Jacques Roubaud's Art of Memory: Metaphor's Mirrors in Le grand incendie de Londres

Jacques Roubaud (b. 1932) is one of the most prolific of France's contemporary poets and scholars. His poetry and scholarship are perhaps most frequently studied through his thesis that "poetry is memory of language." Roubaud's long prose Le grand incendie de Londres is unusual within his oeuvre because it experiments with a spatial model of memory rather than a linguistic one: the form of the work and the mode of its production are both derived from the ancient "arts of memory." Bestowing agency on the writing body, the text investigates the degree to which the physical act of writing influences memory. This essay will read a series of physical, bodily metaphors that complicate the relationships among writing, memory, and the body in the first two volumes of the six-volume project, Le grand incendie de Londres and La boucle.¹ I will argue that the prose transforms the terms of its own metaphors, making the process of Roubaud's particular autobiographical experiment into a metaphor for metaphoricity itself.

The six volumes of Jacques Roubaud's Le grand incendie de Londres are often considered his most clearly autobiographical work because they recount the author/narrator's memory of his life's projects. The prose, however, differs from traditional autobiography in many ways. Perhaps its most unusual feature, with the most far-reaching consequences for the exploration of memory, is that rather than presenting a traditionally retrospective account, the prose is entirely rooted in the present tense of its narration. That is not to say that the author does nothing but contemplate his own reflection while writing. Instead, Roubaud considers remembering to be an act in the present tense, a journey not into the past, but through the present organization of memories. This focus is part of Roubaud's formal experiment with the implications of a spatial model for how memory works which he calls a "champ mnémonique" or "mnemonic field." This spatial model is not static; it suggests that our memory, as a space, is constantly reorganized and has its own history. This in turn affects our access to specific memories, "la mémoire autobiographique," or the "autobiographical memory)" and the ways in which we invent ourselves and tell our own stories.²

Roubaud derives his concept of the "champ mnémonique" from the ancient arts of memory. As we can see from the word "mnémonique," this field is more closely associated with aiding memory and the art of memorization than with memory itself and its so-called natural functioning (mnemic or "mnésique" in French). The "champ mnémonique" is extrapolated from Roubaud's understanding of the way in which a particular technique of memorization relies on spatial organization. The technique, often attributed to Simonides of Ceos (fifth century bce), requires systematically associating the items to be memorized with chosen places along a familiar path through a house, street or public space.³ To recall the items "stored" along the trajectory one only has to "walk" along the path in the mind's eye, recalling each of the items as it was previously strategically placed.⁴ This technique uses the reversibility of a path in space to aide the "reversal" of time effected by memory. As we shall see, this association of space and time through memory via the idea of a path that can be both forged and followed will be key organizing elements not only of the "champ mnémonique" but of Roubaud's prose as well. Roubaud does not see this technique as imposing a spatial organization on memory. Rather, he argues that memories are already organized spatially and that these techniques aid memorization by reorganizing through practice because repeated acts of remembering privilege particular paths through the "champ mnémonique."⁵

Roubaud suggests that each individual's "champ mnémonique" undergoes continuous...