Abstract
This book, edited by Sebastian Groes, is a set of 42 brief chapters along with substantial essays by Groes, of introduction to the whole book, of introduction to each of its six parts, and of overall conclusion. The book arose from a project called “The Memory Network,” based in London and Amsterdam. Among the contributed chapters are some by psychologists and neuroscientists, but most by novelists and artists of other kinds, as well as by philosophers and literary theorists: think-pieces on memory as it may affect us in the twenty-first century.
Groes writes that the occasion for the book was reading Doewe Draaisma’s (2013) The Nostalgia Factory, about memories of immigrants. Draaisma writes about how, for many people, there is a reminiscence bump for memories from their 20s, when neurological maturation is completed and when new modes of life occur: changes of living place, first-time jobs, marriages, births of children. Immigrants experience another reminiscence bump from their experiences of adapting to new societies.
Groes’ concern in this book is to move beyond the times when departments of literature were taken up with disputes about post-modernism, deconstruction, and the like, to inter-connect the humanities and the sciences. For some time, it has seemed to me that psychology has also needed to move beyond its current modes, beyond the technical, to connect with ordinary people and become more like literature. At the same time, literary criticism and history may do well to become more psychological. This book moves in these directions.
The book’s first section is on metaphors of memory. Chapter 1 is by film scholar Corin Depper, who discusses how metaphors for memory have been used since antiquity for thinking not just about storage of information but also about enhancing our abilities. He starts with the metaphor of memory as a space of visual images, in the story of the ancient Greek poet Simonides about how, following the collapse of the ceiling at a banquet, he was able to retrieve images of each person in the room and remember where each had been sitting. Depper then discusses Frances Yates’ (1966) The Art of Memory, about how, in Renaissance times, as suggested by the experience of Simonides, in preparing a speech a person might create visual images for its topics and then mentally put each one in a sequence of places around a familiar house. When giving the speech, the person would be able mentally to walk round the house and easily retrieve the images for the topics in turn. Since then, memory has been enhanced by the technology of writing as it became more universal and of paper as it became more available, so speakers now will typically prompt their minds from notes or headings. And so, says Depper, what happened in these activities is that the art of memory moved beyond mere storage to dynamic questions, of how to arrange what we remember so that we can think and act better. Do newer technologies continue to enable us to do that?
Following Depper’s contribution come two chapters on Marcel Proust, both centering on the scene in which Marcel, the protagonist of Proust’s novel, sits with his mother to drink a cup of herbal tea and eat a madeleine cake. What is it that prompted the memory of his childhood, which then came flooding back to him? Was it a taste or smell? Why might these have had such effects? Then, in this part, come chapters on remembering as dream and as imagination.
The second part of this book is entitled “Memory in the Digital Age.” Now, in this age, we may reflect that, when in the morning, in the United States or the United Kingdom, people put on their jeans, the labels might remind them that the garments, digitally organized and outsourced, were made in Bangladesh. Now if people cannot remember something during a conversation, they may pull out their phone and look it up on Wikipedia. Now, too, although we human beings have been granted the ability to forget, we may wonder whether, once out there on the Internet, some things may persist for ever.
The book’s third section is on ecologies of memory. It includes a chapter by Maggie Gee on how, in her novels, she has dealt not just with ecologies such as racism but with the climate of our planet. She ends her chapter with this: “Right outside the window, pressing its face against the glass, here’s climate change, whispering ‘Remember me’.”
The fourth part of the book is on memory and the future, about how we humans are beings who have intentions and construct plans. On what are these plans based? Is it on our memory of the world as it has been and is, and on our memories of ourselves in the world as we don’t quite want it to be?
Part V of the book, on forgetting, includes chapters on the loss of memory with old age, and with conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, in a century when these effects occur to more and more people.
The book’s last part is entitled “Subjectivities.” In it is a chapter entitled “Memory and voices,” in which Patricia Waugh writes of voices within, which are based on memory. In her chapter, she discusses Mrs Dalloway, in which Virginia Woolf (1925) depicts the inward mind of Clarissa Dalloway, her memories of being at Bourton, of a young man called Peter Walsh who was in love with her, and of her own inner voices that merge with those of Septimus Smith, who has become mentally deranged from having fought in World War I. Now, there is recognition and better understanding of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which help us comprehend effects of certain incidents in Woolf’s life and incidents in the lives of people who fought in wars. Perhaps with such developments, Woolf’s engagement with memory is coming more fully into focus.
Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf were at the forefront of modernism in literature. Their movement toward inwardness, as well as toward understanding the perspectives of others, continued in literary writing into the second half of the twentieth century, with writers such as J.M. Coetzee and W.G. Sebald. It continues now, in the twenty-first century, with such writers as Haruki Murakami and Teju Cole. Although post-modernism could sometimes prompt interesting thoughts, it had an aspect of self-promotion and silliness. If we set it aside as a passing phase, we can think that in the later part of the twentieth century, mind and literature came together with the issue of consciousness, as depicted in such works as David Lodge’s novel Thinks (2001) and his theoretical essay “Consciousness and the novel” (2002). We can consider that in the twenty-first century, the modernist subject matters of inwardness and consciousness continue to be explored, but in ways that now also give emphasis to memory. Such themes begun by modernist writers and critics have not only continued but have been augmented by the study of reading and writing literature in empirical research, as discussed, for instance, by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon (2015). In this new era, there has been a coming together of psychologists, artistic writers, and people in the humanities.
In most books and articles on memory by psychologists and neuroscientists, topics include storage and mechanism. In the twenty-first century, a principal preoccupation has been studies by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging of activations of specific regions of the brain. Deeper principles can be recognized, for instance, in Frederic Bartlett’s Remembering, published in 1932. Cited several times in this book, it is still perhaps the most important psychological work on memory. It is about what Bartlett calls “the effort after meaning.” Now, as we can glimpse in the essays of Memory in the Twenty-First Century, this effort is being written about by people of many kinds, of many disciplines, with many interests, brought together by a fascination with implications of remembrance and possibilities of reflection.