“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana (1863-1952)

 

George Satanyana’s quote is famous, whether you are sitting in history class or chatting with a friend, the words “history repeats itself,” are bound to arise somewhere in daily conversation. A question was raised in my English literature class briefly, however, it stuck with me for days. On our fist day of class we were given our theme for the course, which summarized is “how literature affects and creates memory.” We started with talking about why we remember, and one classmate bravely raised their hand to comment what we were all thinking, she stated, “So we don’t repeat our mistakes”. We debated on it and pondered, “If we had World War I, why did we still have World War II?” And “Why did we still have genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda even after the devastating Holocaust.”

 

I genuinely went back to my dorm room and thought about it. It was not something that could be easily answered. After all, we are studying the literature that reflects, replicates and creates memory. After the seemingly hundreds of thousands of spoken and written stories of failure and triumph, the cycle of history continues – the burning and rebuilding of cities, the suppression of women, the slavery of men and the rise and falls of empires.

 

Specifically for this blog post, I want to focus on the rise and fall of tyrannical leaders. Of course there are many positive repeating facets of history but the point of having technologies that record history are so that we don’t repeat the mistakes. Yet, we still repeat history again and again.

 

In this naturally occurring phenomenon I believe that when rulers do great things they become too concerned with their own history and neglect or fail to recognize the repetition of past history. Meaning, they do not recognize the recycling themes in history, or they don’t see that they will encounter, demise and fall to the same forces that crushed leaders before them.

 

How can literature in memory affect this?

 

I always come to the conclusion that memory in literature can’t accomplish a great deal once a person has established or asserted their power. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of sources of books, plays and recollections that exist of people’s memory, the perception of the leader is pivotal. When a leader steps into boundless power after accomplishing many great military, social, or economic victories, they will look back to their own past history as opposed to the history of others who have come before them. They will look at how they overcame diversity and struggle in their personal life and approach future problems with solutions that have already worked for them. They refuse to enter their grand libraries or archives and read about the documented problems that faced leaders before them. Therefore they won’t learn any new strategies to combat new problems. Eventually, they will lose to forces much greater than them and another wise leader will take over. A leader who has learned from the mistakes of his predecessor and will rule the nation successfully, until his accomplishments consume him and he falls into the never-ending cycle.

 

He will forever be in our eyes as just another ruler who shifted a nation from monarchy to tyranny. And he will forever be remembered as another section of a wheel that is history itself.

Michael Twamley.