ABSTRACT
The myth of memory that dominates Romanticism follows, both chronologically and causally, upon the Enlightenment’s concern with the phenomenology of ‘reminiscent’ consciousness; the, apparently crucial, proposition of G.Poulet in his Studies in Human Time, that ‘The great discovery of the eighteenth century is the phenomenon of memory’, is taken as the starting point for two explorations into the Romantic ‘remembered existence in time’— and particularly that of Wordsworth-initiated by C. Salvesen and H.Lindenberger. The latter continues his citation from Poulet with ‘“it is the greatness of the eighteenth century to have conceived the prime moment of consciousness as a generating moment and generative not only of other moments but also of a self which takes shape by and through the means of these very moments”’; to which he adds his own commentary that ‘memory, because of the double perspective in which it sets the past, becomes a unique instrument in revealing knowledge about the self (1963:139-40). Salvesen defines the ‘characteristic Romantic awareness of time’ as a ‘completely unself-conscious self-consciousness…as the state of being alert-over-alert-to one’s own existence: for Wordsworth, it was enough to be aware of his being’ (1965:3-4). It is my view that it is precisely such ‘alertness’ to the incessant stream of remembered images that constitutes what I would call the dual function of memory: that of creating the unity-of-self in time and that of seeing through-in the sense of ‘exposing’, or ‘exploding’— the strategies by means of which the image of a unified, solidified ‘self’ is fabricated.
