Hopkirk and Balzac and Unremembered Memory

History, said Marx, lies like a nightmare on the backs of the living. “Another Munich…” “Another Viet Nam…” “Another 9/11…” It’s remarkable how much our politics is shaped or determined or distorted by our fears of disappointments of what went before. Stuff I’ve been reading lately offers a couple of remarkable instances of how much this true not only of things that we remember, but of things we don’t even know we remember.

One: here’s Peter Hopkirk, bard of the century (plus) long conflict between Russia and Britain over Central Asia and ultimately, over India itself. Hopkirk’s half dozen or so books are a marvelous catalog of thrust and counterthrust of (the title of his magnum opus) the “Great Game.” I happened to be reading Hopkirk’s In Search of Kim (1996)—in which Hopkirk seeks the truth behind Kipling’s novel— at just about the same time that I was reading Legacy of Ashes (2007), Tim Weiner’s new history of the CIA. After a while I got a curious kind of doppelganger: I told myself we have seen all this before—the tricks and counter-tricks, the plotting and the paranoia: so much of what the Americans and the Russians did for 50 years after World War II served to mirror what the British and the Russians had done for the 100 years before. Certainly Hopkirk felt he understood the moral:

…I am forced to share Kipling’s view of Russian duplicity and everything that has happened since—during both world wars, between the wars, and throughout the long years of the Cold War—has simply enforced this view. (`40)

So Hopkirk in 1996: I wonder what he would think of Putin’s Russia today.

And two: Balzac in The Wrong Side of Paris (Jordan Stump trans. 2003). I won’t labor out the whole plot; I want to focus on the point where old Bernard tells Godefroid how he dreams of getting good medical treatment for his daughter:

Five days ago, Monsieur, the neighborhood doctor…told me that he was not up to the challenge of curing an illness that takes on a new form every two weeks. Neuroses are the despair of medicine, he told me, for their roots lie in the system that cannot be explored. He told me of a certain Jewish doctor, widely considered a charlatan, it seems; but he observed that the man is a foreigner, a Polish refugee, and that he has earned the bitter jealousy of his fellows through his patients’ extraordinary recoveries, which have caused a great stir… (134)

No points at all for the reader who mutters “Sigmund Freud,” and marvels that Balzac is writing in the 1840s (and about the 1830s), so a generation before the eminent Viennese was even born. The doctor—his name is “Halperson” –clearly fascinates Balzac; he comes to dominate the latter portion of the novel. He’s a species of wandering Jew: a person of great insight and great evil: wise, compassionate, insightful, grasping and vainglorious—in short, the bearer of almost every stereotype that non-Jewish Europeans in the 19^th Century visited upon Jews (not incidentally, Balzac makes a dreadful hash of Jews Polish politics, but leave that for another day).

I don’t for a moment begin to suggest that Balzac “had it right” about Halperson, any more than Hopkirk necessarily “had it right” about the Russians—Balzac, at least, is far too confused and self-contradictory to be said to be “right” in measurable sense at all. I would say that reading either Balzac or Hopkirk is a bracing reminder of just how deep and durable and persistent our cultural equipment can be.