Memory Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction by A.S. Byatt

  Part I

  FRANK KERMODE, ‘Palaces of Memory’

  MALCOLM BOWIE, ‘Remembering the Future’

  CRAIG RAINE, ‘Memory in Literature’

  IGNÊS SODRÉ, ‘Where the Lights and Shadows Fall’

  STEVEN ROSE, ‘Memories are Made of This’

  PATRICK BATESON, ‘Memory and Evolution’

  ULRIC NEISSER, ‘Memory with a Grain of Salt’

  SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH, ‘Remembering Badly and Forgetting Well’

  RICHARD HOLMES, ‘A Meander through Memory and Forgetting’

  Part II

  Introduction by Harriet Harvey Wood

  Childhood Memories

  SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest

  THOMAS DE QUINCEY, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

  THOMAS HOOD, ‘I remember, I remember’

  JOHN CLARE, ‘Remembrances’

  SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books

  SIGMUND FREUD, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

  EDMUND GOSSE, Father and Son

  D.H. LAWRENCE, ‘Piano’

  W.H. HUDSON, Far Away and Long Ago

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man

  G.K. CHESTERTON, Autobiography

  HENRY GREEN, Pack My Bag

  GWEN RAVERAT, Period Piece

  CYRIL HARE, He Should Have Died Hereafter

  LEONARD WOOLF, Sowing

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, Moments of Being

  SAMUEL BECKETT, Happy Days

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory

  PENELOPE LIVELY, Going Back

  ANTHONY POWELL, Infants of the Spring

  WILLIAM MAXWELL, So Long, See You Tomorrow

  RICHARD COE, When the Grass was Taller

  TED HUGHES, ‘Fingers’

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Living to Tell the Tale

  HILARY MANTEL, Giving Up the Ghost and ‘Father Figured’

  BRIAN DILLON, In the Dark Room

  NICHOLAS HARBERD, Seed to Seed

  ERIC R. KANDEL, In Search of Memory

  The Idea of Memory

  PLATO, Theaetetus

  PLATO, Meno

  ARISTOTLE, On Memory and Recollection

  SENECA, Letters to Lucilius

  PLUTARCH, ‘Cato the Younger’

  PLOTINUS, Fourth Ennead

  ST AUGUSTINE, Confessions

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays

  ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy

  THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan

  SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Hydrotaphia

  JOHN LOCKE, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  BARUCH SPINOZA, Ethics

  DAVID HUME, A Treatise on Human Nature

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Biographia Literaria

  JAMES MILL, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind

  JOHN STUART MILL, ‘Letter’

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Natural History of the Intellect and Other Papers

  DAVID SHENK, The Forgetting

  HIPPOLYTE TAINE, On Intelligence

  HENRI BERGSON, Matter and Memory

  R.G. COLLINGWOOD, Speculum Mentis

  BERTRAND RUSSELL, Human Knowledge

  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations

  OWEN BARFIELD, History in English Words

  MARY WARNOCK, Memory

  PAUL RICOEUR, Memory, History, Forgetting

  JEAN-PIERRE CHANGEUX and PAUL RICOEUR, What Makes Us Think?

  The Art of Memory

  CICERO, De Oratore

  ANON, Rhetorica ad Herennium

  ABU ALI AHMAD IBN MUHAMMAD MISKAWAYH

  THOMAS BRADWARDINE, ‘On Acquiring a Trained Memory’

  FRANCIS BACON, The Advancement of Learning

  JOHN AUBREY, Brief Lives

  RUDYARD KIPLING, Kim

  STEFAN ZWEIG, ‘Buchmendel’

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, ‘Funes the Memorious’

  FRANCES A. YATES, The Art of Memory

  A.R. LURIA, The Mind of a Mnemonist

  MARY J. CARRUTHERS, The Book of Memory

  ROBERT IRWIN, Night and Horses and the Desert

  DANIEL ARASSE, Anselm Kiefer

  Memory and Science

  ARISTOTLE, History of Animals

  WILLIAM HARVEY, Animal Generation

  FRANCIS GALTON, Inquiries into Human Faculty

  I.P. PAVLOV, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes

  F.C. BARTLETT, Remembering

  KONRAD LORENZ, King Solomon’s Ring

  COLIN BLAKEMORE, Mechanics of the Mind

  J.Z. YOUNG, Programs of the Brain

  KONRAD LORENZ, The Foundations of Ethology

  SEMIR ZEKI, Art and the Brain

  NICOLAAS TINBERGEN, The Study of Instinct

  RICHARD DAWKINS, The Selfish Gene

  GEORGE JOHNSON, In the Palaces of Memory

  DANIEL L. ALKON, Memory’s Voice

  STEVEN PINKER, The Language Instinct

  FRANCIS CRICK, The Astonishing Hypothesis

  GERALD M. EDELMAN, ‘Building a Picture of the Brain’

  JOHN McCRONE, ‘Not-so Total Recall’

  VILAYANUR RAMACHANDRAN, The Emerging Mind

  WELLCOME TRUST, ‘Magic Memories’

  THE ECONOMIST, ‘Sleeping on it’

  ANTONIO DAMASIO, ‘The Hidden Gifts of Memory’

  ERIC R. KANDEL, In Search of Memory

  Memory and Imagination

  ANON, Beowulf

  ROBERT HENRYSON, The Testament of Cresseid

  VOLTAIRE, ‘The Adventure of Memory’

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude

  SIR WALTER SCOTT, Guy Mannering

  JOHN KEATS, The Fall of Hyperion

  THOMAS DE QUINCEY, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, In Memoriam

  ROBERT BROWNING, ‘Memorabilia’

  LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass

  GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda

  HENRY JAMES, The Art of the Novel

  WILLIAM JAMES, The Principles of Psychology

  SIGMUND FREUD, ‘Screen Memories’

  THOMAS HARDY, ‘The Voice’

  FREUD ON GOETHE, ‘A Childhood Recollection’

  MELANIE KLEIN, ‘The Psychogenesis of Tics’

  E.M. FORSTER, Aspects of the Novel

  MARCEL PROUST, Time Regained

  F.A. POTTLE, ‘The Power of Memory in Boswell and Scott’

  EDWIN MUIR, An Autobiography

  E.H. GOMBRICH, Art and Illusion

  CARL JUNG, ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious’

  ESTHER SALAMAN, A Collection of Moments

  ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

  CHARLES RYCROFT, The Innocence of Dreams

  TERRY PRATCHETT, Reaper Man

  MARTIN AMIS, Experience

  HARUKI MURAKAMI, interview

  MILAN KUNDERA, The Curtain

  False Memories

  FORD MADOX FORD, Memories and Impressions

  W.G. SEBALD, Vertigo

  ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS, ‘When a Memory May Not Be a Memory’

  IAN HACKING, Rewriting the Soul

  MICHAEL FRAYN, Copenhagen

  OLIVER SACKS, ‘A Symposium on Memory’

  Public Memory

  WILFRED OWEN, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’

  PAUL FUSSELL, The Great War and Modern Memory

  CEES NOOTEBOOM, Rituals

  JACQUES LE GOFF, History and Memory

  TONI MORRISON, Beloved

  DANIEL ARASSE, Anselm Kiefer

  TZVETAN TODOROV, The Abuses of Memory

  MILAN KUNDERA, The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting

  EVA HOFFMANN, Shtetl

  PAUL RICOEUR, Memory, History, Forgetting

  OLLIVIER DYENS, ‘The Sadness of the Machine’

  DIGITAL PRESERVATION COALITION

  Forgetting

  CICERO, De Oratore

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

  SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Idler

  FRANCOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND, Mémoires d’outre-tombe

  WILLIAM JAMES, The Principles of Psychology

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

  MAX SAUNDERS, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life

  ALPHONSE DAUDET, In the Land of Pain

  CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave

  PHILIP LARKIN, ‘The Winter Palace’

  ROLAND BARTHES, Camera Lucida

  BILLY COLLINS, ‘Forgetfulness’

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  This fascinating anthology introduces us to a wide range of arguments on the subject of memory, the thread that holds our lives, and our history, together. Arranged in themed sections, the book includes specially commissioned essays by the editors and by writers with expertise in different fields – from ‘Memory and Evolution’ by Patrick Bateson to ‘Memory and Forgetting’ by the biographer Richard Holmes, and an account of the chemistry of the brain by Steven Rose.

  Complementing the essays are a rich selection of extracts from writers and thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Montaigne and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami. Stimulating, provocative, funny or profoundly moving, Memory is a book to treasure – and remember.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  A.S. Byatt is a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

  Harriet Harvey Wood is the former Head of Literature at the British Council.

  A.S. BYATT &

  HARRIET HARVEY WOOD

  Memory

  An Anthology

  You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives.

  Life without memory is no life at all … Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.

  Without it, we are nothing.

  Luis Buñuel, Memoirs

  ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5

  Nessun maggior dolor

  Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

  Nella miseria.

  Dante, Inferno

  I remember

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  Introduction

  A.S. Byatt

  Memory is not quite the same thing as consciousness, but they are intricately, toughly and delicately intertwined. Someone once said that we consist of the pure, theoretical instant of awareness, and everything else is already memory. When we think of our selves we immediately begin to sort and arrange memories, which we then rearrange. We are fascinated by those who have – through wounds or brain damage – lost all or part of their memories. A terror of our time is living with dementia – either in ourselves, or in those we share our lives with. Memories can be polished, like objects taken out, burnished, and contemplated, or they can flitter just out of reach, like lost threads of broken webs. To remember is to have two selves, one in the memory, one thinking about the memory, but the two are not precisely distinct, and separating them can be dizzying.

  I have a memory I think of as The Memory. It is seen from the point of view of a small person just seeing over the wall of a playground in East Hardwick Elementary School. The stone is hot, and is that kind that flakes into gold slivers. The sun is very bright. There is a tree overhead, and the leaves catch the light and are golden, and in the shade they are blue-green. Over the wall, and across the road is a field full of daisies and buttercups and speedwell and shepherds’-purse. On the horizon are trees with thick trunks and solid branches. The sky is very blue and the sun is huge. The child thinks: I am always going to remember this. Then she thinks: why this and not another thing? Then she thinks: what is remembering? This is the point where my self then and my self now confuse themselves into one. I know I have added to this Memory every time I have thought about it, or brought it out to look at it. It has acquired notes of Paradise Lost, which I don’t think it had when I was five or six. It has got both further away and brighter, more and less ‘real’. I always associate it with one of my very few good memories of my maternal grandmother – a perpetually cross person, who never smiled. The year she died, she began to forget, and forgot to be irritated. She said to me, sitting by the fire at Christmas, ‘Do you remember all the beautiful young men in the fields?’ And she smiled at me like a sensuous young girl. She may have been talking about the airmen who were billeted on her in the war – or she may have been remembering something from long before my mother was born. I shall never know. But I can see the young men in the fields.

  Memory is an anthology of the ways people have thought about memory – and, to a lesser extent, of things they have remembered. Harriet Harvey Wood and I have tried to cover as many fields – philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, psychological, personal, social – as we could, and this has inevitably meant that each section is inconclusive and suggestive, rather than offering anything like coverage. The anthology is in two parts. The first is a collection of substantial essays on memory, most of them specially commissioned, by scientists, artists, and thinkers from several fields. The second is a collection of extracts, arranged thematically. Harriet Harvey Wood’s Introduction to that section describes the principles of arrangement.

  Craig Raine says in his essay in this book that ‘Memory is like metaphor in its operations.’ He goes on ‘Memory is sexual in its operations.’ (He is referring partly to the use of the word ‘coming’ in describing sexual pleasure, which does certainly bear some relation to the pleasure of finding the desired memory from inside.) Memory is like metaphor and humans have always needed metaphors to think about memory. There is a long tradition, starting with Plato, which uses the metaphor of the mind as a soft wax surface, on which an image can be impressed, or as a gemstone, in which it can be engraved or scratched. St Augustine thought of his memory as palaces full of spaces in which he encountered thoughts and people. Memory can be a pit or well from which things rise to the surface. Lately I have once or twice, searching for names I ‘know I know’ (and how do we know we know if we can’t remember?) found myself looking down into an inky depth in which there was only absence, no elusive flickering fish. We invent machines to assist and fortify our memories, and then use these machines as metaphors for thinking about how memory works. Ulric Neisser, in a fine essay on deceptive certainties of remembering, points out that photographs record indifferently everything present to them, whereas no live memory works like that. He discusses the effects of using the images of recording machines and video cassettes, and of the ‘flashbulb’ memory – so bright and shocking that it is felt to be burned into the brain. We have computers which remember what we cannot, to which we bolt on added memory, or into which we insert ‘memory sticks’. We have the idea that we shall be able to insert a language, or a map, or mathematical skills, into our brains as we can into machines. But cognitive scientists like Neisser and Steven Rose, who work with the ‘wet stuff’, with the chemistry and biological organisation of the brai
n, have taught us to be wary of machine metaphors for bodily thought. Steven Rose’s essay in this anthology is both a lucid description of the history of the scientific study of memory, and a fascinating description of his own experimental work – and that of others – on understanding changes in the substance of brains as they make memories.

  Remembering is a bodily activity, taking place in the brain, and also in the connections between the brain and the nervous system. When I was young there was a philosophical theory that the brain would never be able to study itself – an unease associated with the indivisible self who ‘has’ a memory. But now immense advances are being made in the study of how our brains map and store our thoughts and experience, and communicate with the rest of our bodies. Forests of dendrites, millions and millions of neurones connected into living and changing networks along axons that meet at synapses, arrange both our conscious and our unconscious lives. The word ‘dendrite’ itself is a precise metaphor – it comes from ‘dendron’, the Greek word for a tree, and the dendrites spread and join in branch-like forms. I think metaphor itself, and our pleasure in metaphor, may be the result of two objects or concepts meeting and fusing in these threads of living cells. Not only do we need metaphor to remember – it is a basic part of the process of thinking.

  Surprising discoveries have been made. Students of living brains can now see which precise areas are excited by stimuli. As Antonio Damasio tells us, it turns out that if we think of a hammer we are exciting many different and physically separated areas – those that think of visual images of hammers, those that remember the feeling of how a hand clasps a hammer, those that remember words and groups of words, and those that can translate ‘hammer’ into different languages. We remember colour words in a different part of the brain from the place where we store the ability to see and recognise colours. We know now that London taxi drivers seem to develop an enlarged area of the hippocampus to remember the Knowledge of the streets.

  Memory, language, and the body are intertwined in a very complex way, and this can arouse violent debate. I was once on a committee studying the teaching of English language which contained opposing camps about the virtues of ‘learning by heart’ – a phrase I like, partly because it reminds me of Wordsworth, remembering sensations ‘felt in the blood and felt along the heart’, and partly because the basic unit of English verse, the iambic pentameter, contains as many heart beats as we make during one breath. The writers on the committee needed this idea of committing poetry and grammar to memory – a kind of bodily memory that became a human resource. Many of the teachers felt that ‘rote learning’ was a form of punishment, and unnecessary in the days of calculators, computers and recorders. George Steiner once said that human nature had changed – that there was a generation of teenagers that could find out anything – on the Internet – and remembered nothing, because they did not need to. Poetic rhythms, and grammatical forms, and more complicated and deliberately artificial structures of mnemonics are part of the history and interest of the subject of memory. We have a section on the elaborate memory theatres and weird systems of clues-by-verbal-juxtaposition of mediaeval and Renaissance thinkers – my favourite example is the remembering of a witness, or a testament, by visualising bulls’ testicles. It is interesting that many of the linguistic students of memory refuse to believe that anyone can have a memory that is not put into words. I ‘know’ I have a very early memory of the square rim of a pram hood, and the blue sky beyond, and the ‘feel’ of working out that my body was lying in a space framed by the rim of the hood and the edge of a blanket. It is slightly painful to me to put this into words. When I ‘remember’ it, I do so with my blood and limbs and skin, I don’t use or need words.