Memory, p.40
Memory, page 40
It is only when we turn to the uses that Scott made of his perceptions that we discern a sharp and striking difference between his mind and Boswell’s. His memory works very differently. It will be easier to show this if we say something of Boswell first. The nature of Boswell’s memory has been made the subject of a brilliant investigation by Geoffrey Scott, unfortunately in a work of limited circulation. In what follows I shall draw freely on his conclusions, not pausing to indicate the places where I have modified and extended them.
Given the right kind of jog to his memory, Boswell had something that looks like total recall. If he failed to make a written record soon after a series of events, he seems to have lost those events permanently, or at least to have had no greater power of recall than the next person. But given his written clue, and given time and patience, he could reconstruct accurately and in minute detail an account of practically everything that ever happened to him. The clues he relied on (when he did not write a full journal immediately) were rough and abbreviated notes jotted down on odd scraps of paper, often on the backs of envelopes. In these notes, which are in the highest degree fragmentary and cryptic, there appears to be no attempt to select what is important. Boswell simply jots down whatever rises first to his consciousness, knowing that one sort of hint will serve as well as another. Once fixed in this fashion, the events may be recalled at will, the fullness of the recovery depending less upon the interval of time than upon his patience and ability to concentrate his attention.
The journal is generally written from these notes, after a lapse of time varying from days to years. When the notes and journal are compared (which is seldom possible, for Boswell’s usual practice was to destroy his notes as soon as they had served their purpose), it will generally be found that something – sometimes a great deal – turns up for which there was no sort of hint in the notes, and not infrequently that some hints in the notes are ignored. Suppressions of this kind in the journal I take to be due to several causes: inability to read the note; lack of time or patience to bring the scene back fully; deliberate rejection of remembered material as not worth recording. The material which turns up in the journal without warrant in the notes I can only conclude to have been remembered. It is of exactly the same sort as the material for which the notes furnish hints, and is just as circumstantial. When the circumstances are of a sort that will permit verification, they prove to be correct.
The process of recollection does not stop with the journal, but is still going on in the Life of Johnson. For one thing, the greater part of the extended Johnsonian conversations in which several speakers take part seems never to have been expanded in the journal at all. The only record Boswell had was frequently the rough note written many years before. And even when he had before him a journal version which could have been transferred almost without change into the Life, one constantly finds additions which can only be explained, in my opinion, by assuming that even here he relived the scene as he copied it and recollected matter which had eluded him at the time he wrote the journal, or which he had then suppressed.
The qualities which make the recall of Boswell remarkable are its wealth of detail and its circumstantial accuracy. Memory in people of education, particularly in artists, is usually a very inaccurate affair and deals cavalierly with circumstances. Very few people, moreover, can distinguish between what they have actually witnessed and what they have been told. Adults, no less than children, frequently convince themselves that they were spectators of events which for a time they were content to relate on the authority of others.
Yet the kind of memory here ascribed to Boswell, if it were merely a matter of detail and accuracy, would be no very rare thing. We have all met people who could remember everything, and we have shunned them. Who does not number among his acquaintance a narrator who bores his audience with interminable circumstantial detail, often of events of the remote past? … But accuracy of that sort is tedious. What we want, as we say, is for him to come to his point. We want selection; that is, we want him to pick out a few important things and sink the rest. To repeat, the memory which is tenacious of circumstantial detail is not uncommon, but it is usually associated with a low order of intelligence or a primitive culture.
The really remarkable feat of Boswell is that he has combined the full recall of the savage or the moron with the selectivity of the artist. His record, by its wealth of circumstantial detail, convinces us of its firm basis in reality, while by coming to the point he keeps us interested: that is, persuades us that what he is saying is significant.
What gives the peculiar quality of solidity and trustworthiness to Boswell’s accounts is that he always presents his scenes in terms of average or normal experience. It begs the question to say that he presents things as they really were. There is a certain area in which all minds agree or in which agreement is ideally possible. The circumstantial detail which we have mentioned falls in this area. A particular conversation occurred on Thursday 3 June 1784 in the Oxford coach, or it did not; the ladies who accompanied Johnson were named Beresford, were Americans, were going to Worcestershire, or they were not … We may not always be able to verify things like this, but we shall agree that they are capable of verification and that only one answer is right. This is selection … but it is not interpretation. When it comes to what Johnson said on any subject, if it was a matter of more than a sentence or two, it is obvious that Boswell gives us not merely selection but also interpretation, for you cannot condense or epitomise speech without deciding what, on the whole, it means. Boswell’s interpretation moves on the plane of average or normal experience, with the result that in him we seem to see the past through no kind of medium at all, or at most through plate glass. The style that can achieve this result is one of the rarest things in literature. Much more common is the medium which colours or distorts – Carlyle’s, let us say, or Scott’s.
From EDWIN MUIR, An Autobiography (1954)
The day I remember best was the day when Freddie Sinclair chased me home: it was after we had gone to Helye, and his road lay in the same direction as mine. He was the boy I had fought over the knife, and this day he wanted to fight me again, but I was afraid. The road from the school to Helye lay on the crown of the island, and as I ran on, hollow with fear, there seemed to be nothing on either side of me but the sky. What I was so afraid of I did not know; it was not Freddie, but something else; yet I could no more have turned and faced him than I could have stopped the sun revolving. As I ran I was conscious only of a few huge things, monstrously simplified and enlarged: Wyre, which I felt under my feet, the other islands lying round, the sun in the sky, and the sky itself, which was quite empty. For almost thirty years afterwards I was so ashamed of that moment of panic that I did not dare to speak of it to anyone, and drove it out of my mind. I was seven at the time, and in the middle of my guilty fears. On that summer afternoon they took the shape of Freddie Sinclair, and turned him into a terrifying figure of vengeance. I felt that all the people of Wyre, as they worked in their fields, had stopped and were watching me, and this tempered my fear with some human shame. I hoped that none of my family had noticed me, but when they came in from the fields at tea-time Sutherland said, ‘Weel, boy, I see thu can run!’ I had got over my panic by then, and pretended that Freddie and I had been merely having a race. Sutherland laughed. ‘Ay, a fine race, man, a fine race!’ He called me ‘man’ when he wanted to be sarcastic.
I got rid of that terror almost thirty years later in a poem describing Achilles chasing Hector round Troy, in which I pictured Hector returning after his death to run the deadly race over again. In the poem I imagined Hector as noticing with intense, dreamlike precision certain little things, not the huge simplified things which my conscious memory tells me I noticed in my own flight. The story is put in Hector’s mouth:
The grasses puff a little dust
Where my footsteps fall,
I cast a shadow as I pass
The little wayside wall.
The strip of grass on either hand
Sparkles in the light,
I only see that little space
To the left and to the right,
And in that space our shadows run,
His shadow there and mine,
The little knolls, the tossing weeds,
The grasses frail and fine.
That is how the image came to me, quite spontaneously: I wrote the poem down, almost complete, at one sitting. But I have wondered since whether that intense concentration on little things, seen for a moment as the fugitive fled past them, may not be a deeper memory of that day preserved in a part of my mind which I cannot tap for ordinary purposes. In any case the poem cleared my conscience. I saw that my shame was a fantastically elongated shadow of a childish moment, imperfectly remembered; an untapped part of my mind supplied what my conscious recollection left out, and I could at last see the incident whole by seeing it as happening, on a great and tragic scale, to some one else. After I had written the poem the flight itself was changed, and with that my feelings towards it. A psychologist would say that this was because I had suppressed my knowledge of my cowardice, and that it could trouble me only so long as I suppressed it. That may be so, but what it was that made me stop suppressing it is another question. I think there must be a mind within our minds which cannot rest until it has worked out, even against our conscious will, the unresolved questions of our past; it brings up these questions when our will is least watchful, in sleep or in moments of intense contemplation. My feeling about the Achilles and Hector poem is not of a suppression suddenly removed, but rather of something which had worked itself out. Such events happen again and again in everyone’s life; they may happen in dreams; they always happen unexpectedly, surprising us if we are conscious of them at the time. It is an experience as definite as conviction of sin; it is like a warning from a part of us which we have ignored, and at the same time like an answer to a question which we had not asked, or an unsolicited act of help where no help was known to be. These solutions of the past projected into the present, deliberately announced as if they were a sibylline declaration that life has a meaning, impress me more deeply than any other kind of experience with the conviction that life does have a meaning quite apart from the thousand meanings which the conscious mind attributes to it: an unexpected and yet incontestable meaning which runs in the teeth of ordinary experience, perfectly coherent, yet depending on a different system of connected relations from that by which we consciously live.
From E.H. GOMBRICH, Art and Illusion (1960)
According to Meder, it was Rousseau who first held forth in Emile in 1763 against the traditional way of teaching the elements of drawing. Emile should never be taught to copy other men’s work, he should copy only nature. This is one of those programmes which may be said to be charged with explosive ignorance. True, similar things had been said before of or by Lysippus and Caravaggio, but in the eighteenth century the demand had a new ring. It is the time of ‘original genius’ and of nature worship. And so the break in tradition is heralded, which foreshadows the modern dilemma.
No artist embodies this dilemma more clearly than John Constable, with whose work I began these chapters. Nearly all his utterances betray this ambivalence towards tradition. ‘I remember to have heard him say,’ Leslie writes, ‘when I sit down to make a sketch from nature the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.’ The psychologist who hears of someone’s ‘trying to forget’ will prick up his ears. In fact there is a strange irony in this manifesto of unconditional originality, for in itself it is not original. Cochin records a similar saying by Chardin and this, in its turn, may merely represent a variation on a theme intoned by the great traditionalist Poussin. Not that we need doubt that all these artists really strove to forget the formula. But the sober observer will realise there is all the difference in the world between trying to forget something and never having known it. The cynic may even be reminded of the sad story of the confidence man who promised his dupe a wonderful treasure-trove at a certain spot at midsummer midnight. There is only one condition attached to it – on no account must he think of a white crocodile while digging, or the treasure will vanish. The way to visual treasure-trove cannot lie that way. Nobody knew this better than Constable himself, who said that an artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed. But the worship of tradition which he found prevalent among the public sometimes led him to talk as if the artist could ever do without it: ‘In Art as in Literature, there are two modes by which men aim at distinction; in the one the Artist by careful application to what others have accomplished, imitates their works, or selects and combines their various beauties; in the other he seeks excellence at its primitive source NATURE. The one forms a style upon the study of pictures, and produces either imitative or eclectic art, as it has been termed; the other by a close observation of nature discovers qualities existing in her, which have never been portrayed before, and thus forms a style which is original.’
From CARL JUNG, ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious’, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961)
I was in a region like the Alyscamps near Arles. There they have a lane of sarcophagi which go back to Merovingian times. In the dream I was coming from the city, and saw before me a similar lane with a long row of tombs. They were pedestals with stone slabs on which the dead lay. They reminded me of old church burial vaults, where knights in armour lie outstretched. Thus the dead lay in my dream, in their antique clothes, with hands clasped, the difference being that they were not hewn out of stone, but in a curious fashion mummified. I stood still in front of the first grave and looked at the dead man, who was a person of the eighteen-thirties. I looked at his clothes with interest, whereupon he suddenly moved and came to life. He unclasped his hands; but that was only because I was looking at him. I had an extremely unpleasant feeling, but walked on and came to another body. He belonged to the eighteenth century. There exactly the same thing happened: when I looked at him, he came to life and moved his hands. So I went down the whole row, until I came to the twelfth century – that is, to a crusader in chain mail who lay there with clasped hands. His figure seemed carved out of wood. For a long time I looked at him and thought he was really dead. But suddenly I saw that a finger of his left hand was beginning to stir gently.
Of course, I had originally held to Freud’s view that vestiges of old experiences exist in the unconscious.fn4 But dreams like this, and my actual experiences of the unconscious, taught me that such contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being. My work had confirmed this assumption, and in the course of years there developed from it the theory of archetypes.
The dreams, however, could not help me over my feeling of disorientation. On the contrary, I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. Therefore I twice went over all the details of my entire life, with particular attention to childhood memories; for I thought there might be something in my past which I could not see and which might possibly be the cause of the disturbance. But this retrospection led to nothing but a fresh acknowledgment of my own ignorance. Thereupon I said to myself, ‘Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.’ Thus I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious.
The first thing that came to the surface was a childhood memory from perhaps my tenth or eleventh year. At that time I had had a spell of playing passionately with building blocks. I distinctly recalled how I had built little houses and castles, using bottles to form the sides of gates and vaults. Somewhat later I had used ordinary stones, with mud for mortar. These structures had fascinated me for a long time. To my astonishment, this memory was accompanied by a good deal of emotion. ‘Aha,’ I said to myself, ‘there is still life in these things. The small boy is still around, and possesses a creative life which I lack. But how can I make my way to it?’ For a grown man it seemed impossible to me that I should be able to bridge the distance from the present back to my eleventh year. Yet if I wanted to re-establish contact with that period, I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more that child’s life with his childish games. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistances and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realise that there was nothing to be done except play childish games.
Nevertheless, I began accumulating suitable stones, gathering them partly from the lake shore and partly from the water. And I started building: cottages, a castle, a whole village. The church was still missing, so I made a square building with a hexagonal drum on top of it, and a dome. A church also requires an altar, but I hesitated to build that.
Preoccupied with the question of how I could approach this task, I was walking along the lake as usual one day, picking stones out of the gravel on the shore. Suddenly I caught sight of a red stone, a four-sided pyramid about an inch and a half high. It was a fragment of stone which had been polished into this shape by the action of the water – a pure product of chance. I knew at once: this was the altar! I placed it in the middle under the dome, and as I did so, I recalled the underground phallus of my childhood dream. This connection gave me a feeling of satisfaction.
I went on with my building game after the noon meal every day, whenever the weather permitted. As soon as I was through eating, I began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went back to building. In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified, and I was able to grasp the fantasies whose presence in myself I dimly felt.
