We Happy Few: Erasure and Cultural Memory
The act of selection introduced in We Happy Few: Your Lands is brought into focus in the concrete poem that forms the second triptych of this series. It is an act at the heart of culture:
The lived culture would not only have been fined down to selected documents; it would be used, in its reduced form, partly as a contribution (inevitably quite small) to the general line of human growth; partly for historical reconstruction; partly, again, as a way of having done with us, of naming and placing a particular stage of the past. The selective tradition thus creates, at one level, a general human culture; at another level, the historical record of a particular society; at a third level, most difficult to accept and assess, a rejection of considerable areas of what was once a living culture. (Williams, 1989, p.51)
The three texts used in the creation of We Happy Few: Our Flags are employed in the second triptych that comprises We Happy Few, which is a concrete erasure poem. The poem sets the speeches alongside each other and deletes words from them in order to create - or reveal - a new structure of meaning within them.
The first image-poem in the triptych, We Happy Few: In Alliance, comprises the three speeches set closely together without titles or contextual material. The subtitles in this triptych are selected from the material excluded from this original text, material which is still legible in grey in the second image-poem, We Happy Few: Into Ruins. As the first title, In Alliance, suggests, the texts are posited as bearing a relationship of alliance, partners in a rhetorical tradition. They are representatives of the tradition that valorises and glorifies militarism and conquest, evoking images of honour, victory, pride, nationalist spirit, the validity of government power, and the 'welcome' bringing of order to a culture unable to provide this grounding for itself. They are placed alongside each other to draw out the similarities of phrasing and sentiment and to show the simultaneity of their existence as part of the canon of British history and culture.
The second image-poem, We Happy Few: Into Ruins, shows a process of selection and de-selection of the textual material. This process is analogous to Raymond Williams' analysis of the process of selection which operates at the heart of the production of culture.
We tend to underestimate the extent to which the cultural tradition is not only a selection but also an interpretation. We see most past work through our own experience, without even making the effort to see it in something like its original terms. What analysis can do is not so much to reverse this, returning a work to its period, as to make the interpretation conscious, by showing historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests; and, by exploring the real patterns of the work confront us with the real nature of the choices we are making. (1989, p.52)