The momentousness of memory

Memory

3. 1. The momentousness of memory

In addition to place, the other essential component of this study is memory.

Like place, memory is a strongly interdisciplinary concept, its application areas ranging from neuropsychology through sociology to cultural herit-age studies. The multidisciplinary nature of memory is a logical conse-quence of its central position in our lives. As well as “geographical beings”

(Sack 1997, 1), we are also temporal beings, and consequently both place and memory are vital elements in our common human experience. In order to be able to live and function in our four-dimensional universe, we need both a spatial and a temporal sense of direction, and it is memory that pro-vides us with the latter.

Memory aids us not just in embracing the past but also in preparing for the future. Over the course of evolution, our survival has depended on our ability to store information for future recall, to remember and learn from our past experiences so as to be able to plan for future contingencies. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, memory is in fact “inherently prospec-tive” (Klein, Robertson, and Delton 2011, 121; see also Klein, Robertson,

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and Delton 2010, passim). A severe amnesia robs us not only of our past but also of our future. Without memory, we are stranded by a never-ending present, unaware of the continuum of past, present, and future that could provide us with our identity (see also Trigg 2011, 71).¹⁷ An utter mindful-ness, perhaps, which renders us pure observers so that “there is left [only]

a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye”, to borrow the phrase of Virginia Woolf from her long essay “Street haunting: a London adven-ture” (1942). Although the narrator of Woolf’s essay does not suffer from amnesia — she is only leaving her home to saunter along the streets of London — her leaving of the “shell-like covering which our souls have ex-creted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others” is still analogous to the amnesiac’s loss of her identity along with her memory, her past — and her future (ibid.).¹⁸

17 Paul Ricoeur (2004, 97 and 102) credits John Locke with the “equating of iden-tity, self and memory” in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and defines him as “the inventor of the following three notions and the sequence that they form together: identity, consciousness, self”. (RICOEUR, Paul 2004: Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press.)

18 The situation of the protagonist in S. J. Watson’s novel Before I Go to Sleep (2011) illustrates the significance of memory for human identity, indicated by John Locke and his followers. Christine Lucas is a middle-aged woman who has lost her memory in an accident and is able to remember only the events of the present day.

When she goes to sleep at night, the memories of the day are swept away, and thus she wakes every morning without a past and has to start from scratch the task of rebuilding her identity, based on the facts her husband – or the man who presents himself to her as her husband every morning – tells her. Christine Lucas has a real-life model in the famous patient “H.M.” – a man named Henry Gustav Molaison, who lost the ability to create new memories as a result of a brain surgery intended to ameliorate his severe epilepsy. The operation included removal of most of the hippocampus, and thus Molaison’s case spurred the study of the hippocampus and its function in memory formation. (WATSON, S. J.: “Discussing Before I Go to Sleep”.

Interview at <http://www.sjwatson-books.com/interviews/discussing-the-book/>, last accessed 28 April 2014.; CORKIN, Suzanne 2002: What’s new with amnesic patient H.M.? Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Volume 3, February 2002.

153–160.) See also footnote 21 below.

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As an indispensable element of human life, memory has thus been at the centre of philosophical discourse since antiquity. However, especially towards the end of the twentieth century, memory has gradually become almost an obsession in the contemporary Western culture, manifested in the “popularity of the museum and the resurgence of the monument and the memorial” (Huyssen 1995, 3; see also Whitehead 2007, Introduction).

A kindred phenomenon is the growing fascination with heritage and a sen-timental longing for the past, nostalgia, which David Lowenthal (1985, 4) considers as equivalent to a “modern malaise”. Andreas Huyssen (1995, 7) traces the roots of this obsession with memory to the “accelerating tech-nical processes” and the “threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload” of today’s world which bring about the need for

“temporal anchoring”. Lowenthal (1998, 1, 5–6) has drawn similar conclu-sions as to the causes of the modern “cult of the heritage” and infers that rapid and dramatic changes in almost every walk of life have engendered an acute demand for heritage as a balancing force. Anne Whitehead (2007, Introduction) adds to these causes the “popularization of the discourses of virtual memory, prosthetic memory, and the electronic memory of com-puters” as well as the proliferation of oral archives focusing on the memo-ries of the common people.

Moreover, the wars and genocides of the last century have also contrib-uted to the urgency of questions concerning memory, history, and heritage.

The Holocaust in particular has brought to the fore questions concerning traumatic memories and the very possibility of reminiscence in the face of extreme suffering (Whitehead 2007, chapter 3).

Thus, the present memory boom can be perceived as merely the latest occurrence in a long sequence of debates and reflections on memory and recollection, beginning in antiquity and gaining extra momentum in the af-termath of the political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth

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century (Whitehead 2007, Introduction).¹⁹ Despite the upheavals of the past century, there has been no actual “break in memorial consciousness”

but, instead, an intensification of the memory discourse towards the end of the twentieth century (ibid., chapter 3; see also Radstone 2000, 6).