Memory, page 44
Bernice, as imagined, certainly violates the ancient injunction ‘Know thyself.’ There is a sense in which she really does not know herself, how she came to be as she is, the dreadful episodes with her father that (according to today’s etiology of dissociation) brought about her breakdown. So what? Bernice has achieved a coherent soul. It works, or so we are told. What better truth for her is needed? The therapist will say, perhaps, none. He is glad to get Bernice back to an almost normal life. There is a slight inconsistency in Goddard’s reporting. He ended his article published in 1926 by saying that Bernice is quite happy working half-days. In the book published the next year, and closer to the historical truth, we learn that ‘it will be some time before she will be strong enough to earn her own living.’ Leave that aside. Suppose Bernice carried on well enough after Goddard released her. The pragmatist may say that there is no need for some ‘historical’ truth: Bernice’s soul worked.
I am not satisfied. We do have another vision of the soul and self-knowledge. What is its basis? It comes from deeply rooted convictions and sensibilities about what it is to be a fully developed human being. They are parts of the Western moral tradition – that of Bernice, Goddard, and myself. First, there is an old sense of teleology, fostered by Aristotle, a sense of the ends for which a person exists: to grow into a complete and self-aware person. Second, there is the nominalism, represented by John Locke, according to which memory is a criterion for personal identity, perhaps the essential one. Third, there is the idea of autonomy, that we are responsible for constructing our own moral selves; that is perhaps the most enduring aspect of Kant’s ethics. Fourth, memoro-politics has recently taught us or coerced us to believe that a person, or in older language the soul, is constituted by memories and character. Any type of amnesia results in something’s being stolen from oneself; how much worse if it is replaced by deceptive-memories, a non-self.
The third part of this inheritance is especially interesting in the example of Bernice and many other damaged women. Consider the kind of material that was and was not in the false consciousness of Miss Bernice R. She was reconstructed and built into the male-dominated world of Dr Goddard, in which few fathers molest their daughters, and in which unwell young women are cured if they work as part-time secretaries. Bernice becomes a tidy and polite half-day clerk. Any possible autonomy of this already much weakened woman has been effectively annihilated.
Such a critique of what Goddard did has strong feminist overtones. But it also arises from basic ‘modern’ moral theory, whether we take that to be characterised by Kant or by Rousseau or, for that matter, by Michel Foucault. The thought of those men was dominated by the ideas of autonomy and freedom. They demanded awareness of how to take responsibility for one’s own character, one’s own growth, one’s own morality. Those philosophers had overcome the ancient Greek idea that we, like all else in nature, have a fully defined end to which we as human beings naturally tend. No: in the modern image, it is we ourselves who must choose the ends. That is a stern creed: we can be fully moral beings only when we understand why we choose the ends. To be realistic, we do not expect Bernice to have been strong enough to satisfy the demands envisaged by Rousseau or Kant or Foucault. But Goddard absolutely precluded Bernice’s having any freedom at all. He brutally reconstructed her and suppressed her past. He did so using patriarchal strategies, but one need have no special feminist alignment to see that what he did was wrong.
We should be under no illusions. Autonomy is not comfortable. A 1990s Bernice would not have her memories of incest simply quashed. Things are not so great today, either, for someone like Bernice. But at least with the consciousness that she would acquire now, and some serious sisterly support, there would be some possibility that she would find a self to which it would be worth her while to be true. Beware, however, of cant. One has no confidence that a 1990s Bernice is going to lead a happier or even better life in the rough-and-tumble of fuller knowledge than did my quasi-historical Bernice seventy years earlier. A truer consciousness may be a bed of thistles compared to which the real Bernice’s false consciousness was a thorny rose garden.
Self-knowledge is a virtue in its own right. We value the way in which people can fulfill their own natures by gaining an unsentimental self-understanding. We think it is good to grow, for all our vices, into someone who is mature enough to face the past and the present, someone who understands how character, in its weaknesses as well as its strengths, is made of interlocking tendencies and gifts that have grown in the course of a life. The image of growth and maturing is Aristotelian rather than Kantian. These ancient values are ideals that none fully achieve, and yet they are modest, not seeking to find a meaning in life beyond life, but finding excellence in living and honoring life and its potentialities. Those values imply that false consciousness is bad in itself.
From MICHAEL FRAYN, Copenhagen (1998)
Margrethe: Then the Nazis came to power …
Bohr: And it got more and more difficult. When the war broke out – impossible. Until that day in 1941.
Margrethe: When it finished forever.
Bohr: Yes, why did he do it?
Heisenberg: September, 1941. For years I had it down in my memory as October.
Margrethe: September. The end of September.
Bohr: A curious sort of diary memory is.
Heisenberg: You open the pages, and all the neat headings and tidy jottings dissolve around you.
Bohr: You step through the pages into the months and days themselves.
Margrethe: The past becomes the present inside your head.
From OLIVER SACKS, ‘A Symposium on Memory’ (2005)
In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon – the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories which had lain dormant for upwards of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them – memories, especially, of my boyhood. Moved by these, I wrote two little memoirs, one about the grand Science Museums in South Kensington, which were so much more important than school to me when I was growing up in London; the other about Humphry Davy, an early-nineteenth-century chemist who had been a hero of mine in those far-off days, and whose vividly described experiments excited me and inspired me to emulation. I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated rather than sated by these brief writings, and late in 1997 I launched on a three-year project of dredging, reclaiming memories, reconstructing, refining, seeking for unity and meaning, which finally became my book, Uncle Tungsten.
I expected deficiencies of memory – partly because the events I was writing of had occurred fifty or more years earlier, and most of those who might have shared their memories, or checked my facts, were now dead; partly because, in writing about the first fifteen years of my life, I could not call on the letters, notebooks, etc., which I started to keep assiduously from the age of eighteen or so; and, of course, because of the weakness and fallibility of memory itself. I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal. But I assumed that the memories I did have, especially those which were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial, were essentially valid and reliable, and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.
A striking example of this, the first that came to my notice, came up in relation to the two bomb incidents that I describe in Uncle Tungsten, both of which occurred in the winter of 1940–41, when London was bombarded in the Blitz:
One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat) – many of us in our pajamas – walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?). The streets were pitch dark, for the blackout was in force, and we all carried electric torches dimmed with red crepe paper. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning.
On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire – indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.
A few months after the book was published, I spoke of these bombing incidents to my brother, Michael. Michael is five years my senior and had been with me at Braefield, the boarding school to which we had been evacuated at the beginning of the war (and in which I was to spend four miserable years, beset by bullying schoolmates and a sadistic headmaster). My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, ‘I remember it exactly as you described it.’ But regarding the second bombing, he said, ‘You never saw it. You weren’t there.’
I was staggered at Michael’s words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law and had never doubted as real?
‘What do you mean?’ I objected. ‘I can see the bomb in my mind’s eye now, Pop with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn’t there?’
‘You never saw it,’ Michael repeated. ‘We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it.’ Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then taken it over, appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own.
After Michael said this, I tried to compare the two memories – the primary one, whose direct experiential stamp was not in doubt, with the constructed or secondary one. With the first incident, I could feel myself into the body of the little boy, shivering in his thin pajamas – it was December, and I was terrified – and because of my shortness compared to the big adults all around me, I had to crane my head upwards to see their faces.
The second image, of the thermite bomb, was equally clear, it seemed to me – very vivid, detailed, and concrete. I tried to persuade myself that it had a different quality from the first, that it bore evidences of its appropriation from someone else’s experience and its translation from verbal description into image. But although I now know, intellectually, that this memory was ‘false’, secondary, appropriated, translated, it still seems to me as real, as intensely my own, as before. Had it, I wondered, become as real, as personal, as strongly embedded in my psyche (and, presumably, my nervous system) as if it had been a genuine primary memory? Would psychoanalysis, or, for that matter, brain imaging, be able to tell the difference?
The Threepenny Review, Winter 2005.
Public Memory
WILFRED OWEN, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (1917)
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
From PAUL FUSSELL, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Everyone who remembers a war first-hand knows that its images remain in the memory with special vividness. The very enormity of the proceedings, their absurd remove from the usages of the normal world, will guarantee that a structure of irony sufficient for ready narrative recall will attach to them. And the irony need not be Gravesian and extravagant: sometimes a very gentle irony emerging from anomalous contrasts will cause, as Stephen Hewett finds, ‘certain impressions [to] remain with one – a sunrise when the Huns are quiet, a sunset when they are raising a storm, a night made hideous by some distant cannonades, the nightingales in the warm darkness by a stagnant weedy river, and always the march back from the trenches to reserve-billets in some pretty village full of shady trees.’ One remembers with special vividness too because military training is very largely training in alertness and a special kind of noticing. And one remembers because at the front the well-known mechanisms of the psychology of crisis work to assign major portent to normally trivial things like single poppies or the scars on a rifle-stock or ‘the smell of rum and blood.’ When a man imagines that every moment is his next to last, be observes and treasures up sensory details purely for their own sake. ‘I had a fierce desire to rivet impressions,’ says Max Plowman, ‘even of commonplace things like the curve of a roof, the turn of a road, or a mere milestone. What a strange emotion all objects stir when we look upon them wondering whether we do so for the last time in this life.’ Fear itself works powerfully as an agent of sharp perception and vivid recall. Oliver Lyttelton understands this process in highly mechanical terms:
Fear and its milder brothers, dread and anticipation, first soften the tablets of memory, so that the impressions which they bring are clearly and deeply cut, and when time cools them off the impressions are fixed like the grooves of a gramophone record, and remain with you as long as your faculties. I have been surprised how accurate my memory has proved about times and places where I was frightened.
By contrast, ‘How faded are the memories of gaiety and pleasure.’ Subsequent guilt over acts of cowardice or cruelty is another agent of vivid memory: in recalling scenes and moments marking one’s own fancied disgrace, one sets the scene with lucid clarity to give it a verisimilitude sufficient for an efficacious self-torment.
Revisiting moments made vivid for these various reasons becomes a moral obligation. Owen registers it in an extreme form, but everyone who has shared his circumstances shares his obsession to some degree. He writes his mother in February, 1918: ‘I confess I bring on what few war dreams I now have, entirely by willingly considering war of an evening. I do so because I have my duty to perform towards War.’ Revisiting the battlefields in memory becomes as powerful a ritual obligation as visiting the cemeteries. Of the silent battlefields of Vimy and Souchez, Reginald Farrer says, ‘They draw and hold me like magnets: I have never had enough.’ ‘I still loaf into the past,’ says Tomlinson, ‘to the Old Front Line, where now there is only silence and thistles. I like it; it is a phase of my lunacy.’
From CEES NOOTEBOOM, Rituals (1980), translated by Adrienne Dixon (1983)
Had he been set thinking after all? Then it was obviously infectious. As long as you did not do anything yourself, your life was determined by the people and the things that occurred in it. Their presence set into motion a slow stream of events you had to drag along with you: dead fathers, foreign mothers, boarding schools, guardians, and now also an aunt and a skiing champion. With a certain satisfaction he reflected that once again there had been no need for him to do anything himself. But how was it, then, that while he had the feeling that he had done nothing himself and that everything had only happened to him, his life seemed so long? He had already been here for thousands of years, and if he had studied zoology, it would have been millions. Small wonder, with such a past, that you could not remember everything, and yet at the same time it was surprising what you did remember. And stranger still was the equivalence of these recollections, in which the announcement of his father’s death was on a par with all kinds of other annexed events, such as Thalassa Thalassa, the Crucifixion, and the burning of the Reichstag. All of it was you, in effect, for although you had not yourself experienced it all, it had woven itself into your life. Ultimately, it was your body that remembered these things for you. Strange chemical processes in your brain had seen to it that you were aware of the Paleozoic, which therefore, somehow or other, had become part of your experience, so that you yourself were connected with unimaginably distant times to which you would belong until you died, by virtue of that same mysterious mechanism. Consequently, your life was stretched out infinitely – that was not to be denied. He suddenly felt very old.
From JACQUES LE GOFF, History and Memory (1986), translated by Bridget Patterson
The evolution of societies in the second half of the twentieth century makes clear the importance of the stake represented by collective memory. Extending beyond history both as a science and as a public cult, firstly as a (shifting) reservoir of history, rich in archives, monuments and documents, at the same time as being, further down the line, a resonant (and living) echo of historical work, collective memory is one of the huge forces at play in developed and developing societies, amongst those who wield power and those who are subject to it, all of whom are struggling for power or for life, for survival and for advancement.
André Leroi-Gourhan’s words are truer than ever: ‘From the moment homo sapiens existed, organising a structure for social memory was predominant amongst the problems of human evolution’ and furthermore: ‘Tradition is as vital biologically to the human species as genetic conditioning is to insect societies: ethnic survival depends on routine, the dialogue which becomes established creates a balance between routine and progress, routine symbolising the assets necessary for the group’s survival, progress the intervention of individual innovations for a better survival’. Memory is an essential element of what was subsequently called individual or collective identity, the feverish and anguished search for which is one of the fundamental activities of today’s individuals and societies. But collective memory is not only a conquest, it is also an instrument and objective of power. It is in societies where social memory is primarily oral, or where they are in the process of collating a collective written memory, that the struggle for the control of recollection and tradition, effectively a manipulation of memory, can best be understood.
