Wow, after listening to everyone's presentations so far I have to admit i feel pretty nervous about putting this up, but here you go, my final paper!
Almost a Remembrance:
Memory in literature and literature as memory“Memory is the scribe of the soul”
-AristotleFive years ago a man gave a very confused girl some valuable advice. He told her to think long and hard about what she would chose to major in during her time in college, for the decision would most certainly affect her future. He told her something that would take five years for her to truly appreciate. He advised, “Remember, studying stories doesn’t really help you do anything in real life; it doesn’t prepare you for any real job.” Although the girl barely knew the man, she decided that to spite him and his unsolicited input she would study literature. After studying a subject for five years that she had chosen to some degree out of malice, it became clear that the man had in fact imparted on her a lesson of the utmost significance and importance. His words had been trying to teach her the same lesson that all the stories she would read would give her. She just hadn’t been listening to the right ones. He had said the same thing to her that the divine beings from Jesus to Krishna imparted in their holy texts. The same thing that the characters in the works from Shakespeare to Joyce came to know and the same thing that all stories tell to those who break open their covers and read their pages: remember.
Thomas Mann began the work that he considered his magnum opus, Joseph and His Brothers, with the line “Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”(Mann, 3) Mann resonates a feeling of awe at both the measureless and mysterious nature that is universal and has led mankind to ask so many cliché questions about the existential ponderings on life and death and time and the divine. In turn literature endeavored to provide answers, offering the characters moments of revelations, bestowing an understanding of the absolute truths for which humankind has always searched. These literary epiphanies provide answers to the characters on the page, if only for a moment, but they can only try to capture an overwhelming feeling in words for its readers. While the epiphanies on the page may not provide answers themselves to the reader they instead present the means--memory. Mann deemed the past to be a bottomless well, yet literature is the bucket carrying what seemed to be lost to the surface.
While some works of literature provide the means to recognize epiphanies and understanding in a hidden or ambiguous manner, many works literally come right out and say it. Alas, like the confused student, most readers simply don’t listen to the right words. In Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet the ghost of the king asserts “remember me.” In the sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita Krishna similarly says “remember me.” In the book of Luke Jesus says “do this in remembrance of me.” James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake ends with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s command to “mememormee.” The message of these works is clear, yet knowing what it means is much more uncertain. While it first may seem that the characters and texts only require one to remember them individually, literature as a whole suggests a different option--just remember. Remember the king’s ghost, remember Christ and Krishna and Anna Livia, remember it all for it is this ability—remembrance--that connects the reader to the literature and the epiphanies in them. It is this ability that allows the great epiphanies of literature to transcend the pages on which they were written and reach the reader. The only genuine experiences, and therefore the only experiences which can provide meaning and understanding and answers to the eternally-asked questions, are those that come about through the agency of remembering.
T.S. Eliot wrote in what he called “his finest and most profound poem,” The Four Quartets, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience/ In a different form, beyond any meaning/ We can assign happiness. I have said before/ That the past experience revived in the meaning/ Is not the experience of one life only/ But of many generations-not forgetting/ Something that is probably quite ineffable” (Eliot, 39). It is in this line, and throughout the entire poem, that Eliot gives his rendition if the line “Remember me.” His vision of the restoration of the past reflects the crucial ways in which memory affects meaning and time in all of literature. The beauty of The Four Quartets is overwhelming, its lessons innumerable and its meaning seemingly immeasurable. The opening quartet begins as the narrator and the audience follows a bird into a rose garden only to enter a labyrinth that will take them down “Into the perpetual world of solitude”(Eliot, 18) and back into the sunlight where “rises the hidden laughter/ Of children”(Eliot, 20). From the “open field” of East Coker, to the river and sea of The Dry Salvages and the isolated street of Little Gidding, Eliot seems to weave literature and philosophy, understanding and confusion, questions and answers into an eternally unfolding design. After reading the poem over and over again, and each time finding new and greater understandings from it, I resign myself to it. In order to understand memory I find that I must heed Eliot’s genius, take his hand and follow the bird into the rose garden. Eliot writes, “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost/ And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions/ That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us there is only the trying” (Eliot, 31). Well, here is to the trying.
Memory itself is overall a fairly abstract matter, in its most basic sense it is the ability to collect and preserve information and recall it at a later time. This is considered to be a function of the brain. However, the question arises whether there is more to memory than this and if perhaps at a much higher level, memory becomes less a function of the brain and more a function of the soul. Through literature, memory not only works to recall information in the most rudimentary way, bringing back to mind experiences and scenes that one has encountered, it also is the agency that allows transcendence of time and what could be called divinity. As the functions of memory increase one is able to ascend higher, like rungs on a ladder, in order to find the very features that are an epiphany, a greater, eternal truth.
The Greek word for truth came from the same word used to describe the river of forgetfulness, the River Lethe, which had to be navigated by the deceased in order to enter Hades. Souls entered the underworld and in doing so lost their memory, so it comes as little surprise that the word for truth in Greek is “alethela” which translates to “un-forgetfulness.” Beginning with the ancient Greek tradition, forgetfulness became an image associated with losing oneself and death, while the ability to overcome forgetfulness became associated with an idea of truth. If one must forget in order to reach the underworld, by maintaining memory one might be preserved from mortality, finding eternal truth and transcendence. Throughout literary epiphanies one constant remains: the presence of a greater truth. However, this truth changes forms throughout different pieces of literature acting as either an actual divine being such as Jesus, Krishna, or Buddha or simply just a higher level of transcendence, a total awakening. Regardless of truths changing forms, invariably one must look to their memory in order to retrieve it. For St. Augustine, this awakening lies in the form of God. He writes in his Confessions, “for when I seek you, my God, I seek the happy life. Let me seek you ‘so that my soul may live.’ My body lives by my soul and my soul lives by you” (Augustine, 248).
Just as St. Augustine searches for unity in his truth of God, the great warrior Arjuna is told in The Bhagavad Gita to find the same thing in his truth of Krishna: “Delivered from selfish attachment, fear, and anger, filled with me, surrendering themselves to me, purified in the fire of my being, many have reached the state of unity in me” (Easwaran, 117). This state of unity and truth is not found only in divine beings such as Krishna or God; instead it is the highest level of transcendence found within oneself. As written in The Upanishads, “The Atman is the Brahman,” the soul, or Atman, is the divine, Brahman. They exist within each other, just as in the Christian tradition man is made in the image of God. The divinity or eternal truth is there for everyone, although for each Atman, it takes a different representation. If the truth already exists within the soul, the only way to know it is through turning inward and remembering where to find it.
Memory is incredibly difficult to completely understand or control, and for the most part memory performs only its most basic functions of necessity: restoring the experience alone to its possessor, connecting only enough dots in order to function in daily life. One way to understand this aspect is through the relationship between memory and time, best illustrated in the use of sound and language. Fundamentally speech does not exist without memory as the words we say can only be remembered. By the time they are heard they have already danced through our minds, across our tongues, out our mouths and like the fleeting instant they were conceived in, they disappear. Each syllable and sound of every word follows it predecessor into the past, and “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning” (Eliot, 58). These disappearing moments can only be united and formed into an idea through remembering each individual instant and sound, as Eliot writes “Words, after speech, reach/ into the silence” (Eliot, 19). The words we remember are what exists after the sounds that comprise them have already been lost to the past. Moments in time, like words, are made up of many small instances, all remembered into a complete experience. Therefore experience exists only in our memory as it must be accumulated and assembled together through recollection. Without a complete memory each instant is lost and we exist only in the world of fragmented moments. It is fortunate then, that all living beings are given the gift of memory.
At the most basic level we are able to remember sequences of time. We are able to connect the long thread of ephemeral moments and make some basic sense out of them. From memory we are able to recognize the experience. Eliot observes that for the majority of people we exist in a world where the fleeting moments are allowed to pass by without further examination: “For most of us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment in and out of time,/ The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight” (Eliot, 44). This most basic level of memory allows us to piece together the fragments of time in order to form a comprehension of the events that these instants form. Memory in this manner is utilized in the everyday life of most people. This is analogous to reading a book and remembering the story, being able to bring back to mind the most basic elements, the characters and the plot.
Eliot comments that the reason most of us remain only in the realm of the unattended moment is that the examined moment sometimes is too overwhelming for us to endure. He writes in The Four Quartets, “Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing. / Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning./ The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,/ The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy/ Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony/ Of death and birth” (Eliot, 28). In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Rat and Mole are able to have a profound experience, an epiphany, but it is too much for them to bear and therefore it must be forgotten. For Rat and Mole the absolute truth, the experience of the divine, and the understanding of complete memory would be too much. The animal characters’ ascension on the ladder of memory would bring the possibility of less joy, as the old cliché goes: ignorance is bliss. Therefore following their epiphanic moment Rat and Mole are affected when with “a soft touch came instant oblivion.” This is necessary for Rat and Mole, according to Grahame, “For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before” (Grahame, 126). The only reminder of the encounter lies in the song of the wind in the reeds, whispering “forget, forget” (Grahame, 130), yet the actual event has been wiped from their memories. The profound meaning of the experience would not allow Rat and Mole to live their “lighthearted” and “little animal” lives. They could only have the experience, but they could not remember it and have the meaning. However, for characters that must achieve more than lighthearted little animal lives and achieve a higher sense of understanding, the experiences must be remembered.
Eliot’s poem goes further to explain the relationship between reality and memory. As the little bird tells us upon entering the garden: “human kind/ cannot bear very much reality./ Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present”(Eliot, 14). If everything, both the past and the future, are contained in the present, then it only makes sense that it is impossible to comprehend “very much reality.” Therefore the only possible defense against this much overwhelming reality is the lack of remembering it. The only way of truly coming to appreciate and recognize this much reality is through remembering it. Experience itself is nothing without reexamination through the process of memory. Eliot says” “There is, it seems to us,/ At best, only a limited value/ In the knowledge derived from experience./ The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,/ For the pattern is new in every moment/ And every moment is new and shocking/ Valuation of all that we have been” (Eliot, 26).
If too much reality is more than Rat and Mole, as well as mankind, can endure, then memory becomes the means of examining experiences outside of the new and shocking moments they occurred in. By piecing together all of these moments and using memory to reflect upon them, the meaning of the moment can be further understood in a greater way. In William Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey” the poet must return to a place five years later in order to understand all that it means to him and in revisiting this place from the past, the poet gains a greater awareness of the importance of memory. It is in remembering this place that the poet transcends himself into a higher understanding, a greater sense of harmony: “Nor less, I trust, / To them I may have owed another gift, / Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery, / In which the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.” This thought is then concluded with the lines, “While with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (blupete). While everything that surrounds the poet while at Tintern Abbey is too much for him to comprehend at the time, by remembering it he is able to reach state of epiphany.
Similarly Annie Dillard revisits a past experience of observing a solar eclipse in her short story “Total Eclipse.” The story is written two years after the encounter and reflects back on the moments she experienced in order to find the meaning in them. While the actual moment is profound, it is too profound, so Dillard must return to each instant and each emotion of the moment in order to understand it and what it meant to her. Dillard writes that “the meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination” (Dillard, 19) .When the reality is too overwhelming, the only meaning that can be found is in the recollection of it. Dillard writes that, like Wordsworth, remembering back not only gave her a deeper appreciation of the moment but also of memory itself: “Our minds were light years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong” (Dillard, 18).
Dillard points out that it takes an “act of will” to remind those who had forgotten the way that they had loved the planet and their lives. This act of will seems to be the actual act of reminding oneself to remember. Memory in this way allows for one to remember not only the happening they forgot but something much larger. This is memory not of simply of an event or experience, but instead more importantly it is remembering forgetfulness. In this way a deeper truth is recognized and a character must do more than merely remember. Instead they must actively examine and strain their memory in search of meaning. Eliot tells us that we had the experience but missed the meaning; this level is simply the recognition of this, and in this recognition comes the ability to find the meaning. In order to reach the state of epiphany here there must be an acknowledgment of something forgotten and an effort to recall it. Eliot points out this choice that one must make: either remember that you have forgotten something or remain in the state of forgetfulness. He writes “footfalls echo in the memory? Down the passage which we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose-garden. My words echo/ Thus, in your mind. / But to what purpose/ Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves/ I do not know” (Eliot, 13). The image shows the door we didn’t open as the path to the truth that has been forgotten and the memory being evoked as “My words echo/ Thus in your mind.” When Eliot asks “to what purpose” the question is posed if the dust on the rose leaves will be disturbed just as the dust of the years accumulated on forgotten objects is swept away when it is recovered.
Marcel Proust gives the most visible example of the effort needed to both recognize and recall what has been forgotten. In Remembrance of Things Past the narrator realizes that the petite madeleine he is eating with his tea evokes something in him that he has forgotten yet is vital to his very being. Upon the first bite, he notes “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.” This same pleasure also gives the narrator a transcendental quality as he claims that he had ceased to feel mortal. He then must make an effort to try to remember what it is that this seemingly unexceptional cookie means to him. He recognizes that it is not the actual cookie or the actual cup of tea that stirs such profound feelings, but instead the way they remind him that he has forgotten something. They are linked somehow to him and his past, yet he has forgotten why. It is in his memory that the answer lies. The cookie and tea have only acted as a catalyst to his memory, and he confesses: “It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth.” Proust and his narrator have made the decision to find the meaning within the experience, to admit that there is something that has been forgotten, a part of him that needs to be remembered. The account then illustrates an important aspect of achieving recollection and epiphany: the mental distress that is felt when reaching into the depths of memory and transcending into a greater state of truth. He writes, “I decide to attempt to make it reappear… But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period in my past life” (Proust, 48-51). Proust has taken the advice of Eliot, “not fare well, / But fare forward” (Eliot, 42). In forcing his memory to find this truth, the simple path of seemingly blissful forgetfulness--the path restored to Rat and Mole--has been forgone for the meaningful one.
In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Lily asks herself to recognize something more and she must look to her memory to find it. “And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was so apt to particularize itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life?” It is after asking herself this question that Lily reexamines the “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” and finds her epiphany, in realizing that she has forgotten. Lily looks to her past and remembers a whirlwind of experiences, including Mrs. Ramsey telling life to “stand still here.” In the midst of her collection of memories Lily is described as coming to a epiphanic realization: “Mrs. Ramsay saying ‘life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent ( as in another sphere lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was the nature of a revelation” (Woolf, 161). Once Lily has revisited experiences from the past and recalled Mrs. Ramsay telling life to stand still, she is able to see the meaning in the experience and able to achieve a greater understanding of herself, her own truth, her own Atman and her own Brahman.
Lily is shown that the nature of a revelation is “making of the moment something permanent” and it is only through the act of remembering that something that vanishes as quickly as a moment can be made into something permanent, eternally stored in the great warehouse of memory. Instead of reading the book and remembering the story, this level of remembrance can be equated with the role of the English major searching for underlying meaning; it is the understanding that the book contains more than just the plot.
In order to pass on this same message of remembrance, pieces of literature like Hamlet and The Four Quartets employ ghosts not just as supplementary characters in the plot, but as reminders to both the characters and the reader. Ghosts are used as physical representations of memory; in essence all ghosts are memories of the past that “haunt” our present. Hamlet is haunted by the ghost of his father because he remembers his father; he laments “O heavens! Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet!” (Shakespeare, 137). However his memory discouraged as those around him urge him to forget his father. Hamlets mother tells him to “cast thy knighted color off, / And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. / Do not forever with thy veiled lids/ Seek for thy noble father in the dust” (Shakespeare, 23). The ghost of his father appears to remind him not to forget, imparting the all important phrase “remember me” to him, reminding Hamlet that forgetting is the worst thing that he could do. A realization that he comes to in the end of the play when he begs Horatio not to kill himself so that he may remember him and tell his story, saying “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story” (Shakespeare, 271).
The ghost that appears in Eliot’s, Little Gidding plays a similar role. Like Hamlet’s father, the ghost is composed of “some dead master” known once by the narrator. Instead of one singular character, this ghost seems to be comprised of all those who are in the memory of the narrator, described as “both one and many” and a “familiar compound ghost” (Eliot, 53). The narrator, like Hamlet, is portrayed as being in danger of forgetting this ghost. He recognizes that the ghost is someone “Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled.” He continues by admitting his own lack of ability to remember telling the ghost, “The wonder that I feel is easy, / Yet ease is cause for wonder. Therefore speak: / I may not comprehend, may not remember.” The ghost that he comes upon in the streets of Little Gidding has the same message that Hamlet’s father’s ghost had: remember. He tells the narrator, and the reader as well, “I am not eager to rehearse/ My thought and theory which you have forgotten. / These things have served their purpose let them be” (Eliot, 53). The ghost then goes on to pass the “gifts reserved for age” to the narrator, lest he forget again. The fact that the narrator of The Four Quartets comes across the ghost in Little Gidding is hardly insignificant. The quartet previous to it is The Dry Salvages, in which the narrator and the reader must pass through the depiction of the “strong brown god” which is the river, which resides “within us.” As if guided by Charon himself, the river must be negotiated by the reader in order to come to Little Gidding, the quartet related to fire in which lost souls are met. The river is like that of the River Lethe, and it is after crossing it that the ghost must remind us of that most imperative ability: remembrance. Both the ghosts are memory, and in their meetings with the characters they truly only have one message, “remember me,” remember memory, remember to remember.
Eliot and Shakespeare use ghosts to remind their characters to remember and Dillard, Proust, and Woolf all force their characters to remember back in order to find their epiphany. All characters are forced to develop a greater memory in order to find a deeper meaning, or epiphany. Northrop Frye defines an epiphany as exactly this, remembering something that we have forgotten. “Epiphany is the theological equivalent of what in literature is called anagnosis or recognition.” The idea of recognition is inherently tied to the idea of memory as St. Augustine points out. In order to recognize something you must have already known it and therefore are simply being reminded of it. Similarly Plato’s concept of anamnesis involves memory recalling knowledge that has always been known, stored within us for all of eternity however lost in the farthest depths of the self and the memory. Like Plato, Eliot comments on this when he tells us that we missed the meaning. “I have said it before/ That the past experience revived in the meaning/ Is not the experience of one life only/ But of many generations/ Not forgetting” (Eliot, 39). This eternal knowledge, this knowledge of truth is both stored in everyone and their memory, but is also comprised of everyone and their memory. To Eliot it is made up of a collective and unified memory. However epiphanies and their fleeting nature suggest that they are only a brief insight into this collective memory, this eternal truth. Mere mortals are not able to completely remember, to have full access to all things past. This characteristic seems saved for the divine.
The highest level of memory, the divine memory, is less the ability to remember as much as the inability to forget. This most elevated type of remembrance consists of a complete memory in the most comprehensive and encompassing way. When Eliot writes that “for us there is only the trying” he ends the line with “The rest in not our business.” Eliot appears to be saying that while for humans the constant effort to recover what we have forgotten, remembering without forgetfulness is reserved for a much higher being. The Hindu God, Krishna, tells Arjuna that “You and I have passed through many births, Ajruna. You have forgotten, but I remember them all” (Easwaran, 116). Krishna goes on to tell Arjuna that he is “unborn and changeless,” that he “dwells in every creature,” and that he is “changeless and beyond all action” (Easwaran, 117). Unlike characters who are able to come to a moment of epiphany through memory, using it to find the meaning to the experience, the characters who have a complete memory become the source of epiphany. They have finally reached the stage where “the Atman is Brahman” and have transcended to the level of eternal truth. They have not conquered a moment in time, restoring it through memory; instead these divine characters have conquered all of time. As Philostratus said “all things fade away in time, but time itself is made fadeless and undying by recollection”(Yates, 42). This evokes Eliot’s line that “only in time can the moment in the rose garden … be remembered/ only through time time is conquered” (Eliot, 16). No longer does memory allow for epiphanic moments or moments of divinity; instead memory in this sense allows the character to become the higher truth.
In the Buddhist tradition the Dali Lama is considered the reincarnation of Buddha and it is only through the agency of memory that the divine is distinguished from the mortal. As monks scour the country for the child who will be the next Dali Lama, they carry objects that belonged to the old Dali Lama and objects that did not. The child who is able to remember more than just his own life and remembers his former incarnation picks out the objects that belonged to the Dali Lama before him. While the memory that allows for meaning recalls what has been forgotten, the memory that allows for divinity does not need to recall anything since it has never forgotten. In this sense the divine has realized a sense of memory so complete that it has almost transcended it; it becomes memory itself, and it becomes what we must remember.
Krishna tells Arjuna that his role is to remind people, saying “Whenever dharma declines and the purpose of life is forgotten, I manifest myself on earth. I am born in every age to protect the good, to destroy evil, and to reestablish dharma” (Easwaran, 117). This role is the one taken on by the poet, the recorder of stories, eternalizing memories for all to know. In this same way literature is memory itself, the physical preservation of memories on pages for all to read. In reading books we add to our own memory and climb a bit higher on the ladder towards eternal truth. With each book we read we become one memory closer to remembering our Brahman within our Atman. It is literature that makes us more divine. Literature is memory, written down and made eternal, reminding those who read it of what they have forgotten, telling them: remember me.
