The Fictional Art of Representing Individual

Memory

A presentation in the Art of Memory Series

Drs. Cunningham, Ross, and Workman of the English Department

Previous Presentations about◦Memory consolidation and transfer

within communities (tribal, national, global) through rituals (Day of the Dead), ikons (crucifixes in American Southwest), stories of pilgrims & pilgrimages (to Canterbury, the Holy Lands), memorials (to Lithuanian Jews).

Our Presentation◦The ways in which writers provide a

sense of what it’s like to be a human being with a capacity for memory. The feeling of what happens (inside).

Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Creative Artists (writers, painters, chefs) anticipate the discoveries made by neuroscientists in the lab and through sophisticated brain imaging technology.

Neuroscientists confirm what artists have arrived at through observation and intuition.◦A bridge between the two cultures?

Lehrer’s subjectsProust…(the nature of memoryEscoffier….(the dimensions of

taste)◦Sweet, sour, salty, bitter…and

savorinessCezanne…(the essence of vision)Stein…(the nature of language)Stravinsky…(the origin of music)

Freud’s “borrowing” of the Oedipus legend to explain male development

Year Two of the Art of Memory Series?

The contributions of brain science to our understanding of memory◦Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain◦Lehrer’s How We Decide◦Behavioral Economics:

Superfreakonomics◦Edge.org: “Has the Internet Changed

the Way We Think?” Memory Consolidation/Reconsolidation

◦Klingberg’s The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory

David Lodge: Consciousness and the Novel

Our curiosity about the brain’s nature and function will propel us toward scientific investigation, but we will never achieve a full scientific reckoning. Thus…

Literature as our species’ extended documentation of dense human experience.

The novel is the most successful attempt at describing the experiences of human beings through space and time.

Literature endeavors to get at qualia, that is, the specific nature of subjective experience.

More David Lodge: The Theory of Mind

Our ability to “read” the minds of others and infer what their inner life is like (a necessary social skill).

The writer’s desire to depict the inner life…to render “on the surface” but also “in depth”

19th Century predecessors◦Jane Austen (1775-1817)◦Henry James (1843-1916)

The central consciousness

A generalization about 19th century fiction: the inner life of a character mediated by a controlling, limited-omniscient narrator.

Modernist Writers◦James Joyce Portrait of the Artist (1916)◦Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Modern Fiction (1919)

◦William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1928)

Development of “stream of consciousness” (the “quick of the mind”) ups the ante on the exploration and presentation of inner life

Memory as a dimension of consciousness

Influences on these and other Modernists (in addition to literary forerunners…Austen, James, Proust)

William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The “train” or “chain” or “stream” of consciousness◦ Thought◦ Instinct◦ Pre-thought◦ Reflex◦ Memory

Influence on these and other Modernists:

◦Freud’s ideas about the subconscious Refutation of the unitary self Faulkner’s Compson Brothers: id, ego, superego

◦The 80 year history of photography and the nascent narrative movie Birth of a Nation (1915); The Jazz Singer

(1927)

Influences on these and other Modernists:

◦The cycles of literature: the Victorian novel is worn out. Rejection of the forms and values of Victorian fiction. Pound: “Make it New”

◦Advocacy of critics like Woolf: “only thoughts and feelings, no cups and tables”…

◦[“On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” 1923]

The Paradigm of the Presentation, 1

What does the selected novel say about the nature and function of memory, about◦its triggers, ◦our control over it (memoire

voluntaire + memoire involuntaire, Henri Bergson)

◦duration (la duree…subjective time) ◦frequency, and ◦its power to liberate or imprison

The Paradigm of the Presentation, 2How does the writer use language,

literary devices, type face, etc. to represent consciousness (inner life) in general and the movements in and out of memory in particular? What are the cues on the page?◦How to convey inarticulate and, at

times, simultaneous thought and feeling in a linear art form?

JAMES JOYCE:

Memory and Consciousness

JOYCE AND ASSOCIATIONRare in early works – Dubliners, A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Prevalent in UlyssesThe major mode in Finnegan’s

Wake

JOYCE AND “WILLED”MEMORY

“Heron” incident – Heron Based on Albrecht Connolly, a rival student, and brother Vincent.

Incident taken straight from life –as “Stannie” attested later to Richard Ellmann.

Illustrates Joyce’s alienation from “church,” “family” and “state” at an early age

Early/representative act of defiance and self-definition

HERON INCIDENTHeron et al urge Stephen to “take

off” the English headmaster Mr. Tate.

Headmaster was George Stanislous Dempsey

Stephen recalls incident where peers and headmaster betrayed him – “Admit!”

Mr.Tate accuses Stephen of heresy

Heron et al accost Stephen for literary taste/heresy in their jealousy.

HERON INCIDENTStephen puts himself beyond the

reach of his country/countrymen.Reader participates by feeling

Stephen’s anger at persecution.Tension resolved when Stephen

transcends his peers concerns.“These voices had come to be

hollowsounding in his ears.”

LINK TO NON SERVIAMRecalls Ulysses, Tristram, Faust and

Milton’s Satan – puts truth of own original experience before all dogmas and allegiances.

“I will not serve that which I do not believe – whether it is my home, fatherland or church.”

“I will express myself as freely and wholly as I can in life and art, using only silence, exile and cunning for defense.”

“Alone?” “Yes.” “Not even one friend?” “Yes.”

JOYCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Agreed with Freud – at first.Later used Carl Jung. Jung more

universal.Disavowed Freud’s influence –

cited Edouard Dujardin’s novels as models and read them at age 20 in 1902. Dujardin wrote monologues.

Joyce pioneered the balance of inner monologue and outer social reality.

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

The past is never dead. It is not even past. Gavin Stevens – Requiem for a Nun

Pickett's Charge For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but

whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....

(Intruder in the Dust)

The Weight of Southern History…..

The Sound and the Fury: A Tale of the Compson Family

Quentin III (father) and Caroline (mother)

Quentin IV (Part II, June 6, 1910)Caddy…….Jason (Part III, April 6, 1928, Holy

Saturday)Benjy (Maury) (Part I, April 7, 1928,

Good Friday)Servant Woman Dilsey (Part IV, April 8,

1928, Easter Sunday)

Benjy and his memories The retarded son on his birthday

“hear” and “smell” used 100 times◦ Caddie 300 times

Triggers: ◦ Auditory (caddie/Caddy), ◦ Olfactory, (flower fragrance, Caddy’s Perfume)◦ Visual (the gate in the fence/the mirror spot)◦ Tactile (Caddy’s slipper)

The persistence and power of the past

Quentin Compson (suicide 1910)Common words: shadow,

remember, clock, time◦ Caddie mentioned 100 times

Father: “…clocks slay time…time is dead when it is being clicked of by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life…”

Quentin’s memory◦ Fluid moment between past and present◦ Fluid movement between past episodes

Invented memory: “I have committed incest”

The superimposition of past on present◦ The palimpsest of events, past and

present….Dalton Ames (Caddie’s suitor in April 1910) and Gerald Bland (Quentin’s classmate on June 6 of 1910)

Sartre on Faulkner◦His interior monologues are like an

airplane trip full of airpockets….◦The present is nameless, fleeting,

and helpless before the past. (Quentin III: Man is the sum of his misfortunes)

◦The past is not chronological but a set of emotional constellations.

Some recent “modernist” novels that employ stream of consciousness (and that I like):

Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988)