Samuel Johnson's History of Memory

1. The "History of Memory"?

In the very early hours of New Year's Day 1766, Samuel Johnson took up his latest journal notebook. He wrote a prayer (or prayed in writing), as was his habit on significant days, calling himself "the wretched mispender [sic] of another year."¹ He was apparently restless and ill at ease and was still awake an hour later at 3 A.M. when he wrote down four New Year resolutions and finally composed himself for sleep. But his sleep was fitful and unsatisfactory, and with some relief he rose in the morning unwontedly early (at 8 A.M.)—thus already fulfilling one of the resolutions from the night before. The first of January was a Wednesday. He took up some spiritual reading, but his sleeplessness had made him lethargic. Fortunately he had an engagement to have midday dinner at the home of the actor, Tom Davies (Johnson, so Boswell tells us, "was very much his friend, and came frequently to his house").² He was sufficiently at home there to take a nap for an hour after lunch and to stay on reading until seven. He returned to his home in Johnson's Court in the evening, alone and restless, and again stayed up late, reading devotional works and drinking tea until two the following morning, when he resorted again to his journal.³ In it, he noted the day's activities and, as something of an afterthought, made a pregnant note to himself, "To write the History of Memory."⁴

As the editors of Johnson's fragmentary journals and diaries remark, "there is no further mention" of this curious literary scheme. It emerges from the sparse, miscellaneous, and self-accusatory records which Johnson kept of his daily life, like a glimpse of movements in his unconscious, when a number of thoughts or subjects that have been exercising his mind coalesce briefly into a form of words. The History of Memory does not sound like anything Johnson wrote or anything else he thought of writing. It sounds more like a project of Umberto Eco's or something from a tale by some postmodern fantasist like Jorge Luis Borges. For Johnson, it seems to have been a sudden (and momentary) crystallization of shifting and unknowable preoccupations, perhaps typical of insights imagined and scribbled down very late at night.

The phrase "the history of memory" seems to embody an unresolvable contradiction, history being an inanimate artifact, the literary and necessarily stylized account of the past as given in books, and memory being a human faculty, a fragile but living thing. If you can remember everything, you don't need history; if you have history, you don't need to remember. History pulls towards literacy, memory towards orality. Johnson is of course an almost quintessential representative of literate culture, but this does not preclude a deep interest in the oral world (or for that matter his being deeply implicated in it). Alvin B. Kernan is correct to assert that Johnson is "at once, the ideal of oral society, the person with the prodigious and accurate memory of what has been said, and of print culture, the person who knows exactly what is in books and can find information at once."⁵

Where culture is oral, memory rules. That is to say, in a pre-literate society, the faculty of memory is all-important for socio-cultural continuity, and those whose memories are copiously supplied—such as the aged—are valued. But literacy does not drive out oral patterns of thought, and certainly does not do so immediately. Walter J. Ong, who has written most influentially and comprehensively on such subjects, gives examples from twelfth-century England to show"how much orality could linger in the presence of writing."⁶ But for Samuel Johnson too, six centuries later than this, the pre-literate world is always just back over the horizon. Despite the dispersal of books and private learning in England, Johnson still thought himself able to assume the persistence of orality and memory when in his early "Essay on Epitaphs" he says that...