A land of unlikeness

The English novel The Go-Between (1953) begins a tale of memory and loss with two sentences a historian could love: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”1 The novel’s narrator should know: he is a librarian, someone who, as the memory ghost of his twelve-year-old self will remind him, spends his days cataloguing the relics of the book-past. And many who now live with the past for a living might nod in recognition: the metaphor slips on comfortably, like a well-worn shoe. The past can feel like a place as much as it does a time—a foreign place, outside the doors of the familiar, beyond the gate and the gatekeepers of the now.

Publication Information:

Periodical Title: Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Year of Publication: 2000

Volume Number: 30

Page Numbers: 547-574

Issue Number: 3