The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism (review)

Lorna Martens's book The Promise of Memory, "aims to contribute to the history and theory of adult memories of childhood and of childhood memory narrative" (9). While there has been an unending flow of research on memory as such, there have been relatively few analyses of adult memories of childhood. Richard Coe's When the Grass Was Taller, a study of over 600 childhood autobiographies from around the world, excludes to a large extent the meta-discursive element that Martens finds so interesting in literary childhood autobiography. Martens, therefore, begins with Wordsworth's Prelude, one of the first childhood autobiographies to simultaneously theorize the importance of childhood memory to artistic production, expanding on his 1807 ode "Intimations of Immorality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Just as Wordsworth obsessively revised and reworked the Prelude, so too did the three authors obsessively revise their works around which the book centers: Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge], and Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert [Berlin Childhood Around 1900]. The importance that Wordsworth had given to childhood memories as inspiration for artistic creation is also paramount for Proust and Rilke, while Benjamin, Martens argues, finds the importance of his childhood in prefiguring the geopolitical complications of his adulthood. All three of these works, however, are deeply imprinted with the time in which they take place, the dawning of modernism and the crisis of memory that marked it, with Sigmund Freud's 1899 article on childhood memories, "Über Deckerinnerungen" ["Screen Memories"], casting one of the largest shadows. Along with Freud's screen memories, Dr. Martens draws heavily on associative mnemonics to form the unique focus of her study of the three chosen authors: material objects and physical space dominate adult memories of childhood, at the expense of memories centered around people or social interaction. (Unfortunately, there is no discussion of the possibility that physical space is simply a container of and for material objects.) While Maman intrudes into the childhood world otherwise deprived of human interaction, most notably in Proust and Rilke, objects (Martens often uses the word "things," though this can, on occasion, produce grammatically exacting sentences) and places, often saturated with the childhood feelings and sensations of a "screened" memory, or to a somewhat lesser extent habitual memory, become a type of prompt that triggers a chain reaction of associative memory. Martens argues, and reinforces with results from empirical psychology, that this combination not only dominates adult memory of childhood, but likewise serves as the mnemonic, and therefore aesthetic, touchstone for these three authors.

In her chapter on Proust, Martens grapples with Proust's exceedingly complex web of associations, objects, sensations, places, people, questions of self, and narrative theory. Two central arguments come to the fore: the transition from Proust's abortive novel Jean Santeuil to the Recherche as a movement from sensation to material object, and a close reading of the metaphors of "Combray II" and the central role of the material object as tenors (the element being compared, e.g. "hawthorn hedge" in the metaphor "the hawthorn hedge resembled a series of chapels"). It has often been remarked that Proust wrote (and rewrote) one book over the course of his life, shifting episodes, adding details, synthesizing and analyzing elements from his previous writings and his biographical life. To Martens, however, one large divergence occurs between Jean Santeuil and the Recherche, wherein "material objects are given an important new role, and Proust's narrator's first-narrated experience of involuntary memory brings back childhood" (61). Martens argues that this is no mere coincidence, but rather that these newly fronted memories of childhood in the Recherche necessarily presuppose a pivot to the material object from the sensation-focused Jean Santeuil. While the Proustian distinction between object and sensation, notably in respect to the trigger or cue of...