Discuss the techniques that L.P Hartley and Ted Hughes employ to evoke memory in ‘The Go-Between’ and ‘Birthday Letters’

Hartley in ‘The Go-Between’ opens with the immortal lines ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. It is a broad statement that can be read on many different levels. You could look at the obvious technological advances that have changed the way we live in the past one hundred years (the past fifty for Leo), the social differences in class or creed or how two World wars have changed Britain and the way we live altogether. Leo remembers the events of that summer by what is recorded in his diary, in which he wrote in quite some detail what happened. But, his diary proved only to be a medium, which evoked memories that he didn’t understand at the time.

The main difference, despite one being a novel and the other being a collection of  poems, is at how Hughes and Hartley look at time. In ‘Birthday Letters’ Hughes distorted time to the point that there was order in the non-chronological structure of birthday letters, which in turn creates a timeless aspect in the poems. Whereas Hartley, made sure that the reader knows where they are in time (they look back on Leo’s time and Brandham Hall with Leo) with the ‘The Go-Between’.

In ‘The Go-Between’  Hartley utilized a very faltering narrator in the form of Leo, the accuracy of his memory is questionable as all the memory that is flooding back has been evoked by the proceedings in his diary. The clarity of his memory has been somewhat smudged and repressed thus distorting the original events in his own mind. This shortcoming in memory edges Leo on to remember the events of the summer of 1900. To trigger this ‘flash flood’ of memory, Hartley has Leo looking over his personal possessions, which then ignites the dormant memories that come back at an astonishing rate and keep accelerating until the climax of the story.