Grump's Grump

Here's a great article on "The Art of Memory" I wish I still had the URL for it but I down loaded the pdf.


THE ART OF MEMORY RECONCEIVED: FROM RHETORIC
TO PSYCHOANALYSIS
By PATRICK H. HUTTON
Mnemonics, or the art of memory, is today regarded as an arcane
intellectual interest. It functions on the periphery of popular culture,
largely through a literature of self-help designed to bolster the confidence
of people insecure about their powers of recollection. If it is a useful
skill, it is not an essential one in a civilization whose collective memory
is stored securely in the printed word. Today's archive for reliable reference
is the library or the computer, not the depths of a well-ordered
mind. Yet there was a time in the not too distant past when the art of
memory held pride of place in the councils of learning, for it enhanced
one's power to lecture or preach in a world that trusted in the authority
of the spoken word. From the wandering rhapsodes of ancient Greece
who enthralled listeners with the epic tales of Homer to the philosophers
of the Renaissance who constructed imaginary memory palaces to present
their intricate designs of the cosmos, the development of the powers of
memory was perceived to be an essential intellectual skill.
The art of memory as it was traditionally conceived was based upon
associations between a structure of images easily remembered and a body
of knowledge in need of organization. The mnemonist's task was to attach
the facts he wished to recall to images that were so visually striking or
emotionally evocative that they could be recalled at will. He then classified
these images in an architectural design of places with which he was
readily familiar. The memoryscape so constructed was an imaginary
tableau in which a world of knowledge might be contained for ready
reference. It was in effect a borrowed paradigm, the logic of whose
imaginary structure gave shape to the otherwise formless knowledge he
wished to retain. 1
Most professional psychologists today dismiss mnemonics as irrelevant
to the concerns of their discipline. Some are puzzled by the elaborate
and seemingly cumbersome systems of recall employed by mnemonists
through the ages, and question whether the systems themselves might
not be more difficult to remember than the facts to be committed to
memory. Others, while conceding the efficacy of schemes that help us
to retrieve facts in serial order, regard mnemonics as a skill with relatively
1 For a good example of how the art of memory was applied, see Jonathan D. Spence,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984), 1-23.
371
Copyright 1987 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.
372 PATRICK H. HUTTON
few contemporary applications.2 The study of the mind of an unusually
gifted mnemonist by the distinguished Russian neuropsychologist Aleksandr
Luria is a case in point.3 The subject of his study, Shereshevskii,
entertained audiences across Russia during the 1930s with his capacity
to commit to memory any data with which they wished to test his talent,
including long lists of random monosyllables or the elements of complex,
sometimes incorrect, mathematical equations. He could still recall such
information without prompting a decade later. Shereshevskii possessed
what Luria characterized as a "marked degree of synesthesia," i.e., acute
sensory perception that heightened his capacity to remember ideas by
virtue of the vivid imagery that he could attach to them.4 Yet Shereshevskii
lacked the capacity for abstraction and the agility of mind essential
for success in the modem world. Tormented by a clutter of facts that he
could forget only through an enormous effort of will, he found his gift
a burden. Unable to hold an ordinary job, he plied the trade of a showman
for want of something better to do.5 It is as if Shereshevskii were for
Luria a clinical psychological find, akin to an anthropologist's discovery
of a stone-age tribe in some remote jungle. One might admire the mnemonist's
genius while recognizing its obsolescence. If the art of memory
was an essential technique of learning for yesterday's rhetoricians, it has
become for today's psychologists the stuff of sideshows.
In focusing upon the practical techniques of mnemonics, however,
the psychologists have overlooked its theoretical foundations. The art of
memory as it was understood in its classical formulation provided not
only a useful skill but also a way of understanding the world. For some
mnemonists the design of the structure of their mnemonic system corresponded
to their conception of the structure of knowledge and so
implied a vision of the world. The power of the mnemonist lay in his
ability to interpret the world through a paradigm that would provide its
initiates with a davis universalis, a master key to the workings of the
universe.6 From this perspective the art of memory was not only a pedagogical
device but also a method of interpretation. It is this link between
the art of memory and the making of paradigms of cultural understanding
that suggests the larger significance of this topic. If the art of memory
as it was employed from classical antiquity until the Renaissance seems
2 The psychologist's disdain for mnemonics is discussed by B. Richard Bugelski,
"Mnemonics," in the International Encyclopedia o/Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychoanalysis,
and Neurology, ed. Benjamin B. Wolman (New York, 1977), VII, 245-50.
3 Aleksandr R. Luria, The Mind 0/ a Mnemonist, trans. Lynn SolotarotT (Chicago,
1968).
4 Ibid., 21-38.
5 Ibid., 66-73, 111-36, 149-60; cf. Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d 'encre (Paris, 1980),93-
105.
6 Paolo Rossi, Cia vis universalis: Arti mnemoniche e logica combinatoria da Lullo a
Leibniz (Milan, 1960).
THE ART OF MEMORY 373
cumbersome in comparison with our present mental operations and remote
from our current needs, we may ask whether the art's intimate
association with model-building has not enabled it to survive in the
modem world in a different guise.
This essay will inquire into this revisioning of the art of memory since
the eighteenth century. It will search for correspondences between the
art of memory as it was practiced in the rhetorical tradition that culminated
in the Renaissance and the use of memory as a technique of
soul-searching in the Romantic tradition of psychology that culminates
in psychoanalysis. Two figures especially are prominent in explaining
this transition: the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista
Vico, who relates the power of memory to the poetic consciousness
in which civilization began, and the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud,
who pressed the search for memory's sources into the recesses of the
unconscious mind. Just as the mnemonists of the Renaissance sought to
convey to their initiates a hidden knowledge of the world, so this essay
seeks to show how the art of memory itself is hidden in the rhetoric of
more recent forms of intellectual discourse.
For an understanding of what the art of memory was in the distant
past, the work of the English historian Frances Yates is essentiaP Yates
was a student of the intellectual underground of the Renaissance and her
study of mnemonics was an offshoot of her inquiry into the thought of
Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher whose fascination
with systems of memory had roots in the ancient hermetic
tradition of gnostic thought.s Yates was intrigued with the Renaissance
revival of the art of memory at a time when one might suppose the advent
of printing would have rendered it obsolete. In the course of her investigations
she traced mnemonics as a system of artificial memory to its
origins in Greece in the fifth century B.C. From its simple beginnings
in the rhetoric of sophistry to its sophisticated refinement in the hermetic
cosmology of the Renaissance, Yates explains, the art of memory was
employed in the service of diverse philosophies. In Greco-Roman times
it enhanced the rhetorician's eloquence. During the High Middle Ages
it was used to classify an increasingly complex scheme of ethics. By the
Renaissance it had become intertwined with Neoplatonic metaphysics.
Yet through all of these cultural transformations, Yates stresses, the
techniques of the ar-t of memory remained essentially the same.9 Indeed,
across these 2000 years a sense of a classical mnemonic tradition developed,
as each restatement of the art alluded to earlier formulations,
7 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966).
8 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964),
and "The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science," in Art, Science and History in
the Renaissance, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1967), 255-74.
9 Yates, Art of Memory, xi-xii, 145, 151.
374 PATRICK H. HUTTON
notably to the Ad Herennium, an anonymous Roman tract written about
82 B.C., and even to that of its legendary Greek founder, the poet
Simonides of Ceos, who was the first to reflect upon the emotional power
of a system of images as an aid to memory.1O
The techniques of artificial memory that Yates identifies with the
classical tradition of mnemonics were essentially the same as those that
the modem mnemonist Shereshevskii devised intuitively. They consisted
of arrangements of places and images. The places provided an architectonic
design in which the knowledge to be remembered was to be situated.
These were places so deeply embedded in the mind of the mnemonist
that they could not be forgotten. The architecture of place, often conceived
as a palace or a theater, might be likened to a sacred space with which
the mnemonist possessed intuitive familiarity. This deep structure of
memory, in tum, was given its particular character by the images with
which it was adorned. A good memory was a function of a resilient
imagination, and images were chosen for their aesthetic appeal. Vivid
pictorial imagery that inspired awe was judged to be the most effective.l1
If the techniques of the art of memory remained essentially the same,
change was interpreted in terms of the purposes for which the art was
used. Yates explains that these oscillated between two theories of knowledge,
one derived from Aristotle and the other from Plato. In the Aristotelian
tradition the art of memory was merely instrumental. Aristotle
taught that knowledge is derived from sense experience and that a mnemonic
system is to be judged by its practical capacity to fix knowledge
in images that heighten sense perception. Whether mnemonic images
possessed any correspondence of meaning to the ideas to be conveyed
was irrelevant. This conception was especially popular during the High
Middle Ages, when scholastic philosophers valued memory systems for
their utility in communicating moral lessons, yet held them in suspicion
because of their derivation from the pagan learning of classical civilization.
Mnemonics was a profane art, always subordinate to the sacred
message it carried. 12 In the Platonic tradition, however, the powers of
memory were judged to be more substantive. Plato taught that mnemic
images were directly expressive of a transcendental reality. For the mnemonist
who s~ared these views, the value of a mnemic image was directly
10 Simonides (ca. 556-468 B.C.), according to legend, discovered the mnemonic power
of pictorial images when he, a guest at a palace banquet, fortuitously exited just before
the palace collapsed. Awestruck at his good fortune, he found that his emotional reaction
to the experience enabled him to conjure up a vivid and detailed picture of the banquet's
participants in their assigned places just before the crash. Thus he discovered that ideas
difficult to remember can be systematically committed to memory by associating them
with unforgettable images. Ibid., 1-2, 22. See also Herwig Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik
(Hildesheim, 1969),41-46.
11 Yates, Art of Memory, 2-26.
12 Ibid., 31-36, 230.
THE ART OF MEMORY 375
tied to the ideal reality that it was empowered to represent. The art of
memory, therefore, was a way of establishing correspondences between
the microcosm of the mind's images and the macrocosm of the ideal
universe, which were believed to be congruent structures. In such a
conception, the role of the mnemonist took on added importance. Not
only did he practice a skill, but he also assumed a priestly status as an
interpreter of the nature of reality.13
This Platonic conception of the art of memory, Yates explains, received
its fullest expression during the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth
century. In that era Neoplatonic philosophers employed the art of memory
in an ambitious quest for a unified paradigm of knowledge. Among
many ingenious designs, Yates singles out for special attention the mnemonic
systems of Giulio Camillo and of Giordano Bruno, both of whom
were in search of the key to the hidden structure of the universe in the
hermetic teachings of the ancient Egyptian divine, Hermes Trismegistus.
Camillo designed a memory theater in which the drama of all human
experience was played out on an imaginary stage.14 Bruno's model was
more intricate still. Devising a memory wheel that incorporated geometrical
designs borrowed from the best mnemonic systems of the day,
he conceived of himself as the architect of a synthetic paradigm of the
universe that would provide its practitioners with insight into the deep
structural unity of all knowledge of heaven and earth.ls
It is not surprising that these Neoplatonic paradigms were presented
in images of wheels, palaces, theaters, and other geometrical configurations.
The structure of knowledge envisioned by the Neoplatonic philosopher
was spacial. It was based upon an unchanging reality, as all of
these mnemonic images implied. Journeys into the memory moved along
fixed trajectories to be travelled again and again. The wheel, the palace,
and the theater were mementos of repetition. Working from a conception
of a timeless cosmos, the Neoplatonic mnemonist possessed no sense of
development. He was in search of knowledge that was eternal yet presently
hidden. Discovered by the gnostic philosophers of antiquity yet forgotten
in the intervening millennium, this hermetic knowledge was waiting to
be revealed once more. As the purveyor of secrets at once ancient and
powerful, the mnemonist viewed himself as a magus, dealing in an esoteric
knowledge that made him privy to the workings of the universe, with
all of the powers that such omniscience implied. 16
13 Ibid., 36-39.
14 Ibid., 129-59.
l'Ibid., 199-230, and Yates, Collected Essays (London, 1983), II, 101-11.
16 Yates, Art of Memory, 251-60, 293-99, 339-41; cf. Robert S. Westman, "Magical
Reform and Astronomical Reform: The Yates Thesis Reconsidered," in Hermeticism
and the Scientific Revolution, ed. Robert S. Westman and J. E. McGuire (Los Angeles,
1977), 5-72, challenging Yates's thesis about the magical implications of Bruno's cosmological
design.
376 PATRICK H. HUTTON
As a paradigmatic expression of the world-view of the idealist philosophers
of the Renaissance, mnemonics survived into the seventeenth
century because it served a line of intellectual inquiry that continued to
display vitality. Mnemonics would begin to lose its honored status only
as Neoplatonic idealism was successfully challenged by scientific empiricism
in the course of that century. The new science, Yates suggests,
would continue to employ the art of memory but in a less exalted role.
In a world in which reliable knowledge was identified with a systematic
understanding of sense experience, mnemonics was .destined to return to
an Artistotelian formulation. Herein lies the importance of the English
philosopher Francis Bacon. Rejecting the notion of magical correspondences
between mnemic images and the powers governing the heavens,
Bacon spumed the prideful role of magus for the more modest one of
scientific investigator. 17 Having contributed to the rise of science in its
stress upon systematic classification, Yates contends, mnemonics lost this
distinguishing characteristic as the scientific method acquired an autonomous
identity.18 Having outlived its usefulness, the art of memory as a
recognizable intellectual tradition came to an end.19
Yates persuasively explains the eclipse of the art of memory. But if
the art had contributed so powerfully to the paradigmatic expression of
such a variety of world-views popular in earlier periods of Western
civilization, would not its imaging resources be. appropriated to advance
new schemes of knowledge in the modem age? The science into which
the classical art of memory was absorbed was a science of nature. By
the eighteenth century, however, a new science of humanity was in the
making, and it was in this context that the art of memory was to be
reconceived. The central figure in this revisioning of the role of memory
in culture was the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico's
conception of memory, as it had been for the Renaissance Neoplatonists,
was tied to a search for deep structures of knowledge hidden from contemporary
humankind.20 But for Vico such knowledge was hidden in the
17 Ibid., 370-73, and Yates, Collected Essays, III, 60-66. See also Paolo Rossi, Francis
Bacon: From Magic to Science, tr. Sacha Rabinovitch (London, 1968), 207-14.
18 Yates, Art of Memory, 368-69, 378-89.
19 Anachronistic applications of the art of memory nonetheless survived into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Representative approaches include: Gregor von Feinaigle,
The New Art of Memory (London, 1813); Aime Paris, Principes et applications
diverses de la mnemonique (7th ed.; Paris, 1833); A. E. Middleton, Memory Systems,
Old and New (3rd rev. ed.; New York, 1888); Laird S. Cermak, Improving Your Memory
(New York, 1975); and Harry Lorayne, Harry Lorayne's Page-a-Minute Memory Book
(New York, 1985).
20 On Vico's relationship to Renaissance Neoplatonic mnemonics, cf. Paolo Rossi,
"Schede Vichiane," La Rassegna della letteratura italian a, 62 (1958),375-83, and Francis
Bacon, 77-79, 133-34; Emile Namer, "G. B. Vico et Giordano Bruno," Archives de
philosophie, 40 (1977), 107-14; and Donald Phillip Verene, "L'Originalitit filosofica di
Vico," in Vico oggi, ed. Andrea Battistini (Rome, 1979), 114-17. On the roots of Vico's
THE ART OF MEMORY 377
origins of civilization, a lost history of human creation, not in the heavens
as an expression of God's design. The Renaissance Neoplatonists had
taught that the magi of antiquity were in possession of an occult wisdom
that put them in touch with the divine plan. The ancients, Vico explains,
did possess wisdom, but it was a wisdom of poetry not philosophy. The
ancient poets were magi of sorts, seeking to divine the mysteries of the
universe. What they discovered in the process were their own human
powers of understanding and acting. What the art of memory in Vico's
New Science (1744) promised to provide was a key to this poetic knowledge.
21
Vico's vision of the world was historical rather than cosmological,
and his work is significant for this study because he was the first philosopher
to explain the historical origins of the art of memory. If the art
had hitherto been understood in spatial imagery, he would recast it in a
temporal design. For Vieo the art of memory was more than a technique
invented by Simonides. Simonides and the classical rhetoricians who
embellished his teachings were only restating the principles of an art that
had been intuitively understood since the dawn of civilization. The artificial
memory systems employed by rhetoricians since the classical age
were but studied variations on the poetic structure of language employed
spontaneously by primitive peoples. Mnemonics, therefore, is no more
than a refinement of the poetic logic of memory, grounded in the primordial
structures of poetic expression.22
The key to understanding the nature of memory, Vico contends, is
derived from the direct correspondence between image and idea in primitive
poetic language. In the beginnings of civilization, image and idea
were one. Primitive peoples possessed robust memories because of the
inseparable association they made between images and ideas in their
comprehension of the world. They thought metaphorically, and the metaphors
that they uttered were easily mimicked and remembered because
they were richly expressive, grandiose, and full of wonder at the world.
The link between human imagination and the universe that the Renaissance
Neoplatonists had sought to discover magically, Vico revealed to
have been born historically in the development of human consciousness.23
The source of the mnemonist's method is visible in the poetic logic
"tree of knowledge" in mnemonic imagery, see Giorgio Tagliacozzo, "General Education
as Unity of Knowledge: ·A Theory Based on Vichian Principles," Social Research, 43
(1976), 772, 774 n.30.
21 The New Science o/Giambattista Vico (3rd ed.; 1744), tr. and ed. Thomas G. Bergin
and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca, 1970), 331, 342, 349, 374-83, 391, 494, 846; hereafter NS,
(reference to numbered paragraph).
22 NS, 201, 211, 699, 811, 819, 833, 855, 878, 896 contain Vico's principal references
to memory.
23 NS, 221, 700, 814, 816, 819, 833, 933. On the role of memory in Vico's theory of
mind, see Donald Phillip Verene, Vico's Science 0/ Imagination (Ithaca, 1981),96-126.
378 PATRICK H. HUTTON
of Vico's theory of the emergence of human consciousness. That theory,
too, involves the relationship between places and images, which Vico
labels topics and tropes. Topics were the poetic formulae through which
primitive people identified the phenomena of the world?4 As imaginative
representations of particular aspects of reality, they provided commonplaces
or fixed points of reference amidst the flux of sense experience.
As topics multiplied, they came to constitute a structure of the perception
of reality. Topics were in effect the groundwork of an emerging field of
knowledge. For Vico consciousness develops out of the formulation of
topics in imaginary expressions known as tropes. Originally, all topics
were interpreted metaphorically. But the use of metaphor was itself a
selection of a particular image in which to represent a topic, and the
human capacity to be selective was gradually refined. As their knowledge
of topics became more extensive, humans learned to express themselves
in an imaginative shorthand that modified metaphor: first in terms of
metonymy (an eidetic image of a detail that stands for a complete metaphorical
topic); then of synecdoche (an image that conveys the character
or quality of a topic); and finally of irony (an image that has acquired
a generalized meaning of its own, without reference to the particular
topic to which it originally had been attached )?5 The development of
consciousness, therefore, is for Vico a process of abstraction in which
the distance between topics (places) and tropes (images) widens until
the metaphorical origins of a topic are forgotten in the ironical imagery
of modem discourse. The process of abstraction that inheres in the development
of consciousness, therefore, is one of forgetting the connection
between our present vocabularies and the poetic process through which
they were originally formed. As Vico expressed it in a poetic image of
his own, "metonymy drew a cloak of learning over the prevailing ignorance
of these origins of human institutions, which have remained
buried until now. ,,26
Considered in this context, Vico's new art of memory becomes a
retrospective search for the connection between our present conceptions
and the lost poetic images out of which they were born. In the logic of
Vichian poetics, the new art of memory is a reconstruction of the imaginative
process by which the poets of antiquity gave shape to their perception
of the world. Therein the imaginative sources of our present ideas
are to be found. The original topic might be likened to a palimpsest,
repeatedly covered over with more abstract imagery as the human mind
historically ascended the tropological gradient of linguistic expression.
24 NS, 297-98, 699, 768. Cf. Yates, Art of Memory, 3l.
25 NS, 236, 331, 404-11. See also Hayden V. White, "The Tropics of History: The
Deep Structure of the New Science," in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, ed.
Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore, 1976,) 65-85.
26 NS, 402.
THE ART OF MEMORY 379
Vico's art of memory was to decipher 'each tropological layer along the
way until the original metaphorical topic, long forgotten, was recalled
to mind.27
We might say that what Vico offers is a model of the life-cycle of
memory. Memory originates in the ontological act of creating images in
order to give form and meaning to the phenomena of the world. But as
civilization advances, memory comes to be identified with mimesis, i.e.,
mimicking or repeating the creative act in order to discover its original
meaning.28 Such meanings elude the modern philosopher, who does not
understand the historical circumstances in which topics originated or the
way in which the mind has been altered in the interim,z9 Vico's theory
of memory as an act of interpretation that enables us to establish connections
between the familiar images of the present and the unfamiliar
ones of the past anticipates the modern science of hermeneutics.30 Vico
describes the hermeneutical process as it was understood metaphorically
by the ancients in their image of the god Hermes. Hermes was the
messenger of the gods, and he taught humankind the art of communication.
He did so by travelling from familiar into strange places and back
again. Hermes taught humans to understand the unfamiliar by relating
it to the familiar. The ancient poet interpreted the world creatively by
explaining strange phenomena in terms of images that he knew well,
initially images of his own body. He created new images to explain new
experiences but always related these to his extant structure of knowledge.
The contemporary philosopher, Vico argued, must use his memory to
reverse the process. He must return from the rational discourse in which
he is presently at home into the alien poetic idiom of the past whose
meaning he will rediscover as he establishes connections with its imagery.
In descending the tropological gradient of linguistic expression, the new
art of memory completes the hermeneutical circle, the circle of Hermes'
flight and his return. 3!
Implicitly, Vico explained why the art of memory as practiced from
classical antiquity until the Renaissance worked. In its association of a
mnemic image and an unrelated idea, it borrowed primordial poetic
techniques to convey modern prosaic knowledge. Amidst the flux of
abstractions of modern discourse, it reached back to the poetic forms of
an earlier age to aid in the classification of modern knowledge and to
27 NS, 331, 338, 846.
2. NS, 211, 217, 375-77, 381, 447, 520, 692, 849, 855, 878, 896. See also Patrick H.
Hutton, "The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Historicism in its Relation to Poetics,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 30 (1972), 362-64.
29 NS, 220, 429, 444, 518.
30 On Vico and hermeneutics, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New
York, 1975), 19-26, 30-31; and Donald R. Kelley, "Vico's Road: From Philology to
Jurisprudence and Back," in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, 20.
31 NS, 122, 604-6, 713, 741.
380 PATRICK H. HUTTON
provide the emotional power needed to evoke that knowledge at will.32
So wide had the distance between image and idea become for mnemonists
who practiced the classical art in the modern age that they had lost touch
with the structure of the poetic code. This structure was important
because it provided a coherence which the ideas to be remembered did
not in themselves symbolically convey. In other words mnemonics as a
skill to be acquired was a response to the loss of a linguistic frame of
reference. It was the need for such a frame of reference that prompted
the search for a mnemonic model that might serve as.a practical substitute.
By the age of the Renaissance this need had set Neoplatonic mnemonists
on a course of seeking to establish the connection between images and
ideas in magical ways because they lacked the historical understanding
necessary to uncover such connections in the past.
Vico's New Science pointed toward a fundamental reorientation of
thought about the uses of memory. Henceforth memory would be employed
as a technique to uncover forgotten origins understood as lost
poetic powers. The quest to touch the original, imaginative powers that
make us creative would become the primary quest of the Romantic poets
and philosophers of the early nineteenth century. It pointed as well toward
the new interest in autobiography, in which the notion of continuous
development from infancy to adulthood would provide the sense of unity
that could no longer be discovered in the heavens. As metaphysics yielded
to psychology, memory as a key to magic was displaced by memory as
a key to soul-searching. The distance that the art of memory had travelled
in the journey from sixteenth-century rhetoric to nineteenth-century psychology
is revealed in the revisioning of the image of memory itself. The
image of memory as a brightly-lit theater of the world was replaced by
one better attuned to the kind of inquiry with which the art of memory
was henceforth to be allied - that of memory as a mirror of the dark
abyss of the mind.33
As a practitioner of the ancient art of rhetoric, Vico had in the modern
age come to appreciate not only the poetic resources but also the evolution
of language. In Vichian terms the art of memory drew upon metaphor
to further an ironical mode of understanding. The irony was that for all
of the originality of his "new science," the discipline of rhetoric from
32 Luria's study of the mind of the mnemonist Shereshevskii confirms Vico's explanation
of the poetics of memory. When demonstrating his skill before audiences, Shereshevskii
developed techniques to speed his commitment of facts to memory. When the
facts were extremely difficult, he relied on detailed metaphorical associations. But to
recall less complicated data, he intuitively turned to metonymic or synecdochic images.
The easier the facts, the further he ascended the tropological gradient of abstraction in
his search for images that might be incorporated more rapidly into his memory. Luria,
Mind of a Mnemonist, 38-61.
33 Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," in Autobiography:
Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, 1980), 32-33, 40.
THE ART OF MEMORY 381
which he had derived his insights was losing its intellectual status. The
age of Enlightenment in whose early days Vico lived marked an intellectual
divide between manuscript and print culture. By the end of the
eighteenth century the printing press, extant for three centuries, had
fundamentally altered the way in which knowledge was transmitted and
preserved.34 The need for an art of memory to verify the integrity of
knowledge through recourse to memorized oral formulae was rendered
obsolete by the dramatic expansion of the publishing business and the
rapid growth of the reading public. Encyclopedias and dictionaries transposed
the task of indexing information for ready recall from the mind
to the archive.35 In the process the printed word displaced the oral maxim
as the ~ource of learned authority among literate people.36
At the same time the advent of print culture, however revolutionary
its implications, had been made possible by the long developmental process
through which communication was transformed in early modem
European culture. The printed word was introduced into a society that
had been literate for many centuries. That literacy, in tum, remained
highly dependent upon oral tradition. Until printing became the primary
mode of human communication during the course of the eighteenth
century, oral interpretation continued to provide the basic topical codes
for the organization of literate expression. In manuscript culture documents
were still composed as if they were to be read aloud.37 The transformation
of the human mind that Vico describes in terms of the evolution
of tropes, therefore, may also be understood in terms of the long-range
shift from orality to literacy to print culture. Literacy was dependent
upon orality in much the same way that reason was dependent upon
poetry in Vico's scheme. The oral tradition in which Vico discovered
"the true Homer" is the same one to which modem classicists return to
explain the origins of literacy. From the Homeric epics (eighth century
B.C.) to Greek tragedy (fifth century B.C.), they argue, oral modes of
interpretation exercised an immense residual power over literary expression.
38
34 Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.,
1982), 167-208, and The Business of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1979),428-
34; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge,
England, 1979), I, 3-159; Fran~is Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing:
Literacy in France from 9alvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge, England, 1982), 5-47.
35 Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole (Paris, 1965), II, 9-34; Robert Darnton,
The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French History (New York, 1984), 191-
213; Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca, 1971),278.
36 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London, 1982), 124.
37 Ibid., 5-10, 78-116, 119; Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge,
England, 1977), 112-18.
38 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 100-103, 115-28, and
The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, 1982), 143-
49.
382 PATRICK H. HUTTON
To this transition the art of memory is an essential guide, for its
development was coeval with the rise of literacy. In the days when
Homer's epics were first recited, a prodigious memory was still the
intuitive talent of bards who stitched together formulaic verses in a
different design each time they performed.39 But by the time that Greek
culture entered its classical age three centuries later, mnemonics had
become the studied skill of the rhetorician. It is worth noting that the
legend of Simonides' invention of the art of memory dates from the early
fifth century B.C., precisely the time when literacy was becoming the
dominant cultural mode. Moreover, the major theoretical expositions of
the art in the ancient world, those devised by Roman rhetoricians in the
first century B.C., were contributed during Rome's most illustrious age
of literary expression. The revival of the art of memory in the Renaissance
of the sixteenth century and its growing refinement over the following
one hundred years might be characterized as a Vichian ricorso in that
this era, too, was one in which a highly literate culture still organized
learning according to the canons of oral conceptualization. Mnemonic
formulae provided the deep structures for the classification of knowledge
until the full impact of the print revolution was felt toward the end of
the eighteenth century. Born of intuitive mnemonic powers common in
the pre-literate cultures of antiquity, the art of memory as an acquired
technique retained its importance as long as oral interpretation influenced
the manuscript culture of early modem Europe. Not only was mnemonics
a skill derived from oral culture; it was a mode of understanding essential
to the organization of literate expression prior to the print revolution.40
Only when movable alphabetic type had completely replaced oral formulae
as the basis for indexing knowledge would mnemonics be perceived
to be a marginal skill.41
The advent of print culture revolutionized human perception in learning.
Print transformed words from sounds to be heard into surfaces to
be seen.42 As places permanently fixed on the printed page, words acquired
an autonomy they had not previously possessed. Oral communication is
dependent upon living memory, and an argument voiced in conversation
must be repeated to be reported anew. But written communication is
transacted through texts and thereby acquires a specific identity of time
and place. With the coming of print culture, the dissemination of knowledge
was thought of less often as the reporting of maxims drawn from
a reservoir of timeless common sense, and more often as the recognition
39 Havelock, Preface, 89-121; Ong, Orality, 57-68; Berkley Peabody, The Winged Word
(Albany, 1975), 214-18.
400ng, Orality, 26,33-36, 115-16.
41 Ibid., 108-12, 125.
42 Ibid., 12,71-74, 100, 117.
THE ART OF MEMORY 383
of ideas readily identifiable with individual authors writing at specific
moments in history.43
As for the reader, the print revolution contributed to a change in his
self-perception. Reading was a solitary act. As a conversation with an
absent author, it encouraged the reader to think more about his own
thoughts and feelings. As a mirror for his reflections, the printed page
promoted introspection. In this way reading contributed to the discovery
of personality, which so preoccupied Romantic writers and readers at
the turn of the nineteenth century.44 The psychological reorientation
promoted by reading also permitted a new way of understanding the use
of memory. The art of memory, previously identified with rote learning
for a society whose knowledge depended upon living memory, was reconceived
for one more secure about the permanence of its intellectual
acquisitions. Less constrained by demands for assiduous memorization,
the citizen of print culture was disposed to use his memory for a more
inquisitive kind of learning.45 If the art of memory appeared to many to
have lost favor in the declining prestige of rhetoric, it was destined to
Jjse once more in the guise of autobiography.
Autobiography, understood as a form of meditation (Augustine of
Hippo) or as an exposition of personal accomplishment (Benvenuto Cellini),
was a genre of long-standing.46 Only in the late eighteenth century
did it become closely identified with a more personal exploration of the
psyche.47 Best known among the practitioners of this new form of soulsearching
was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
thought of his Confessions (1770) as a distinctly original literary enterprise.
48 Rousseau's autobiography does display a marked departure from
its immediate antecedents. Vico's life chronicle, for example, although
written only fifty years before, is a tale of his intellectual formation.49
43 Ibid., 44, 101-4, 131-32.
44 Ibid., 54-57, 102, 105, 130-31, 153-54; see also the interesting discussion of the way
in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel, La Nouvelle Heloise, promoted such introspection
in Damton, Great Cat Massacre, 215-52.
4S Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, 277-79, and Orality, 133-34.
46 A great deal has recently been written about the role of memory in autobiography.
Some of the best articles on the topic are reproduced in the anthology edited by James
Olney (cited above in n. 33). Indispensable on conceptions of memory in this context is
the sprawling essay by Georges Gusdorf, Memoire et personne (Paris, 1951). The only
literary critic to examine the relationship between the classical art of memory and the
rhetoric of autobiography, however, is Beaujour, Miroirs d 'encre, esp. 81-112, who shows
how the fields are joined by memory's constructive role in each.
47 William L. Howarth, "Some Principles of Autobiography," and Michael Sprinker,
"The End of Autobiography," in Olney (ed.), Autobiography, 113, 325-26.
48 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, tr. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1953), 17.
49 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, tr. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard
Bergin (Ithaca, 1963). Only posthumously was Vico's life narrative labeled an
autobiography.
384 PATRICK H. HUTTON
Rousseau's, by contrast, is a saga of emotional discovery. Rousseau professed
to lay bare his interior life since childhood. His intent was to search
out the hidden feelings of the child within his soul. In much the same
way that Vico had identified emotional expression with the poetic perceptions
of primitive peoples, Rousseau culled his memory for images
that had shaped his feelings about himself. 50
One might contend, however, that Rousseau's Confessions display not
an art of memory but a memory without artful design. His professed use
of memory to recall spontaneously the significant events of his life implied
a kind of Vichian recourse to those sources of poetic logic in which
memory and metaphor are in transparent correspondence. Critics have
since pointed out the degree to which Rousseau's rummaging amidst his
memories to discover the sustaining thread of his personal formation was
disingenuous. The recollection of the past, they argue, is by nature constructive.
One selects images out of the past on the basis of what one
deems significant from one's present vantage point, and weaves them
tendentiously into a narrative design of the life process.51 The recollection
of the past is therefore a process of emplotting the landmarks of one's
life history as it is presently perceived. The search for mnemic images
that mark life's significant turning points (i.e., its commonplaces) is
reminiscent of the mnemonist's scheme, even if its structure has been
transformed from a spacial into a temporal modeP2 Life's continuity is
to be found in this imagined structure of images of one's life journey,
not in the objective recovery of the continuous chain of life's events.
Rousseau subjectively selected what he believed were the salient events
of his life when he composed his Confessions, and later in life admitted
to confabulations in its narrative in places where his memory failed him.53
If Rousseau's Confessions do not convey an obvious sense of the
mnemonic design of the developing self, the rough shape of such a design
was already in the making. By the early nineteenth century the life process
was being interpreted in terms of distinct developmental stages. The
growing awareness of childhood as a period of life distinct from yet
preparatory for adulthood, and of youth as a transitional age of passage
between these stages, adumbrated a theory of growth through stages
50 Jean Starobinski, "The Style of Autobiography," in Olney (ed.), Autobiography,
80-82; Samuel S. B. Taylor, "Rousseau's Romanticism," in Reappraisals of Rousseau,
ed. Simon Harvey et al. (Totowa, N.J., 1980), 16-17; Ann Hartle, The Modern Se/fin
Rousseau's Confessions (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1983), 115-17.
51 Stephen Spender, "Confessions and Autobiography," James Olney, "The Ontology
of Autobiography, " and Louis A. Renza, "A Theory of Autobiography" in Olney (ed.),
Autobiography, 120-22, 254-55, 288-95; see also Huntington Williams, Rousseau and
Romantic Autobiography (Oxford, 1983), 218-23.
52 Gusdorf, Memoire et personne, II, 554; Beaujour, Miroirs d'encre, 65-69.
53 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire (Geneva, 1967), 69-
73; see also Gusdorf, Memoire et personne, I, 212-15.
THE ART OF MEMORY 385
along life's way.54 The notion of the life process as a structured sequence
of discrete units demarcated by crises of transition would provide the
architectonics for a new art of memory devoted to self-analysis. In the
following century, the conception of the life cycle would be further refined
into a model of growing complexity, culminating in the eight-stage paradigm
designed by Erik Erikson in the mid-twentieth century. It is significant
that Erikson presents his model as an easily visualized" epigenetic
chart," and that the same chart serves as the centerpiece of no less than
four of his books. 55 This schematic diagram may not serve literally as an
aid to memory in the classical sense of indexing an imaginary archive
for the retrieval of ideas. But it does facilitate the interpretation of the
meaning of mnemic images by providing a clearcut memoryscape on
which they may be easily placed.56 This suggests why Erikson, in his
psychobiographies of Martin Luther and Mohandas Gandhi, concentrated
upon mnemic images that signalled significant turning points
(" historical moments") in their life histories rather than upon the detailed
description that characterizes conventional biography.57 The meaning
of a life is epitomized in what Erikson calls the "moments and
sequences" that give structure to one's life history. 58
The use of memory to further self-understanding, of course, operated
within an orbit far wider than autobiography or psychobiography. Nineteenth-
century European society was reflective not only about personal
recollection but also about collective remembrance. Cults of memory
emerged in a myriad of manifestations. Philippe Aries has pointed out
the way in which exaggerated rites of mourning and monumental grave
statuary were employed to reinforce the remembrance of departed loved
ones. The cemetery was consciously redesigned as a field of memory for
kin to visit and wherein they could reminisce. 59 More conspicuous was
the way in which rites of commemoration were used to reinforce an
emerging vision of cultural nationalism. The nineteenth century witnessed
the revival and growing popularity of folk traditions about the mythological
founders of nations, of the heroes and heroines of national liberation,
of the deeds of revolutionary martyrs, and of soldiers fallen in
battle. All of these emblems of the nationalist ideal were given concrete
54 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, tr. Robert
Ba1dick (New York, 1962), 29-32.
55 Erik H. Erikson: Childhood and Society (2nd ed.; New York, 1963), 273; Identity,
Youth and Crisis (New York, 1968), 94; Identity and the Life Cycle (New York, 1980),
178; The Life Cycle Completed (New York, 1982), 32-33, 56-57.
56 Identity and the Life Cycle, 150-58; The Life Cycle Completed, 61.
57 Erik H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York, 1975), 36-
37, 123-24.
5B Ibid., 113-68.
59 Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present,
tr. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, 1974), 72-82, and The Hour of Our Death, tr. Helen
Weaver (New York, 1981),474-75,500-593,508-13,518,524-46.
386 PATRICK H. HUTTON
expression in national shrines, which served as places of pilgrimage and
as sites for festivals on days of national remembrance. In effect such
shrines were actual memory palaces, constructed of imposing architecture
and adorned with aesthetically pleasing icons and artifacts designed to
evoke memories of a heroic or glorious past and to imprint them vividly
on the minds ofvisitors.60 This association of images with places to further
the nationalist ideal drew upon classic mnemonic techniques. As in the
case of autobiographical reminiscence, the exponents of nationalist ideology
believed that if people could recover lost memories of their common
origins and heritage, they could make contact with emotions that would
enliven their sense of a common identity. Invariably the memories they
had in mind came clothed in enchantment.
If mnemonic techniques lay at the source of Romantic soul-searching,
both personal and collective, they were only rarely the subject of comment.
It was left to Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century
to explain the role of memory in introspection in terms of a mnemonic
code. Freud's search for a method with which to recall lost memories of
the self is best appreciated in terms of its Romantic antecedents.61 Like
the autobiographers and the apologists for nationalism, Freud identified
the search for the self with the recollection of past experiences. But he
was suspicious of the enchanted imagery in which childhood memories
or, for that matter, conceptions of national origins, were presented. His
quest was to dispel that enchantment in order to expose realities hidden
beneath. There was something I:!,kin to the method of the Renaissance
magus in Freud's endeavor. Like Bruno, he was in search of a model
that would enable him to uncover a secret universe. Freud was fascinated
with the notion of a deep structure of the mind that shaped the workings
of the unconscious. His search for a method with which to analyze the
psyche was a search for a clavis universaiis, a master key to this cosmos
within.62 Like Vico, Freud attached enormous importance to the formative
influence of origins. What Vico had discovered about the mind in the
beginnings of civilization, Freud believed was recapitulated in the present
mind (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), and he hoped that the probe
might proceed deeper into prehistory. Vico had explored new vistas upon
60 George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975), 73-99;
Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat: L 'imagerie et la symbolique repub/icaines de
1789 a 1880 (Paris, 1979); Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition
(Berkeley, 1981), 119-42; Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque (New Haven,
1985), 3-24.
61 Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York, 1960), 167-70,
177-90; Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, 1970),204-
10, 222-23; Arthur K. Berliner, Psychoanalysis and Society (Washington, D.C., 1983),
21-25.
62 On this approach to Freud's work see Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Morelli, Freud,
and Sherlock Holmes," in The Sign of Three, ed. Umberto Bco and Thomas A. Sebeok
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1983), 84-87; Beaujour, Miroirs d'encre, 210, 213-16.
THE ART OF MEMORY 387
memory by virtue of his historical journey into remote regions of human
origins. What permitted Freud to move beyond into original terrain was
his desire to travel into a realm of which Vico could not have conceivedthat
of the unconscious mind. For Vico, this would have been a passage
across the mythological river Lethe into a realm of oblivion beyond
forgetfulness. 63 But what Freud discovered there by making the passage
might be characterized as a mnemonics of the unconscious mind.
It was Freud's faith that, barring biological impairment, the unconscious
mind retains all of life's memories. The problem of forgettingof
gaps in memory-is due to repression, the relegation of painful or
unpleasant memories to the unconscious mind where they are stored
intact. The loss of memory, therefore, is not a function of time's erosion,
for the unconscious mind has no sense of time. Memory loss is rather a
consequence of barriers erected by the unconscious. The analyst's task
is to recall these memories from the limbo of repression where they await
recollection. 64
Freud was struck by the fact that childhood, the period of life most
formative of our adult personalities, is the one about which we remember
the least. 65 The more that we can recollect from this period of our lives,
the more likely we are to understand ourselves. But Freud viewed with
circumspection those childhood memories that did surface from the unconscious
mind, for they were generally benign and sometimes bathed
in nostalgia. Whereas the Romantics trusted that there was a direct
correspondence between such mnemic images and the experiences
through which they had actually lived, Freud denied that transparency
of association. For him such memories were innocuous substitutes for
more important ones that remained repressed and hidden from view.66
If the Romantic project of establishing the connection between past and
present identities was to be realized, then the fantasies in which the
unconscious psyche clothes its past must be uncovered.67 The task of
Freud's art of memory was to decode these substitute, or screen, memories.
The substitution of an image for an idea, the key to the classical
mnemonic code, is also the central proposition of Freud's theory of screen
63 NS, 346, 717. For the relationship between Vico's and Freud's theories of mind,
see Silvano Arieti, "Vico and Modem Psychiatry," Social Research, 43 (1976), 739-44,
746-50.
64 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), tr. James Strachey (New
York, 1965), 54.
65 Sigmund Freud, "Screen Memories," (1899), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1962),
III, 303-4, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), tr. Alan Tyson (New York,
1965), 46.
66 Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 47-48.
67 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (19l3), tr. James Strachey (New York, 1950),
91-95, and Interpretation of Dreams, 530, 539.
388 PATRICK H. HUlTON
memories.68 Screen memories are mnemic images that displace deeper,
hidden memories. By comparison with the memories they shield, screen
memories are of lesser consequence, arouse fewer emotions, and relate
to more recent experience. They are projected backward in time to fill
the gap created by the repression of the memory of actual experience,
and thereby to fulfIll the conscious mind's need for a coherent sense of
life's development. As in the associations of the mnemonic systems of
the Aristotelian tradition, the link between the screen memory and the
repressed one is an attachment of place rlither than of-content. The screen
memory fits the pattern of the past envisioned in our present fantasies,
yet marks the place where the repressed memory of our actual experience
may be retrieved.69 As Freud explains,screen memories "are not made
of gold themselves but have lain beside something that is made of gold. ,,70
Elsewhere he likens the connection to that of the hermit crab with its
shell. 71
But in contrast to the classical art of memory, the purpose of the
screen memory is to enable us to forget. Screen memories are defenses
employed by the unconscious mind to ward off the recollection of intense,
painful, or traumatic experiences, especially those of childhood. Whereas
the mnemonist employed vivid images to stimulate his recall of ideas,
the unconscious mind uses inconsequential ones to spare the conscious
mind the recollection of distressing memories.72 Freud's theory might be
characterized as a reverse mnemonics. Forgetting rather than remembering
is what we wish to do because it is easier to live with a screen of
fantasies about what our lives have been than with the reality. In his
theory of screen memories Freud asserts the constructive power of the
unconscious mind to shape recollection. To use his terminology, memory
is tendentious in that it reflects unconscious psychic intent.73 In this
respect the unconscious mind is the guardian of memory. It legislates
the selection of what is to be remembered and hides the rest away. As
an art of memory, therefore, Freud's psychoanalysis is a technique for
deciphering the psychic intent encoded in screen memories.
For Freud the analysis of dreams was also a fruitful source for drawing
memories from the unconscious mind. Dreams are full of memories that
the psyche more willingly gives up as it relaxes its watch during sleep.
But the memories of dreams surface in random fragments and SQ, even
if they are successfully interpreted, only provide clues to the code of
68 Freud, "Screen Memories," 303-22, and Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 43-52.
See also Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, tr. Denis Savage (New Haven, 1970), 91,
97 n., 105.
69 Freud, "Screen Memories," 307, and Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 43-45,50.
70 "Screen Memories," 307.
71 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 49 n.2.
72 "Screen Memories," 308-9.
73 Ibid., 322; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 43, 45.
THE ART OF MEMORY 389
unconscious psychic intent. These memory remnants must still be decoded
to discover their connection to forgotten experiences yet to be disclosed.74
Using the art of memory to interpret mnemic images, therefore, is far
more difficult for the Freudian analyst than it was for the Neoplatonic
mnemonist. The mnemonist was able to scan the complete array of images
housed in the brightly-lit rooms of his memory palace, whereas the analyst
is obliged to scrutinize the haphazard images cast up in shadowy dreams.
The mnemonist worked from an index of clearly delineated architectural
design, whereas the analyst must decode memory fragments in the hope
that they contain pieces of the mosaic of unconscious psychic intent.
Freud's psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci is his most famous
case study of the analysis of a screen memory. It is based upon da Vinci's
account of his recollection as an adult of a childhood memory of a vulture
placing its tail in his mouth. Freud concluded that it was a fantasy
transposed upon his early childhood from adolescence. This screen memory
shielded him from the painful memory of his separation from his
father during infancy, when he lived alone with his mother. During
latency, when he had repressed his love for his mother, he took himself
as a model for emulation to fill the void left by his absent father, and so
came to love his own childish self. The screen memory of the vulture
was a homosexual fantasy of this narcissistic self-love, projected into
infancy to displace the painful memory of his lost father. But repressed
memories continue to work their power upon the unconscious mind, and
da Vinci's repressed memory of his love for his mother was eventually
to be transfigured in the creative images that he painted in his adult
years, notably that of the beguiling smile of Mona Lisa.75
Freud's work on the psychological development· of individuals eventually
led him to inquire into the psychological development ofthe species.
Herein Freud wrestled with the problem of collective consciousness raised
by the nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists. To deal with it, he
returned to the approach first suggested by Vico-the analysis of our
memories of human origins. Like Vico, he believed that the development
of the consciousness of each individual recapitulates the development of
the consciousness of all humankind.76 He reasoned that if the analysis of
a screen memory can disclose the lost experiences of childhood, then the
analysis of the myths of primitive peoples should enable us to recover
lost memories of human origins. But Freud sought to extract from these
myths memories of experiences prior to the conscious beginnings of
74 Interpretation of Dreams, 44-55.
75 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality (1910), tr. A. A.
Brill (New York, 1947), esp. 33-49.
76 Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its Discontents (1930), tr. James Strachey (New
York, 1961), 86-89; An Autobiographical Study (1925), tr. James Strachey (New York,
1952), 138; Moses and Monotheism (1937), tr. Katherine Jones (New York, 1967),90-
101, 125-29, 153.
390 PATRICK H. HUTTON
civilization that Vico had identified with the creation of poetic myths.
For Freud, these myths were not transparent representations of the age
in which they were created, as Vico believed them to be, but screen
memories covering earlier events from which humankind wished to shield
itself. The memory of civilization's beginnings was reconstructed after
an historical period of latency, whereas the actual beginnings remained
hidden in repressed memories that we collectively retain in our unconscious
minds.77
To unblock these memories Freud turned to the-analysis. of religious
myths of origins. Struck by the ongoing power of religion to mold people's
minds from antiquity to the present, Freud sought to demythologize
religious imagery to uncover the secrets about human origins that he
believed they contained. Through his analysis of the myths of totemic
religions, the earliest faiths of civilized people, Freud concluded that they
screened acts of tribal parricide in which warrior sons murdered the
omnipotent tribal father and reluctantly apportioned his power among
themselves in a collective covenant. The totem, usually an animal, symbolized
the displaced father even as it obliterated him from conscious
memory. The totem feast, in turn, was a symbolic act of worshipping
while devouring this father whom they had once held in awe yet had
been willing to destroy.78 The father and son imagery of monotheistic
religions such as Judaism and Christianity merely reiterated the screening
of this primal truth.79 Religious myth transfigured the primordial conflict
of love and aggression into a sacred memory that rendered tolerable a
profane truth that remained repressed. The power of religious myth in
the present age, Freud concludes, testifies to the power of the repressed
memory it screens. Born historically in the first social contract, the
religious myth of origins has become timeless as it is unconsciously
recapitulated by each generation in the psychological revolt of sons against
their fathers. 80
To conclude we may return to the beginnings of the art of memory
in the legend of Simonides, who reconstructed from memory the palace
from which he had escaped as it was about to collapse into ruins. Each
of the practitioners of the art of memory that we have discussed believed
that he could reconstruct such an imaginary palace out of the intellectual
ruins of his day because each had faith in his imaginative power to recreate
the design of the human world. Each was a builder of paradigms, and
each paradigm implied an art of memory. Whether in the guise of Bruno's
magic, Vico's poetics, or Freud's psychoanalysis, mnemonics was based
77 Totem and Taboo, 155; Moses and Monotheism, 101-2, 164-69.
78 Totem and Taboo, 142-53; Civilization and its Discontents, 47-54; Moses and Monotheism,
102-8, 152-53.
79 Totem and Taboo, 153-55; Moses and Monotheism, 108-14, 174-76.
80 Totem and Taboo, 157; Civilization and its Discontents, 79; Moses and Monotheism,
157-60, 170. .
THE ART OF MEMORY 391
upon the premise that imagination is born of memory. In the teachings
of ancient Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is
honored as the mother of all of the arts and sciences of human creation.
Through her ministry, all knowledge is continually being rebound into
new configurations that express the harmony of understanding that humans
seek. If Freud's depiction of the human condition is a grim one in
comparison with the Romantic ones it challenged, it still provides the
consolation of a coherent conception of the human condition. Freud is
one of the last exemplars of a tradition of learning based upon the faith
that humans have the capacity to recover all human experiences that
have been forgotten and thereby to make the record of human history
whole.
Since Freud's death that tradition has come under more frequent
criticism. Our age possesses considerably less faith in the proposition that
the development of civilization, or for that matter the development of
the individual psyche, possesses a continuous thread of meaning. In this
respect, recent work by cultural historians has tended to place the accent
upon the discontinuities between historical epochs, and even among the
mentalities of different social groups living beside one another in the
same historical era.8! Michel Foucault's notion of "counter-memory,"
which denies the ability of collective memory to bind meanings across
dissimilar historical epochs, is a provocative statement of this point of
view.82 Foucault's questioning of the intrinsic value of remembering the
thought of ages past reveals the degree to which our present perception
of the art of memory has shifted from the problem of forgetfulness to
that of oblivion. The current popular obsession with maladies of amnesia
may well be a legitimate medical worry. But it is also a metaphor for
the cultural malaise of our time. As Oliver Sacks, a neurologist with a
philosopher's bent, suggests in his recent analysis of the consciousness
of a victim of Korsakov's syndrome, amnesia is especially terrifying in
our culture because our sense of identity is profoundly tied to specific
experiences in our past with which we believe it is crucial to maintain
present connections.83 But the decline of mnemonics itself is perhaps a
better example of our forgetfulness of the cultural sense of memory's
81 Among historians who put the accent upon discontinuity, see esp. Femand Braude!,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, tr. Sian Reynolds
(New York, 1972), I, 20-21; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, tr. John and
Anne Tedeschi (New York, 1982), xi-xxvi. On the challenge to the notion of the integral
se!f in autobiography, see Sprinker, "Fictions of the Self," in Olney (ed.), Autobiography,
321-42.
82 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), 139-
64.
83 Oliver Sacks, "The Lost Mariner," The New York Review of Books (16 February
1984), 18-19.
392 PATRICK H. HUlTON
meaning. Those psychologists who today dismiss the art of memory as
irrelevant to their professional interests may think that they have sound
reasons for doing so. But they are missing the historical connection it
has always maintained with the human capacity to explain human experience
in terms of a vision that unifies knowledge in coherent ways.
The University of Vermont.
"My heart had stopped ...
Everything was just completely
black ... this void
became the shape of a tunnel,
and then before me
was the most magnificent
light ... "-From a 20th-century
near-death account
"Four days ago, I died and
was taken by two angels to
the height of heaven ... The
light was indescribable,
and I can't tell you how
vast it was ... "-From a
6th-century near-death
account
_In the past decade, dozens of books, articles, TV shows, and films have appeared in which
people who have survived a close brush with death reveal their extraordinary visions and
ecstatic feelings at the moment they" died." What do these reports mean, and what does
their popularity tell us about our culture?
In the fullest treatment to date of the evidence surrounding near-death experiences, Carol
Zaleski shows that modem near-death reports belong to a vast family of otherworld journey
tales, with representatives in nearly every religious heritage.
Zaleski compares near-death accounts from two periods-medieval Christendom and
modem secular America-and concludes that the otherworld vision is a key for understanding
imaginative and religious experience in general.
$18.95 at better bookstores or order directly from
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Dept. NW, 200 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016


I thought this was great because I actually got some of the sources Hutton used, just maybe some of this is sinking in.