The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies

Siobhan Kattago

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317042723
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

Memory has long been a subject of fascination for poets, artists, philosophers and historians. This timely volume, edited by Siobhan Kattago, examines how past events are remembered, contested, forgotten, learned from and shared with others. Each author in The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies has been asked to reflect on his or her research companions as a scholar, who studies memory. The original studies presented in the volume are written by leading experts, who emphasize both the continuity of heritage and tradition, as well as the memory of hostilities, traumas and painful events. Comprised of four thematic sections, The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research within the discipline. The principal themes include: ¢ Memory, History and Time ¢ Social, Psychological and Cultural Frameworks of Memory ¢ Acts and Places of Memory ¢ Politics of Memory, Forgetting and Democracy Featuring contributions from key thinkers in the field, this comprehensive volume will be a valuable resource for all academics and students working within this area of study.

PART I
Memory, History and Time

1

History as an Art of Memory Revisited

Patrick H. Hutton

On Historians Writing Memoirs

It has been twenty years since History as an Art of Memory was published, my wide-ranging historical inquiry into the workings of memory. Upon completing the typescript, my wife Lee and I took a vacation in Bermuda. The idea was to put a little distance between ourselves and the project. But it was not a complete escape. Most afternoons I sat in the sunshine by the sea and sketched a preface to my book. My essay was not unlike the exercise that we have been asked to undertake here. The French historian of memory Pierre Nora labelled such writing ego-histoire. Mine consisted of two parts.

One part was a condensation of my argument, distilled from what had been lengthy discussions of the idea of memory by a gallery of philosophers, ancient and modern. I cast this precis of my interpretation as a historical reflection on the notion of memory’s eternal return. I reviewed the four phases of the memory cycle, as first limned by Aristotle deep in antiquity and later given more elaborate substance by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza nuova in the mid-eighteenth century. The cycle they envisioned proceeded from imagination to recollection, then to historicisation, before passing into forgetfulness. The closing of the cycle evoked nostalgia for its renewal. Today we autopsy such memory cycles from a critical historical perspective. Our sense of emotional distance from once valued traditions has been a factor prompting today’s fascination with the relationship between collective memory and historical understanding.

The other was a personal sketch of influences from my own heritage that had set me on my intellectual journey toward these reflections on memory in the middle of my life-journey. Rereading this passage today leaves me slightly embarrassed by its transparent candour. Having laboured so long in realms of historiographical abstraction, I must have wanted to convey the concrete beginnings of the project through memories drawn from my own life-world. The substance of my book, by contrast, marked a time and place in my maturation as a scholar, and, as I would later come to recognise, my witness to a sea change in thinking about the nature of history in its relationship to memory.

Nora attributed the phenomenon of historians writing memoirs to the breakdown of personal identification with well-defined historiographical traditions (2003). His observation correlates closely with philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s thesis concerning the demise of scholars’ allegiance to the idea of a unified, continuous narrative of history, conceived as the rise of modern Western civilisation through the agency of the nation-state (1979). Most contributors to Nora’s edited collection, Essais d’ego-histoire (1987), attested to the constraints of having written under the tutelage of a master historian articulating a well-established historical narrative. As historians, each had a different tale to tell about their entry into the profession, and, for readers, all of their stories were absorbing for their personal reflections on the routes by which they sought a measure of intellectual autonomy from the historiographical traditions in which they had been apprenticed.¹ My favourite is Michelle Perrot’s account of her audience in the early 1960s with the eminent doyen of studies in the French revolutionary tradition, Ernest Labrousse, her thesis advisor as a graduate student. When she proposed a study of the feminist movement, he suggested that she try something more current. He set her to the task of investigating workers’ coalitions in the face of economic crisis in the early nineteenth century, a topic, he allowed, not yet filled in the broad canvas of social history that he was painting. Perrot complied, but eventually found her own path into women’s history (1987: 275–8).

At the time, I conceived of my preface as a rhetorical strategy. As an editor, I had learned to be attentive to the pragmatics of writing in ways that might draw in readers beyond professional specialisation. Moreover, I was attuned to the ‘rhetorical turn’ in contemporary historiography. I had read Hayden White’s study of the poetics underpinning historical narrative and Michel Foucault’s rhetorical inversion of the knowledge–power relationship for interpreting the meaning of public discourse. These scholars confirmed my understanding that the past as history is not encountered transparently but rather through the narratives we devise to set forth its meaning. I began each chapter of my book with a place of memory taken from a passage by the author under review. Each localised an argument in a mnemonic scheme. My preface was a walkway toward the portals of these ‘memory palaces’ of my thinking about history among the arts of memory.

Sources of the Idea of History as an Art of Memory

I initially conceived of my project on the art of memory as a study within the genre of the history of ideas. The principal concept underpinning its method is that of associative displacement. The ancient art was a hermeneutical exercise: familiar places anchor less familiar ideas.² Working from easily remembered spatial designs, mnemonists devised a method for organising their thoughts as their knowledge widened. Their art was the first studied formulation of artificial memory, permitting a distinction between spontaneous recall and conscious recollection. Not surprisingly, its invention was related to the rise of manuscript literacy in ancient Greece and Rome. The realm of artificial memory – memory as exported into archives and memory banks – has since expanded and diversified exponentially, and so the practical uses of the art for rote memorisation have been marginalised. Our current passage from print into media culture has been a major incentive behind all of the recent historical scholarship on like transitions in the invention of new technologies of communication in times past (Ong 1982: 3, 79–81, 135–8).

Some see mnemonics as a lost skill, one that if revived as a technique could strengthen one’s powers of recollection. Since the early twentieth century, books on mnemonics as a remedy for weak or failing memory have regularly appeared to renew that promise.³ My sense is that this is a fundamentalist interpretation of the resources of the art of memory. Instead I went in search of learned uses of mnemonic schemes, notably those that might enhance our understanding of cultural history. This ancient art remains of historical interest, because it has survived in so many disguises. Its changing uses can be traced over time. My question as I embarked on my research was: in what guise has the art of memory been dressed in modern times?

In making my way into this field, the English historian Frances Yates served as a guide, and she provided me with a model for proceeding on my own. During the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote a series of studies concerning radical (mostly arcane) intellectual movements of the Renaissance. A scholar of considerable originality, she had the good fortune in mid-life to become involved in the scholarly work of the Warburg Institute in London, a centre where studies in art history were conjoined with those in philology and cultural history (Yates 1984; Jones 2008). The institute’s founder, the German exile Aby Warburg, had been fascinated with the persistence throughout history of certain kinds of iconic representation and wondered whether he might identify archetypal images that gave form to a collective unconscious available to all humankind (Gombrich 1986: 221–3). Yates never subscribed to this notion of free-floating collective memories unbounded by time and place, but she was especially interested in the way images localized in specific contexts may be read for their historical meaning.

Yates sketched the origins of the art of memory as a useful rhetorical technique in Graeco-Roman antiquity. But her larger interest was to explain the ways the art had been put to use by the idealist philosophers of the Renaissance in their efforts to fathom the design of the universe. They conjured up ornate memory palaces to portray correspondences between their frameworks of earthly philosophy and what they imagined to be God’s providential plan (Yates 1966). Yates studied the art, architecture and learning of the Renaissance on these historical margins – inquiries of passionate interest during those times but since relegated to intellectual obscurity. Thereby she found a place for this lost learning in her interpretation of the Renaissance as a more pluralistic intellectual milieu than modern scholars had imagined. Among the many topics of magic, the occult and spiritualism that she examined, that of the art of memory would be the one her readers would find most intriguing.

Yates’ work on the art of memory played into her method for understanding history. For her, places of memory are points of intellectual departure for interpreting larger cultural realms. The art of memory exemplified in rudimentary fashion the method she would come to employ as cultural historian. She recognised that the art, invented to facilitate accurate recall, contained the ancient beginnings of the modern technique of philological investigation. Philologists reconstruct intellectual traditions. They locate cultural images in their time and place, then study the way they are revised as they are used and reused in changing cultural contexts. Yates’ method presupposes that in their beginnings there was a transparent correspondence between image and artefact. Words and things mirrored one another. Over time, the divide between them widened. Their initial connection was eventually forgotten, as ideas conceived in particular places took on a life of their own as they were remembered in unrelated contexts. Philologists reconstruct these lost connections, revealing the way the meanings of ideas are modified (and almost always idealised) over time as they come to be appreciated in new cultural settings. Out of this chain of ongoing revision, one may read the history of the way in which they have been remembered. In closing, Yates speculates briefly about what uses of the art of memory might be worthy of study in modern times, noting in particular its visible applications in the scientific writings of Frances Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz during the seventeenth century (Yates 1966: 368–9).

I saw possibilities for exploring other vocabularies of mnemonic association in times closer to our own, as in the case of the poet William Wordsworth or the neurologist Sigmund Freud. My strategy at the time was to further extend Yates’ project by exploring modern uses of the ancient art of memory in this paradigmatic way. Along the way, I had also come to see that mnemonic schemes took on a historical cast in the early twentieth-century studies by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. He showed how the influence of collective memory is intimately tied to the realities of social power. The construction, vitality and decay of the commemorative sites in which such memory was localised could be plotted historically. I read widely in his writings and especially appreciated his historical study of the imaginary topography of the Holy Land as it was constructed and reconstructed over the course of the Middle Ages according to the vicissitudes of the encounter between Christian pilgrims from Europe and indigenous people in Palestine (Halbwachs 1971). Though written in the 1930s, Halbwachs’ study was recalled to serve as the prototype for the new interest in the history of commemorative practices, the first foray of historians into memory studies during the 1970s.

Eventually, I came to appreciate Yates’ approach to memory less as a matrix for understanding the memory phenomenon in contemporary historiography and more as an application of the uses of memory in manuscript culture. There were other sources for my inquiry, notably the workings of collective memory. This interest grew out of a larger and earlier historiographical context, that of the history of collective mentalities as it developed as a field of historical scholarship during the 1960s and 1970s (Mandrou 1968; Ariès 1988). Work on mentalities proposed new approaches to cultural history, putting the accent on popular mores as opposed to learned high culture. Leading the way in these investigations was the highly respected French Annales school of historical scholarship. Its founders, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and their successors, Fernand Braudel and Robert Mandrou, were famous for their ambition to write a synthetic history that encompassed not mere politics and statecraft but also the largely anonymous social, economic and geographical processes that shape the deep structures of historical change. Annales scholarship was grounded in evidence supplied by material culture, and it evinced a deterministic view of history. It leaned heavily on accounts of slow-moving impersonal forces whose impact was barely perceptible at any moment but sure and certain when considered à la longue durée (Pomian 1986).

The take among Annales scholars on mentalities as a problem of collective memory, therefore, emphasised the weight of tradition. In their research, they gravitated toward the early modern era so as to expose the way tradition acted as a break upon innovations in the natural and social sciences and as an opposing force to the moral imperatives of political reform that we have come to identify with modernity. Progress was made against the stubborn resilience of tradition-bound custom and the habits of mind of ordinary people in their everyday lives. The entry of memory into scholarship on mentalities, therefore, came through their interpretation of tradition as a bulwark against the erosive forces of historical change. The topic of the dynamics of tradition was the basis of my interest in the historian Philippe Ariès, whose nostalgia for old France inspired his highly original studies of the cultural history of attitudes toward the life cycle in the modern world (1986: 33–43). Ariès, I soon discovered, was as interested in innovations that updated or supplanted custom as he was in stubborn resistance to change. Drawn to his insights into the relationship between continuity and change in explaining the nature of tradition, I decided to write his biography (Hutton 2004). Ariès’ historical scholarship is an exegesis of the collective memory of the tradition into which he had been born and continued to cherish. Hence it would be a stretch of the imagination to portray him as a pioneer of memory studies as we have come to understand the interpretative perspectives they advance today.

After researching and writing my study of Ariès as historian, I returned to the larger topic of memory within contemporary historical scholarship, prompted by requests to write encyclopaedia articles on the relationship between memory and history (esp. Hutton 2013). By the turn of the twenty-first century, what had first been perceived to be a transitory ‘memory boom’ in historical scholarship had become a well-established field of cultural history. In this new milieu of scholarly endeavour, my thinking about the topic turned from the workings of memory to the implications of memory studies for historiography. Two questions preoccupied me. How does collective memory influence the rhetoric of historical writing? To what degree is it possible to recapture the experience of the past in our present imagination? Two authors especially have helped me to address these questions and to think through this reorientation in historical understanding in light of all the interest in memory: the French historian Pierre Nora and the German literary critic Walter Benjamin. I valued the first for the way he had placed the memory/history puzzle in a historiographical context germane to the needs of the present age and the second for his insight into memory’s power to rekindle the human imagination.

Pierre Nora on History and Memory Reconfigured

I have studied and appreciated the work of French historian and publicist Pierre Nora for a long time. His Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) is the most imposing work by an historian within the emergence of memory studies, and it helped me to see the historiographical implications of the new interest in memory. He conceived, planned and edited this complex study of commemorative conceptions of the French national memory. I dealt with him only briefly in History as an Art of Memory: he was the final figure in my discussion of the memory cycle in the historiography of the French Revolution. His project, which over the course of the 1980s ran to three volumes, appeared about the time of the celebration of the bicentenary of the Revolution. As a pioneering work in memory studies, it became the seminal historical study of the moment, diverting attention from books about the Revolution itself. Nora and his contributors canvassed the varied sources of the national memory, of which the Revolution was but one. Like Foucault during the 1980s, Nora became an intellectual celebrity for the first decade of the twenty-first century, at least in French circles. In 2002, he was elected to the Académie Française. More recently, he has published an anthology of his most important essays on memory and history (Nora 2011a). An admiring scholar has written a highly sympathetic biography of him (Dosse 2011).

I was first intrigued by what I perceived to be Nora’s application of the art of memory as a method of framing his historical inquiry. In abandoning the linear sequencing of conventional historical narrative in favour of a spatial design of a genealogical tree of memory, he returned to the multitude of places that had contributed to the making of the modern French national identity with a method not unlike that employed by Halbwachs. He visited sites of memory in a retrogressive perspective, turning attention to a vast array of formative influences in the construction of the national memory, including sites that had become obscure or that localised lost causes. Cultural sites were juxtaposed to those that were political. Like Yates, he pointed to the pluralism of the past when viewed not as an ascent from origins but as a descent into the complex mix of collective memories issuing from the past.

In recent years, Nora has reflected frequently on Les Lieux de mémoire. Since the last volume appeared in 1992, he has devoted much time to writing articles and giving lectures that place his project within the context of a changing historiography. He has offered what has struck me as the most convincing explanation of the concept of the ‘end of history’, a notion that captured the media’s attention at the end of the Cold War. The deep issue, Nora contended, lay not in a new conception of politics but rather in a changing conception of historical time – what he and his colleagues referred to as a ‘new regime of historicity’ different from modern history, indeed from all such regimes that had gone before (Hartog 2003: 26–30). Citing t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Memory Studies and its Companions
• PART I: MEMORY, HISTORY AND TIME
• PART II: SOCIAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL FRAMEWORKS OF MEMORY
• PART III: ACTS AND PLACES OF MEMORY
• PART IV: POLITICS OF MEMORY, FORGETTING AND DEMOCRACY
• Afterword
• Index