Clive James on E P Thompson & the importance of remembering the past
I didn’t agree with the politics of the late Clive James. I hesitate to put things into a box but I think he was somewhere in the area of a social democratic Atlanticist. By contrast I remain firmly a socialist.
That doesn’t mean that James didn’t write interestingly or have important things to say. The book he mentions below for example is well worth a read. In it he specifically calls out the Marxist and Literary Theorist Lukacs as someone he disagrees with. By contrast I’m generally sympathetic to Lukacs work.
That is not the point here however. Rather it is James’s reference to E P Thompson and the need to remember the past. We might well debate what the past was and what it means but if we don’t remember it in the first place that debate wont occur
The book I’d most like to be remembered for
Since by definition the world will have to still be here in order for anyone to remember my book Cultural Amnesia, then that’s the one. EP Thompson talked about history rescuing the past from the “enormous condescension of posterity”. Condescension towards the past has never been more enormous than it is now. My book not only says that we have to remember the past, it presumes that we will, so there is hope in it as well as a warning.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/05/clive-james-books-overrated-all-magic-realism
Leave a Reply