, the door of law, exemplified by the Roman mapping, opens up to both: beyond the threshold of the law is both the imagined authority that supports it, which proves to be nothing but the desire for there to be an authority, and the real that operates through files in the work of cancelling, storing, manipulating, destroying and transforming. The anecdote of Roman antiquity is about the real operation of drawing a line on the territory, mapping it by transformation and thereby also cancelling the territory that was, to create a symbolic world. This is a legal act, and for Vismann one of the first legal acts. Hence, the map always already precedes the territory as the operation of creating a territory involves mapping. The question that Ng leads us to ask is regarding the temporal before mapping. For Vismann, asking what is “before the law” is complex; the law is an endless referential puzzle (thereby echoing Baudrillard despite the distance between the objects of each one’s discourse), but, in technical terms, “the writing that stands before the law is a draft or prescript” (25). Vismann’s point is that the law disavows its mutability: the concealment and disposal of its “before” as a draft is part of the law’s very condition. The law’s inaccessibility constitutes it. Hence, if the act of mapping is a legal act, the forgetting that Ng points to, the waste of maps, is intentional insofar as old roads have no place in law.
If Ng’s poem can be read as memory, as I argue, the pertinent question is to ask how exactly the poem remembers. By describing the poem as “performative,” I regard the poem as enacting the work of which it speaks; that is to say that the act of reading the poem is the act of memory. With Vismann in mind, this operation is made more apparent by way of a contrast between what I refer to as the poetic discourse and the legal discourse. Structured as a poem that reaches into the past by beginning with the present, the act of reading becomes the act of remembering. The third stanza, which recounts the violent history of the highway, is a making-known of the operation of law. This operation, which is law’s history, is precisely what Vismann describes as the real that is cancelled and unsayable in the symbolic discourse of law. Ng, strikingly, has spelled it out in his poem. The dispossession of houses in the kampong (village) as remapping is the cancellation of one set of documents for the putting in place of another. This operation of law through files seeks to be forgotten. Operating in direct contradiction to the law, which seeks to elide its own history or notion of a “before,” the poetic discourse as I have laid it out here is a remembering and making visible that is enacted by the act of reading: the poem puts the operation of law before us.
Similarly, reprising the history of the highway is an act of repetition, the injunction to read and thereby enact the event again in memory. This notion of repetition has psychoanalytic bearing; for Freud, repetition is different from remembering: “Remembering [...] could not but give the impression of an experiment carried out in the laboratory. Repeating [...] implies conjuring up a piece of real life” (152). Where remembering is a memory spoken, repetition is an acting out of “real life.” Ng’s poem is both: reading of the highway is a repetition of the act of remembering, insofar as the memory is not the reader’s and thus reading is the repetition of the real memory of another. While Freud’s repetition lies in the possibilities enabled by introducing the safety of the analytical setting wherein the analyst and analysand may “work-through” the unsayable memory implied by the act of repetition, the poem has no such reparative goal. Ng is not attempting to perform an individuated healing practice, but impels the reader to contend with the event that caused the repetition. It does not make sense to ask readers to heal themselves through the memory of another; rather, the repetition in this case has the act of remembering that lays bare the real operation of law as an end. The reader finds themselves not just remembering, but refusing the symbolizing work of the law by speaking that which has been foreclosed, namely the dispossession of land for new roads.
In another way, the poem is also instructive. As opposed to the discourse of law, which seeks to elide its operations in moves that mystify, Ng’s poetic discourse makes known its own operations and in doing so clarifies and instructs. In the second stanza, where Ng speaks about signifiers that point to the past—Baudrillard’s vestiges of the real—Ng’s speaker trains the reader’s eye. The second stanza, comprised of three lines, is first a reminder, then a demonstration by example: “But there are always signs. / Ornamental plants. Shattered clumps of asphalt. / Trees set in ordered ranks like soldiers on parade” (lines 7-9). Again, attention might be paid to the movement of the poem. “But there are always signs” comes after the first stanza, which is a wistful recounting of the roads; the “but” thus acts as a jolting reminder that the legal discourse enacted through maps is not the singular truth. Though maps may precede the territory, Ng’s point is that no act of cancellation is ever fully successful. Some form of what was there before remains, and what is needed is a trained eye. As well, Ng’s comparison between trees in “ordered ranks” and the “soldiers on parade” discloses the work of the poem as reading the process of the law, which conditions both the military and the territory, against itself. This moment may be read as biographical, too: as a Singaporean man, Ng’s experience in mandatory military conscription provides the backdrop to this reference. Ng lived experience of the force of the law as a soldier on parade in concealed military bases is ironically reconfigured in the ambiguous meanings of this line as he makes known the hidden operation of the law, just as he brings to light the hidden workings of the army. This part of Ng’s poem can be read as training a poetic sensibility, demonstrating how the legal discourse may be regarded as something to be undone and deconstructed by revealing its workings.
Ng’s poem, as performative and instructive work, foregrounds the sensibility required in order to remember the remnants involved in legal discourse, what I have here referred to as the real foreclosed by the work of its symbolic order. It also demonstrates how an orientation toward reading as remembering is an end in itself, in that reading is the work of remembering that refuses the legal discourse’s imposition of selective and intentional forgetting. With this theoretical framework, it might be useful to now think through what it is that literature that memorializes, remembers, and recovers in the face of legal and economic force is doing performatively. In Siegfried Kracauer’s “Farewell to the Linden Arcade,” Kracauer’s “farewell” is both a historicizing of the time of the arcade—an institution and space no longer needed in the next stage of capitalism—and a kind of memoir of the arcade that, in parallel ways, performs what Ng’s poem does. The Linden Arcade, for Kracauer, was a space that held a unique role within a specific historical moment of capitalism. Constructed through the ironworks that marked the flourishing of industrial capitalism, the “half light” of the arcades housed the phantasmagoric, perverse other of the bourgeois capitalism outside it: “Everything excluded from this bourgeois life because it was not presentable or even because it ran counter to the official world view settled in the arcades” (338). As capitalism continues, this function of the arcades vanishes; Kracauer concludes the essay: “What would be the point of an arcade [Passage] in a society that is itself only a passageway?” (342). In Kracauer’s view, the arcades was the sign of its own demise. The conditions of its production signalled the way it would end. The society that is itself a passageway has no need for a bourgeois morality that conceals its desires in the dark underground; the drawing out of objects from the arcades kills their ghostly presence, leaving behind a department store of mass-produced commodities. One thinks of Baudrillard’s “ecstasy of communication” wherein the perverse and obscene constitute communication itself.
In the opening paragraph to his essay, Kracauer recounts: “When I recently strolled through it [the Linden Arcade] once again, [...] the work of destruction was already almost complete. [...] Fortunately, the old Renaissance architecture—that horribly beautiful imitation of style from the time of our fathers and grandfathers—still peeked through here and there” (337). Kracauer then goes on to describe gaps in the new construction where traces of the old arcade may be found: a pillar that still “brazenly displayed its brick relief work,” and other signs of the old that were “now sinking into a mass grave of cool marble” (337). In the next paragraph, and as a segue into his theorizing, he remembers his “boyhood fantasies” of “the dark passageway” (338). Approaching Kracauer’s work as poetic is both generative and not very difficult, for it lends itself well to poetry. Set before his theorizing and his historicizing, these two paragraphs reads like a witnessing: it is a testimonial that recounts his experience with a disappearing arcade, or an arcade that has since disappeared. But maybe this kind of legalistic language fails here: if it is a witnessing, what is the crime and who is the perpetrator? If the answer is capitalism, what is the justice? If the justice is simply a call to overturn capitalism, then what is the critique? That is, why include this remembering? In the face of these questions, Kracauer’s theorizing, historicizing, and witnessing all become a kind of making-known in the style of Ng’s; hence Kracauer’s pointing to signs of the arcade’s disappearance in the architecture, like Ng’s instructive moment. These observations are not (only) rhetorical flourishes, but observations set into text that are intended to bring to light the intentionally erased violent process of transformation and replacement. The concealment of the architecture of the old arcade is quite literally the elision of the process of cancellation that Vismann considers part of the work of law; here, it is not just the law, but capitalism, modernity, and its discontents.
It is possible to see Kracauer and Ng performing, quite literally, the work of remembering in the face of an active and selective forgetting; forgetting in law, perhaps, but really through any work that seeks to displace and transform, to disavow what it used to be. This speaking and symbolizing the foreclosed against processes that seek to erase their own past (law, capitalism) intervenes into movements that refuse to reflect and meditate on the damage they cause. Here, finally, is the scene of the “historical materialist” against the catastrophe at the feet of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (391). Ng’s poem and Kracauer’s essay are not the wistful rememberings of subjects who are trying to work through their relationships with a now foregone past; these are works that seeks to encounter history, “appropriating” that which is under the “danger” of disappearing. This work seeks to force a meditation on that which seeks to conceal its history, which I have called “mapping,” not in order to disavow the disappearance of the object meditated on (the road and the Linden Arcade)—it would be reductive to think of Ng and Kracauer’s writing as pure fantasy to defend against their disappearing objects—but to disavow the kind of discourses and symbolic acts that seek to erase their operations of erasure and their concomitant damage. The remnant, the vestiges of the real, the waste that is intentionally lost and concealed yet observed and remembered through poetic orientation, becomes that which is spoken and remembered in order to refuse the operation of forgetting.
Hui Wong is a Communication Studies M.A. Student in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. This essay was written as a BMS student in the UBC Bachelor of Media Studies program.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation [1981]. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
—. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, The New Press, 2002, pp. 126-34.
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings Volume 4 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 389-400.
Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II).” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12, 1914, pp. 145-156.
Kracauer, Siegfried. “Farewell to the Linden Arcade.” The Mass Ornament. Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 337-342.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alan Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, Norton, 1991.
Ng, Leonard. “Forgotten Roads.” Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore, edited by Leonard Ng, Azhar Ibrahim, Chow Teck Seng, Kanagalatha Krishnasamy, and Tan Chee Lay, Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd for Poetry Festival Singapore, 2019, p. 56.
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. 2000. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Stanford University Press, 2008.
Picture: “Road construction, Singapore” by Jnzl's Photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
