Memory, p.42
Memory, page 42
– It’s just so I know where they are, he says.
– Gives them somewhere to be.
– Exactly.
Then I went through with something I had planned to say. I said.
– Do you remember the book you wrote called Ending Up? They did it on TV with John Mills and Michael Hordern and Wendy Hiller and Googie Withers. Remember? Anyway, one of the characters in the book you wrote, a nice old boy called George Zeyer, suffers from nominal aphasia. He can’t remember common nouns, he can’t remember the names of common objects. In the book you wrote this gives him the chance to be very entertainingly boring in three different ways. In the first phase he’s incredibly boring because he just stumbles along improvising as he goes. Like: ‘This chap’s got a thing, you drive around in it. It’s got a, you know, it turns round.’ In the second phase he’s incredibly boring because he tries to get over the difficulty with rehearsal formulas and paraphrases. Like: ‘They hit him with a screwing-up job and the iron thingummy for the fire.’ In the third phase he’s incredibly boring because he’s cured! He’s completely back to normal and he can’t stop displaying his mastery of the common noun. Like: ‘table, sheet chair, glass, bottle, spoon.’ All this, Dad, in the book you wrote.
He is contemplating me with delighted admiration.
– Do you remember?
– No, he said.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, from an interview with Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph Magazine (16 August 2003)
By a good story I mean that the reader will arrive at a different place from where they started – a good place. It’s not necessarily that the story has a moral, or a happy ending; not saying this is right, this is wrong. The difference must be that it leaves a kind of memory. I believe memory is a kind of petrol in your life, in your body, in your will to live. My memories help me a lot to live on, to survive.
From MILAN KUNDERA, The Curtain (2007)
The perpetual activity of forgetting gives our every act a ghostly, unreal, hazy quality. What did we have for lunch the day before yesterday? What did my friend tell me yesterday? And even: what was I thinking about, three seconds ago? All of that is forgotten and (what’s a thousand times worse!) it deserves no better. Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it – every word, every phrase – deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such.
Still, the perception of art does not escape the force of forgetting either. Though it should be said that each art has a different relation to forgetting. From that standpoint poetry is privileged. A person reading a Baudelaire sonnet cannot skip a single word. If he loves it he will read it several times and perhaps aloud. If he adores it, he will learn it by heart. Lyric poetry is a fortress of memory.
The novel, on the other hand, is a very poorly fortified castle. If I take an hour to read twenty pages, a novel of four hundred pages will take me twenty hours, thus about a week. Rarely do we have a whole week free. It is more likely that, between sessions of reading, intervals of several days will occur, during which forgetting will immediately set up its worksite. But it is not only in the intervals that forgetting does its work; it participates in the reading continuously, with never a moment’s lapse; turning the page, I already forget what I just read; I retain only a kind of summary indispensable for understanding what is to follow, but all the details, the small observations, the admirable phrasings are already gone. Erased. Someday, years later, I will start to talk about this novel to a friend, and we will find that our memories have retained only a few shreds of the text and have reconstructed very different books for each of us.
And yet the novelist writes his novel as if he were writing a sonnet. Look at him! He is amazed at the composition he sees taking shape before him: the least detail is important to him, he makes it into a motif and will bring it back in dozens of repetitions, variations, allusions, like a fugue. And so he is sure that the second half of his novel will be even finer, stronger, than the first; for the farther one progresses through the castle’s halls, the more the echoes of phrases already pronounced, themes already set out, will multiply and, brought together into chords, they will resonate from all sides.
False Memories
From FORD MADOX FORD, Memories and Impressions (1911)
Just a word to make plain the actual nature of this book: it contains impressions. When some parts of it appeared in serial form, a distinguished critic fell foul of one of the stories that I told. My impression was and remains that I heard Thomas Carlyle tell how at Weimar he borrowed an apron from a waiter and served tea to Goethe and Schiller, who were sitting in eighteenth-century court dress beneath a tree. The distinguished critic of a distinguished paper commented upon this story, saying that Carlyle never was in Weimar, and that Schiller died when Carlyle was aged five. I did not write to this distinguished critic, because I do not like writing to the papers, but I did write to a third party. I said that a few days before that date I had been talking to a Hessian peasant, a veteran of the war of 1870. He had fought at Sedan, at Gravelotte, before Paris, and had been one of the troops that marched under the Arc de Triomphe. In 1910 I asked this veteran of 1870 what the war had been all about. He said that the Emperor of Germany, having heard that the Emperor Napoleon had invaded England and taken his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, prisoner – that the Emperor of Germany had marched into France to rescue his distinguished connection. In my letter to my critic’s friend I said that if I had related this anecdote I should not have considered it as a contribution to history, but as material illustrating the state of mind of a Hessian peasant. So with my anecdote about Carlyle. It was intended to show the state of mind of a child of seven brought into contact with a Victorian great figure. When I wrote the anecdote I was perfectly aware that Carlyle never was in Weimar while Schiller was alive, or that Schiller and Goethe would not be likely to drink tea, and that they would not have worn eighteenth-century court dress at any time when Carlyle was alive. But as a boy I had that pretty and romantic impression, and so I presented it to the world – for what it was worth. So much I communicated to the distinguished critic in question. He was kind enough to reply to my friend, the third party, that whatever I might say, he was right and I was wrong. Carlyle was only five when Schiller died, and so on. He proceeded to comment upon my anecdote of the Hessian peasant to this effect: at the time of the Franco-Prussian War there was no emperor of Germany; the Emperor Napoleon never invaded England; he never took Victoria prisoner, and so on. He omitted to mention that there never was and never will be a modern emperor of Germany.
I suppose that this gentleman was doing what is called ‘pulling my leg,’ for it is impossible to imagine that any one, even an English literary critic or a German professor or a mixture of the two, could be so wanting in a sense of humour – or in any sense at all. But there the matter is, and this book is a book of impressions.
From W.G. SEBALD, Vertigo (1990), translated by Michael Hulse (2001)
In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible. For almost a fortnight, an interminable column of men, animals and equipment proceeded from Martigny via Orsières through the Entremont valley and from there moved, in a seemingly never-ending serpentine, up to the pass two and a half thousand metres above sea level, the heavy barrels of the cannon having to be dragged by the soldiery, in hollowed-out tree trunks, now across snow and ice and now over bare outcrops and rocky escarpments.
Among those who took part in that legendary transalpine march, and who were not lost in nameless oblivion, was one Marie Henri Beyle. Seventeen years old at the time, he could now see before him the end of his profoundly detested childhood and adolescence and, with some enthusiasm, was embarking on a career in the armed services which was to take him the length and breadth of Europe. The notes in which the 53-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection. At times his view of the past consists of nothing but grey patches, then at others images appear of such extraordinary clarity he feels he can scarce credit them – such as that of General Marmont, whom he believes he saw at Martigny to the left of the track along which the column was moving, clad in the royal- and sky-blue robes of a Councillor of State, an image which he still beholds precisely thus, Beyle assures us, whenever he closes his eyes and pictures that scene, although he is well aware that at that time Marmont must have been wearing his general’s uniform and not the blue robes of state.
Beyle, who claims at this period, owing to a wholly misdirected education which had aimed solely at developing his mental faculties, to have had the constitution of a fourteen-year-old girl, also writes that he was so affected by the large number of dead horses lying by the wayside, and the other detritus of war the army left in its wake as it moved in a long-drawn-out file up the mountains, that he now has no clear idea whatsoever of the things he found so horrifying then. It seemed to him that his impressions had been erased by the very violence of their impact. For that reason, the sketch below should be considered as a kind of aid by means of which Beyle sought to remember how things were when the part of the column in which he found himself came under fire near the village and fortress of Bard. B is the village of Bard. The three Cs on the heights to the right signify the fortress cannon, firing at the points marked with Ls on the track that led across the steep slope, P. Where the X is, at the bottom of the valley and beyond all hope of rescue, lie horses that plunged off the track in a frenzy of fear. H stands for Henri and marks the narrator’s own position. Yet, of course, when Beyle was in actual fact standing at that spot, he will not have been viewing the scene in this precise way, for in reality, as we know, everything is always quite different.
Beyle furthermore writes that even when the images supplied by memory are true to life one can place little confidence in them. Just as the magnificent spectacle of General Marmont at Martigny before the ascent remained fixed in his mind, so too, after the most arduous portion of the journey was done, the beauty of the descent from the heights of the pass, and of the St Bernard valley unfolding before him in the morning sun, made an indelible impression on him. He gazed and gazed upon it, and all the while his first words of Italian, taught him the day before by a priest with whom he was billeted – quante miglia sono di qua a Ivrea and donna cattiva – were going through his head. Beyle writes that for years he lived in the conviction that he could remember every detail of that ride, and particularly of the town of Ivrea, which he beheld for the first time from some three-quarters of a mile away, in light that was already fading. There it lay, to the right, where the valley gradually opens out into the plain, while on the left, in the far distance, the mountains arose, the Resegone di Lecco, which was later to mean so much to him, and at the furthest remove, the Monte Rosa.
It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d’Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance, he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Müller’s engraving after it had become superimposed in his mind; the wretched pastels by Mengs in the same gallery, on the other hand, of which he had never set eyes on a copy, remained before him as clear as when he first saw them.
From ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS, ‘When a Memory May Not Be a Memory’ (March 1994)
‘But I don’t want to go among abused people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Therapist: ‘We were all abused here. I was abused. You were abused.’
‘How do you know I was abused?’ said Alice.
‘You must have been,’ said the Therapist, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
If Lewis Carroll were writing today, he might decide to have Alice talk to the Therapist rather than the Cat. It is hard to exist in the modern, media-fed world without hearing about adults remembering for the first time that they were sexually abused as children. Any discussion of this topic must begin with an acknowledgement of the horrible reality of child sexual abuse. Harrison Pope and James Hudson estimate the prevalence to be 27–51 per cent of children for narrowly defined childhood sexual abuse by an older perpetrator and 31–67 per cent if non-contact experiences are included.fn1 Many factors contribute to the variability of these estimates. We can all agree that even the most conservative of these estimates tells us that child abuse is a serious social problem.
One subset of the large class of abuse memories involves memories that emerged after a long period of ‘repression’. Roseanne Barr Arnold is one of many celebrities who have recently remembered incest. Her earliest memories were of her mother abusing her from the time she was an infant. Later memories involved abuse by both parents that continued until she was six or seven years old.fn2 Roseanne’s public accusations caused her parents and siblings to denounce her in an equally public way.
Those interested in the details of Roseanne’s allegations and how she recovered her memory can find clues in a long interview Roseanne gave to Playboy magazine. Implied in the article, Roseanne accused her mother of putting soap in her vagina; her father allegedly fondled his penis, made Peeping Tom photos, and chased her with his dirty underwear.fn3 Roseanne’s memories of abuse came after therapy: ‘When I first started to have therapy and recall my memories, I really couldn’t handle anything.’ But later she would go public with her accusations. Why? She may have several reasons. ‘There’s tons of abuse going on. Hardly anything is being done about child sexual abuse and the way it’s handled in the courts, in the media, everywhere. That’s what I feel I was put on earth for, and I’m going to do it.’ But elsewhere she tells Playboy, ‘I say what I say because my fans want to hear it.’
Did the abuse happen? Roseanne says it happened not only to her, but also to her sister, Stephanie. She says that she and her sister talked about it every day for hours and hours. Stephanie denies anything ever happened, and traces Roseanne’s charges to an ‘overheated imagination’.
Roseanne appears completely uninterested in exploring the veracity of her claims: ‘To question any victim is hideously immoral.’ Roseanne and I would agree if she changed one word in her plea: ‘to question all victims is hideously immoral.’ But that is not what is being done.
This article is not about the child who has gonorrhoea of the throat. This is not about the woman who suffered silently her whole life with memories of abuse and first got the courage to tell a talented and trusted therapist about it decades later. We know that many tortured individuals need time to bring the dark secret of their abuse to light. This is not about those long-held memories. This is about one small class of ‘memories’: those that emerge in adulthood after extensive ‘memory work’ – age regression or body memory interpretation or suggestive questioning or guided visual-isation or sexualised dream interpretation or aggressive sodium amytal interviews or any of many other suspect techniques. These techniques have led to the surfacing of ‘memories’ of child molestation. Sometimes, what have surfaced are endless numbers of violent traumas spanning years of one’s life. This happens even when patients begin therapy thinking they had happy childhoods.
In cases such as Roseanne’s, the traumatic events supposedly happened in the first six months of life, sometimes even earlier. In one case a woman sued her mother’s former boyfriend for child molestation. The woman also claimed that the therapist had helped her recall prenatal memories.fn4 There is not one piece of empirical work in human memory to support the idea that adults have concrete episodic memories of events from the first year of their lives. Research on later childhood amnesia raises many questions about some claims of repressed memory.
John Kihlstrom has written: ‘While the notion of repression is intuitively plausible, the evidence for the delayed recovery of valid repressed memories of incest and other forms of abuse is rather thin.’fn5
As adults we are occasionally asked, ‘What is your earliest memory?’ There is enormous variability in the age of earliest memory – from two years to eight years, and occasionally later. One thing is true for most of us: there is a period from which no events can be remembered, and this period is sometimes called ‘childhood amnesia’. The inverse of childhood amnesia is the onset of autobiographical memory. Most cognitive psychologists place the end of childhood amnesia at age three or four. One study suggested that some people might have a memory for a hospitalisation or the birth of a sibling that occurred at age two. Even these ‘memories’ could well have been educated guesses, general knowledge about what must have happened, or external information acquired after the age of two. Anyone who is familiar with the literature on childhood amnesia cannot help but feel some scepticism about adults who ‘remember’ events from infancy.
What about repression of memories? It would not be surprising if something that really happened to a small infant, no matter how traumatic, was not remembered later in life. One need not invoke the idea of repression to understand this failure, for it is most parsimoniously understood as ordinary childhood amnesia.
