The Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth, Text

By Philip Kuberski

While memory is one of the most fascinating faculties of consciousness, it is also one of the most mysterious. Is it memory—our own marvelous personal computer or data base—that brings us the intense feelings prompted by a certain object or situation?

Drawing on an expansive array of sources, from microbiology to cosmology, Ovid to Proust, Egyptology to the cinema, Philip Kuberski leads us on a brave and beguiling exploration of memory. He enables us to see it as a worldly process in which individuals both remember and are remembered, all in a network of associations that join our bodies, personal and cultural myths, and aesthetic and literary experiences. His essays will provide a tantalizing and thoughtful read for those interested in literature, psychology, biology, anthropology, and philosophy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520335769

Philip Kuberski

Philip Kuberski is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University.

Book preview

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

A WAKE FOREST STUDIUM BOOK

WFS

Pro Humanitate

THE PERSISTENCE

OF MEMORY

ORGANISM, MYTH, TEXT

PHILIP KUBERSKI

University of California Press

Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

Oxford, England

Copyright © 1992 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kuberski, Philip.

The persistence of memory: organism, myth, text / Philip Kuberski.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07909-4

1. Memory (Philosophy) 2. History

Philosophy. 3. Natural history—Philosophy. I. Title.

BD181.7.K83 1992 92-19844

128’.3—dc20 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

for Claudette

Contents

Contents

Introduction

Unconscious Cities

Dreaming of Egypt

Inmost India

The Word of Galaxy

The Metaphor of the Shell

The Memory of Nature

Proust’s Brain

The Silence of Rivers

Notes

Index

Introduction

I began writing this book without knowing it. After a summer in Europe I came back to California and wrote out a few essays about cities and museums and antiquity. I began to wonder at the power that a fresh encounter with ancient things had on me. Walking in Rome and Arles, I had begun to think about what memory is and why it is such a consolation and a mystery.

Anyone who has lived, off and on, in the commercial wastes of southern California—where in the course of a decade a series of different buildings or forms of buildings can appear on the same site—will have a sense of absolute otherness and familiarity when walking through such ancient cities. Los Angeles may not be as old as Arles, but when a branch library bums down or an apartment building is flattened it enters into the mind and into the unconscious, along with everything, whether romantic or banal, that only exists in fragments and traces, in memory.

Soon my interest in memory broadened from cultural to natural topics. I began thinking about the most basic of human mnemonics, things like stars and shells, and wondered why they play such an important role in human imaginings. In turn I began to reflect on the role that the natural world plays in lending form and consequence to our ideas of the self, of conscience, of a poem, and of scientific or mythological accounts of human origins. From there I explored the claims made by biologists and neurologists about how organisms organize themselves and how the brain is able to collect, store, and recollect memories.

The essays in this book became focused on the nature of memory as it manifests itself in organisms, mythologies, and texts, and also on the way these three elements are reflected in one another. Although there is an order and a consistent point of view in these essays, I have not attempted to provide a consecutive or cumulative argument. My purpose rather has been to dramatize and illustrate the ways in which memory functions through associations, leaps, or other dislocations out of time or space and how the more profound of these occurrences can give us a new understanding of our relation to the world.

Thus a number of these essays are concerned with experiences of the sublime reported by Freud, Napoleon, and Erwin Schrôdinger, with dreams recalled by Wordsworth and Descartes, and with sudden reflections described by Robert Oppenheimer, Kant, and Marcel Proust. Experiences of this kind make a new knowledge of the unconscious possible, if we understand by the unconscious more than simply the repressed elements of our mental life. Erwin Schrôdinger believed that the unconscious included everything that our bodies do without our conscious knowledge. Respiration, heartbeat, digestion are not only autonomic processes but also forms of the unconscious. Given that the organism is an evolutionary outgrowth of the past, Jung believed that the individual unconscious was characterized by collective or archetypal forms which are expressed in dreams, mythology, and art. And Proust believed that involuntary memory could provide access, not only to the unconscious and the past, but to the principles of literary production enunciated by the living world.¹ From organisms through myth and into texts, one can see the persistence of the unconscious and of memory.

Western individuality and subjectivity come into being, as J. H. Breasted argued with regard to Akhenaton, when men and women achieve the ability to forget. This heretic Pharaoh was the first individual in history because he was able to turn his back on the drift of tradition and replace the profligacy of polytheistic culture with a monotheism symbolized by the sundisk, Aton.² According to this modern and Western perspective, the adventures of subjectivity begin with two fundamental acts: withdrawal from natural flux, and the association of the abstract with the divine. Both of these acts require the profound forgetting of which Breasted spoke, the wearying but heroic repression which gives us notions of our tragic or existential or poignant ephemerality.

In the essays that follow I explore the interplay of forgetting and recollecting in a number of different contexts. The first three essays concern Europe’s relationship with antiquity and the East. Drawing on archaeology, psychoanalysis, and modernist poetry, Unconscious Cities focuses on the ways in which modern and ancient cities can represent one another in the unconscious. Dreaming of Egypt shows how modern philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cinema reveal Egypt in particular, and the non-European world in general, as a repository for forgotten or denied desires. And Inmost India develops this premise by exploring the ways in which, following the recognition of Sanskrit’s relationship to Greek and Latin, Europeans have considered the antiquity and wisdom of India in relation to Western science and modern culture.

The next two essays push beyond antiquity to consider the sublime or unsettling effects that any prolonged contemplation of natural artifacts may have. The Word of Galaxy, ranging from astronomy to Kantian ethics, and from Plato’s metaphysics to science fiction, elaborates on the fundamental bond which human beings have imagined between some inner aspect of themselves and the spectacle of the stars. The Metaphor of the Shell takes this marine artifact as a natural metaphor which mediates the passage from the inorganic to the organic world and links the languages of mathematics and poetry, showing parallels between evolution and literature.

The last three essays explicitly consider the ways in which nature manages to remember itself. The Memory of Nature shows the ways in which neo-Darwinian theory and practice derive from a venerable tradition going back to Genesis, and opposes to it the highly speculative argument, offered by Rupert Sheldrake, of formative causation. Proust’s Brain further explores the traditionally physical and writerly assumptions about memory formation, moving from primitive, Christian, and scientific examples, and then shows ways in which both Proust’s novels and speculation by prominent physicists and neurologists provide an alternative. The book ends with The Silence of Rivers, a brief reflection on the role of oblivion in natural, cultural, and personal memory.

♦ * ♦

I would like to thank Allen Mandelbaum for putting me in touch with Stanley Holwitz of the University of California Press. Working with Stanley, Rebecca Frazier, and Deborah Birns has been a pleasure. I would also like to thank Dennis Foster, Nina Schwartz, Alex Gelley, Fred Dolan, Dillon Johnston and Jim Hans for their encouragement and friendship, my brother Les for urging me on, and Claudette Sartiliot for all of these things, and more.

Several of the chapters in this book were originally published, in different forms: The Georgia Review, Winter 1990 (Unconscious Cities), Substance, Volume 60 (Dreaming of Egypt), and The Yale Review, Autumn 1988 (Proust’s Brain). My thanks to the editors of these journals for their interest in my work and permission to reprint.

Grateful acknowledgment is given to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works: The Personae of Ezra Pound (Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound); H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Collected Poems, 1912-1944 (Copyright © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle).

Grateful acknowledgment is given to Harcourt Brace Jova- novich, Inc., for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works: Excerpt from The Waste Land in Collected Poems 1909-1962, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1954, 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpt from Burnt Norton and East Coker in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Unconscious Cities

Not to know one’s way in a city doesn’t signify much. But to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a forest calls for schooling.

—Walter Benjamin

When the great cities of Europe and North America first began to open their undergrounds to the traffic of municipal trains, archaeological digs in the Near and Middle East had already begun to uncover the boundary stones and broken walls of Troy, Nineveh, and Babylon. As Paris, London, New York, and Berlin became electrified, systematized, and plumbed, the cities of antiquity were brought to light for the first time in thousands of years. But even before the digs of Heinrich Schliemann, Sir Arthur Evans, and Robert Koldewey had substantiated myths and legends from Homer and Genesis, Charles Baudelaire had postulated that modernity was basically a perceptual faculty that consisted of regarding a modern city—rising outward, upward, and downward on the accumulated wealth of industry and empire—as if it were already ancient. To be modern, Baudelaire implied, means to see one’s life in a city like Paris poised on the very edge of history, but also in eternity.¹

As the languages and cities of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean became accessible to the electric lights of modern archaeologists, it became possible to consider ancient Babylonians, Myceneans, and Trojans in an oddly familiar way. After the devastations of World War I, Paul Valery mused, We later civilizations… we too now know that we are mortal… Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia … these too would be beautiful names.² Indeed, as European culture began to feel a strange interest in, and identify with, the fallen cities of Mesopotamia and the Nile, a different light was cast on its own cities, both classical and modern. Athens and Rome could never have the same authority after the uncovering of Knossos and Babel: it was as if the very ground beneath them were crumbling.

Such reflections were by no means rare in the early decades of this century. Ezra Pound’s classic imagist poem In a Station of the Metro perfectly expresses this uncanny modernity. Pound describes in two lines the appearance of passengers from a Parisian subway:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.³

But who or what has emerged from the underground? The faces are compared abruptly to petals on a bough, a simple enough analogy: people return from the darkness of the underground in the same way that flowers in spring return to wet boughs. But what can the petals themselves be compared to? According to the Homeric Hymns, flowers return as Persephone does from the underworld after Dis has released her from her autumn and winter imprisonment. Pound witnesses the return of the feminine—associated with organic renewal- out of the modern, and perhaps masculine, hold of technology. The subway in Pound’s poem is the medium that leads to and from the underworld, the chthonic realm of elemental forces that regulate the basic natural cycles. In the unnatural light of the Metro with its white tiles and neat signs there is a meeting of history and eternity, modernity and myth.

One of Freud’s last articles, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis (1937), serves as a dramatic illustration of how such a modern reorientation of time and timelessness takes place in mental life. Freud’s disturbance of memory, described in a public letter to Romain Rolland, had occurred more than thirty years before the article was published, during his first visit to Athens and the Acropolis. He reports that his initial reaction upon mounting that ancient inner city in 1904 was a nonsensical one: "So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!"⁴ Freud explains how this reaction was, among other things, a denial of his own success, which contrasted so starkly with the humble experience and achievements of his father, who could never have come such a distance from Vienna.

Freud’s denial manifested itself through a feeling of derealization (Entfremdungsgefühl) which overtook him at that moment as he ascended to the lofty site of Western rationality. Such feelings result from a conflict between empirical facts and unconscious associations. In an attempt to balance the demands of reality and the unconscious, the ego experiences various derealizing sensations which call into question either the reality of the real (What I see here is not real) or the reality of the conflict (I've been here before!). To avoid either of these absurdities, Freud produced a compromise which implied that he had always doubted the existence of Athens (So all this really does exist!), but he could produce it only at the cost of making a false statement about the past.

Was it indeed a false statement? What Freud doubted was not only the geographical existence of Athens in general and the Acropolis in particular; his doubts must have concerned surpassing his father’s achievements, as well as surpassing and dishonoring the fathers of Western idealism and science, Plato and Aristotle. But if these unconscious thoughts found expression in that moment on the Acropolis, they did so because Freud had in fact always doubted that Athens (the capital of Western Thought) was real.

Such is the impression one gets from The Future of an Illusion (1927), where Freud compares an unsubstantiated faith in the geographical existence of cities one has never visited, such as Constance and Athens, with the teachings and assertions of religion. At this point in his life he describes his visit to Athens this way:

I was already a man of mature years when I stood for the first time on the hill of the Acropolis in Athens, between the temple ruins, looking out over the blue sea. A feeling of astonishment mingled with my joy. It seemed to say: "So it really is true, just as we learnt at school!" How shallow and weak must have been the belief I then acquired in the real truth of what I heard, if I could be so astonished now! But I will not lay too much stress on the significance of this experience; for my astonishment could have had another explanation.⁵

As we have just seen, Freud would not offer such an explanation until 1937. One can appreciate Freud’s tentativeness in 1927, for he then associated Athens not with the origin of reason, but with the "unsubstantiated