Literary critic Frank Kermode died this week at the age of 90. Writing for Index on Censorship in 2001, he discussed memory and biography
Whether it is a question of a single person, or a multitude of persons falsely represented by the self-biographer (selves-biographer?) as one, there is no avoiding the question of memory, as Augustine was the first to understand. We are warned that he used the term in a much wider sense than we do. For him it was the very instrument of personal continuity, the basis of self-identity, and “the stomach of the mind” (Confessions X.8). And it was also the means of access to grace. Since his narrative is of a delayed self-opening to grace, memory is in every sense the basis of it.
Memory also offers the clue to the way the world at large functions, for the world is also fallen into materiality and sense, so that its redemption must be a matter of history, of a cosmic memory. One sees why Augustine follows his narrative with the philosophical enquiry into memory that occupies the tenth book of the Confessions. Here are some of the famous words:
I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasuries of all kinds of objects brought in by sense perception. Hidden there is whatever we think about, a process which may increase or diminish or in some way alter the deliverance of the senses and whatever else has been deposited and placed on reserve and has not been swallowed up and buried in oblivion. When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately certain things come out; some require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles.
Some memories pour out to crowd the mind, and when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the centre as if saying, “Surely we are what you want?” With the hand of my heart I chase them away from the face of my memory until what I want is freed of mist and emerges from its hiding places.
Other memories come before me on demand with ease and without any confusion in their order. Memories of earlier events give way to those which followed, and as they pass are stored away available for retrieval when I want them. And that is what happens when I recount a narrative from memory (X.viiii)
This is a simple model, basically rather like a library, and it does distinguish easy-access books from books on reserve. However, the books interact. What the senses have collected and stored is modified by association with “whatever we think about”. Some items come easily, even too easily, so some must be waved away. Some are deep in the stacks or in special collections. The section that follows describes a sort of cataloguing system, in which acquisitions are organised according to the sense that introduced each of them: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.
Access to these resources enables one to enjoy and compare images of the world: “I distinguish the odour of lilies from that of violets without smelling anything at all” (X.viii). And in these halls of memory “I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it”; moreover, with those recollections other images less immediate to that self-meeting may in their turn be blended and combined.
To see what Augustine meant by self-exploration amid the contents of memory one needs to reflect that it is not merely sensory images that are collected and combined. Ideas are stored in the memory before one has learned them. As in Plato’s Meno, though with the important difference that Augustine does not admit prenatal knowledge, learning is remembering. Similarly stored, part of the original deposit, are “the affections of my mind”. Thus the rememberer can identify affective experiences when he or she has them later; but, as preserved in the memory and reported to the enquirer, they may differ strangely from what they were as primordial experience; and here the doubling effect is obvious: “I can be far from glad in remembering myself to have been glad, and far from sad when I recall my past sadness. Without fear I remember how at a particular time I was afraid . . . I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy” (X.xiv).
Forgetfulness in Augustine’s memoria is treated as a fact of memory: “memory retains forgetfulness… So it is there lest we forget what, when present, make us forget” (X.xv). I must remember forgetfulness, even though it destroys what I remember. One further point: how is it possible to aspire, as everybody does, to a felicity which, though we have the idea of it, we have never actually experienced? We have no memory, in the ordinary sense of the word, of any earlier happiness on which to model such hopes. Yet where else can they come from, if not from memory? The notion of happiness must be there, put there by some prior agency, innate. God, too, is in the memory, but by his own intervention, to be found there perhaps very late, when fascination with his creation gives way to love of him. Here comes the requirement of continence, a degree of abnegation, achievable only by grace. Da quod iubes. God must give the continence he commands. Only then will he be found, and the enquiring spirit enabled to meet itself.
From this remarkable passage we can derive the idea of a necessary doubleness, and also the notion that the experience as remembered is not, affectively, of the same quality as the experience itself; or, as one almost needs to say, the experience as remembered is not the same as the experience remembered. Here is another aspect of difference in doubleness. A pain recalled is recognised as a pain, yet it may be recalled with pleasure; a past joy can be remembered with intense sadness (a point perhaps remembered by Dante, in a famous passage, as well as by Wordsworth). Augustine is sure, as many of his successors have been, that what memory celebrates is not, in tone or significance, identical with the actual moment remembered. For, as he remarks in Book Xl.xviii, meditating on past and future: “the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses . . . when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am looking on its image in present time . . .” This image belongs to what he calls “the present of things past”. Other memories have worked on the image, and Augustine here anticipates the Freudian Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action (Freud spoke of “memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances — to a retranscription”).
Forgetfulness affects memories, of course, but memories can do the work of forgetfulness by modifying the original deposit, which is further changed when the product of time and much reworking must suffer a translation into language.
For Augustine any such translation must be a fall. Language, in its nature successive, is part of the fallen world, the world of time. He sets the word against the Word; the Word belongs to the simultaneous present, the nunc stans, of eternity. In a famous passage (Xl.xxviii) Augustine speaks of reciting a psalm. Before he begins to do so he has an expectation directed towards a whole. Verse by verse, as he recites, it passes into memory; so there is a blend of memory and expectation. But his attention is on the present, through which the future passes into the past. As he goes on, memory expands and expectation diminishes until the whole psalm has been said, and all is in the memory. The same action occurs in the life of the individual person, “where all actions are parts of a whole, and also of the total history of the “sons of men” (Ps. 30:20) where all human lives are but parts”. So one’s life, in this respect like all other lives, passes into memory and has a typical near-completeness which, long as we remain alive, we can seek in the memory; always remembering that when we report it in words we have in some measure to undo that completeness, both because we are using words, and because memory always entails forgetting.
Although he stresses certain dualisms in the action of memory, Augustine does not doubt the continuous individuality of the ‘I’ which is doing the remembering and the forgetting. Nevertheless, he sees his life, and the life of all the fallen, as a collection of scattered fragments. But he is far from wanting to represent the memory-image and his own report of it as such; for in achieving closure, totality, it has taken on a kind of intemporality, it imitates the eternal Word. His story is in fact of the unification of those fragments by his conversion, the terminus of his narrative, the conquest of division. So in this matter of fragmentation and dispersal of the self you could say he is aware of the problems of memory and subjectivity, but not that he would have recognised his problem as expressed in the language of Nietzsche or that he could have accepted the rhetorical and formal solutions offered by Roland Barthes or Paul Valery in the Cahiers. Augustine recognises fragmentation but his whole drift is to mend it. He is thus antithetical to these writers, and
also to Henry Adams, who expressly wanted to deny the illusion of unity in his life, to bring it back “from unity to multiplicity”. This is the counter-Augustinian trend in modern autobiography. But the Augustinian strain remains strong.
Our modern assumptions about memory are likely to refer more directly to the Freudian tradition. In a recent paper called “Freud and the Uses of Forgetting” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips begins by remarking that “People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget.”
Symptoms are involuntary and disguised memories of desire, unsuccessful attempts at self-cure. Those memories need to be forgotten, but desire, for Freud, is unforgettable. Repression is simply a way of seeming to get rid of things by keeping them. There is no cure for memory, though we try to use it to forget with, as in screen memories, devices designed to enable us to forget memories of a forbidden desire. Psychoanalysis attempts a cure by inducing the kind of remembering that makes forgetting possible. The only certain cure is death.
Here are paradoxes on remembering and forgetting that represent the two as a doublet and in that respect are faintly reminiscent of Augustine’s; but the differences are at least as marked. Phillips can think of the logic of Freud’s psychoanalytical process as being the reverse of what we take to be the autobiographer’s: “Either the most significant bits of one’s past are unconscious, and only available in the compromised form of symptoms and dreams; or the past is released through interpretation into oblivion.” Forgetting is the only way to remember; remembering is the only way to achieve benign forgetting. The product of analysis is not autobiography but evacuation. And Phillips finds in the analyst’s ideal state of “free-floating” or “evenly suspended attention” a parallel use of forgetting; the analyst must learn not to mind not having things in mind, he works by not trying to remember. This is not, to most people’s way of thinking, at all like the practice of attentive reading (though it is sometimes held to be the correct practice, as in the writings of Andre Green and some others).
So the concept of memory offered by psychoanalysis is at first sight hostile to the truth of autobiography. What we profess to remember is what we have devised to protect us from the truth; and this will be the case even when, or perhaps especially when, the attempt to hide nothing is exceptionally strenuous and well advertised, as with Jean Jacques Rousseau. The concept of Nachtraglichkeit explains how a past is recovered in a distorted form; a childhood memory becomes a trauma, a trauma not directly associated with a “real” childhood memory. Memory invents a past. Its reworkings defend us against the appalling timelessness of the unconscious. What we remember we may remember because we are forgetting in the wrong way; our remembering then takes the form of repetition, of acting out. If the analyst cures this repetition by fostering “the work of remembering” he is not doing it because the memories thus elicited are valuable, but because he wants to dispose of them as bad for the patient, as what he needs to forget. “Psychoanalysis is a cure by the kind of remembering that makes forgetting possible.”
Here the timeless is not, as in Augustine, eternity, but the unconscious, and we struggle against its forces, using substitute memories, writing about what ought to be disposed of precisely because of its inauthentic link to the unconscious. There are deposited anterior memories, and Augustine had those, but his were related to felicity and to God, not to incest and murder. Augustine needs access to the timeless, but our need is rather to forget it as totally as possible. We achieve access to its contents by the dual imaginative activity of the transference, but we do so with the object not of verifying them but of destroying them: to remember them, or even seem to do so, is a stratagem to relinquish or dispose of them. But Augustine needed them alive, because he sought the timeless for reasons having nothing to do with destruction; he wished to account for his life as a whole, given shape, made so by the action of memory and the timelessness into which it passes when it is finished.
There seems little doubt that the dominant myth of autobiography is still Augustinian rather than Freudian. Of course it may be that all autobiography is in Freudian terms defensive or resistant, that to totalise, to close, to advertise a psychic structure that cannot on a strict view be authentic, is false and evasive. But it seems to be true that what excites many writers is to achieve some measure or simulacrum of closure, and thus a substitute timelessness. Tolstoy got over being impressed by Rousseau’s Confessions when he decided that, far from demonstrating the love of truth, Rousseau lied and believed his lies, which of course made him incapable of the truth to which he claimed to aspire. Rousseau himself admits that he left things out – from very pure motives – and occasionally made things up. Nabokov’s artful autobiography is full of elegantly rendered and various detail, but, as he once remarks, what gives such a work its formal value is thematic repetition. John Sturrock is especially interested in the phenomenon, so often repeated in autobiography as to be endoxically recognisable, of what he calls the “turn” — the point of epiphany or conversion, seen as the moment when the person under description individuates or selves himself, as it were, finds the point from which all can be seen to cohere, and so achieves a kind of closure. This moment is present in some form virtually everywhere. It draws on or constitutes the memory of a deviance, often apparently quite slight, from some norm of experience or behaviour, a deviance that makes the writer, in his own eyes at any rate, worth writing about as a single person. In the process he cannot avoid providing relevant material on what he takes himself to be deviating from, so that autobiography appeals to our notions of normality as well as to our interest in the myriad possible deviancies; and to our interest also in wholeness, a quality we seek when recounting to ourselves our own lives. Everybody takes these things for granted, and if they want confirmations they will look for their best expression not in the narratives of analysands, which require a different and specialised form of attention, but in the works of people who understand the conditions of art: say, in poets such as Wordsworth. For to communicate persuasively the experience of the turn it is necessary to practise an art.
Kinds of memory are subject to various sorts of classification, but we are familiar, largely on the evidence of works of art, with the idea that there is a rough, recognisable distinction between two kinds of memory, roughly voluntary and involuntary. Those “turns”, those hinges or fulcra on which a whole narrative depends and which justify the very existence of the narrative, are a very conspicuous, very “placed”, treatment of involuntary movements of consciousness momentarily present in some more accessible area of the memory, brought, as Augustine might have said, from special collections to open shelves, and then displayed against a background of simpler recollection. Now, their subtly fine bindings gleaming against the drab covers of commonplace recollections, they stand out, and seem worthwhile recounting. Though they are the sort of thing that can, perhaps does, occur to everybody, these privileged moments are not easy to put into words; they are not only what the author is really about but also a test of whether he ought to be an author.
I will borrow from Barrett J. Mandel a neat little illustration from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. The author describes it as one of the many “trifling things” that make up a life, but still “a landmark”. The boy’s fundamentalist father wanted him to decline an invitation to a party, and suggested that he pray for guidance from the Lord as to whether he should go. Asked what the Lord’s answer was, the boy, well knowing his father’s confidence that God’s response would favour his own view, nevertheless replied, “The Lord says I may go to the Browns.” The father “gazed at me in speechless horror” and left the room, “slamming the door”. Mandel admires this and calls it genuine autobiography, but adds that the writer Gosse knows more about the father and his thoughts than the boy Gosse can have done, and for that reason is able to pinpoint this moment as one of significant rebellion, a type of such resistance, and set it in a larger context that explains why it was significant, a landmark and not a trifle — or, perhaps better, despite its seeming a trifle, and getting called that by an author who wishes us to understand that he can now see how things hang together in a larger view of his remembered life. It is the mature, hindsighted record of an important stage in the widening gulf between father and son, part of a narrative designed to chart that process. We allow without demur that Gosse could not possibly be remembering his father’s precise words; we already know, from our own memories, the nature of the relation of such a moment to truth and memory. As Mandel expresses it, the author is saying to the reader: “My life was as this tale I am telling.” This is a satisfying formula, and it implies a claim that in this form (as this tale) it will have power to indicate landmarks and confer meaning on what would otherwise be mnemonic trifles.
We can add that an episode of this sort could have been worked over, told and retold to the author himself and perhaps to others; as the memory of a memory, of many memories perhaps, it acquires those associations of which Augustine speaks. To give this degree of centrality, of totality, to a memory, or to “thematise” in the way recommended by Nabokov, is to seek to confer on the narrative a power to eliminate the restrictions of time; to institute its own laws of causality, to endow it with totality by invoking what WB Yeats called “the artifice of eternity”“. Much autobiography presumes to imitate that power.
Wordsworth offers an account of his life as “this tale I am telling”, though he might have accepted both the ultimate relation of time dispersed elements to eternity, as adumbrated by Augustine, and the apparent triviality of some of the scattered episodes in themselves.
Certain elements in this exercise in self-distinguishing are worth mention. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth is aware of the double consciousness all autobiographers must contend with. Childhood days have “self-presence” in his mind (The Prelude ii.30—32); but more generally it is the present consciousness that speaks of a remote past recreated, remembered sometimes without his being able to give simple reasons for the memory. The most memorable of these memories, I suppose, are those spots of time: the gibbet, the girl with the pitcher, the bleak music of an old stone wall. These are the memories that count, and they count because the language that expresses their freight of emotion is, so to speak, adequately inadequate: it cannot verbalise what was not verbal, and so devotes itself to mystery and even discomfort.
There are other escapes; one of the great things about Wordsworth, as with Augustine, is that one sees them as constituents of that calm society he could, at the end of this story, with pained rejoicing, detect in himself. For loss, and these insistent premonitions of further loss, he needs consolation, a word that occurs, in company with a “strength” that endures, as early as The Prelude iii.108 (1805). Yet the fulcrum, the moment of illumination, comes a little later, when, after a night of dancing, he moves through “a common dawn” and recognises, although making no vows, that nevertheless “vows were then made for me”; that henceforth he would be, “else sinning greatly, / A dedicated spirit. On I walked / In blessedness, which even yet remains” {The Prelude iv.337—45).
The kind of experience, here so delicately rendered, recurs in most autobiographies, always as a claim to distinction, to the stigma of individuality, of election, though as a rule far less distinguished. For in the end what distinguishes is not the experience itself but the force and authority of the language claiming it. The religious tone is unmistakable, the sense of involuntary vocation calmly accepted; the boldness and pathos of that “even yet remains”. It is, we say, pure Wordsworth.
The Prelude is the greatest and most original of English autobiographies, but it is so not because Wordsworth’s intention is so different from most others. What we see particularly clearly in his prose is his desire to break through the assumptions and habits controlling or limiting normal introspection, as they limit poetry. The forces that break through, and enable deeper self-examination, are all anterior in origin to the formation of customary and habitual behaviour, shades of the prisonhouse; they are deep in the memory and hard to reach because of the distracting mist and clamour of ordinary life. But the memory, for a time at any rate, is accessible, its records can be reached, brought up from the deep store. It is not surprising that Wordsworth used the Platonic trope of anamnesis, for, as Augustine also knew, the memory contains what seems not to have been put into it by the senses. Probably many vocations are discovered by some such process. These deep, vertiginous mnemonic plunges most of us know about from literature rather than from ourselves — not because we are denied them, but because they have to be given appropriate expression or enactment. The question as to what sorts of people are capable of doing this – what sorts of people should be writing autobiography anyway — I must, for the moment, leave unanswered.
