La Mémoire du cœur au XVIIe siècle (review)

This book places under one roof some new materials and a variety of previously published essays from different sources, such as chapters of books or conference proceedings: one advantage is that nine of these essays, already published in the author’s Volti della memoria nel ‘grand siècle’ e oltre, may now be read in French. The 19 chapters of this volume, grouped into three sections devoted to moralists, spiritual writers and imaginative literature, touch on the theme of memory in a pleasing range of seventeenth-century writing. The introduction presents some of the questions raised by contrasting ideas of memory, and the first, ‘moralist’ section follows up from this by examining the ambiguous responses to memory as a mental process, seen either as a burden to rationality or as a source of richness to creativity and the emotional life. A chapter on memory and sociability looks at the role played by memory in La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld. The following chapter looks at a series of metamorphoses of representations of memory, such as a wax tablet into water, a mirror and glass, as a prelude to questions of its truth or falsity. The author then examines the relationship between memory and identity, first through the prism of Pascal and Shaftesbury, and then in the Mémoires that flourished in the seventeenth-century, and points to the growing importance of self-discovery and its relationship with memory. This first part concludes with a study of the little-known philosopher monk François Lamy, whose writings show his attentiveness to the different traces left in human consciousness by previous experience. The second, ‘spiritual’ section opens with a chapter on meditation, showing that debates about what this should involve, whether rational process or openness to the spirit, are linked to the twin processes of memory, procedural and implicit. A chapter on mystical writing shows how often memory was overlooked in this context, or else needed to be overcome for union with God to be possible, and the dialogue between self and God is studied first in the Mémoires of Fontaine and then in the Vie of Mme Guyon, seen as a precursor of the modern autobioraphy. There follow chapters on memory and solitude in Rancé (and a study of Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé is published as an appendix), on the philosophical and spiritual implications of Pascal’s negative conception of memory, and finally on Fénelon, and the difficult compromise between the intuitive and the rational. The final, ‘literary’ section of the volume is composed of some essays on the role of memory in prose fiction, concentrating on L’Astrée and La Princesse de Clèves, in tragedy, with chapters on Cinna and ‘Racine’ (with a tendency to see plays in terms of characters and their quest for the hidden self), and in Fénelon’s Télémaque. The erudition deployed by Benedetta Papasogli throughout these densely packed pages is quite formidable, and different readers will surely find points of interest in what is a finely meshed net that nevertheless trawls wide. It is a long book but, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost, one would not wish it longer.