ABSTRACT
Forgetfulness is categorized as a malfunction of memory, and yet forgetting is our commonest experience. We do not remember great tracts of life, great tracts of narrative. Of its nature, what has been forgotten is not available to be discussed. Remembering is achievement - and memory is prized as we prize all human achievement, with a sense of the exceptional. A summary example of how acceptable is memory, how unacceptable forgetting, is that in working on this project I found it impossible to gain access to material in catalogues except by looking under memory: forgetting (except in the clinical intensification of amnesia) and even oblivion were not available as subsections.1 Forgetting is the habitual activity of each human being; oblivion covers all that has been forgotten. We all ride, largely unperturbed, what Shakespeare in Richard III called ‘the swallowing Gulfe of dark Forgetfulnesse, and deepe Oblivion’ (III. vii). But there are times when the act of forgetting becomes crisis and the recognition of oblivion becomes threatening to a community. One such time was the end of the sixteenth century in England; another was the Victorian period.In this essay I suggest connections between the ordinary act of ceasing to remember and deep anxieties about the extent of oblivion, the remoteness and unreclaimableness of origins, in Victorian creativity. I want to consider how and why some Victorian narratives resist or dwell upon the dissolution of record, and so to study an intersection between general reading process and a particular historical period.It is not surprising that forgetting and oblivion are frequently seen as antagonists within literature: a common great theme has been the heroic task of the poet who makes things last by writing them. However, it may be an unobserved professional deformation that as
critics we tend to identify forgetting with inefficient reading and fail to notice how important in our experience of a fiction is the dissolution in memory of the specificity of the text. We remember (or pretend to remember) the totality of a narrative and so misread its passing. We dwell on particular passages with intense semantic attention, and we triumphantly recall the names of minor characters. But long narrative must either accept or combat the reader’s constant forgetting. Many early novelists had few qualms about dissolution.The multi-plot form of many of the greatest Victorian fictions, particularly those of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, makes it difficult for the reader to remember all that passes by.2 In Hardy that difficulty becomes the mainspring of narrative meaning. I do not propose in this short paper (nor am I qualified) to enter the controversy among experimental psychologists as to whether all memory is stored (even though some is unusable) or whether most experiences pass through us and are irretrievably lost. In any case, the loss of individual memory was not the only form of the problem that beset Victorian writers. They were enforcedly made aware that life had been going on for millions of years before human memory existed: no memory of that state was possible; life and story did not require the human race. In such a situation, human beings’ imaginative zeal in ‘decipherment’, what Richard Owen and others called ‘the writing on the rocks’, gave an entry into the pre-human past for human consciousness.3 Another point of entry was what W.B. Carpenter, Eneas Sweetland Dallas, and, later, Freud thought of as the possibility that ‘involuntary, unconscious thought’ harboured traces of existence prior to the individual’s history and continuous with the extreme and infinitely remote emergence of humankind.4Eneas Sweetland Dallas, in the 1860s, conceives imagination as a ‘function’ rather than a faculty, a function of what he calls ‘the Hidden Soul’ or ‘unconscious’ with its ‘perpetual magic of reminiscence hidden from our conscious life’. And, in Derridean style, he writes that ‘imagination . . . is only a name for the free, unconscious play of thought. But the mind in free play works more as a whole than in conscious and voluntary effort.’5 Dallas’s emphasis on imagination as an expression of the ‘involuntary and unconscious’ mind accords with Walter Benjamin’s description of Proust’s acts of memory:
Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s mimoire involontaire,much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? . . .
