Recapitulations

February 2, 2015
Recognizing the incomplete nature of recollection and admitting to the glow of childish romanticism, distinguished anthropologist, philosopher, and literary critic Crapanzano (The Harkis) nevertheless deftly conducts us, sometimes ploddingly and haltingly, often brilliantly and dazzlingly, through the twists and turns of a life lived reflectively. He takes us from his childhood on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital—where his father worked—to his peripatetic life through Europe and America as a teenager, his college and graduate school years at Harvard and Columbia, respectively, studying with Paul de Man and Clifford Geertz among others, and his anthropological work in various parts of the world. The structure of his life provides only the thinnest veil beneath which lies Crapanzano’s elegant probing of identity, nostalgia, memory, and loss. In a meditation that illustrates the shortcomings and the promise of his own memoir, Crapanzano reflects: “An autobiography strives to resurrect that life, but is destined to fail, if only because, like Narcissus, seduced by his own image, the autobiographer is seduced by his or her story. To resist that seduction is to recognize the artifice of the endeavor, its inevitable deceits, and elaborations.”

January 15, 2015
A book of memories about the act of remembering.In this memoir, anthropologist Crapanzano (Comparative Literature and Anthropology/CUNY Graduate Center; The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals, 2011, etc.) uses all the tools of his trade, approaching his memories skeptically and psychoanalytically, as a set of data where the truth is wrapped in self-protective layers. He considers all the key events of his life: growing up on the grounds of a New Jersey mental institution-where his father was a psychiatrist- then losing his father at an early age, which led to estrangement from his mother; a peripatetic foreign and domestic education at Harvard, followed by marriage to New Yorker writer Jane Kramer and a long career at CUNY. Crapanzano knew Margaret Mead and Jacques Lacan, and he saw the rise and fall of Paul de Man-the literary theorist later outed as a Nazi collaborator-but the book is more concerned with what he's learned along the way. Memoirists, he writes, always want the big picture; they "have to give their life a raison d'etre that transcends it." He never takes the straight route. Like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, Crapanzano becomes unstuck in time, recalling events as they occur to him, casually going from present to near present to far past to many places in between, always weighing what he felt then against what he knows now. He can be rough (or ruthlessly honest) regarding old friends, but he never stops interrogating himself. "What was my style? What were my styles?" he asks of his younger self. "Was I like everyone else at Harvard?" Later, he questions his desire to settle old scores: "Am I being discreet in writing this? Am I avenging myself?" Crapanzano's self-conscious, self-analytical style makes this a unique and interesting search for lost time.

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