memory practices in the sciences / geoffrey c. bowker

Geoffrey C. Bowker
1 Review
MIT Press, 2005 - Philosophy - 261 pages

Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). and Awarded "Best Information Science Book 2006" by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Google Books.

The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases—shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science—the making of infrastructures—and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past.

At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

REVIEW ONE

Wilson, T.D. (2006). Review of: Bowker, Geoffrey C. Memory practices in the sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Information Research, 12(1), review no. R238 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs238.html]

Geoffrey Bowker has had an interesting career, ending up (to this point at least) as Regis and Diane McKenna Professor at the University of Santa Clara after spells in Paris, at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, and the Department of Communication in the University of California at San Diego. Probably his best known work (with Leigh Starr) is Sorting things out, a study of classification, and, to a degree, this work is in the same general area.

The term 'memory practices' is not immediately understandable—or, at least, it was not to me—and that might damage the books chances in the library and information sciences market place. That would be a pity, since this is the kind of book that can stimulate a dozen Ph.D. studies, or more, and that contributes a genuine intellectual dimension to the field, which is so often lacking in our technology oriented (one might say 'technology bound') age. Bowker's definition of 'memory practice' is presented almost tangentially in a section (p. 6-15) on What this book is about. He notes that,

Acts of committing to record (such as writing a scientific paper) do not occur in isolation; they are embedded within a range of practices (technical, formal, social) that I define as memory practices. Taken as a loosely articulated whole, these practices allow (to some extent) useful/interesting descriptions of the past to be carried forward into the future. (p. 7)
Earlier, he notes that the traces we leave of our actions are not truly the way they were, or the way they happened, but 'a tacit negotiation between ourselves and our imagined auditors': we write accounts of research not to truly report exactly what happened, but to observe the rules (formal and informal) of scholarly communication. A comment that reminds me of John Johnson's PhD thesis on The social construction of official information, in which he records how social agency statistics were reported so as to gain the biggest budget benefit. Bowker has a similarly interesting tale, from earlier research in the field of company history:

A similar move [to the current company policies of setting rules for e-mail communications] was made in the 1930s by the Schlumberger company, when it realized that its internal records could be scrutinized by a court—the company shifted very quickly from writing detailed accounts of their practices in French to writing highly sanitized versions in English. (p. 7)
Following the introduction, Bowker addresses 'memory practices' in three areas and eras: geology in the 1830s, cybernetics in the 1960s, and environmental sciences (with a focus on biodiversity) today.

In the first of these, geology itself is presented as a 'memory practice', the emerging knowledge of the earth's construction revealing its history, the strata themselves containing the records of ages past. Of course, as geology was developing so was the scientific literature in many fields. Bowker notes that geology's focus on the temporal distribution of the geologic record and the relationship of this, in the scientific mind to watchmaking and, from there, to mechanical models in general.

In the cybernetics chapter Bowker suggests that the 'memory practice' of the field was, in fact, the destruction of memory; all things being reproducible from first principles. Memory was seen by Ashby, for example, as something needed in man only because of our '...incomplete knowledge of the appropriate Markov chain for the given closed system'.

Finally, in Databasing the world: biodiversity and the 2000s, Bowker examines the present reliance upon the database, underpinning the information infrastructure built upon, among other things, the Internet, showing that, in historical terms, we have moved from perceiving the world as a clock (geology) to the world as a computer (the world of the Internet and the database). Today's technology leads to collaboration in science, to information sharing and information access beyond anything previously available. The database becomes memory in an analogic way to the rock strata becoming memory.

The three case chapters are followed by three further chapters: Chapter 4, The mnemonic deep: the importance of an unruly past explores the problems of naming things and classifying them and the problems arising from multiple classifications:

...we need databases held together through good metadata practice; and in order to work out the latter, we need to recognize the depth of the problem. In a biodiverse world, we need to be able to manipulate ontologically diverse data.
Chapter 5, The local knowledge of a globalizing ethnos attempts to answer the question, Why keep knowledge local and local knowledge? Bowker notes that the first answer is a simple one: knowledge is inevitably local. However, he does not suggest any other answers, although his following text leads one to suppose that his comments on different ways of knowing are intended to convey the notion that knowledge held locally will be viewed in different ways and, perhaps, lead to different kinds of understanding.

In the final chapter, the concluding paragraph effectively summarises what the book is about:

Just because the past is over doesn't mean that there is a truth about "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist". The work of creating partial objects and conjouring them into a given, small set of trajectories is a work in the present of expanding our empire and our knowledge. If we want the future to be other than what it seems to be turning out, we must create a past that is other than it seems to have turned out. People, planets, and purgatory (Le Goff 1984) deserve multiple pasts. Only an open past can unlock the present and free the future.
This is a very interesting work, but I think it could have benefited from the attentions of a good editor. The style is dense and somewhat quirky, with parenthetical interpolations in many sentences, that interrupt the flow of understanding—and not always usefully. In spite of this, I unreservedly recommend the book to anyone who seeks to understand how, in science, we can ensure that what is learnt in the past and the present is available for the future.

Professor T.D. Wilson
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
September


REVIEW TWO

Sarita Albagli
[www.reciis.cict.fiocruz.br] ISSN 1981-6286

Pesquisadora do Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT/MCT), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil sarita@ibict.br

In the book Memory Practices in the Sciences, Geoffrey C. Bowker discusses the relationship between infrastructures and supporting information used to record knowledge and construct a memory of science (such as manuscripts, printed matter, archives and data bases, among others); and the development of knowledge and information itself. The author not only considers the technical aspects of this debate, but also their socio- political dimensions.

Executive director of the Centre for Science, Tech- nology and Society of the University of Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley, California, Bowker was the first Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor in Science, Technology and Society. Previously, Bowker worked in the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Paris and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Urbana- Champaign, Illinois. Furthermore, he was a Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

With Memory Practices in the Sciences, he gives con- tinuity to his academic project initiated in previous works, especially Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (co-authored with Susan Leigh Star, MIT Press, 2000) and Science on the Run: Information Manage- ment and Industrial Science at Schlumberger, 1920-1940 (MIT Press, 1994).
His focus of interest again falls on the field of classi- fication and standardisation and its role within the infra- structure of information, particularly in the development of that which is called scientific “cyberinfrastructure” and its social and organisational features. Bowker is especially concerned about the relationships between these subjects and collaborative scientific work, data sharing and the use of computer science in biodiversity studies. The author defines the central question in this field as being how scientists analyse some sciences that contribute to the subject of biodiversity; how they communicate with each other and among themselves in matters such policy formulation - and in particular how data structures and current practices affect this communication.

Through the use of vast multidisciplinary literature, Bowker considers, in Memory Practices in the Sciences, the examination of two great issues: (1) How do scientists configure their own past, either as individuals, “land creatures”, or as pertaining to a disciplinary line? (2) How do scientists configure the past of their objects - the land, climate and the process of extinction?
The author points out the concerns and inten- tions of science, as a social institution, to create a perfect memory of the past; developing technologies that permit the recording of the pasts’ traces, which, conversely, would be forgotten. He highlights that, by means of these traces, they can be understood better as part of a temporal process and larger space.

On the other hand, he argues that the traces we leave - or the records that we execute - do not neces- sarily correspond to that which we were or to the facts that happened. In truth he deals with a tacit negotiation between us and our future readers, listeners or those who want to come to judge or evaluate us. In the case of texts and other scientific records, many times they tell the history of an ideal past, essentially being concerned that the protocols have been adequately followed.
The act of recording (as for example writing a sci- entific article) occurs in the scope of a set of collective practices - technical, educational, social - articulated furthermore in a tenuous way that the author defines as memory practices. These range from being totally unaware to being super-aware. They confer utility to our past in the present, in a way to better drive the future. For the author, the interesting thing is to characterise and understand how a set of memory practices are ar- ticulated in memory regimes, around relatively constant technologies and practices.

The archive is the unit of space in which memory practices are extended, while memory epochs are their units of time. They are units that make communication and information sharing possible. There is also the con- cern with interoperability, on the one hand, and with the loss of data that is frequently caused with the changes in information technologies, on the other. It is emphasised that information infrastructure evolution - especially in information technologies - affects the ways in which we deal with our past, our ability to recover, reconstruct, and forget it. In reality, we think of the past with instruments of our own time and from our social matrices, as well as technologies that we employ in the present, therefore projecting - including onto nature - our ways of thinking and organising them.

The emergence of each memory epoch occurs in association to the development of new recording me- dia, seeing that the limits between these epochs - oral, manuscripts, mechanical, electronic, digital... - are not very clear or evident. The matter of characterising and analysing the circulation of memories occurs through multiple media which are developed by us.
The transition to new memory practice regimes, as well as the increasing valuation of the record on the side of organisations – was not frequent or trivial throughout history, it involved profound transformations in regard to ways of thinking, on both an individual and social plain.

The memory would then be operated by means of a variety of “technical devices”, amongst which the author highlights classification and standardisation. Clas- sification is a resource that allows us to forget something that we will need to remember afterwards. Standards and protocols are formal procedures and/or techniques that result from negotiations and commitments, being essential for communication and sharing between those who are involved in a network.

Without professing a linear chronological narra- tive, the author conveys this discussion from a historical perspective, analysing the ways of networking support material and technological information and the nature of producing knowledge, throughout the last 200 years. Its starting point is the Industrial Revolution in England, arguing that it is was here that new archiving methods were developed - and the new underlying scientific memory practices.

Industrialisation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Europe, is considered an important moment in the increase of historical awareness. In a similar way, the period of 1870-1914 is seen as being particularly significant in the recent history of memory practices, with the intensification of concern about standardisa- tion and classification of information, creating space in the twentieth century for the planning of databases as a central, cultural form.

From there, the author constructs his argument on the basis of scientific analysis of the specific methods of reconfiguring of scientific knowledge at three histori- cal points and in three scientific fields, which he calls “memoryepochs”:thegeologyofthenineteenthcentury, mid-twentieth-century cybernetics and today’s sciences of biodiversity. The current epoch is baptised by the author as “the epoch of potential memory”.

He begins by drawing a parallel between the trans- formations in nineteenth century geological science and the change in perspectives of time and memory since the Industrial Revolution, taking the form of a “second nature” completely “archivable” - monetised time, mechanised time and standardised time, essential to the globalisation process that would deepen in the following century.

Next he comments on the cybernetics of the post World War II era, whose emphasis falls into the func- tional similarities between mind and machine, human and non-human systems. Cybernetics thus began as a metascience to which several disciplines would be subordinated, requiring the development of a common language, however also bringing indignity by scientific memory.

He then covers memory practices in the emergent science of biodiversity. This requires the interaction and cooperation of scientific fields and many diverse geo- graphic regions, generating an enormous mass of data and information, simultaneously making the development of unified databases and the compatibility between many classification systems difficult.
Digital archiving reveals the emergence of a new regimen of technologies that intend to conserve - but also to mold - the experience. This new regimen now permits a new flexibility, a new texture, a new mobility of global to local and vice versa. It furthermore makes possible the aggregation of data involving much more complex and diversified operations - such newness is not a quantitative capacity; already having been developed in the nineteenth century, but principally in its curves and folds, its distinct crossings and intersections.

This empirical-analytical statement serves as a con- ducting wire for the discussion about how memory - and our own conscience - are configured very differently in different infrastructures and information technologies. This material is expressed in a metaphoric way. New mediations, new recording media, new memory pros- theses form a new identity already imbricated in these new media. This same information infrastructure is also used in order to speak of ourselves.

The author seeks to demonstrate the overlapping, the traffic and synchrony between the world (and time) social and the natural (and time) world. He argues that information technology, as much as metaphor and materiality, permits the creation of a second middling nature of indexation and archiving, thus eternalising the present and allowing a better understanding of the past. He thus considers that the database and archive - as material substratums and symbolic artefacts - are central elements in the development of longue durée knowledge in the West in recent centuries.

For Bowker, then, the act of remembering doesn’t lessen recovery of the past. However it is inserted in de- veloping reading concerning current methods. Memory - or the act of remembering - is an instrument of sociali- sation and relation with the world, a way to mold and to act regarding the present. There are traces of the past in every part and the possibility of accessing them is, by itself, heartwarming.

The exercise of memory is, according to the author, transcendent and inherent, political and personal, allow- ing a better understanding of our respect and regarding our insertion in the living and inanimate world, in all its complexity. In a similar way, the archive is not simply a stock of useful facts; it is inserted in our sets of actions that contribute in molding the present.
It is a work of great contemporaneity, proving that the fields of information studies and social science studies have much to contribute to each other’s mutual enrichment, opening a scenario for new transdisciplinary practices.


REVIEW THREE

K8's review Jan 07, 09

bookshelves: academic, lis

I just finished reading Geoffrey Bowker's Memory Practices in the Sciences for the book club over at Reading Information Sciences. I gave myself a break and allowed myself to read it at a leisurely pace, a luxury I rarely have anymore.

At the heart of the book, is Bowker's examination of the ways in which "acts of committing to record" are socially imbued practices affecting our conception of the past in ways that. As a consequence, affect our present and future. Bowker begins with the effects of industrialization on memory practices in geology.

For me, what stands out is: The ways accounting practices used during the Industrial Revolution were transferred onto Geology (and geologic ways of deciphering the age of the earth) by Lyell and others. Lyell argued that the earth itself isn't "irregular," rather that it is just a bad archivist. What Lyell constructed was a spatio-temporal systemization that moved away from seeing the history of the earth as a series as catastrophic events. Methods of organizing work and the workplace were used to explain how the earth ages at regular intervals, rather than by events such as earthquakes and floods. He moved away from creationist theories of the earth's age. Bowker discusses how this (and other geologic theories of the time) privileged Western Europe and aided imperial interests and burgeoning globalization.

Bowker follows this approach to memory practices by looking at cybernetics, and its focus on semantic memory - "memory as pure pattern" (pg 76). Bowker sees cybernetics as working from universalism. Theories of cybernetics during the mid-twentieth century posited that cybernetics removes the need for memory as it worked to create a system that could hold all information equally, like a universal discipline. To work, cybernetics must be general. And through cybernetic systems, history becomes just a part of a classification scheme, a way of patterning. And as a result, Bowker argues, memory needs to be destroyed to create unity .

Bowker writes: "First, past disciplines are destroyed: they need to be created anew from first principles Second, an individual experimenter must destroy his or her knowledge of previous experiments. Third, one result of this double destruction will be the discovery by cybernetics that memory itself is epiphenomenal (pg 101).

As Bowker later notes, though, all data is always collected within a context. In cybernetic systems, context is eliminated, eliminating important information about how and why data has been collected. We lose the reason(s) behind collection methodologies which are almost always discipline specific.

Early in chapter 3, "Databasing the World: Biodiversity and the 2000s," Bowker writes "The miracle of memory in our time is that memory practices are materially rampant, invasive, implicated in the core of our being and of our understanding of the world - and yet we experience them and discourse about them in terms of their ideal ramifications on some hypostasized entity created to void materiality from the equation: the individual, the nation-state, the people, and so forth" (pg 109).

What Bowker broaches, in this chapter, is the way we as humans often take ourselves outside of nature when we create our ways of organizing and controlling nature. In addition, he examines the ways in which western peoples' have created systems that place other peoples (as a way of colonialization) classified as 'nature,' while placing their own practices as 'culture' and outside of these modes of classification.

As the chapter progresses, Bowker leads up to a discussion of how we can read databases both materially and discursively. Drawing from Derrida's discussions of how technologies can create new kinds of 'traces.' From these premises, Bowker argues that to 'read' databases, we need to look at what isn't categorized or classified. What is classified is considered important, politically, economically, ideologically, etc. By examining what is left out of these systems, we can start to form the context of systems. He notes that "If certain kinds of entities are being excluded from entering into the database we are creating, and if those entities share the feature that they are singular in space and time, then we are producing a set of models of the world that - despite its avowed historicity - is constraining us generally to converge on descriptions of the world in terms of repeatable entities: not because the world is so but because this is the nature of our manipulable data structures" (pg 146). What this means is that those entities that are named are studied, and once studied, are considered relevant subjects for future study. The unnamed become unimportant, and the systems created around those things we name are not created to support a place for the unnamed.

In biodiversity work, researchers from multiple disciplines using multiple discipline-specific methods and contexts deposit data into common databases. In addition, the data in the databases themselves need to be accessible when databases are updated technologically. As a result, the use of metadata becomes central. Metadata needs to be flexible enough to be accessible both today and in the future. And, it needs to be able to provide as much context as possible. Developing metadata standards that can encompass all possible futures while still serving our present (and the present and future for everyone) is still far off into the future.

the sense of an ending: julian barnes

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his family memoir cum meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes admits that he and his brother disagree about many details of their childhood. His brother, a philosopher, maintains that memories are so often false that they cannot be trusted without independent verification. “I am more trusting, or self-deluding,” writes Barnes, “so shall continue as if all my memories are true.”

The narrator of his Booker longlisted new novella has always made that same reasonable assumption, but the act of revisiting his past in later life challenges his core beliefs about causation, responsibility and the very chain of events that make up his sense of self. This concise yet open-ended book accepts the novelistic challenge of an aside in Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “We talk about our memories, but should perhaps talk more about our forgettings, even if that is a more difficult – or logically impossible – feat.”

Like so many of Barnes’s narrators, Tony Webster is resigned to his ordinariness; even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. On harsher inspection, “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was.” Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that “the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss”, that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change.

But like all of us, he has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory. Looming largest in his personal mythology is his brilliant, tragic, Camus-reading schoolfriend Adrian (another echo ofNothing to Be Frightened Of here: in that book Barnes remembers a similar friend by the fitting but unlikely name of Alex Brilliant). It is a solicitor’s letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has been left Adrian’s diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks his life has been.

The novella divides into two parts, the first being Tony’s memoir of “book-hungry, sex-hungry” sixth form days, and the painful failure of his first relationship at university, with the spiky, enigmatic Veronica. It’s a lightly sketched portrait of awkwardness and repression at a time when yes, it was the 60s, “but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country”. In one of the book’s many slow-rumbling ironies, the second section undermines the veracity of these expertly drawn memories, as Tony reopens his relationship with Veronica, a woman he had previously edited out of his life story.

It was a “slightly odd thing”, he cautiously admits, to pretend to his ex-wife when they first met that Veronica had never existed (and then later give such a one-sided account of her that she’s known within their marriage as “The Fruitcake”). Barnes builds a powerful atmosphere of shame and silence around the past as Tony tries to track down the elusive diary, which promises, as missing diaries tend to do, some revelation or closure. In a book obsessed with evidence and documentation – verification for unreliable, subjective memory – the most powerful depth charge turns out to be something forgotten yet irrefutable that Tony has kept from himself for 40 years. With it Barnes puts the rest of the narrative, and his unreliable yet sincere narrator, tantalisingly into doubt.

There’s the atmosphere of a Roald Dahl short story to Tony’s quest; the sense that, with enigmatic emails and mysterious meetings in the Oxford Street John Lewis brasserie, he is somehow being played or manipulated by others. “You don’t get it. You never did,” Veronica tells him repeatedly. A secret permeates the text, heavily withheld. But this schematic element pales beside the emotional force of Tony’s re-evaluation of the past, his rush of new memories in response to fresh perspectives, and the unsettling sense of the limits of self-knowledge. As ever, Barnes excels at colouring everyday reality with his narrator’s unique subjectivity, without sacrificing any of its vivid precision: only he could invest a discussion about hand-cut chips in a gastropub with so much wry poignancy.

With its patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret. But it gives as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken – lost to memory – as it does to the engine of its own plot. Fiction, Barnes writes in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability”.The Sense of an Ending honours that impossible desire in a way that is novel, fertile and memorable.



review by Anita Brookner in The Telegraph 25 Jul 2011

Memory, individual rather than collective, accounts for who we are and what we have become. And early memory is particularly valuable, though it can be misconstrued. Its influence can persist throughout adult life, though what is cause and what effect may be difficult to judge. In this short but compelling novel Julian Barnes tracks the origin of one particular memory through a long and apparently uneventful life towards an explanation that leaves traces of unease that are difficult to dismiss.

The facts are quite simple. Three school-friends, of whom the narrator, Tony Webster, is one, are joined by a fourth, Adrian Finn, who is much cleverer than any of them. They age and lose contact with one another. But Webster, eventually married and divorced, cannot rid himself of the memory of his former girlfriend, Veronica, at whose family home he once spent a weekend. At the time he had felt uncomfortable, socially inferior, and he was hardly surprised when the enigmatic Veronica took up with the more prestigious Adrian. His early misconception hardens imperceptibly into a mystery that is exacerbated when he learns of Adrian’s suicide. Nor can he understand why Veronica’s mother should leave him a small legacy and the news that she possesses Adrian’s diary.

These facts throw into relief his inability to reconstruct his relations with either Adrian or Veronica. What remains in his memory is the discomfort he felt on that weekend, a discomfort he cannot explain even at an advanced age. The clue might lie in the diary, but attempts to get hold of it are unavailing. He is up against an initial misalliance to which others are being added, containing the same characters but no further explanation.

Webster’s attempts to resolve this enigma form the bulk of this clever novel, in the course of which it becomes clear that the character of Veronica is pivotal. Even her random impulses, to which Webster had become accustomed, seem opaque. The explanation, when it comes, is so fortuitous that it throws into doubt that early unease and what Webster had made of it. The unease had been, and had remained, authentic. This is a fact to which others are gradually added.

Going back in his mind, Webster unearths another memory of that uncomfortable weekend: the odd kindness of Veronica’s mother and her eventual legacy. His reading of the incident had been inconclusive: later reconstructions supply more clues. Finally he accepts an alternative version, which turns out to be the correct one, though it is a betrayal of all concerned.

review by Kirsten Alexander from ABC Bookshow 5 September 2011

English novelist Julian Barnes has written a slip of a new book, a mere 150 pages populated by a small handful of characters. But his novella The Sense of an Ending punches well above its size, and has deservedly been longlisted for the Booker Prize. With brevity and restraint, Barnes addresses some of life’s most significant questions: Can you trust your memories? Have you intentionally forgotten parts of your own past? What will you regret?

The story is narrated by Tony Webster, a man in his sixties looking back on his rather ordinary life. While he is stoic about his lot, he says: ‘I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded — and how pitiful that was.’ Tony married, had a daughter, divorced, worked as an arts administrator and then retired. ‘And,’ he says, ‘ that’s a life, isn’t it?’ He needn’t have worried too much. Life soon does bother Tony Webster, and offers him an intriguing mystery to solve.

The first part of the story is set in England in the 1960s, though it may as well have been the 1950s since, as Tony explains, it was the Swinging Sixties ‘only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.’ But within Tony’s small group of school friends there is certainly drama and change, amplified when they welcome into their midst a smart, serious boy called Adrian Finn. Tony is in awe of Adrian and declares they will be friends forever.

However, he does not anticipate that Adrian will take up with his rather poisonous ex-girlfriend Veronica Ford while they are all at university, albeit different universities. Tony is furious about this development and, feeling bewildered and betrayed, cuts off contact with the pair. A few months later, Adrian commits suicide. This string of events will affect Tony for the rest of his life.

In the second part of the book, Tony’s quiet retirement years are rocked when he is bequeathed Adrian’s diary by Veronica’s mother. He’s shocked to learn the diary had, in fact, been left to him in Adrian’s suicide note decades ago but Veronica had chosen not to pass it on. Why, we wonder, is the diary with Veronica’s mother? And why has she left it to Tony now? Tony realises Adrian had a secret, one that may have driven him to his death, and he becomes fixated on learning what it was. He begins by trawling through his own memories for clues about what Adrian may have written, unsettling himself and us in the process.

Of course, secrets have a way of making themselves known one way or another. And when we do eventually learn Adrian’s dark story we have to re-evaluate all of the characters in the book. However suspenseful the story is, though, at its core is a profound rumination about memory, perspective, and the fictions we craft out of our own lives. The Sense of an Ending is the work of a strong and assured writer. It may not warm your heart but it might make you wonder about your own life and memories. For that alone, it’s worth reading.

memory – an anthology: harriet harvey wood / a.s. byatt

look back in wonder: review by Craig Raine in The Guardian, Saturday 5 January 2008

Google Books.

What is the nature of memory? And can it be captured in literature? Craig Raine considers the most successful attempts at doing so, from Wordsworth‘s ‘spots of time’ to Proust’s tea-soaked madeleine.

In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says many acute things about memory – about physical memory in the body, for instance, in Du cote de chez Swann . One thinks of Robert Frost‘s “After Apple-Picking”: “My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.”

Proust is good, too, on memory’s inaccuracy and its arbitrariness. Think of Albertine’s wandering beauty spot in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs or Marcel’s observation in Le temps retrouve one forgets the duel one nearly fought but remembers the yellow gaiters one’s opponent wore as a child in the Champs-Elysees. A strikingly dramatic but implausible illustration, this, where sartorial details, revers and darts and flares, are given a Wodehousian precedence over world events. Less good, though, than Henry V’s prediction that soldiers at Agincourt will remember their part in the battle “with advantages”.

I prefer, too, TS Eliot‘s more sober sense of arbitrariness in the “Conclusion” to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism:

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.

They are, then, these memories, super-charged with sensation. Can we describe this sensation – of significance, of occluded feeling? Can we say what it means?

Proust is interested in the particular sensation that accompanies remembering. The tea-soaked madeleine loses its force when it is repeatedly tasted. Tom Stoppard recorded something similar in the first issue of Talk magazine when he wrote “On Turning Out to be Jewish” (September 1999). He meets in Czechoslovakia a woman whose cut has been stitched decades before by Dr Straussler, the father he never knew: “Zaria holds out her hand, which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief, a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar.” A moving moment. But Stoppard has recorded unsentimentally that its power to move diminishes every time he tells the story.

Is the sensation simply nostalgia – like the nostalgic regret of Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch for the time when he was an effective methodist preacher in Islington’s Upper Row with an ambition to be a missionary? Or is it something more profound – like Proust’s meditation, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, on his Aunt Leonie’s sofa in the brothel? On that same sofa, Marcel has first experienced love with a girl cousin. Proust gives us a stereoscopic irony as the seedy and the pre-sexual amalgamate. There seems to be a hidden message in the coincidence. Is the coincidence merely a coincidence? Or has the coincidence been arranged? Elements of this supernatural innuendo emerge repeatedly in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory . General Kuropatkin is showing the young Nabokov tricks with matches on a sofa, when he is summoned away: “the loose matches jumping up on the divan as his weight left it.” Fifteen years later, the disguised, fugitive general asks Nabokov’s father for a light … Nabokov says the true purpose of autobiography is “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life”.

In Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about significant yet insignificant memories as “spots of time”:

There are in our existence spots of time

Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress’d

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repair’d …

This is not so much an explanation as a statement of intrigued bafflement: “the hiding places of my power / Seem open; I approach and then they close.” And the example that Wordsworth gives is interestingly drab. It has a few meagre components – a “naked Pool, / The Beacon on the lonely Eminence, / The Woman and her garments vex’d and toss’d” – and its power is largely retrospective. It is “in truth, / An ordinary sight”. Looked back on, though, the dreariness becomes a “visionary dreariness” that Wordsworth would need colours and words unknown to man to paint. The discrepancy here, in Eliot, and in Proust, is between the original experience and that experience when it is hallowed by remembrance.

The effect is something like cropping in photography. At the beginning of The Waves, Virginia Woolf gives us the childhood memories of Rhoda, Louis, Bernard, Susan and Neville as highlights, ordinary epiphanies: Mrs Constable pulling up her black stockings; a flash of birds like a handful of broadcast seed; bubbles forming a silver chain at the bottom of a saucepan; air warping over a chimney; light going blue in the morning window. These mnemonic pungencies are different from the bildungsroman of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as that novel gets into its stride. They resemble rather the unforgettable anthology of snapshots Joyce gives us at the novel’s beginning – a snatch of baby-talk; the sensation of wetting the bed; covering and uncovering your ears at refectory. Or Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, when Augie is a kind of ship-board unofficial counsellor, the recipient of emotional swarf: “Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory”; “He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a fiver”. Cropped for charisma.

Of course, memory itself is naturally cropped, as Stendhal records in Chapter 13 of Vie de Henry Brulard, where he notes that some memories are undated, vivid as fragmented frescoes, but surrounded by the blank brickwork of oblivion. Actually, anything fragmented, as the romantics knew from Percy’s Reliques, is granted a penumbra of suggestion that we mistake and read as vividness of outline.

Memories are more effective than memoirs. Isolation counts for more than continuity. The Paris of Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) is less vivid than the same material telescoped in the earlier “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1961).

This is A Moveable Feast:

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

It isn’t just the clumsiness of the triple “where”. It’s the automatic, sentimental cliche that poisons A Moveable Feast – the flyblown yellowed poster, the unknown girl at the cafe “with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek”. Nostalgia, as Kundera redefines it in Ignorance, is “the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return”. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway fails to return to his past, he is exiled from his memories, because his prose is writing itself and he is having a hard time keeping up.

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, on the other hand, the detail is seen and hand-picked:

There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tyres, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.

By 1964, Hemingway has forgotten the flower dye and the round square. His memory fails. So his memories fail.

Nostalgia, of course, has a meaning less connected with suffering and more with emotional indulgence. As in, “they wallowed in nostalgia”. Here the territory is thick with shared memories, with mnemonic solidarity. For example, Ursula in Women in Love remembers “the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar”. In one of Edna O’Brien’s novels, the heroine sits on the step of the back door, eating sugar on bread.

In Le temps retrouve, Marcel floats a theory of involuntary memory which he opposes to the willed act of memory. The theory is founded on three rapidly consecutive examples less famous than the madeleine in Du cote de chez Swann

Two uneven paving stones outside the Princesse de Guermantes’s mansion recall two particular paving stones in the baptistry of San Marco in Venice. The ” ting” of a teaspoon against a plate recalls the noise of a railway man’s hammer testing the wheels of the Paris train as it stood outside a wood – when Marcel (20 pages earlier) reflected on his lack of talent for literature, a verdict based on his apparent indifference to nature. “I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates your radiant foreheads from your shadowy trunks.” Now the formerly tedious scene dazes Marcel with its previously unmentioned specifics – opening a bottle of beer, hearing the tapped wheels. The experience is experienced with its accessories. And, lastly, the texture of a napkin brings back the very texture of Marcel’s bathing towel at Balbec. The napkin contains the towel, which contains an ocean green and blue as a peacock’s tail – the ocean since involuntary memory never recalls the indefinite article.

Involuntary memory, in this account, restores reality in its entirety, and is therefore a form of resurrection. It is, further, a kind of “immortality”. Marcel, accordingly, feels joy that makes death a matter of indifference to him. His faith in his literary talent is restored by the intensity with which he recalls these essentially banal experiences.

The idea is shared, or perhaps borrowed, by Nabokov, a much greater writer, in Speak, Memory:

I see again my class-room, the blue roses of the wall-paper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

In Nabokov’s account, memory is complete, beyond process, exempt from change. The reasoning here is coherent.

Proust’s exposition of “fragments of existence withdrawn from Time” is somewhat muzzy by comparison:

The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time.

In any case, Proust’s laborious explanation is partial. He has not elucidated the mechanism of memory properly. The mystery that needs explanation is why the recalled experience should bring such acute pleasure when the actual, original experience was “tedious”, and therefore unapprehended.

Proust’s “answer” is that we experience intimations of immortality. It is possible, though, that we simply enjoy the act of remembrance – and that this requires no explanation. It is a fact, the way we are, part of any human being’s hard-wiring.

On the other hand, the pleasure is extraordinary. It is comparable to “the constant readiness to discern the halo round the frying pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier”. That simile from Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a clue to the true nature of memory’s mechanism.

Memory is like metaphor in its operations. Memory is sexual in its operations. In English we speak of “coming” when we speak of orgasm. “I’m coming” means that the sexual partner is arriving at the predestined place, the site of pleasure. The journey can be long or short but the elusive destination is known in advance.

The words Marcel uses to describe the pleasure that accompanies his three involuntary memories are “a shudder of happiness” (” avec un tel fremissement de bonheur “). Not that this is explicitly or exclusively sexual. The word fremissement can be applied to fear, anger, as well as pleasure. It is, too, according to my Petit Robert, a light ( leger ) sensation, rather than Eliot’s “blood shaking the heart”. The other word Marcel uses is une joie . In French, another word for joy, jouissance, is also the word for coming, for plaisir sexuel . Jouissance seems less pedestrian than “coming”. But having an orgasm – or orgasme – is parvenir a la jouissance . And parvenir means to arrive at a predetermined point.

In English we use the French word “parvenue” to suggest someone who is socially ambitious, someone who has only recently achieved social prominence, social heights – an assiduous social corkscrew, someone who isn’t a someone, but someone who is a nobody. “One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”

Our other word, also French, for such a person is an arriviste – someone who has just arrived at the desired destination.

I suggest that the pleasure, the joy really experienced by Marcel, and by the rest of us, is bound up with the sensation of imminence, suspense and arrival – common to sex and simile.

The pleasure experienced by Marcel is primarily the actual act of remembrance, and only secondarily in the recovered detail of what is remembered. In each of these three involuntary memories, Marcel experiences a delay. The paving stones are like … what? The teaspoon is like … what? The texture of the napkin is exactly like … what? Marcel claims the recall is instant, but it isn’t. As he tests the uneven paving stones, he has to repeat the initial movement exactly:

Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I set you.”

The pleasure of memory is the pleasure we experience when we read a good simile – the pleasure of difference between the two things being compared, the pleasure we take in the justice of the comparison and the sensation of comprehension. Every good simile is a kind of riddle: X is like Y. Why is X like Y? The mind sifts the evidence for and against, seeking the evidence for. Marcel solves the riddle of what the paving stones remind him of. He arrives at a solution, he comes to the destination, to the only conclusion retrospectively possible.

At its most banal, this process is what Bloom experiences in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses when he tries to remember a name across 20 or so pages. Finally, it comes to him: “Pen. Pen. Penrose.” The itch is scratched. The search has come to a conclusion.

At its most complex, it is Molly’s recollection at the end of Ulysses of losing her virginity to Bloom on Howth Head. Whereas in Proust, the present provokes a specific memory of the past, Molly’s memory of Howth is underlaid with an earlier memory, and, surrendering to Bloom, she surrenders also to an earlier lover:

yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another …

Molly’s first proper kiss and her first full act of intercourse are conflated. Lieutenant Jack or Joe or Harry Mulvey (Molly can’t remember his Christian name) is twinned with Leopold Bloom. Memory as multiple orgasm, so to speak.

Nabokov began Speak, Memory with a phrase that was later lifted by Samuel Beckett and vulgarised in Waiting for Godot : “The cradle rocks above the abyss.” (In Beckett, “we give birth astride the grave”. Twice.) The word “remember” is itself an implicit rejoinder to death. Its etymology counters dismemberment. It is very rare therefore to encounter a flat rejection of memory such as Ursula Brangwen’s in Women in Love

She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have rolled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree that she should ‘remember’! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollection or blemish of past life.

Of course, Lawrence had a low opinion of Proust: “too much jelly-water: I can’t read him.” As did Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to Nancy Mitford (March 16 1948):

I am reading Proust for the first time – in English of course – and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to a public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel.

Nor was Joyce keen to be matched against Proust. On October 24 1920, Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen:

I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain M Marcel Proust of here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.

On the whole, though, Proust’s influence makes itself felt wherever memory is important.

In spite of his confession in 1948 that he hadn’t read A la recherche, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) is clearly influenced by an idea of Proust’s novel. Not only is there a reference to Charlus – the toady don Mr Samgrass spends “a cosy afternoon with the incomparable Charlus” – but there are several uncharacteristic extended metaphors stretching for a paragraph at a time. Uncharacteristic of Waugh – and though a famously Proustian trope, one less frequent, it is my impression, in the later volumes of A la recherche, where the sentences themselves are pithier, more Waugh-like. And Charles Ryder, Waugh’s narrator, encapsulates his theme at the beginning of Book 3: “My theme is memory … These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s …” An extended metaphor ensues. Is it a coincidence or a Freudian slip that the pigeons are situated in San Marco, a locus central to Le temps retrouve

I should say, too, that Virginia Woolf’s The Years – with its time range from 1880 to 1937, its repeated motifs, its chronological gaps during which characters alter dramatically – was an attempt to emulate Proust in English. Delia’s party at the end of The Years gathers all the narrative’s aged sur- vivors in one place, just as Proust assembles his survivors at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, where their aged appearances are ironically and famously described as fancy dress – an extended conceit that begins brilliantly but soon shows signs of strain, like a man with asthma holding his breath.

Of course, Virginia Woolf idolised Proust: on May 6 1922 she wrote to Roger Fry:

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly get out a sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification he procures – theres [sic] something sexual in it – that I feel I can write like that and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.

Fulsome praise, though in October she is still on volume one. Three years later, on February 9 1925, Woolf tells Margaret Llewelyn Davies that she’s only read three volumes. No obstacle to her claim on April 21 1927 to her sister Vanessa that Proust is “far the greatest novelist”.

She seems, however, never to have actually finished reading A la recherche . In a 1928 newspaper piece, “Preferences”, she writes: “I have also bought and propose to read should my life last long enough the final volumes of Proust’s masterpiece.” ( Le temps retrouve was published in 1927.) On April 27 1934, she tells Ethel Smyth she’s reading Sodom et Gomorrhe . And on May 21 1934, again to Ethel Smyth: “I cant [sic] write myself within its arc; that’s true; for years I’ve put off finishing it.”

And yet in April, May, June of 1929, her three-part essay “Phases of Fiction” claims that Proustian psychology is an advance on Henry James, while adding the qualification that the “expansion of sympathy” is almost self-defeating. Everything in Proust, however trivial, provokes an extended meditation. “Proust is determined to bring before the reader every piece of evidence upon which any state of mind is founded.” The risk is that the commentary is surplus to requirements, that there is no hierarchy of importance – that the footnotes bury the trickle of text, as it were. “We lose the sense of outline.”

How do we account for Woolf’s high opinion of Proust if it is so precariously founded? It is partially explained by this hyperventilating assessment to Fry on October 3 1922:

One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses : to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished – My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for pounds 4.10.

For Virginia Woolf, Proust was a way of putting her rival Joyce in his place – and a way, too, of acceding easily to the preferential judgments of homosexual Bloomsbury.