ABSTRACT

Following its final flourish in Renaissance Hermeticism, the traditional ‘art of memory’, which had functioned from the classical to the early-modern period, fell into disuse. Although the reasons for this were undoubtedly complex, Richard Terdiman notes that it was due, at least in part, to ‘profound changes in social organization and hence in the information economy in Europe after the Renaissance’ (1993: 16, n. 24). In discussing the decline of the ‘art of memory’, Terdiman opposes two contrasting models of memory which map closely onto John Frow’s distinction, outlined at the close of the previous chapter, between the ‘retrieval’ model and the ‘textual’ model. For Terdiman, the ‘art of memory’ conforms to the model of memory as ‘reproduction’; like Frow’s notion of ‘retrieval’, this entails that memory, in its ideal form, simply reproduces exactly the content that was initially deposited or stored. As Terdiman points out, again echoing Frow, one problem with this model of memory is that it ‘engages us in an infinite regress’ (1993: 58); it is concerned above all with stasis and ‘seeks to sustain content against the universal tendency of remembered material to drift entropically’ (1993: 58, n. 42). Against this tendency towards the ‘retention of the old’, Terdiman argues that, with the

waning of the beyond the representation’ (1993: 59; original emphasis). Like Frow’s ‘textual’ memory, the ‘representation’ model recognizes that the very act of inscribing memory itself ‘rewrites the text that it makes available for rereading’ (1993: 109; original emphasis). In inscribing, memory simultaneously transforms, so that a memory represents not a copy of an original but more precisely a version of it. In this chapter, my intention is to trace this emergent model of memory across selected authors of the period from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, namely John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Wordsworth. There is a new emphasis, in each of these writers, on how the past is (re)figured in memory; in their works, remembering does not simply reproduce an image of the past but necessarily adapts it in the process.