Memory's Fragile Power in Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and W. G. Sebald's "Max Ferber"

The vagaries (vagrancies?) of memory continue to fascinate scientists and humanists alike, perhaps precisely because memories are so fragile, still so resistant to complete understanding. More than a hundred years have now passed since Freud, following partly in the footsteps of his immediate predecessor, Jean-Martin Charcot, the eminent nineteenth-century French neurologist, presented his theories of the workings of memory. While subject to emendation and at times to misinterpretation, they remain valid. The assimilation of the concept of "repression" testifies to the widespread acceptance of the role of the unconscious in our everyday experience of remembering and forgetting; selectivity, far from being random, may form a discernible pattern.

The Freudian view of memory has recently been complemented, though by no means wholly superseded, by biological models. A signal attempt to meld the two approaches is made in Mark Solms's article "Freud Returns." It underscores the relevance of Freud to current neuropsychiatry. Among the biological models, two books by the Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter stand out for both their capacity to order and their provocativeness. In Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996), Schacter argues that memory is liable to sundry "imperfections" because "our memories are not just bits of data that we coldly store and retrieve, computerlike" (3, 4). In an age familiar with the concept of false memories, we have come more to distrust memory and to acknowledge the possibility of its fallaciousness. We may misremember in various ways: by distortion through over- or understatement, by partial forgetting, by biased elaboration of past experiences. Memory is a crucial but a fallible, certainly a "fragile" power of the human mind, as Schacter describes it in his opening chapter.

In a subsequent book that is at once more specific and more controversial, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (2001), Schacter classifies the different paths whereby memory becomes fragile. He names them transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence (4). The first three he describes as "sins of omission," in which we fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event, or idea. Transience comes from "a weakening or loss of memory over time." Absentmindedness "involves a breakdown at the interface between attention and memory" so that the desired material is never properly "registered" (4). Blocking "entails a thwarted search for information that we may be desperately trying to retrieve" (5). The other four are designated "sins of commission," in which either an incorrect or an unwanted memory is present. Misattribution "involves assigning a memory to the wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering" what has been said by a friend. Suggestibility stems from the implantation of possibly erroneous comments or leading questions "when a person is trying to call up a past experience." Bias reflects the strong influence of "current knowledge and beliefs" in remembering the past. Finally, persistence denotes repeated recall of disturbing information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether.

The primary objection to Schacter's second book must center on his choice of the word "sins." It has a moralistic, judgmental connotation that is totally out of place in a consideration of the involuntary processes of memory. A more neutral term, such as "flaw" or "lapse," suggesting a degree of failure but without the overt condemnatory overtones of "sins," would be preferable. Nevertheless, Schacter's categories offer a usable theoretical framework for an analysis of the fragility of memory. Admittedly, the problem turns out to be more complex than his definitions imply. For the sake of his argument and for didactic purposes, Schacter cites rather simple examples of the seven types of memory flaw, taken from the trivial happenings of daily life, such as blocking names. He sets great store by the physical findings of neurobiological tests, to the detriment of the factors derived from depth psychology that play so decisive a role in more extensive and fundamental memory lapses. The earlier book, Searching for Memory, does comprise...