The "Presence" of Memory

The "Presence" of Memory Richard Stamelman Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus. —Proust, Le temps retrouvé C'est le re de ce revivre qui est la folle chimère. —Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'irréversible et la nostalgie AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS ESSAY I want to talk about beginnings : the opening lines of two poems, written more than 130 years apart, on a subject and an experience that have in that time changed but little. The first incipit, "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans," is by Baudelaire, the second, "Ce souvenir me hante," by Yves Bonnefoy.1 When the nineteenth-century poet starts one of his four "Spleen" poems with "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans," and then goes on to tell us what a necropolis his mind and heart have become— "une pyramide, un immense caveau" with more corpses than a potter's field, "un cimetière abhorré de la lune," a landscape filled with fragments of a dead past, an old boudoir musty with the nearly effaced fragrances of bygone days, a cumbersome piece of furniture with its drawers overflowing with the mementos of a forgotten past—Baudelaire makes clear how weighted down and broken he is, how haunted, by an excess of memory. "Gros meuble," "pyramide," "caveau," "cimetière," "boudoir," "vieux sphinx ignoré du monde insoucieux"—each metaphor is a figure that represents a loss and a disappearance (of vibrancy, of force, of life). Yet, by its presence in the present instance of the poem, each figure, even if it designates a loss, adds a "something" to the "nothing" of spleen; each image announces the advent, the presencing, of a word, une parole, within the space of a language whose subject and origin are absence. The image literally "em-bodies," "in-carnates" this absence, giving to it the shape, the presence, the "surplus of signification "2 that only figuration can achieve: but a figuration that is also, it should be noted, a disfiguration, since the originary, generative loss cannot be represented, not in any full or permanent way, that is. "Le souvenir," writes Vladimir Jankélévitch, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 65 L'Esprit Créateur avive par son insuffisance même ou... par son impuissance notre faim et notre soif de réalité: le souvenir, loin de suppléer au Revenir, aiguise la nostalgie et confirme l'irréversible .... En dégageant la passéité du passé, le souvenir nous rend sensible, hélas! tout ce que nous avons perdu: l'odeur irremplaçable du présent et la saveur incomparable de la présence, la tangibilité du réel en chair et en os.3 Poetic figuration, seeking as it does to endow an absent reality with presence and thereby reverse absence, disfigures the loss into which this reality has fallen and with which it is coincident. Each figure functions as a monument commemorating and thus giving presence to the past, but at the same time designating the pastness and goneness of this past. A crypt whose external facade represents and commemorates the irrefutable fact of loss, but whose internal chambers preserve the relics and fragments of that loss, the poem is at once metaphor and reality, commemoration and death, remembrance and oblivion, celebration and mourning: a paradoxical and simultaneous doubleness not lost on a poet as sensitive to dualities as Baudelaire. And so he ends this poem of lyric melancholy with the image of a faraway song emerging out of the darkness of the crypt and voyaging into the darkness of the world: "Un vieux sphinx ignoré du monde insoucieux,/Oublié sur la carte, et dont l'humeur farouche/Ne chante qu'aux rayons du soleil qui se couche." The song of spleen, which rises from the matter of dead things, from the weight of a thousand years of memories, to sail into a moment of declining light, at the end of day, at the end of life, resounds with the vowels and consonants of a memory weighed down by death, loss, melancholy, and forget fulness, a memory of absence granite-like in its hardness and permanence . This...