"A Good Memory Is Unpardonable": Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory

"A Good Memory Is Unpardonable": Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory Margaret Anne Doody Ein Marmorblock, obgleich er leblos ist und bleibt, kann darum nichts desto weniger lebende Gestalt durch den Architekt und Bildhauer werden; ein Mensch, wiewohl er lebt und Gestalt hat, ist darum noch lange keine lebende Gestalt. Dazu gehört, dass seine Gestalt Leben und sein Leben Gestalt sei.1 Friedrich Schiller "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." ... Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous.2 Jane Austen It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Enlightenment depends upon memory. Indeed, the Enlightenment in a sense—in its very sensations of thought—loves memory. Memory in the Lockean world is the foundation of consciousness. The soul cannot think 1 Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe. Theoretische Schriften. Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz et al., Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), letter 15, 8:610. 2 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Isobel Armstrong (Oxford: World's Classics, 1990), chap. 3. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 1, October 2001 68EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION "before the Senses have furnish 'd it with Ideas to think on"3 Retaining these sensible ideas, so as to have them available for the process of thought, must be the province of Memory. And in a case of disease or disorder of Memory, the mind that thinks may as well not be thinking: To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very useless sort of thinking, and the Soul in such a state of thinking, does very little, if at all, excel that of a Looking-glass, which constantly receives variety of Images, or Ideas, but retains none; they disappear and vanish, and there remain no footsteps of them; the Looking-glass is never the better for such Ideas, nor the Soul for such Thoughts, (p. 112) Locke's primary (or at least overt) purpose in this passage is to get rid of the traditional idea that the Soul always thinks—though to us the passage may function less as abstract speculation than as a sharp reminder of the observable confusions and vagaries of minds lost to disease—as in cases of what we term "Alzheimer's," especially dreadful perhaps to academics and all writers and thinkers who live proudly in the castles of their own minds. Swift's deathless Struldbruggs horrifically exemplify such useless continuance of the soul without understanding: "they forget the common Appellation of Things, and the Names of Persons" and they cannot read "because their Memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a Sentence to the End."4 Locke himself always writes with an alert poetic horror of the fading of memory and the concomitant loss of the powers of the mind. The vanishing looking-glass world is indeed what all would be condemned to were it not for the underlying assurance of memory which, retaining the ideas supplied by sensation and reflection, permits consciousness to find itself. Consciousness itselfis the splendid flowering ofhumanity. In consciousness alone, in the Lockean view, can each of us be said to have a Self. Consciousness is the hero ofevery tale. It is consciousness also which guarantees social order, by providing a full entity, a guilty person , to be answerable before the law. The conscious Self is also the basis of the entire Whiggish republican and capitalist system. A person is an individual, answerable for himself. He stands by or behind 3 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 116. References are to this edition. 4 Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, better known as Gulliver's Travels (1726), ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: World's Classics, 1994), p. 205...