Memory
AN ANTHOLOGY
edited by Harriet Harvey Wood & A.S. Byatt
(Chatto & Windus/ 412pp / £25)
Review by Hugh Lawson-Tancred
?How do we know?, Bertrand Russell was fond of teasing the philosophically naïve, ?that the world was not brought into being a moment ago with all our memories built in??. Anxiety about the authority of memory is the invisible worm cankering at the rose of self. It nocturnally subverts both the personal pace Locke and pace Wittgenstein, the collective record.
Consider the findings of Ulric Neisser. He recorded the memories of witnesses to ‘flashbulb’ events, such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, a week or so after the event and then a few years later. The two accounts often bore only minimal, or even no, resemblance. It appears that the time span in which a culture loses an accurate record of its past without the use of external documents is a matter of years, perhaps months, not decades or centuries.
But while recollection is fragile and open to confabulation, unsolicited recall can be terrifyingly obdurate, complex and persistent. Phobic memories acquired at a certain age cannot be removed short of surgery, a Proustian madeleine that has been simulated in the laboratory by the Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield through the application of electrodes to the hypothalamus.
These are just two of the contradictory aspects of memory. There are many, many more. How is memory of a fact related to memory of a skill, or to memory of a person? Is public memory derived from private thought, or is it, more mysteriously, the other way round? Should memory be used in evidence? Is memory something that the mind has, or something that it does? Where, indeed, lies the route to answering these questions – in the rich and fascinating testimony to the workings of the mind in the humanities, or in the revolutionary and often elegant findings of a whole battery of scientific guns now trained on the process of cognition?
No single book surely will be able to solve all these riddles, but Memory: An Anthology makes a contribution to the necessary prolegomena for future progress. The editors have put together an initial set of contemporary essays, about a quarter of the whole, followed by a thematically-arranged survey of earlier views. The spirit is admirably interdisciplinary. So the ‘modern’ contributions range from evolutionary ethology (Patrick Bateson) and neuroscience (Steven Rose) across literary, musical and artistic criticism to fairly deep-end Freudianism and a fascinating study by Sudhir Hazareesingh of the simultaneous awakening of French public memory to the realities of Vichy and continued denial of the uglier aspects of the Algerian war a decade later. The effect is not to summarise but to illustrate by accessible and tantalising example the state of play in the various avenues to memory. Richard Holmes rounds off the first half with a glorious whimsy.
The second half of the volume well reflects the diversity of ways in which individuals have interacted with their past. Freud, for instance, is represented both by characteristic passages on the heavily laden and often ?screened? texture that he saw in all our memories of early childhood, and by an admirably commonsensical piece in which he refrains from the temptation to read too heavily into the only childhood recollection that Goethe seems to have recorded. Borges’s justly acclaimed Funes the Memorious is balanced by a similar fable from Stefan Zweig, with which it has equally suggestive parallels and differences.
Philosophers are, perhaps, less well represented than writers and scientists. With Plato, we could perhaps have had more Meno and less Theaetetus, since the latter masterpiece is, in my view, so tightly organic as to be unexcerptable. And the Empiricist tradition gets a better look in than either Rationalism or Romanticism – no Kant or Hegel, let alone Husserl or Heidegger. Maybe, however, this reflects the nature of the anthologists jackdaw task, since it is always easier to pluck an anecdote or aperçu from its context than a snatch of heavily self-referential theory.
The public dimension is, however, well maintained, notably through the discussion of Anselm Kiefer’s struggle as a post-war German to come to terms with that country’s burden of collective memory, though there might have been more on the Russian experience. The weakness of metaphorical discussions of the mind to describe computer storage systems is also well considered.
In the area of memory more than any, anthologists face the problem that an inclusion resonates with the echoes of excluded alternatives, but this collection admirably balances the fanciful with the profound, the analytical with the intuitive, and through anecdote, sermon, lyric and protest makes us feel that we have been brought up against the subject fair and square.
Hugh Lawson-Tancred is a Departmental Fellow in Philosophy at Birkbeck College,
University of London
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