Memory, p.4
Memory, page 4
Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the muses, has enjoyed high prestige as an intellectual aid ever since her appearance in Plato’s Phaedrus and Theaetetus. Divinised or not, memory has been seen as the fountainhead of human knowledge, and the protector of all those who seek wisdom, virtue and truth. What is it about memory that nevertheless makes me uneasy, and willing, with all due modesty, to dissent from the judgement of the centuries? As a technical term it is one of the least threatening items in any psychological or philosophical lexicon. Whether we think of memory as a mental faculty or as a stored and retrievable mental image, it has important tasks of definition to perform. In the former case it helps us to characterise the humanity of human beings, for men and women are by far the most skilful remembering organisms, and in the latter it helps the individual to sustain a continuous sense of personal identity: only I possess exactly these memories arranged in exactly this mobile mosaic. You and I may both take ‘blue remembered hills’ around with us as mental traces, and we may both see them through the filter of that celebrated phrase from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, but only I have those hills woven together with the bus ticket, the mint imperial and the ominous bank statement that were in my pocket when I stepped out eastwards from the ruins of Cluny Abbey on 3 April 1982. Memory is so closely woven into the texture of our lives that it would be madness to seek ways of unpicking and expelling it. Having qualms about memory makes no more sense than having reservations about air, water or bread, or worrying about the tilt of the earth’s axis.
Yet uneasy I remain, and worried. In part this strain of feeling is just a personal rebellion against the commodification of memory that currently rages in publishing, the media and academic research. Perhaps it is memoirs rather than memories that I dislike so, and the rising tide of ‘life-writing’ in its many lucrative sub-genres. Perhaps the thing that bothers me most is the sentimental sheen that the remembered past so often acquires, the rosy-hued patina that so readily descends on life-events once the machinery of retrospection is set in motion. Tragic awareness is in danger of being lost. And just look at what has happened to nostalgia, I am inclined to grumble when this mood is upon me. It started out as an affliction, a morbid and insistent homesickness. It was to the human sense of belonging to a native place what neuralgia was to nerve tissue and myalgia to muscle: it hurt. But now nostalgia is the slightest and flimsiest of sensations. It is what we feel when we allow ourselves to be tickled by memories, and caressed by a past that has had its claws removed. Modern nostalgia is so obviously delusional and demeaning as a habit of mind, and so shoddy when turned into merchandise, that men and women of good will and discrimination will, one hopes, have no truck with it.
What is happening when memory or one of its main emotional derivatives begins to cause me such an excess of indignation? Am I merely exciting myself with the thought of my own singularity, prancing along in my moral solitude like the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, or am I taking a roundabout route to the simple truth that too much memory is a debilitating thing? The answer, I suppose, is that I want memory to be drained of its sentiment, and to prepare itself for a life of action. I want memory to have a prospective dimension, to inhabit the future tense, to bring new worlds into being. And to complete this wish-list, let me add that the new kind of memory I am calling for will, while hurling itself forward in time, remain true to the past, fully able to celebrate its achievements and mourn its losses.
All this will seem a tall order until we remind ourselves that some such cross-weave between past, present and future already exists and is available for inspection. It is to be found in the experience of art, and in those complex acts of remembrance that works of art invite us to perform. A novel, a sonnet or a symphony is a mnemonic device inside which, intricately coiled and coded, is an elaborate set of instructions. These tell us, time-bound creatures that we are, how to handle the time dimension in which all artworks unfold: when to look back, when to look ahead in expectation, and how to layer and interconnect different time-levels inside the onrush of artistic experience. Recognising these instructions in one encounter with art, we are soon able to apply them elsewhere. Listening to Byrd’s polyphony prepares us for our first acquaintance with Palestrina’s, and becoming accustomed to the tension between forward movement and the vertical layering of voices in Renaissance choral music at large may prepare us for similar-seeming tensions elsewhere: between linear narrative and simultaneous pictorial patterning in a fresco by Masaccio, or between sound-echoes and propositional structure in a Mallarmé sonnet. From one encounter to the next, we become more adept as readers, listeners or viewers, and our increasing proficiency soon begins to supply a further reward. We are able to take the hesitations and two-way pulls of art experience back into our ordinary lives. In the conviction that an exhilarating rather than a maundering style of remembrance is to be found in certain artworks, I shall now examine some cases of strong, future-directed artistic memory, beginning with a late work of Beethoven’s.
Labouring at his Thirty-three Variations in C major on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Opus 120 (1819–23), Beethoven remembered Mozart’s Leporello, and the laborious life of which he sings in the opening measures of Don Giovanni (1787):
Notte e giorno faticar
Per chi nulla sa gradir;
Pioggia e vento sopportar,
Mangiar male e mal dormir!
Slaving night and day/for one whom nothing pleases/enduring rain and wind/ill fed and short of sleep!)
Looking back over the twenty-one variations already composed, and ahead to the deeply expressive culmination of his drama, Beethoven discovered not only a moment of fellow feeling with
Don Giovanni’s aggrieved servant but a new potentiality of Diabelli’s undistinguished tune. Guided by the hand of a master, the tune turns into Mozart as we listen, or so it seems. From the composer’s own viewpoint, it would be more accurate to say that he had noticed the near-identity between Leporello’s brief solo and the left hand of Diabelli’s piece, stored the resemblance away, and released it on cue when a coup de théâtre was called for in the plotting of his own work.
Beethoven’s borrowing from Mozart in the twenty-second variation of his Diabelli set prepares the way for a much more elaborate act of homage. As he moves forward to the climax of the work in variations 29–31, his retrospection takes him further back in the eighteenth century, to the mighty summation of baroque variation form that is to be found in J. S. Bach’s Goldberg set, BWV 988 (1741). The relationship between the two works is complex. At one level, Beethoven is fired by a sense of creative rivalry with an admired predecessor: he writes thirty-three variations to Bach’s thirty, and rises to his high summit of tragic declamation from a much lower starting point than the one that Bach had chosen for himself. Where Bach begins with an exquisite aria that already foretells the tragedy of his variation 26, Beethoven begins with a jaunty waltz of limited predictive power, and moves by slow stages to his final outpouring of grief. Modelling himself on Bach, and placing his lament at exactly the point that Bach had pre-ordained for it, Beethoven nevertheless presents himself as the hero of an improbable process of discovery. Reverence and rebellion are finely balanced.
The Goldberg and Diabelli sets are both encyclopaedic in their range, and bold in their yoking together of disparate styles and conventions. In each the variation principle is relentlessly foregrounded over a very long span of musical invention, and each, considered alone, is a formidable art of memory. In each case a major source of pleasure for the listener is in the gradual saturation of the space of possibility. The rhythmic, melodic, harmonic and dynamic potentialities inherent in the preliminary theme are explored with an insolent display of thoroughness and method. The acoustic domain fills with echoes and reminders as the time of hearing passes. And being able to remember well, across the spectrum of feelings and forms, is an essential skill for the listener. If he already has this skill his advantage is clear. If not, the work itself will school him in the required gambits during successive rehearings.
Simpler variations, for all the respite from contrapuntal ingenuity they seem to offer, bring a rich texture of recollected earlier material in their wake. Complex variations seem to be striving for their own effects of extremity and exhaustiveness by way of the multiple resonances they keep in play. The basic picture in each of these capacious works is, therefore, of a forward-driven linear drama wreathed around in silent or inwardly sounding grace-melodies. Each is alive with reminiscence and self-reference.
The Beethoven set becomes still more extraordinary when its underlying Bach-derived template is brought to life. Equipped with knowledge of the Goldberg variations, the listener remembers not only the accumulated previous states of the Beethoven/Diabelli theme but a previous moment in the tradition from which the whole work grew. We not only measure Beethoven’s virtuosity against Bach’s, and a later against an earlier sequence of bravura exercises, but we superimpose one cumulative and irreversible emotional contour upon another. We hear double, and in so doing move beyond any rivalry between composers towards a limitless absorption of the one into the other. Beethoven thinks within and against the Bach keyboard manner, and invites us to do likewise. Remembrance has become a first-hand medium of artistic expression; the future of the later work, its propulsive power, the individuality of its intentional movement, the new sonority it propounds, have been found in an eager and acquisitive backward leap.
To some, all this will sound too didactic to be a major element of the compositional process, and much too indirect as a route towards aesthetic rapture. It will sound more like a critical history of music in sound than a spontaneous adventure of the acoustic imagination. Those who hesitate in this way are unlikely to be persuaded to change their listening habits by being reminded that Bach and Beethoven themselves are unashamedly learned composers. What is more likely to convince them is the simple fact that remembering under controlled conditions is an essential aim of artistic form, and that memory-events occurring inside the individual artwork are replicated in large format on the wider stage of cultural history.
Beethoven starts from a waltz, and ends with a transcendentalised minuet. His last variation is a recapitulation of his own work seen as a catalogue of dance and other rhythms; it both extends an argument and, summarising it, closes it off. It would make little sense to confine the recapitulatory process to this single work, however, for the work occupies a public world in which musical forms pass freely from hand to hand. Dance-rhythms, to speak only of those, are common property and available off the shelf to any composer who needs them. What is more, Beethoven will have known, without being excessively erudite, that Bach in his instrumental suites and elsewhere had been the dancing master of his age; he had taken jigs, minuets and sarabandes from the dance-floor and made them into staples of the recital room. Remembering Bach’s dances was not very different from remembering his own. For the listener, the pleasure to be taken from complex interrelations such as these often feels remarkably simple and direct: the music in performance is haunted by voices, the composer’s own and those of his predecessors. Those the performer plays and those the listener silently adds grow together to yield an unparalleled sense of fullness in the time-bound transformational process that the musical work comprises.
For the critic or analyst, the relations between one instrumental work and another may be difficult to construe, but at least a common language exists in which to map their exchanges and divergences. Whether by Bach or by Beethoven, the work is all notes, reverberations and silences; under the sign of Goldberg or of Diabelli, it all takes place at the keyboard. The picture, initially at least, is very different when two art-forms are brought together and when the ambient voices that a given work summons up are from another artistic workshop. When the language of poetry meets pigments and brush-strokes, for example. Here, the critic and the analyst become notably squeamish.
For the most part, we can forget about plenitude and creative memory when scholarship gets to work on meetings of this kind. Titian, for example, belongs firmly to art history, and Ovid to literature and mythography. When the former turns to the latter in search of pictorial subjects, as he does in the great poesie commissioned by Philip II of Spain, the craft of the painter overshadows that of the poet, who is reduced, in many learned accounts, to the rank of anthologist or copywriter. Ovid in this view was no poet, and there is no need for the Titian specialist to honour him as one. Ovidians, in the same way, can easily condescend to Titian and treat him as no more than an illustrator, one among hundreds who have swarmed around the Metamorphoses for centuries. Yet when the supreme painter plucks Venus and Adonis, Bacchus and Ariadne, Diana and Actaeon or the contest between Apollo and Marsyas from Ovid’s poem an uncanny event begins to unfold. Ovid finds a new reader of extraordinary energy and originality, and an absorbing transitional realm between the arts opens up. A new intermediate species is called into being: a reader-viewer, a recipient of art whose eyes are literate, as Titian’s were.
What happens when a viewer brings the experience of literature to the panel or the canvas before him? What kind of manifold event takes place when, looking at Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda (1554–56) in the Wallace Collection, for instance, the visitor has before his or her mind’s eye Metamorphoses IV. 660–714 rather than the descriptive label supplied by the gallery? Both artists depict Andromeda chained to a rock, threatened by a sea-monster, and about to be rescued by Perseus. Ovid dwells upon the moment of rapture that propels the slayer of Medusa towards further heroic action:
quam simul ad duras religatam bracchia cautes
Vidit Abantiades, nisi quod levis aura capillos
Moverat et tepido manabant lumina fletu,
Marmoreum ratus esset opus; trahit inscius ignes
Et stupet et visae correptus imagine formae
Paene suas quatere est oblitus in aere pennas (672–7)
(Andromeda was pinioned to a rock./When Perseus saw her, had a wafting breeze/Not stirred her hair, her eyes not overflowed/With trembling tears, he had imagined her/A marble statue. Love, before he knew,/Kindled; he gazed entranced; and overcome/By loveliness so exquisite, so rare,/Almost forgot to hover in the air.)
Titian follows his source closely in producing a visual equivalent to these lines. Breezes waft about Andromeda’s person, although it is her modest veil rather than her hair that bears the impress of the wind; her pose and flesh colour recall marble statuary; and the ungainly dive that Perseus launches against the monster suggests that his winged ankles are indeed losing thrust. Cross-referring between the canvas and the verse narrative, tracking not only the painter’s adherence to the Ovidian template but also his self-willed departures from it, the reader-viewer begins to take possession of a teasing in-between world.
Yet this is only the start of his adventure, for the works unsettle each other profoundly; each introduces instability and syncopation into the other’s characteristic behaviour as an artistic proposition. At the simplest level, Titian rediscovers real cruelty in setting the captive’s naked skin against the lacerating teeth of the beast, and in allowing a shape-echo to pass between those teeth and the hooked sword that Perseus wields. By an opposite vein of suggestion, the lightness and comedy of Ovid’s verse may prompt us to see the three main actors in Titian’s drama as three versions of a single spiralling, insinuating dance. A richer form of interaction between the two works, however, is to be found in their combined play with narrative time.
The painting, if we read it from left to right, as if it were a gigantic printed page, retains Ovid’s original order of events: imprisoned Andromeda on the extreme left is followed by the preying monster, which is followed in turn by the flying ace who will destroy the monster and set the victim free. But the painting differs from the verbal narrative in that the rightwards movement of the viewer’s eye can be reversed at will, or abandoned in favour of an impatient to-and-fro scansion of the scene. The picture surface is alive with refrain and recall: against the onward flow of events, human gestures, including the artist’s brush-strokes, are caught in a rhyme-scheme and a time-scheme of their own. In paint, the outcome of the drama is for ever uncertain, even if we consult Ovid to remind ourselves that this mythical story ends well. At any moment narrative time can be brought to a standstill and the human protagonists left hovering in the face of violent death. A benign sea-rhythm runs through Ovid’s lines: images of water and wave carry the story forward through extreme danger to eventual triumph. Titian gives us instead a remorseless ocean that laps indifferently against Andromeda’s rock and the scaly sides of a predatory serpent. His heroine in her radiant nakedness is both the victim of an unjust decree and a trophy bride for Perseus, and in both capacities she has her origin in the Metamorphoses. Titian insists on the ambiguity, compresses two potential outcomes into a single supercharged instant and restores a tragic resonance to what might otherwise have remained a swaggering romantic exploit. His depiction of elemental force and animal savagery keeps death perpetually in play.
Brush in hand, Titian remembers Ovid, and his act of memory is easier to grasp, and more rewarding to contemplate, if we remember that brush, and think of the act primarily in painterly terms. Subsidiary questions about the painter’s role in this particular encounter between the arts can of course sometimes be rewarding. How much Latin did Titian have, and which of his learned friends helped him to read Ovid in the original? Which vernacular translations of the Metamorphoses did Titian know? How familiar was he with the various attempts to ‘moralise’ or Christianise Ovid that had been produced from the fourteenth century onwards, and to what extent did he rebel against these? In what sense was he himself a moraliser of pagan antiquity? But such questions are much less absorbing than the face-to-face interrogation of one great artist by another. If we allow Ovid and Titian to meet in their own intermundium, if we are brazen enough to create such a space for them by our exertions as combined reader and viewer, we can begin to uncover memory as a kinetic principle and creative force. Poetic and pictorial meanings interweave contrapuntally; two rhythms run at once through the time-dimension of art.
