Memory: An Anthology
edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and AS Byatt
412pp, Chatto & Windus, £25
How does one remember how to write a book review? How does one remember reading the book under review? To the first question, a measure of experience and procedural memory can be used to produce writing which, according to certain conventions, might be deemed acceptable. The second question is much more of a poser. One might dog-ear the pages, scrawl in the margin or take copious notes, but the experience of reading itself, already a shuttling process of mental oscillation from the first line on, is impossible to recapture in full for the reader of the review.
As Harriet Harvey Wood and AS Byatt's wonderful Memory: An Anthology shows, the first line too has its antecedents, more or less well remembered, and these have an active effect on not just the readers of literature but also its writers, and on the creators and beholders of other arts. This particular importance of memory in respect of artworks is signalled by the anthologists' choice of Frank Kermode's fascinating essay "Palaces of Memory" (which first appeared in Index on Censorship) to open the book.
Lifting off from St Augustine's philosophical inquiry into memory ("I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are treasuries of all kinds of objects"), Kermode investigates those "deep, vertiginous mnemonic plunges" through the sequencing of which people make sense of their lives. These epiphanies or conversions or "turns", as John Sturrock has described them, appear to find the point at which "all can be seen to cohere", and as Kermode says, "to communicate persuasively the experience of the turn it is necessary to practise an art".
Well, you can disagree with him about that if you like, but maybe any disagreement will be settled by reading the Malcolm Bowie essay that follows, which characterises the "world of promises, prefigurations and echoes" that we enter when considering any great artwork, the beholder rediscovering the time-axis of his own preferences and also those of the original artist, that in turn adumbrate future creations. Bowie saves himself from the ivory-tower mentality by beseeching that "the Janus-time of art's unfolding [ . . .] flow back variously into the time of ordinary living and, in doing so, [ . . .] protect me from the complacencies and sentimental trappings of the merely nostalgic backward gaze".
Backward as it must necessarily look, this anthology has a pleasingly flow-like feel, taking us from high cultural assaults on the problem of memory in art to excerpts on or about childhood memory. These run from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, via Freud, Edmund Gosse and Nabokov (whose Speak, Memory is cited by many in the volume as a whole, along with the inescapable Proust).
A solid section on the philosophy of memory leads on to one on "The Art of Memory", which gives advice on retention by experts in rhetoric and snapshots of memory artists real and fictional, from Thomas Fuller in John Aubrey's Brief Lives ("he would repeat to you forwards and backwards all the signes from Ludgate to Charing-crosse") to Kipling's Lurgan Sahib, presiding over what has become known as Kim's Game, and Borges's magnificent Funes the Memorious.
The selections on memory and science are at once the most fascinating and the most inconclusive. While some of the more ancient scientific observations ("without memory there is no experience" - William Harvey, 1651) are borne out in more detail by the qualitative assessments of critics and writers, the more modern ones, from Pinker to Damasio, simply set deeper problems for the artists to recalibrate. Despite astonishing advances, there is no solution in sight, as Colin Blakemore and subsequent scientists recognise.
I'd thought Steven Rose's excellent essay on the relationship between memory and synaptic connections was in that science section but I see it was in the opening section after all. That's probably an example of a lack of attention rather than false memory, which is the subject of another chapter, investigating the psychoanalytic "subtleties of the relation between memory and forgetting", as Byatt puts it in her lucid introduction. The dredging up "of lost (or imagined) terrors from the deep well of the unconscious" leads naturally to the equally fraught business of public memory - of "witnessing" and what Byatt describes as the "desiderated narratives" of nations and communities.
Even in the most acute cases, such public memory is a form of storytelling insofar as it involves a perspective and the delivery of informational material from that perspective to an auditor, viewer or reader. Memory: An Anthology is itself subject to the same provisions, but it takes a wide view of the subject, raising many a ghost, from Freud's "archaic vestiges" of old experience in the unconscious to Dawkins and the evolutionary "survival value" of the idea of God.
Nor is the issue of digital copying neglected, both for what it means for the retention of physical documents and for the virtue of human memory increasingly falling back on electronic helpmeets. Both sides of that question may have a destructive effect on the relationship between imagination and memory. The operations of the latter on the former do not take place in discrete digital units, and future populations may discover in actuality what IA Richards once described as the "sinister potentialities" of recording devices.
Still, if they can with Larkin - in his poem "The Winter Palace", one of the closing pieces here - "blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage", maybe those future writers and readers will fare OK. At the very least let's hope some bibliographic maniac remembers, in an essay or even a note, the minor literary form of the book review.
