Memory - can you bear reality?

Memory is a favourite stamping ground for novelists. Ishiguro’s wistful yearnings for lost childhoods and Julian Barnes’ struggle with conflicting family remembrances in The Sense of an Ending highlight what a fertile subject it is. Thriller writers in print and television grab hold of the oddities – the mnemonists who never forget anything; and the amnesiacs who have to begin anew again every day. 

  We forget how vital memory was, in practical terms, in pre-google and pre-book publishing days.  Which is why systems to promote accurate recall - the arts of memory - were developed by the Greek philosophers and on up to the 16^th Century, associating groups of words with  images. And in so-called primitive non-literate societies,  the village storyteller had to recite hours of poetry and narrative learnt by heart, for the evening's campfire entertainment. I say so-called because of something an old boyfriend, a military type, once told me. He had fought with Arabs in the desert decades back. He said if he gave a complicated order, the illiterate soldiers would remember first time. The ones who could read and write required several tellings. As we have become better educated we have lost the facility for a particular form of remembrance.

  Fast forward to the 1990s, the Memory Wars became a toxic battleground, as parents facing allegations of child abuse argued that therapists had brainwashed ‘false memories’ into their adult child’s head. They were backed by academic psychologists who jealously guarded memory as their preserve. They were hostile to new evidence suggesting that trauma victims – child abuse, war damage, the holocaust – stored memories in a way that differed significantly from students playing games in university laboratories. Even ‘soft’ scientists loathe being told their theories (on which careers had been built) are wrong, so metaphorical swords were drawn.

   The oddity was that this was not new evidence at all. Pat Barker’s Booker-winning Regeneration trilogy dramatized the work of First World War psychiatrist WR Rivers, who treated Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen for PTSD. He had said it all 80 years before, but, as was typical, once war subsided the effects of trauma were forgotten. In the words of TS Eliot, ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’

  In fact the commonest ‘false memory’ is of the ways things never were, a past airbrushed into soft focus, deleting what is too painful to bring to mind.

  It’s a subject I touch on in BY the LIGHT of a Lie and to which I will doubtless return. 

    “You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all ... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” Luis Bunuel.

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