Memory, p.8
Memory, page 8
They moved in tracks, of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire […]
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off and sank,
Like lead into the sea.
I will quote again from ‘A Stone Woman’, a few pages down:
When would she be, so to speak, dead? When her plump flesh heart stopped pumping the blue blood along the veins and arteries of her shifting shape? When the grey and clammy matter of her brain became limestone or graphite? When her brainstem became a column of rutilated quartz? When her eyes became – what? She inclined to the belief that her watching eyes would be the last thing, even though fine threads on her nostrils still conveyed the scent of brass or coal to the primitive lobes at the base of the brain. The phrase came into her head: Those are pearls that were his eyes. A song of grief made fantastic by a sea-change. Would her eyes cloud over and become pearls? Pearls were interesting. They were a substance where the organic met the inorganic, like moss agate. Pearls were stones secreted by a living shellfish, perfected inside the mother-of-pearl of its skeleton to protect its soft inward flesh from an irritant. She went to her mother’s jewel-box, in search of a long string of freshwater pearls she had given her for her seventieth birthday. There they lay and glimmered; she took them out and wound them round her sparkling neck, streaked already with jet, opal, and jacinth zircon.fn9
In this passage, the bereaved woman moves towards death by identification with the dead mother, and simultaneously moves towards memory and differentiation from her. The eyes (which are both the self’s most effective organ for ‘taking in’ the object, and simultaneously that which makes the infant aware of the separation between himself and the mother) are potentially dead and yet very much alive in her self-observation and in her curiosity: ‘Pearls were interesting. They were a substance where the organic met the inorganic’. Internal objects are organic and inorganic at the same time; she is delicately poised between life and death. Moving towards mother’s jewel-box recreates mother-in-the-past, memory-of-mother; there is both differentiation and closeness: her pearls, my neck (and ‘freshwater’ … no slimy things at this particular moment?). And yet the double meaning of wound brings back the operation, the scars turned into dead jewels, the pain of loss; also perhaps a more actively suicidal thought, perhaps a reference to unconscious guilt: the mother as her Albatross hanging from her neck.
This is Freud’s description of what happens to memory during mourning; his ‘jet, opal, and jacinth zircon’:
[The reality of death can only be accepted] bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. [my italics]fn10
And now, back to Silas Marner, who finds a place near an expanse of water which, even though it is just a Stone Pit, will hide an important secret and a corpse (its deep did rot); there he creates a tiny mournful Sicilia on the fringes of an incomprehensible, alien Bohemia, where he spends his insect-like existence until one day a daughter will bring him to life again.fn11
In the beginning of the story, Silas Marner the weaver has become a recluse as a consequence of a very painful situation; he had been betrayed by his girlfriend and his best friend, and falsely accused of stealing money. As this accusation was considered by the religious community in his primitive church as ‘proven’ by drawing lots, he also suffered a loss of religious faith; in essence, all his good objects deserted him, and he felt condemned to go away to a foreign place, and live a life of total isolation. In psychoanalytic terms, we could say that he suffered such catastrophic loss that he was unable to mourn it, and became melancholically withdrawn. He had nothing left but work; gradually he became addicted to the gold coins he earned and started to build up his treasure. ‘He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.’ When his gold is stolen, he becomes desperate: Silas’s ‘had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging’.
One night, as he stood outside his house, disconnected from reality in a ‘cataleptic fit’, a two-year-old girl, whose mother had just died in the snow, comes in, attracted by the light from the door, and sits near the fire, just where the gold had been buried before it was stolen. When he comes in and sees the child’s bright blond hair, his first thought is: ‘my gold has returned to me!’
This is not just what is needed for the development of the plot; it also conveys the meaning of an unresolved mourning, which would remain so unless a symbolic metamorphosis can take place; the presence of the unconscious link with his coins experienced as his ‘familiars’ and, as the word suggests, his family in his internal world, (‘bright faces which were all his own’) makes psychic recovery possible. The implication is that the ‘dead disrupted things’ still have a deep emotional connection, through unconscious memory, with the lost love objects, especially with his dead little sister, and that the belief in the transformation of something dead into something alive – which can repair the wrong committed against him – allows his own process of resurrection to begin. The memory of the lost love object ‘unfolding’ into psychological light allows for the return of the symbolic functioning: this child is not the sister, but she symbolises the sister, and can therefore be invested with the emotions that belonged to the loved object in the past, starting the reparative process.
Very early in the novel George Eliot portrays movingly how pity and compassion redress momentarily the situation of emotional isolation by connecting Silas to the past, bringing to illuminated focus a particular aspect of his autobiographical memory:
About this time [i.e. when he started falling in love with the gold coins] an incident happened which seemed to open a possibility of some fellowship with his neighbours. One day, taking a pair of shoes to be mended, he saw the cobbler’s wife seated by the fire, suffering from the terrible symptoms of heart disease and dropsy, which he had witnessed as the precursors of his mother’s death. He felt a rush of pity at the mingled sight and remembrance, and, recalling the relief his mother had found from a simple preparation of foxgloves, he promised Sally Oates to bring her something that would ease her, since the doctor did her no good. In his office of charity, Silas felt, for the first time since he had come to Raveloe, a sense of unity between his past and present life, which might have been the beginning of his rescue from the insect-like existence into which his nature had shrunk. [my italics]
There he was, with his sick mother fully imagined/remembered, as well as his healthy mother of earlier times when she could make good medicine from herbs, and good emotional medicine for her little boy through compassion – when she consoled him for his losses. He symbolically helps his suffering (internal) mother through helping Sally Oates, and (temporarily) retrieves her through ‘mingled sight and remembrance’.
What makes this fascinating for a psychoanalyst is this sense that several levels of memory are operating in a vital integrated way at the same time: the sick, dying mother, bringing alive his compassion and also a re-experience of the bereavement; the mother of his youth, who was capable of a particular expertise and could help and heal others and teach him useful life skills; and ultimately, in implicit (not conscious) memory, he is also the once-loved child, ‘cured’ of pain, who will therefore be able to ‘cure’ a ‘mother’. The identification with a good mother is there to be re-awakened at the sight of the bereaved child.
Another moving passage displays Silas’s unconscious memory of the warm, nurturing link between mother and child:
Yet even in this state of withering a little incident happened, which showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was one of his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had a brown earthernware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among the very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been his companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave him a satisfaction mingled with that of having the fresh clear water. One day as he was returning from the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with force against the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken in three pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.
With her usual psychological brilliance George Eliot had already shown that, in the melancholic state, love itself doesn’t do the trick, without the ‘mingled sight and remembrance’: before the appearance of Eppie, Marner is befriended by Dolly Winthrop, but she can’t cure his melancholia – even though she imagines that the sight of a lovely child might do this; Marner can’t but be brought to life by seeing and hearing her little son Aaron singing a Christmas ‘carril’:
She stroked Aaron’s brown head, and thought it must do Master Marner good to see such a ‘pictur of a child’. But Marner, on the other side of the hearth, saw the neatly-featured rosy face as a mere dim round, with two dark spots in it.
In his emotional withdrawal, Marner relates to Aaron as an autistic person might. What he sees is entirely lacking in emotional significance; the image perfectly conveys what happens to sight when not ‘mingled’ with memory, when devoid of symbolic connection. George Eliot also shows us the opposite process to this ‘turning into stone’: as Eppie’s mind develops, she makes alive what is inanimate. Dolly describes how Eppie will
‘get busier and mischievouser every day – she will, bless her … but I’ll bring you my little chair, and some bits o’ red rag and things for her to play wi’: an’ she’ll sit and chatter to ’em as if they was alive’.
Marner can only engage again in the life process through Eppie, so life acquires meaning with the symbolic return of the lost loved object, now a vivid memory constantly informing the new relationship. The trigger for the restoration of emotional sight is the linking of the live child/sister with the fantasy of recovering the gold, standing for the treasured, buried internal objects; as in Byatt’s story, where every aspect of mother has turned into jewels, buried in the Stone Woman’s body.
Even at his most miserly, which is the same as his most amnesic, Marner wouldn’t exchange his gold coins for others with different faces – in other words, in unconscious memory he discriminates between his loved ones and strangers – and when particularity is preserved, something human remains. By transforming the Stone Woman not into just a massive piece of stone but into many different very particular kinds of stones – different colours, textures, shapes, ages, etc. – Byatt shows the discrimination in the internal world between the hundreds of very particular, distinct memories of various aspects and functions which compose the internalised lost object, and therefore the multi-faceted nature of the process of identification.
The process of making the world alive depends on ‘mingled sight and remembrance’, actual experiences in external reality coloured by projections of our own emotions and of memories of our objects (as in Eppie transforming rags into people). In pathological over-remembering, a similar but sinister version of this occurs, as for instance in Captain Ahab’s invention of an inner world of motives and personality for Moby Dick through the projection of his own hatred into his enemy: Ahab’s imagination is not used for play but to feed his obsession, and it transforms his memories in a destructive way. He could be said to hoard the one distorted and over-illuminated memory, killing off in the process all other memories. By ‘petrifying’ countless Wedding-Guests throughout his life, the Ancient Mariner hangs on possessively to his Albatross: not allowing the past to be mended through allowing space for other, different memories.
Steven Rose, ‘Memories are Made of This’
‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient – at others, so bewildered and so weak – and at others again, so tyrannical, so beyond controul! [sic] – We are to be sure a miracle in every way – but our powers of recollecting and forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.’
Thus Fanny Price, Austen’s long-suffering heroine in Mansfield Park. It took more than half a century from the writing of that novel for psychologists to attempt to bring the discipline of the laboratory to bear on this tyrannical and uncontrollable memory, and nearly another before it was to become subject to the molecular probes and confident claims of a resurgent neurobiology. Today’s neuroscience seizes not on Austen but on the poet Emily Dickinson for its claim to knowledge, its leading figures gleefully quoting her verse:
The Brain – is wider than the Sky
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside
Yet after my own lifetime of research, in charting the biochemical cascades and cellular remoulding that even the simplest of learning experiences seems to generate in my young chicks (the experimental animals which have participated, albeit involuntarily, in more than three decades of my study of memory) I have to confess that I still don’t feel we have done more than deepen some of its mysteries. Fifteen hundred years before Fanny Price, in his Confessions, St Augustine listed some of the phenomena that needed explaining: Memory, he says, is a ‘spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images’. But memory is capricious. Some things come spilling from the memory unwanted, whilst others are forthcoming only after a delay. Memory enables one to envisage colours even in the dark, to taste in the absence of food, to hear in the absence of sound. ‘All this goes on inside me in the vast cloisters of my memory.’ Memory also contains ‘all that I have ever learnt of the liberal sciences, except what I have forgotten … innumerable principles and laws of numbers and dimensions … my feelings, not in the same way as they are present to the mind when it experiences them, but in a quite different way …’ and things too, such as false arguments, which are known not to be true. Further, he points out, when one remembers something, one can later remember that one has remembered it. No wonder that the mind seemed to soar outside the physical confines of mere brain-goo. For Augustine, unlike Emily Dickinson, it is the mind, not the brain, which is wider than the sky, and I am inclined to agree.
What the experimental sciences have tried to do, of course, is to operationalise memory, to reduce and control ‘learning experiences’ in such a way that their parameters could be studied. The process was begun by Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose book, Uber das Gedächtnis (On Memory), published in 1885, broke new ground by asking whether there were general laws of memory formation. To explore these general laws, he invented the simple technique which in various forms has been a staple psychologist’s tool ever since – that of the nonsense syllable, a series of three letter sets each composed of a vowel between two consonants, as for instance: HUZ; LAQ; DOK; VER; JIX. Using himself as subject Ebbinghaus then explored the conditions required to remember such lists; numbers of readings, spacing and so forth, until he could make two errorless readings of the entire list. Once the list was learned, he could then test how successful he was at recalling it at various subsequent times from minutes to days. To quantify this process of recall, all that he had to do was to note how many readings of the list were necessary, at any given time after it had been learned, to once again be able to repeat it without error.
A number of general rules could be derived from such observations. For instance, in any such list of a dozen nonsense syllables, some are easier to remember than others – in particular, those at the beginning and at the end of the list. These are the so-called primacy and recency effects. They may seem obvious when described so simply, but what Ebbinghaus did was to demonstrate clearly that in this case at least common sense was supported by science. In addition, he showed that if a list is once learned, it becomes easier to relearn subsequently. A comparison of the number of trials required to learn it the second time with those required first time round provides a calculation which has become known in the psychology literature as savings – the measure of memory. The use of the savings score enables one to specify more precisely the loss and stabilisation of memory with time. He found that most of the memory loss occurred within the first minutes after training; once the memory had survived that hurdle it seemed much more stable, leading to the temporal distinction between short- and long-term memory which has become a staple of subsequent research.
Ebbinghaus’s was the first step in developing the taxonomy of memory that has provided much of the focus of subsequent psychological research. In the 1930s Frederick Bartlett famously showed how the content of even remembered items becomes transformed and simplified over time. And in the 1980s and 90s, Alan Baddeley drew a distinction between working memory – that is memory dredged up from past experience for current use, so to say – and the more deeply stored reference memory. Meanwhile, based in part on evidence from patients with identifiable brain lesions, Endel Tulving, and later Larry Squire, added a further taxonomical distinction, that between various classes of memory. Procedural memory is remembering how to do something – to ride a bicycle for instance. Declarative memory is remembering that – that a particular two-wheeled drivable object is called a bicycle. Declarative itself becomes divided into semantic (Augustine’s numbers and dimensions) and episodic or autobiographical memory – recall of episodes in one’s own life.
