English Literature

Metaphors of memory: Resurrecting the past in modern and contemporary culture

“One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years has been the emergence of memory as a key concern in Western society”

Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia”, 2000

Globalizzazione delle memorie collettive: Le memorie di chi? Le identità nazionali (di chi)?

Humanities and memory (Heritage)

• Canon formation (history of literature, of art, etc.).
• Texts and images as repositories of memories.
• Museum, archives, libraries.
• Cities and public monuments.
• Architecture.
• Festivals.
• Cemeteries.

Memory studies

Rivista: “Memory Studies” (Sage Publications) dal 2008

Antologie critiche Metaphors of memory

We do not have access to “what” memory is, how it works and what it means except through metaphors: we cannot conceive of (individual/collective) memory without using metaphors.

“Experience”

The process of remembering involves a search, the retrieval of some past (where is it stored?), its visualisation or some other form of presentification, of bringing back, repeating, reenacting, playing the past back in the present. The process implies that, somehow, the past has been recorded/imprinted/stored somehow and somewhere in my mind or in my body.

Conceptualization of memory

The conceptualization of memory depends on the means/media invented:

• To record knowledge and experiences (recording metaphors): writing (the Greek verb graphein = writing, drawing, painting = inscription). Recording technologies: recording machines - phonograph, photograph, cinematograph; advent of electronic/digital memory: computer (Back up memory).
• To store knowledge (storage metaphors). Storage space: the wax tablet/writing surface (the page), the book, the photograph plate, the celluloid film (pellicola = pelle), the vinyl record, the magnetic tape. Spaces: the archives, the storehouse (what sort of house: a cell? A palace? A museum? A cellar? The underground? A cinema?).
• To externalise data, knowledge, experiences: material mediators and practises: monuments, memorialising spaces (graveyards), ruins, archives, museums, reenactments.

N.B. Every technological innovation in the media can change the ways of conceiving memory and its functioning. The history of memory is the history of the media and of the metaphors through which memory has been described and imagined.

The writings of Plato and Aristotle provide one of the foundational metaphors for memory, which has exerted a powerful influence over the Western tradition.

• Memory - writing or inscription.

The writing tablet: ancient civilizations wrote on wax, clay or stone (paper did not come into widespread use until the 13th century). Form of writing equated with engraving (karakter: a tool for marking and engraving).

Recording and storage

Memory as writing: the wax tablet

“Our minds contain a wax block, which may vary in size, cleanliness and consistency in different individuals [...]. This wax tablet is a gift of Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses; and whenever we want to remember something we’ve seen or heard or conceived on our own, we subject the block to the perception or the idea and stamp the impression into it, as if we were making marks with signet rings. We remember and know anything imprinted, as long as the impression remains in the block; or cannot be imprinted.”

But we forget and do not know anything which is erased.

- Plato, Theaetetus (Teeteto, 191a-196c)

Memory as images/icons

“For it is obvious that one must consider the affection which is produced by sensation in the soul, and in that part of the body which contains the soul - the affection, the lasting state of which we call memory - as a kind of picture; for the stimulus produced impresses a sort of likeness of the percept, just as when men seal with signets rings.”

- Aristotle, Della memoria e della reminiscenza, 449b

How can I retrieve what has been stamped in my memory?

Storage metaphors: landscapes and palaces

“And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think [...]. When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say,” Is it perchance I?” [...] The images of the things perceived are there in readiness, [...]” for thought to recall.

- S. Agostino, Confessions

mnemotechnical method, or “art of memory”,

The Romans devised a for storing and retrieving important information coded and engraved on the memory. According to its foundational legend, the mnemotechnical method was invented by Greek poet Simonides, and was later developed by the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian.

Ars memoriae (Art of memory or mnemotechnics)

“There is a story that Simonides [the poet] was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas [...], and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honour of his host [...]. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.”

“The persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.”

- Cicerone, De Oratore, II

Memory palace

The Method of Loci (Memory palace) is a method of memorising information by placing each item to be remembered at a point along an imaginary journey. The information can then be recalled in a specific order by retracing the same route through the imaginary journey.

Memory theatre by Giulio Camillo (1550)

He thought of building a physical theatre to contain the whole knowledge of the world.

N.B. Mnemotechnics focused on space and filtered out the dimension of time.

New modern conception of memory and time introduced by philosopher Locke, Essay on Human Understanding (1690). He marked a turning point in the relationship between identity and memory, and is responsible for having invented the equation of identity, self and memory. As a philosopher in the era of the modern middle class, Locke replaced the genealogical identities of families, institutions, dynasties or nations, with individual identity drawn exclusively from the life of the person concerned.

“Consciousness, as far as ever it can be extended, should it be to ages past, unites existences and actions very remote in time into the same person. [...] That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself makes the same person and is one self with it, and with nothing else, and so attributes to itself and owns all the actions of that thing as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no further.”

- Locke, Essay on Human Understanding

Locke also used the metaphor of the mind as a camera obscura.

“For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or ideas of things without; would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all object of sight, and of the ideas of them.”

- Locke, Essay on Human Understanding

Locke emphasises also the process of oblivion and erasure.

“There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even those which are struck deepest and in mind the most retentive [...]. Thus the ideas as well as children of our youth often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching: where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time and the imagery moulders away.”

- Locke, Essay on Human Understanding

John Locke in Essay on Human Understanding (1690):

• Invented the equation of identity, self and memory.
• Metaphor of the mind as a camera obscura, a projection mechanism.
• Metaphor of the mind/memory as a graveyard: dialectic between remembering and forgetting.

“Our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching: though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time and the imagery moulders away”.

Thomas De Quincey

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

De Quincey draws on this ancient tradition, the notion of memory, but he introduces a novelty not only in the way we conceive memory, but also in the way we conceive subjectivity.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater was first published anonymously in 1821 (two instalments of London Magazine) and then published in book form in 1822.

Suspiria de Profundis, published in 1845, was conceived as a sequel to the Confessions.

This text was really influential as it was the first “drug memoir” ever written in literature, the first account of the experience of a drug addict: it marks the beginning of a typically modern tradition in literary writings → from Charles Baudelaire (Les Paradis Artificiels, 1860) (he also translated parts of Confessions of an English Opium Eater into French) to William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959).

At the time, the use of drugs and in particular opium, was not illegal and, on the contrary, very widespread, because opium was considered a therapy, a pain killer and it was often given to children as well. Drug consumption did not become illegal until the 20th century. It was so widespread because opium was cultivated in India when it was a British colony, so there were a lot of supplies. The book was not scandalous because it was recounting the story of someone who suffered from a nervous disease and used drugs, because so many people did, but because he, for the first time, connected the use of drugs with aesthetics, with artistic creation. Before De Quincey, the use of opium was not openly discussed as an extra-medical substance, or one with any aesthetic importance. Opium is utilised by De Quincey as a perception-altering technology. (technology in Greek is an art). It gave him a chance to focus on altered states of mind, such as dreams, nightmares, hallucinations. These are states that trigger a new idea of the interrelations between memory, perception and imagination. De Quincey is a cosmonaut of inner space. He offers a new mapping of the mind, new metaphors to describe its workings and its spaces. These new mappings prefigure Freud’s notion of the unconscious.

Locke had introduced the idea of identities, memories, of life-writing as storytelling, a form of biography. With De Quincey we have an entirely new idea of subjectivity.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

It draws on a long tradition of autobiographical writings, stretching back to St. Augustine (Confessioni) and made popular in the late eighteenth century by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782-89). The term “confession” stronger than mere “autobiography” - - evokes a tale centred on subjectivity, on a private self who exposes her/his inner secrets.

“(To the reader) … the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities … the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars”

The term “confessions” is highly charged: you make a confession to a priest or a judge, the term is related to criminals or to some guilty secret. The term “confession” presupposes:

• The concept of a “inner truth”, which is recognised and made public.
• The presence of some form of judgement, either divine or human, on your actions.
• The idea of explanation and purification, a cathartic effect.

But the truth that emerges from De Quincey’s text is highly compromised.

He never repents for his drug abuse, nor condemns his practice.

“The interest of the judicious reader will not attach itself chiefly to the subject of the fascinating spells, but to the fascinating power. Not the opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale; and the legitimate centre on which the tale revolves. The object was to display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain.”

In so far as the drugged experience is confessed by someone who is still under the effect of drugs - in an altered state - how can we be sure that what he confesses is the real “truth about himself”? It is an important turn in the notion of modern subjectivity: the subject is unfathomable, contains no truth.

“The pains of opium”

At the beginning of the text De Quincey describes the defects of opium: he could no longer read nor work, but he emphasises the fact that he feels himself continuously in a dormant state, which indicates that he is continuously half way between being awake and being asleep, a semi-conscious mode, called hypnagogic state, meaning a transitional state from wakefulness to sleep.

“The re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most, have power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms.”

His perception went back to a state that was similar to childhood: primitive and instinctive childish way of looking at the world, where you have no filter on the vision of the world, no rational control over perception. Children not only see the world in a different manner, but they can also project upon darkness all sorts of phantoms, that is: children project upon the darkness the vision of their mind.

“When I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp: friezes of never-ending stories [...] And, at the same time, corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”

He is laying in bed and something happened in his dream: to the external space theatre, an inner space theatre corresponded. We find the metaphor of the mind as a theatre. The room in which he was was full of phantoms, of stories from within my mind.

“A sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point - that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams [...] like writings in sympathetic ink.”

Visions that were in the darkness transferred in his dreams. “Like writings”: the images he traced in space were introjected into his mind like writings, inscriptions. All the previous metaphors are returning here (theatre, camera obscura, writings). “Sympathetic ink”: it is something only he can see and they are inscribed in his mind, even if they might be invisible.

He is exploring his mind and might find things that he did not even know were there.

He begins a topology, a description of spaces of the mind: he intervenes in the notion of the mind as a space.

“I seemed every night to descend – –not metaphorically, but literally to descend into chasm and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended.”

The mind is still described as a space: abysses, but it is a bottomless space. It is an infinite space: the more you explore, the more there is to find.

“Buildings, landscapes were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled [...] This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time: I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes, had feelings representative of a millennium, passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.”

It is overwhelming. We have two categories: space and time. We are defined by these categories: a person can be described in the present, in a certain time and space and this person is such if memories can be stretched back and projected forward. If we explore our minds, space cannot be contained, because it is huge and swelling that we cannot locate ourselves in space, but more importantly he talks about time: “ lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night”: it is a complete relativisation of the time within the mind and of memory.

“The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantaneously.”

It is passive, all of the sudden memories came back. He was not recollecting them (nowadays we would speak of conscious and unconscious).

“I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river