Figures of Memory: From the Muses to Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics by Zsolt Komáromy (review)

Hobbes denied any meaningful distinction between memory and the imagination; Blake avowed that these two faculties had nothing in common. The 150 years that separated these claims are often understood as the period in which the open-ended, liberated imagination emerges to triumph over the closures and limitations imposed by memory. Mr. Komáromy’s study argues persuasively that things are not so simple. Rather, writers on aesthetics in the eighteenth century often describe an imagination that is fundamentally dependent on memory, even though many late-century claims for the imagination would prefer to erase and deny that dependence. In an erudite argument that takes its readers from preliterate Greece to the Scottish Enlightenment by way of Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Addison, Mr. Komáromy suggests that memory’s claims to represent truth—to validate itself—and to lend vivacity and authenticity to acts of representation made it an essential contributor to aesthetics in the eighteenth century.

His argument throughout explores and explodes the familiar description of memory as a purely reproductive and mimetic faculty that is essentially subordinate to the imagination’s capacity to construct new ideas and images. This division is perhaps most famously made by Coleridge, who described a “mechanism” characteristic of fancy (which depends on memory) from which the organic imagination can free us. Mr. Komáromy’s aim is to suggest not just that memory is to be understood as an active as well as a passive faculty—although this is part of his claim. He also argues that memory is most distinctive in its ability both to produce and to reproduce; that it acts, but that it acts on the basis of given materials, impressions stored and given new life by mnemonic performances. By so arguing, he hopes to link eighteenth-century aesthetics—a key site for commentary on the role of memory in creative processes—to other ongoing discussions in the “memory boom” in fields such as brain science and history. This is an ambitious agenda, but while this study cannot meet all its high aspirations, its strong case for thinking about these aesthetic and cognitive categories in different ways has wider implications than we might expect.

The book divides its attention between classical and modern understandings of memory. After briefly outlining what he describes as the representational model— the idea that the memory merely records experience—he offers readings of Plato and of mnemonic practices in the ancient world to suggest that this model presented paradoxes and problems at the very beginning of aesthetic discourse: it was difficult to confine Memory’s operations to mere storage and reproduction of the past. Plato, for example, wavers between construing memory as a reproductive faculty and memory as a performative utterance that validates itself. That is, Platonic memory is not simply pure cognition but also productive speech distinguished by its claim to truth rooted in experience—discursive acts that he calls “mnemonic practice.” An entire chapter is devoted to these practices, which were governed by the Muses. Memory, Mr. Komáromy argues, “validates” discourse, including the discourse of poetry—a fact that is significant for the second phase of the book’s argument. Refusing to oversimplify, Mr. Komáromy adeptly distinguishes the ways that Plato’s representation of memory is inconsistent and troubling and yet important for those who seek to justify the practice of poetics. This is valuable and interesting, though readers working toward the second half of the book might have wished for a more precise explanation of the validity that memory provides; what sort of validity does an imaginative work possess if it does not present itself as a memory? This lack of clarity troubles the later discussion.

The book’s second half turns toward eighteenth-century aesthetics. Here readers will find sophisticated analyses of cognition and aesthetics in Addison, Gerard, and Lord Kames, alongside briefer treatments of Pope, Hume, and others. First, however, the book illuminates the...