Zones of Re-Membering: Time, Memory, and (Un)Consciousness by Don Gifford (review)

This elegant collection of lectures by the late Don Gifford is a deeply pleasurable read for those with interests in memory studies, as well as for anyone interested in experiencing lectures by an all-around scholar as intimate with William Shakespeare as with Joyce, with Augustine as with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book is a timely reminder, in fact, of the ways in which scholarship has moved and changed so rapidly as to have created narrow areas of expertise unknown in Gifford’s day. This posthumous publication is comprised of a series of lectures on “Zones of Memory” that Gifford gave at the age of seventy-six, which were subsequently “revised slightly” (7); an additional two essays were included, one of which focuses on Joyce.

The first essay functions as an overview of the idea of memory, situated in a largely American intellectual milieu informed by William James and Emerson. Gifford, like others before him, tries to establish a metaphor for memory that works; he challenges the “computer” and is reluctant to rely wholly on science—although he is very much aware of and steeped in the literature of the science of memory, which makes him unusual and ahead of the curve in memory studies more broadly (24-30). In chapter 2, he meditates on the memory techniques of aboriginal Australians and the ways in which the ancient Greeks revered memory. Both cultures, Gifford argues, had a more natural memory that functioned far more extensively than ours does. Memory, he notes, is performed in these cultures, rather than preserved—and, crucially, it inspires art and is accessed by all members of the culture. The third essay offers Gifford’s thoughts on memory overload, initially with the advent of print but now through countless media channels. Currently, he argues, library catalogues, encyclopedias, and similar compendiums are all attempts to maintain our grasp on memory.

Memory is intricately interwoven with language, and Gifford attempts, in the next chapter, to probe their intertwining. He notes that we are cognitively programmed for metaphor and narrative and considers the way in which childhood requires a language for memory, as well as a social memory. These requirements indicate a need to place ourselves in the world: the concept of place both triggers and holds memory, particularly in the case of early childhood, a time of which we generally lack specific memories. Gifford follows this chapter with one that moves from individual memory to history-as-social-memory and distinguishes between centralist and fractal histories: those driven by a central narrative aim (religion, empire) versus the endless array of narratives that comprise the fractal. Both are marked by a need to commemorate and remember, and both by a concern with an ethics of memory.

In the addendum essays not specifically concerned with memory, Gifford addresses himself to the subject of dreaming, considering it from psychological and physiological perspectives before moving on to a brief and rather dazzling run-through of the representations of dreaming in literature, from medieval dream visions to Finnegans Wake. The final essay, largely on Ulysses, is not the strongest in the book but still displays an enormous knowledge of the text.

For those with an interest in memory studies, the lectures offer an absorbing and wide-ranging read through a series of problems that have engaged psychologists, cognitive scientists, biologists, philosophers, and many others in examinations of memory. What makes them so absorbing is not only the huge swath of material covered but also Gifford’s voice and the style in which the lectures are delivered. There is a person present in them; these are not the largely disembodied outputs of academics who disappear behind their work (“paring … fingernails” or not—P 215). In the tradition of Emerson, Gifford is the I/eye of the text, being and seeing at once, offering his audience not only insight but also modeling for academics another possibility of...