Abstract
Is it possible to remember Hiroshima and, if it is, what exactly is being remembered? This paper uses Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour as a way of asking this question. The problem of remembering is identified as being due to how nuclear explosions are beyond the human capacity to understand. The paper draws on the work of Günther Anders to explore the implications of Hiroshima for the human understanding of human possibilities.
The 1959 movie Hiroshima Mon Amour is a meditation on memory and forgetting. Directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by Marguerite Duras, it tells the story of a French actress, known only as She, who, at the end of a trip to Hiroshima to play the part of a European nurse in a film about the immediate aftermath of the nuclear bombing, has a short, passionate affair with a Japanese architect, He. 1 Because the affair happens in Hiroshima, ‘Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning’ (Duras, 1961: 9). The lovers are ‘covered successively with the ashes, the dew, of atomic death – and the sweat of love fulfilled’ (Duras, 1961: 8). The perspiration on the lovers’ bodies suggests radiant dust on naked skin, and their embraces become like death-clutches. Their every word becomes loaded with the weight of what She and He remember … and what they forget. Their every silence becomes pregnant with the memories they prepare to speak … or choose to leave unsaid. And so, ‘Their personal story, however brief it may be, always dominates Hiroshima’ (Duras, 1961: 10). But Hiroshima is the context and charge of this personal story. Hiroshima is what makes this ordinary love memorable, not forgettable. Can Hiroshima be dominated? The film is about Hiroshima and ‘mon amour’. By the end of the film the and has evaporated.
Robert Jay Lifton criticized Hiroshima Mon Amour for failing to bring the love story into ‘convincing confrontation’ with ‘Hiroshima’s grotesque death imagery’ (Lifton, 1967: 468). But perhaps the lack of obvious confrontation was precisely the point Duras and director Resnais were trying to make. It is a film about memory and forgetting, about how the one implies the other. It is about how speaking of one thing is to remain silent about another, and about how a commitment to the one means a degree of practical indifference towards the other. Hiroshima or ‘mon amour’? Hiroshima Mon Amour is about the inevitability of the complicity of memory in what Richard Rorty called cruel incuriosity (Rorty, 1989: 158).
You were here, at Hiroshima …
No … of course I wasn’t.
That’s true … How stupid of me.
But my family was at Hiroshima. I was off fighting the war.
A stroke of luck, eh?
Yes.
Lucky for me too. (Duras, 1961: 28)
This little discussion happens in bed, as She and He embrace. She proves herself to be ‘both ecstatic and cruel, noticing and heartless’. She is one of those typical characters of everyday life who are ‘only selectively curious, obsessives who are as sensitive as they are callous’ (Rorty, 1989: 160). When She sees a stroke of personal good fortune in the presumed death only of the family of He, She clearly exemplifies the cruel incuriosity Rorty spoke about. She is sensitive and passionate in her relationship with He, but utterly incurious about his wider life and, especially, his past. In this way it is justifiable to see She as actually cruel. She remembers his ‘luck’ and instantly forgets his loss. This is not because She is an especially bad person, quite the contrary. She is cruelly incurious as a consequence of what Hiroshima has become. The sharpest twist of this cruelty is how She can nevertheless believe herself actually to be extremely curious. Indeed, she is curious and has attempted to find out about Hiroshima. She seeks to remember and to know. She wishes and tries to understand what happened. But can She understand without cruel incuriosity?
Günther Anders spoke about how nuclear weapons have made us ‘smaller than ourselves’. This is because humans have created technologies utterly beyond our abilities of understanding and imagination. It is impossible for us to visualize what it is now possible to make happen. Furthermore, when Hiroshima made it possible to speculate about the instant death of all humankind, it also destroyed the structures of confidence. 2 As Anders said, even in the face of Auschwitz it was possible to be confident in the continuation of something after or outside of the camps (to give a trite example, many survivor memoirs talk about hopes for life after liberation – despite everything, the prisoners imagined a place and time to and in which they might be liberated). Hiroshima demolishes this confidence. It is perfectly possible that there will be absolutely nothing after or outside of the next nuclear explosion (Anders, 1962: 496). A very similar realization runs through Hiroshima Mon Amour. As Duras wrote, and as the film implies, it is ‘impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima’. The frameworks of understanding and confidence have all fallen apart. Duras saw any ‘knowledge of Hiroshima being stated a priori’ as ‘an exemplary delusion of the mind’ (Duras, 1961: 9, emphasis added).
Yet the statement of such knowledge a priori is indeed culturally established as possible. The character of She certainly believes it is possible. She claims in all sincerity to be able to understand and speak of Hiroshima. Her curiosity has been satisfied. She is able to visualize Hiroshima because she has visited the museum – ‘four times at the museum in Hiroshima’ (Duras, 1961: 17) – and seen the artefacts invested with an authenticity of telling the truth of the bomb. She has walked amidst ‘the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, among the photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, the explanations, for want of something else’ (Duras, 1961: 17). The authenticity given to the photographs and reconstructions by virtue of them being placed in the museum overcomes the nagging doubt of the ‘for want of something else’. They overcome the absence of ‘something else’. What else? They satisfy curiosity by offering a priori evidential knowledge. Thanks to the museum – and, as the film makes clear, thanks also to the establishment of Hiroshima as a site containable within the tourist gaze – there is an implication of the ability of culturally authorized memory to contain even a nuclear holocaust. In this way the gaze of She is directed in some directions and not others. The museum satisfies her curiosity because its artefacts legitimate certain questions (the questions for which the artefacts are both the cause and the answer) while rendering other questions illegitimate. Consequently it is possible to ask whether the museum is both a memorial site and a generator of cruel incuriosity since it orients curiosity to see some things and not others. For instance She seems to be remarkably blind to the wasteland in the middle of which stands the modernist hotel where she is staying. Is the museum with its objects invested with the weight of authenticity a site of exemplary delusion? Does the museum imply a cultural redemption of human largeness from the nuclear? Does the museum make it possible to see? Or does it lead to blindness?
Hiroshima Mon Amour is an essay on how there is indeed talk about Hiroshima on account of these authentic reminders of the bomb. Yet the film goes deeper than description. It shows how this talk, this knowledge, is actually founded upon a delusion permitting cruel incuriosity without bad faith. It shows how an objective reminder of one thing denies space to the memory of something else. These are some of the stakes of the film’s magnificent opening dialogue with its repeated antiphonic: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. I saw everything. Everything. (Duras, 1961: 15)
A little later the exchange is strengthened, and seeing shifts to claims about knowing. In Duras’s terms this is also the point at which there is a slip into exemplary delusion: I know everything …
Nothing. You know nothing. (Duras, 1961: 21)
This is the challenge Hiroshima throws down at the level of culture. This is also the challenge this paper seeks to explore: What is remembered when Hiroshima is remembered? More pertinently perhaps, what is forgotten? 3
The paper is divided into three parts. The first explores the position of She: ‘I saw everything’. What is the status of this everything and how can it be seen? The second part of the paper draws out from the antiphonic ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima’. What does this mean? In its concluding section the paper wonders whether Hiroshima has generated a terminal paradox at the heart of the contemporary human condition.
I saw everything
She describes her visits to the museum with an almost obsessive cataloguing of the exhibits. She mentions the other visitors when she was there and continues to list the melted iron, the human skin, the scorched stones and the clumps of hair. She connects the uncomfortable heat of Peace Square during her visits with the literally melting heat of the explosion. The nuclear heat invests the Hiroshima day with an overwhelming significance it presumably lacks in Tokyo or Yokohama. 4 The summer heat in Hiroshima is greater than the thermometer can possibly register. She carries on to talk about the museum’s reconstructions and films. She almost admits them to be illusions, but they have emotional effects and, thus, come to be possessed of an authenticity all their own: ‘the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry’ (Duras, 1961: 18). She has seen all of these things, and all of these things constitute the objective everything justifying the cognitive everything of her claim to ‘know’.
Her claim rests on a presumption: everything is in the museum. This is a doubly-weighted presumption. On the one hand it is a simple description of the content of the museum. Everything she catalogues indeed is in the museum. But on the other hand, the statement can be taken in a quantitative manner: everything there is to see is within the museum. The totality of what is seen is identified with the totality of what can be seen, thus reinforcing the presumption of the claim to have seen everything. Everything it is possible to see and necessary to be able to know is here. Consequently the museum is a site of Duras’s exemplary delusion. As Kyo Maclear wrote of the museum in Hiroshima Mon Amour (although the remark applies to all museums): ‘The four walls provide a centre, a focal point, for envisioning meaning. Four walls so that we might know where to look to see everything (that counts, can be counted, accounted for)’. And as Maclear continues to comment, in a passage which immediately recalls Rorty’s cruel incuriosity, the museum offers ‘four walls so that we may be freed from looking beyond to bordering longings and miseries for which no records whatsoever exist’ (Maclear, 1999: 146). These longings and miseries include the family of He. What is beyond the walls need be neither looked at nor considered because within the walls there is everything.
The four walls of the museum have another significance. They do not just act as a kind of container. They also invest what is within them with authenticity. The museum anchors the collection of artefacts ‘in time and space’ and lends it ‘unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin, 1970: 214). Furthermore, the items She catalogues are possessed of an aura of authenticity, indeed with an authenticity lending them aura, because they have a unique existence quite beyond any reproduction. They are, and evidently can only be, here.
The artefacts are auratic in two ways. First of all they are marked by the history of which they stand as a record. According to Walter Benjamin, from whom this discussion of authenticity and aura has obviously been taken: ‘The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’ (Benjamin, 1970: 215). This is precisely how She talks about the items in the museum. They are identified as authentic because they bear witness to what they have undergone. She tells He: ‘I myself looked thoughtfully at the iron. The burned iron. The broken iron, the iron made vulnerable as flesh. I saw the bouquet of bottle caps: who would have suspected that?’ (Duras, 1961: 17). As She describes it the iron transmits its presence in history, and is testimony to the impact of a nuclear bomb. The burned, broken and grotesque (the bouquet of bottle caps) iron has an authenticity because it is quite unique. It is a testimony to what happened here. The iron uniquely exists as a testimony to the history of Hiroshima.
What She sees in the museum is auratic in a second way. Benjamin illustrated aura, the sense of authenticity, with the example of looking at mountains or at the branch of a tree on a summer day. The aura of the mountains and the tree is a register of how they always seem to be distant from, and independent of, the observer (Benjamin, 1970: 216). This relates to the artefacts in the Hiroshima museum too. Museums create distance, however close the artefact might be. As Andreas Huyssen points out, a museum removes an artefact from its everyday context, ‘thereby enhancing its alterity’ (Huyssen, 1995: 33). Artefacts are fixed in the time and space of the museum where they happen to be. Consequently what is in the museum is distant from the everyday and ordinary. Huyssen argues: ‘Objects that have lasted through the ages are by that very virtue located outside of the destructive circulation of commodities destined for the garbage heap’ (Huyssen, 1995: 33). In the case of the Hiroshima museum, the artefacts have lasted through the giant waste-creation of the bombing itself and have an aura for precisely this reason. They have proven themselves to be independent of the everyday because they went through the day of the destruction of their everydayness. They are everything remaining. They are authentically everything.
Huyssen went on to mention how ‘the more mummified an object is, the more intense its ability to yield experience, a sense of the authentic’ (Huyssen, 1995: 33). An object is mummified when it is completely lifted out of the everyday. Huyssen’s point is about how mummification is the establishment of an insurmountable distance between the observer and the artefact. 5 A mummy is something once living. It signifies its unique ‘having been here’ thanks to preservation. In this way Huyssen’s use of the word ‘mummification’ immediately brings to mind the human remains She saw in the museum: ‘Human skin floating, surviving, still in the bloom of its agony … Anonymous heads of hair that the women of Hiroshima, when they awoke in the morning, discovered had fallen out’ (Duras, 1961: 17). The skin and hair possess authenticity in themselves, but their ability to ‘yield experience’ to the museum visitor is enhanced by the extent to which they are a survival of the human as specimen even as the human as social being has been destroyed. In other words, the skin and hair are primarily mummified in the circumstances of their display in the museum, but they are mummified to a second degree because they are also distanced from the very humanity whose suffering they authenticate. The skin and hair are generic. They are signs of humans and not of this or another particular human. Indeed about whose skin this might be, whose hair (as well as questions about how they were obtained as artefacts, and the circumstances of their selection for display) the museum allows for cruel incuriosity. The skin and hair become sufficient. They are everything.
When Benjamin discussed aura it was in what he identified as the circumstances of its destruction on account of the development of the technological means of the reproduction of images. But Huyssen stresses how museums often turn to reproduced images in order to bolster the authenticity of their displays. It is easy to conflate the films and images used in museums with those watched on domestic television, but Huyssen emphasizes the difference. It resides in how the aura of the artefacts in the museum lends an authenticity to the technologically reproduced images shown alongside them. There is a presumptive slippage: since the artefact is authentic the film or photograph cannot possibly be fake. As Huyssen puts it: ‘The materiality of the exhibited objects themselves seems to function like a guarantee against simulation’ (Huyssen, 1995: 33–4). As She tells He: ‘The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible. The films have been made as authentically as possible’ (Duras, 1961: 18). 6 There is in fact a symbiosis of the artefact and the image. The temporality of the image rescues the artefact from absolute mummification. The image protects the artefact from becoming museal precisely because both are within the walls of a museum and thereby able to stake a claim to authenticity. There is a kind of mirroring. The artefacts authenticate the images, and the images partially reinsert the artefacts into everyday flows, making them phenomenologically knowable. Here there is another slippage. Maybe She was not entirely wrong when She moved from a statement about having seen everything to one about knowing everything.
There is more. Benjamin identified the ‘value’ of the auratic object with its use in ritual (Benjamin, 1970: 217). Hiroshima Mon Amour appreciates the connection of authenticity to ritual at a number of levels. Within the film itself, there is newsreel and original footage of demonstrations (Duras, 1961: 42). The demonstrators carry banners with slogans as predictable as doubtless sincere. The marchers act in the expected ways. The demonstrations are indeed kinds of ritualistic action, deriving their validity from the uniqueness of the spaces where they take place. The demonstrations with their unquestioned – and in Hiroshima unquestionable – stress on peace invest the artefact of Hiroshima itself with aura. Hiroshima is the value of peace. As She answers after He has asked what film she is making: ‘A film about Peace. What else do you expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture about Peace? (Duras, 1961: 34). The film in which She is acting has to be about peace because this has become the purpose of the rituals taking place in Hiroshima, rituals such as demonstrations and, indeed, films about peace (for discussions of the peace demonstrations and the politics hidden by the rituals, see Oe, 1995; Yoneyama, 1999). Meanwhile, Duras describes the film She has been in Hiroshima to make. It confirms the connections of aura and ritual: ‘An enlightening film about Peace has just been completed. Not at all a ridiculous film, but just another film’ (Duras, 1961: 11). Moreover, it is just another film about peace made in Hiroshima. There have been and shall be others, including Hiroshima Mon Amour itself. These films too become integral components of the Hiroshima everything. Duras talks about a parade, not a demonstration: ‘Children parading, students parading. Dogs. Cats. Idlers. All Hiroshima is there, as it always is when the cause of world peace is at stake. A baroque parade’ (Duras, 1961: 11).
Hiroshima now radiates the aura of peace. Peace becomes the authentic and ritual meaning of Hiroshima. 7 It is the ultimate everything and the ultimate exemplary delusion. Indeed, thanks to this delusion it becomes possible to be cruelly incurious about anything else since, by definition, the category of everything denies space for anything else.
You saw nothing
The response of He to She’s claims to have seen and to know everything is quite consistent. It is flat denial. He says She has seen and knows nothing of Hiroshima. But what is the status of his denial of her claims? It is certainly not a personal attack, or at least if it is the attack is so subtle She – and it must be said the audience too – fails to notice. Her voice never changes in response to his denials, neither do her actions. She and He neither argue nor disagree. She states her position, and He simply denies it, over and over again. Since his denial is a negation it is not expanded upon. If He provided evidence to support his denial or, indeed, tried to justify it, in effect He just would be telling her she had been looking in the wrong places. It would simply be a discussion about where best to look, a question of the most reliable guidebook. Yet the stakes of the antiphony are rather more significant than this. He does not refute her claim, He refuses it. On what grounds?
When He refuses to accept her claim to have seen everything He is not making a claim to be a privileged eyewitness. His repeated you saw nothing is not a statement along the lines of, ‘you saw nothing compared to what I saw’. He does not make any claim to greater reliability. After all, He had been ‘lucky’ enough to escape the fate of the rest of his family by being away in the military. He cannot claim to have seen things She has not, because He was absent too when the bomb was dropped. Perhaps the denial of her seeing is in a different register entirely. Perhaps it is not a statement about knowledge, rather it is about there actually being nothing to see. Here then you saw nothing means ‘there is nothing in Hiroshima anymore for anyone to see. It has all been destroyed’. This would tie in with his reasons for being in Hiroshima. He is an architect, and of course architects are in the business of building things on empty ground. But this interpretation of his antiphonic fails because there are things for her to see in Hiroshima. As She knows full well there is the museum and there is also the hotel where they lay together. There is the bar they visit together and a railway station. Meanwhile the mangled ruin of the Peace Dome has transcended materiality and become the authentication of the impact of a nuclear blast on buildings. 8 Consequently even if materiality is denied, still something remains. Hiroshima is more than a ‘there’ with buildings and things to see. It is also an aura.
Sarah French has also thought through the possible meanings of the antiphonic you saw nothing. First, French stresses the status of She as a tourist. She is doing things tourists do in Hiroshima because the nuclear explosion has made the city a tourist attraction. Hiroshima Mon Amour shows the tour bus with its happy guide, and other paraphernalia of the industry. This is tourism because of what has happened as opposed to what is happening. She sees nothing because the bombing, the initial cause of her gaze (and the reasons for her being in the city in the first place), is decisively in the past tense (French, 2008: 5). However, and as French does not stress, in the film She is quite persistent about how the bombing continues. For example, She implies it is still happening in the hospitals where the survivors wait to die (Duras, 1961: 20). Second, French emphasizes how She has seen the everything she claims to have seen through mediation. She has seen films of Hiroshima, not Hiroshima. According to Sarah French, films like those in the museum or newsreels (in other words, the very films woven into Hiroshima Mon Amour itself), ‘are dangerous … because they give the tourists the impression that they have witnessed something of what actually happened when all that they have seen is the representation that stands in place of the real’ (French, 2008: 5). So, She might well have seen everything, but this does not mean She has seen a real everything. French’s point is well-made, but as Huyssen shows, artefact and image are mutually authenticating in the museum. The images She has seen might not be entirely real, but neither are they necessarily entirely unreal. Third, and perhaps most usefully, French links the antiphonic you saw nothing to the way the bomb survivors are shown in the evidently documentary footage in Hiroshima Mon Amour. As French puts it: ‘The footage of Hiroshima does not allow the atomic bomb survivors to enter the frame for more than a few seconds; they turn away from the gaze of the camera resisting characterisation’. She continues: ‘The very presence of the incomplete images points to the absence of all that cannot be incorporated of the atomic bomb experience, to all that exceeds the representational frame’ (French, 2008: 5–6). This is an important insight.
As Anders argued, the nuclear itself escapes the ‘representational frame’. It exceeds any frame at all. The nuclear is quite beyond any incorporation not founded upon an exemplary delusion. This points to further dimensions of you saw nothing. There appear to be neo-Kantian underpinnings to Anders’s understanding of what he referred to as the ‘atomic age’. He assumes an identity between the cognitive capacity of the human mind and the possibilities of human action. We can understand what we produce, and what we produce can be understood through the frames of our cognitive abilities. This identity underpins coherent experience, understanding and action in the world. It is also an identity which can be presumed no more. Practical achievements now outstrip cognitive sense. Thanks to Hiroshima, ‘our pragmatic life horizon … the one within which we can reach and be reached, has become limitless’. Any attempt to ‘visualize’ this ‘limitlessness’ necessarily ‘violate[s] the “natural narrowness” of our imagination’ (Anders, 1962: 497). 9 Indeed, even the old human dream of the achievement of the infinite, as a transcendence of the finiteness of mortality, has become utterly redundant. Metaphysical anxieties have been resolved in a most unexpected and brutal way. According to Anders, after Hiroshima humans are no longer finite because it is now quite possible for the moment of the individual death to coincide precisely with the universal death. And the moment of universal death is the end of time. Consequently, in a very real sense infinity and the infinite life – the infinite life as the ability to endure through all time – has become ours thanks to the possible simultaneity of all deaths and therefore also the end of human time (Anders, 1956: 146).
Anders spotted how the anxiety generated by the lack of identity between Hiroshima and the human, as well as the collapse of confidence in all frameworks of understanding, leads to a retreat to the safety of empirical sensual perception. What is beyond the ability of the cognitive to grasp is reduced to the empiricism of sense perception and feeling. She has seen everything. She feels the heat in Peace Square. Anders’s point would explain why She ends her catalogue of the exhibits seen in the museum with the declaration: ‘I’ve always wept over the fate of Hiroshima’ (Duras, 1961: 18). Anders sees this kind of reduction of the limitless to more or less passing feelings as nothing other than ‘false witness’ since the empirical senses – with their extension into feeling – are far too narrow to come to terms with what Hiroshima entails (Anders, 1962: 497). For instance, it is quite impossible to feel the full heat of a nuclear explosion and talk about it an hour or two afterwards. To put this back into Duras’s terms, the reduction of response to feeling is another exemplary delusion.
When Anders pursued the threads of this analysis he identified a split resonant with the different positions of She and He in Hiroshima Mon Amour. ‘In short’, Anders proposed, ‘man as producer, and man as a being capable of emotions, have lost sight of each other. Reality now seems attributable only to each of the specialized fragments designated by an “as”’ (Anders, 1956: 154). In the film He is ‘man as producer’ and She is the human as capable of emotion. Each character can thus be interpreted as expressive of one dimension of the deeply divided human condition in what Anders called the ‘atomic age’. By extension then, when He refuses her claim to have seen everything He is speaking the truth of humanity as producer, and here it is worth remembering He is an architect. He is speaking with the voice of the modern human who is aware of the technological transcendence of human cognition and action. He is speaking with a voice She cannot understand, and according to a dimension of human being She is without. Even when, maybe especially when, She looks at He, as well as when She looks in the museum, She truly and indeed sees nothing. She sees the production beyond understanding, the production which is limitless and incapable of becoming a totality of everything. Yet She does experience the totality of her emotions. All She can depend upon is the truth of her emotional, sensual perception. She speaks with the voice – and feels with the perceptual apparatus – of the human as capable of emotions. Her claim to have seen and to know everything is as valid as his refusal of her statement, because it is grounded in the aspect of human being He cannot grasp.
If this lead is followed it suggests an explanation of one of the more poignant and mysterious exchanges in the film. She says to He: You destroy me. You’re so good for me. You destroy me. You’re so good for me … Take me. Deform me, make me ugly. (Duras, 1961: 25)
Although the statement is presented within Hiroshima Mon Amour as pillow talk between two lovers, the lead from Anders writes it at a far more abstract level. This is a plea for completion, for the reconciliation of the human as emotion with the human as production. The characters of She and He stop being the representations of individuals, and instead they become allegories of aspects of what it means to be human after Hiroshima. He is both good for and destructive of She because He adds what She lacks (the gendered dimension of the film which this reading uncovers is inescapable). She turns to He – not He to She – because ‘the producer half, by far the stronger, drags the emotional half behind it’ (Anders, 1956: 155). It drags rather than brings because these two sides of what it means to be human are no longer linked. Hiroshima has torn them apart. She asks to be deformed and to be made ugly because only in this way can ‘the horror of man’s present condition’ in which ‘the conflicting forces within him are no longer inter-related; they are so far removed from each other, each has become so completely independent, that they no longer even come to grips’ be endured (Anders, 1956: 154). And so it also becomes possible to think in a different way about why She and He embrace so tightly and insistently as the film begins. They are not each of them holding a lover. They are each of them trying to remain in touch with something they lack as themselves. This is the situation all of us now have to confront.
Consequently the end of the film is not just the end of a love affair. More than this, it is also the end of the chance of a reconciliation of the human as producer with the human as emotional. Life can only carry on if the dream of their previous unity is forgotten. As She says to He in the last dialogue of Hiroshima Mon Amour: ‘I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already! Look how I’m forgetting you! Look at me!’ (Duras, 1961: 83).
Conclusion
Can Hiroshima be remembered? Yes it can, but only on the basis of an exemplary delusion and through the practice of a cruel incuriosity. Yet the consequent silences in remembering need never be confronted because the aura of Hiroshima with its rituals of peace is everything. Can Hiroshima be forgotten? Yes it can, but only if the aura and rituals of Hiroshima are denied and only if the bombing is taken to be utterly beyond any frame of understanding, only if the human understanding is now nothing. Are we capable of remembering and forgetting Hiroshima? Absolutely, since if Anders is right we are now split just like the atom itself.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is a lever with which it is possible to open these questions and challenges. The film offers a phenomenological encounter with the cultural meanings of Hiroshima, and it does so with honesty. The best evidence of the integrity of the film is its refusal to offer easy answers. Hiroshima Mon Amour reveals the questions the ‘atomic age’ needs to ask but cannot possibly answer without delusion and cruelty. Instead, what it reveals is the extent to which the human condition in the ‘atomic age’ is lived through and in a terminal paradox. The phrase is from Milan Kundera, and a terminal paradox exists when a situation emerges in which contradictions cannot be reconciled (Kundera, 1988: 10). To claim to know Hiroshima is delusion and to see everything is to be blind. To refute claims to having seen Hiroshima is perhaps honest, but it leads to silence. To feel an emotional response to Hiroshima is hubris, but to be a producer of the limitless is to make humanity smaller than itself. These are aspects of a paradox which is terminal because they can only be confronted, never overcome. ‘[T]he fact that … there is no internal principle integrating these halves, defines the misery and disgrace of our condition’ (Anders, 1956: 155).