Memory, p.39
Memory, page 39
From MELANIE KLEIN, ‘The Psychogenesis of Tics’ (1924), translated by Hanna Segal (1925)
The tic comprised three phases. At the beginning Felix had a feeling as though the depression in his neck, under the back of his head, were being torn. In consequence of this feeling he felt constrained first to throw his head back and then to rotate it from right to left. The second movement was accompanied by a feeling that something was cracking loudly. The concluding phase consisted of a third movement in which the chin was pressed as deeply as possible downwards. This gave Felix a feeling of drilling into something. For a time he performed these three movements three times over consecutively. One meaning of the ‘three’ was that in the tic
– I shall return to this later in detail – Felix played three roles: the passive role of his mother, the passive role of his own ego, and the active role of his father. The passive roles were represented predominantly by the first two movements; though in the feeling of ‘cracking’ was contained also the sadistic element representing the active role of the father, an element which came to fuller expression in the third movement, that of drilling into something.
In order to bring the tic within the scope of the analysis, it was necessary to obtain the patient’s free associations to his sensations associated with the tic and to the circumstances which gave rise to the tic. It had developed after some time into a symptom that occurred with increasing frequency but at first at irregular intervals. Not until the analysis had succeeded in penetrating the deeper layers of his repressed homosexuality, the material for which had first appeared in his accounts of games and the phantasies associated with them, did its significance begin to emerge. Later his homosexuality found expression in the form of a hitherto unrevealed interest in concerts, particularly in conductors and individual musicians. A love of music came to light and developed into a real and lasting understanding of music.
Felix had already in this third year revealed by his singing an identification with his father. After the trauma this interest, in conformity with the rest of his unfavourable development, became repressed. Its re-emergence in the course of the analysis was preceded by screen memories of early childhood. He remembered as a small boy getting up in the morning and seeing his face reflected in the polished surface of the grand piano, noticing that it was a distorted reflection, and feeling afraid. Another screen memory was that of hearing his father snore in the night and seeing horns growing out of his forehead. His associations led from a dark piano, which he had seen at the house of a friend, to his parents’ bed, and showed that the sounds which he had heard emanating from the bed had first contributed largely to his interest in sounds and music and had later caused their inhibition. After attending a concert he complained, during analysis, that the grand piano had completely concealed the artist, and in this connection he produced a memory: the position of his cot at the foot of his parents’ bed had been such that the end piece of the bed had obstructed his view of what was taking place, but had not prevented him listening and making observations. It became increasingly clear that his interest in conductors was determined by the equation of the conductor with his father in the act of copulating. The wish to participate actively in what was taking place, while still an onlooker, came to light in the following association: he would very much like to know how the conductor manages to make the players follow his beat with such precision. To Felix that seemed extremely difficult, because while the conductor had a fairly large baton, the musicians use only their fingers.fn3 Phantasies of being a musician and playing in time with the conductor constituted an essential part of his repressed masturbation phantasies. The already developing sublimation of his masturbation phantasies into an interest in the rhythmic and motor elements of music became impeded by the premature and violent onset of repression, and in this connection the trauma of the surgical manipulation when he was three was significant. The need for motor activity therefore was discharged in excessive restlessness and, in the course of his development, was expressed in other ways as well, of which I shall speak later.
From E.M. FORSTER, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we cannot understand. If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends. Every action or word in a plot ought to count; it ought to be economical and spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead matter. It may be difficult or easy, it may and should contain mysteries, but it ought not to mislead. And over it, as it unfolds, will hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains but of something aesthetically compact, something which might have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it straight away it would never have become beautiful. We come up against beauty here for the first time in our inquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it.
From MARCEL PROUST, Time Regained (1927), translated by Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin and D.J. Enright (1992)
I got out of my cab a second time just before it reached the house of the Princesse de Guermantes and I began once more to reflect upon the mood of lassitude and boredom in which I had attempted, the previous day, to note the characteristics of that line which, in a countryside reputed one of the loveliest of France, had separated upon the trunks of the trees the shadow from the light. Certainly the reasoned conclusions which I had drawn at the time did not cause me so much pain today. They were unchanged; but at this moment, as on every occasion when I found myself torn from my habits – in a new place, or going out at an unaccustomed hour – I was feeling a lively pleasure. The pleasure seemed to me today a purely frivolous one, that of going to an afternoon party given by Mme de Guermantes. But since I knew now that I could hope for nothing of greater value than frivolous pleasures, what point was there in depriving myself of them? I told myself again that I had felt, in attempting the description, not a spark of that enthusiasm which, if it is not the sole, is a primary criterion of talent. I tried next to draw from my memory other ‘snapshots’, those in particular which I had taken in Venice, but the mere word ‘snapshot’ made Venice seem to me as boring as an exhibition of photographs, and I felt that I had no more taste, no more talent for describing now what I had seen in the past, then I had had yesterday for describing what at that very moment I was, with a meticulous and melancholy eye, actually observing. In a few minutes a host of friends whom I had not seen for years would probably ask me to give up being a recluse and devote my days to them. And what reason had I to refuse their request, now that I possessed the proof that I was useless and that literature could no longer give me any joy whatever, whether this was my fault, through my not having enough talent, or the fault of literature itself, if it were true that literature was less charged with reality than I had once supposed?
When I thought of what Bergotte had said to me: ‘You are ill, but one cannot pity you for you have the joys of the mind,’ how mistaken he had been about me! How little joy there was in this sterile lucidity! Even if sometimes perhaps I had pleasures (not of the mind), I sacrificed them always to one woman after another; so that, had fate granted me another hundred years of life and sound health as well, it would merely have added a series of extensions to an already tedious existence, which there seemed to be no point in prolonging at all, still less for any great length of time. As for the ‘joys of the intelligence’, could I call by that name those cold observations which my clairvoyant eye or my power of accurate ratiocination made without any pleasure and which remained always infertile?
But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter – which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years – and it opens of its own accord.
Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absentminded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbour, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken and of which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.
I had followed no new train of reasoning, discovered no decisive argument, but the difficulties which had seemed insoluble a moment ago had lost all importance. The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea. But if on that occasion I had put off the task of searching for the profounder causes of my emotion, this time I was determined not to resign myself to a failure to understand them. The emotion was the same; the difference, purely material, lay in the images evoked: a profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of dazzling light, swirled round me and in my desire to seize them – as afraid to move as I had been on the earlier occasion when I had continued to savour the taste of the madeleine while I tried to draw into my consciousness whatever it was that it recalled to me – I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: ‘Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.’ And almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place – from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge – in the series of forgotten days. In the same way the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Combray to me. But why had the images of Combray and of Venice, at these two different moments, given me a joy which was like a certainty and which sufficed, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indifference to me?
Still asking myself this question, and determined today to find the answer to it, I entered the Guermantes mansion, because always we give precedence over the inner task that we have to perform to the outward role which we are playing, which was, for me at this moment, that of guest. But when I had gone upstairs, a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting-room used as a library, next to the room where the refreshments were being served, until the end of the piece of music which was being played, the Princess having given orders for the doors to be kept shut during its performance. And at that very moment a second intimation came to reinforce the one which had been given to me by the two uneven paving-stones and to exhort me to persevere in my task. A servant, trying unsuccessfully not to make a noise, chanced to knock a spoon against a plate and again that same species of happiness which had come to me from the uneven paving-stones poured into me; the sensation was again of great heat, but entirely different: heat combined with a whiff of smoke and relieved by the cool smell of a forest background; and I recognised that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious both to observe and to describe but which I had just now for a moment, in a sort of daze – I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer – supposed to be before my eyes, so forcibly had the identical noise of the spoon knocking against the plate given me, until I had had time to remember where I was, the illusion of the noise of the hammer with which a railwayman had done something to a wheel of the train while we stopped near the little wood. And then it seemed as though the signs which were to bring me, on this day of all days, out of my disheartened state and restore to me my faith in literature, were thronging eagerly about me, for, a butler who had long been in the service of the Prince de Guermantes having recognised me and brought to me in the library where I was waiting, so that I might not have to go to the buffet, a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, I wiped my mouth with the napkin which he had given me; and instantly, as though I had been the character in the Arabian Nights who unwittingly accomplished the very rite which can cause to appear, visible to him alone, a docile genie ready to convey him to a great distance, a new vision of azure passed before my eyes, but an azure that this time was pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations, and so strong was this impression that the moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment: more bemused than on the day when I had wondered whether I was really going to be received by the Princesse de Guermantes or whether everything round me would not collapse, I thought that the servant had just opened the window on to the beach and that all things invited me to go down and stroll along the promenade while the tide was high, for the napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes’s house, unfolded for me – concealed within its smooth surfaces and its folds – the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock. And what I found myself enjoying was not merely these colours but a whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested, an instant which had been no doubt an aspiration towards them and which some feeling of fatigue or sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec but which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied, caused me to swell with happiness.
From F.A. POTTLE, ‘The Power of Memory in Boswell and Scott’ (1945)
It may be felt that the comparison [between the sensibility of Boswell and the sensibility of Scott] is rendered futile at the start by the fact that Scott was a writer of fiction, Boswell a biographer and journalist. And indeed, unless one is willing to grant the fundamental assumption of the Crocean position – that all expression is art, and that the difference between a novel and a journal like Boswell’s is a difference of degree and not of kind – there will seem to be no justification for the present study. It is precisely that assumption that will be made in what follows: that in analysing Boswell’s journal we are concerned not merely with perception and memory, but also with imagination. To distinguish Scott from Boswell merely in the workings of the imagination is useful, but I should like to go farther back and see if even more interesting results could not be obtained if we began at the level of perception and continued on through the stage of memory. It may well be that memory will prove to be the most useful differential of all.
Did Boswell and Scott perceive the same sort of world to begin with? We have, as it happens, documents which should be capable of answering the question. They are Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and the journal of the tour to the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Hebrides which Scott made in 1814. The material is all similar in nature, and some of it – rather less than one would have expected – is quite parallel …
The fact is that the two journals show much less difference in immediate perception of the world than one would have predicted. Boswell favours conversation (and would have even if Johnson had not been his companion), Scott favours scenery. But the central interests are so similar that not merely sentences but whole paragraphs could be interchanged without being detected by a casual reader. The two journals do not show respectively a typically ‘neoclassic’ and a typically ‘romantic’ perception of the world. Scott’s throughout has the shrewd, humane, humorous tone of common sense that we associate with the eighteenth century …
