There have been theories of memory which tested the idea that the DNA, which carried the handed-on forms of a species, might also be the organ of memory. Rats, and nematode worms, were trained to remember and perform tasks, and then slaughtered and fed to other rats and nematode worms, which were thought to have ingested the learned behaviour and to react more quickly in the next generation. Scientists searched for the ‘engram’, a ghostly descendant of Plato’s impression on the wax, the Form of Memory that mysteriously persists in a creature’s brain when every molecule in that brain has decayed and been replaced several times. The image we have now – which ‘feels’ to me like a good image – is one of constant communication and reinforcement and pruning (to use J.P. Changeux’s useful word) of the network of cells in the brain, which is simultaneously a structure of molecules, and a system of electrical signals. This gets rid of the imagined infinite regression of homunculi observing either ‘representations’ or reproductions ‘in’ the brain. Nevertheless, even if the DNA is not the vehicle of Memory, there is a complex and delicate relation, suggested in an elegant essay by Patrick Bateson, between what animals may learn or remember, and their fitness, and therefore survival and handing on of their genes. The example he begins with is the cheetah who learns, or remembers, that gazelles who ‘stot’ vigorously are less worth-while to pursue than feebler ones. Here memory reinforces natural selection and works with it.

  Memory, or Mnemosyne, was, the Greeks believed, the mother of the Muses. Art is all, at some level, both a mnemonic and a form of memory. Frank Kermode, in an elegant essay compares St Augustine’s contemplative form of memory as a search for God with Wordsworth’s Prelude, an autobiographical poem about the Growth of a Poet’s Mind, which has some of the subtlest recordings of the feeling of thinking in English, and with Freud’s analysis of the psyche as a system for hiding and disguising desires and individual histories – and then of repeating the patterns of desire and disguise. Malcolm Bowie is interested in what he calls remembering forwards – the way in which a composer, or a painter, can envisage and then make something new, by remembering and reshaping something earlier – Beethoven remembering Bach’s variations, Titian remembering Ovid’s Marsyas. Bowie is extremely subtle about the way the mind moves forward and back, elaborating and discarding. His essay reminded me of what a painter once said to me when he was halfway through reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. You can feel the form of what is to come, he said, weighing on you. Or in you. I think the felt form of the part of an unfinished work – a novel half written, say, that has found its shape – is not unlike the search in the memory for something you know you know. And culturally, of course, the same mixture of remembering and reinventing is always going on. Our anthology includes a passage from a recent book by Milan Kundera in which he meditates on the fact that no reader – not even another novelist, a professional – can ever hold in the memory the whole of a complex novel, by Flaubert, say, or by Kafka. The work is formed, and no single memory will ever be adequate to think about it.

  Frances Yates studied the intricate and strange Memory Theatres of the Renaissance, where an argument, or a poem, could be remembered by arranging it in an imaginary building, in floors and alcoves and stages, which the professional thinker then revisits. This solidifying of remembered ideas or objects turns out to be very similar to the techniques used by professional mnemonists – such as the one studied by the Russian psychologist, Luria – who attach things to be remembered to buildings and gates along a path. This also resembles what the London taxi drivers appear to do – they associate words with buildings – they ‘see’ a Crystal Palace or an Odeon and attach routes to fixed points.

  One of the great memory-connected systems of recent times is of course psychoanalysis. Freud’s metaphorical map of the psyche, a building with storeys, with the Superego, the Ego, and the shapeless dark sea of the Id rising above each other, is a different kind of memory theatre. Frank Kermode quotes Adam Phillips, who says the patients of analysts are people haunted by memories they want to rid themselves of. Freud discovered the device of screen memories – memories which disguise, or cover, memories the subject wants to forget or hide. But these screen memories at the same time point to the lost incident, or love object, or fear, and the skilled analyst can resurrect the lost memory by the method of asking the ‘patient’ to make free associations to dreams, or waking fears, until, it is hoped, the form of what is lost can be brought to the surface, contemplated reasonably, and understood. Here the Unconscious has done the work of the unnaturally conscious mnemonist, and attached meanings to apparently arbitrarily chosen objects. This particular map of the soul and its workings has been a great resource for all sorts of artists, literary, visual, and in film and theatre. Ignês Sodré, a psychoanalyst with an acute literary intelligence, has written on Freud’s study of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and has related it to George Eliot’s profound understanding, in Silas Marner of the processes of remembering, clinging on to, internalising and fetishising a lost object.

  Psychoanalysis deals with the subtleties of the relation between memory and forgetting. Recent uses of psychoanalytic techniques to ‘bring to the surface’ lost abuses from childhood, or traumas suffered and suppressed, have also aroused a considerable interest in false, or created, or invented memories. The usefulness of dredging up lost (or imagined) terrors from the deep well of unconsciousness has been called in question for various reasons. Studies have recently suggested that survivors of a catastrophe who have been professionally debriefed and encouraged to remember often fare less well than those who have gone through a more natural process of forgetting and adjusting. We need to forget, in order to survive. Both psychologists and psychiatrists have studied our propensity to make up memories, to create, or add, or subtly change what we remember. Studies of ‘false memory syndrome’ show that suggestion – by therapists or others – can bring into being the memories they are looking for. Ulric Neisser made an illuminating study of the inaccuracy of firmly held memories of, say, the day Kennedy died, or the day the Shuttle exploded. People asked to write down their memories at the time of an event, and to write them down again some time later, were found radically to have altered their accounts – and to believe firmly that the later account was ‘true’. Neuroscientists can now study the process of putting together a memory as neurones and axons are reinforced. It has been suggested that every time we, so to speak, take out, or visit a memory to look at it, we repeat the process of putting it together in the brain. This would lead logically to the inference that there is no ‘true’ or ‘original’ memory to be reconstructed or discovered. And this in turn, as Neisser says, should make us worried about the whole idea of giving evidence in law courts, of our reliance on people recalling the truth under oath. Good witnesses are quite probably creative constructors of memories.

  What is true about the relations between invention, imagination and ideology in individual processes of remembering is of course also true of public, and communal memory. Nations put up public memorials to events that are part of a desired history. They construct history books for children. They prune and reinforce desiderated narratives. Sudhir Hazareesingh has been carrying out research in the French National Archive on the image and memory of Napoleon Bonaparte in the nineteenth century. He writes very lucidly about the construction of a national memory and identity by the use of markers such as street names – a political Memory Theatre – flags, and songs. He is interested in what the French chose not to remember about what went on in Vichy France, and are now revisiting. It is possible for states to erase, and reinstate, people in common memories, as politicians in Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being are airbrushed out of photos when out of favour, and put back when the climate changes. The German people after the Second World War are very different from Germans before it, and have a very complex relation to their common memories. The painter, Anselm Kiefer, deliberately transgresses public proprieties of memory by revisiting images that have been consigned to oblivion. He ranges from the Nazi salute to the bombastic architecture of the 1930s, from Teutonic myths to Wagnerian Nuremberg. He paints with doubleness – the images are seen partly through the beauty and terror of the poems of Paul Celan. But they are there – not to be forgotten.

  There is a public analogy to George Steiner’s clever, resourceful, unremembering teenagers. Manfred Osten, in a thoughtful book, Das geraubte Gedächtnis, [Stolen Memory], argues that precisely the aids to memory we have constructed in machines – the memory banks which have replaced card indexes, the CDs that have replaced diagrams and drawings – are taking away our inhabited public memory. This is both because – as in the case of the teenagers – everything is indiscriminately available, and, which is a problem the big memory institutions, the great libraries and museums are encountering – the technology becomes rapidly obsolete, and as it becomes inaccessible the memories are lost. Thomas Hobbes, in one of the quotations I most love about memory, remarks severely that imagination is nothing but decaying sense, and that when the decaying sense is ‘fading, old and past’ we call it memory. Obsolescent technology gives a whole new terror to the decay of sense, imagination and memory itself.

  In our anthology we have – including Hobbes – many literary evocations of memory and memories. We have autobiography – including Augustine and Wordsworth, and a splendid essay by that most subtle of biographers and autobiographers, Richard Holmes, who ranges from the ‘memory boxes’ used to arouse fading memories in the old, to Mole’s stream of sudden memory in The Wind in the Willows, to Coleridge’s wonderful image of the memory or mind as an insect winning its way along the surface of a stream ‘by alternate pulses of passive and active motion’. We have the Woolfs, and Proust, and Nabokov who Craig Raine says is a greater writer than Proust. Raine may be right when he says Proust’s attempts to make philosophical definitions of memory don’t quite work. (He claims that Proust’s description of involuntary memory – as opposed to the willed act of memory – elevates the former to a religious experience: ‘[It] restores reality in its entirety, with all its qualia intact, and is therefore a form of resurrection. It is further a kind of ‘immortality’. I agree with Raine that this doesn’t quite work, that the religious joy it bestows is suspect.)

  But the glory of Proust is the precision with which he renders the moment of the recall of lost time, even if we may have reason to suspect that he is creating, or recreating the past.

  I shall end by picking out one example, which is from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a poem whose greatness is still not sufficiently recognised. It is one of the most powerful meditations on loss and recall, time, and the movement and construction of the human mind in time. The passage we chose is a precise meditation on the nature of consciousness, which would have satisfied Freud and Melanie Klein. It describes the conundrum with which I began, the identity and difference between the self who remembers, and what is remembered. It is written in a stanza which is both a mnemonic and a mimicry of the way thought composes and turns on itself.

  The baby new to earth and sky

  What time his tender palm is prest

  Against the circle of the breast,

  Has never thought that ‘this is I:’

  But as he grows he gathers much,

  And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me’

  And finds ‘I am not what I see,

  And other than the things I touch.’

  So rounds he to a separate mind

  From whence clear memory may begin,

  As through the frame that binds him in

  His isolation grows defined.

  The two editors of this collection started from very different interests and preoccupations. Harriet Harvey Wood is a mediaevalist, and a classicist, with an interest in Scottish literature and thought. In that context I am a Romantic, with an intense, if necessarily amateur, interest in neuroscience and psychology. These preoccupations – which are also to a certain extent limitations – can be seen in our choice of texts. But the collaboration has been inventive and wide-ranging because of the differences of emphasis. All sorts of strange connections and coincidences have been discovered. We should like to thank our contributors – who have been patient and understanding during illnesses of both editors. And we hope readers will find things that surprise them, and things they remember and revisit with pleasure.

  Part I

  Frank Kermode, ‘Palaces of Memory’

  Whether it is a question of a single person, or a multitude of persons falsely represented by the self-biographer (selves-biographer?) as one, there is no avoiding the question of memory, as Augustine was the first to understand. We are warned that he used the term in a much wider sense than we do. For him it was the very instrument of personal continuity, the basis of self-identity, and ‘the stomach of the mind’ (Confessions X.8). And it was also the means of access to grace. Since his narrative is of a delayed self-opening to grace, memory is in every sense the basis of it.

  Memory also offers the clue to the way the world at large functions, for the world is also fallen into materiality and sense, so that its redemption must be a matter of history, of a cosmic memory. One sees why Augustine follows his narrative with the philosophical enquiry into memory that occupies the tenth book of the Confessions. Here are some of the famous words:

  I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasuries of all kinds of objects brought in by sense perception. Hidden there is whatever we think about, a process which may increase or diminish or in some way alter the deliverance of the senses and whatever else has been deposited and placed on reserve and has not been swallowed up and buried in oblivion. When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately certain things come out; some require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles. Some memories pour out to crowd the mind, and when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the centre as if saying, ‘Surely we are what you want?’ With the hand of my heart I chase them away from the face of my memory until what I want is freed of mist and emerges from its hiding places. Other memories come before me on demand with ease and without any confusion in their order. Memories of earlier events give way to those which followed, and as they pass are stored away available for retrieval when I want them. And that is what happens when I recount a narrative from memory. (X. viii)

  This is a simple model, basically rather like a library, and it does distinguish easy-access books from books on reserve. However, the books interact. What the senses have collected and stored is modified by association with ‘whatever we think about’. Some items come easily, even too easily, so some must be waved away. Some are deep in the stacks or in special collections. The section that follows describes a sort of cataloguing system, in which acquisitions are organised according to the sense that introduced each of them: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Access to these resources enables one to enjoy and compare images of the world: ‘I distinguish the odour of lilies from that of violets without smelling anything at all’ (X. viii) and in these halls of memory ‘I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it’; moreover, with those recollections other images less immediate to that self-meeting may in their turn be blended and combined.

  To see what Augustine meant by self-exploration amid the contents of memory one needs to reflect that it is not merely sensory images that are collected and combined. Ideas are stored in the memory before one has learned them. As in Plato’s Meno, though with the important difference that Augustine does not admit prenatal knowledge, learning is remembering. Similarly stored, part of the original deposit, are ‘the affections of my mind’. Thus the rememberer can identify affective experiences when he or she has them later; but, as preserved in the memory and reported to the enquirer, they may differ strangely from what they were as primordial experience; and here the doubling effect is obvious: ‘I can be far from glad in remembering myself to have been glad, and far from sad when I recall my past sadness. Without fear I remember how at a particular time I was afraid … I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy’ (X. xiv).

  Forgetfulness in Augustine’s memoria is treated as a fact of memory: ‘memory retains forgetfulness … So it is there lest we forget what, when present, makes us forget’ (X. xvi). I must remember forgetfulness, even though it destroys what I remember. One further point: how is it possible to aspire, as everybody does, to a felicity which, though we have the idea of it, we have never actually experienced? We have no memory, in the ordinary sense of the word, of any earlier happiness on which to model such hopes. Yet where else can they come from, if not from memory? The notion of happiness must be there, put there by some prior agency, innate. God, too, is in the memory, but by his own intervention, to be found there perhaps very late, when fascination with his creation gives way to love of him. Here comes the requirement of continence, a degree of abnegation, achievable only by grace. Da quod iubes. God must give the continence he commands. Only then will he be found, and the enquiring spirit enabled to meet itself.