"Soft Figures" and "a Paste of Composition Rare": Pope, Swift, and Memory

“Soft Figures” andzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA “a Paste of Composition Rare”: Pope, Swift, and Memory MELINDA ALLIKER RABB In a letter of 1728, Swift urged Pope to make the topical allusions in the Dunciad less difficult, “for I have long observ’d that twenty miles from London no body understands hints, initial letters, or town-facts and passages; and in a few years not even those who live in London” (16 July 1728).1 One can surmise how Pope felt at being told that only a few people would understand him, and that none would remember. Swift’s remark is premised on a belief in the writer’s complex dependence on memory; it determines what may be lost or preserved — poetic meaning, relationships with people, history, and more fundamentally, a continu­ ous sense of self. Pope’s Dunciad investigates the function of memory in the creation and perpetuation of art; it attacks the memory-less dunces, and foretells the dire consequences of the failure of memory. Neverthe­ less Swift fears that Pope’s allusive techniques may cause the Dunciad itself to be forgotten. Thus Swift refers first to the geographical exigen­ cies of the present moment, that those twenty miles from London may not understand satiric hints and town-passages. But, in case Pope does not care about provincial readers, Swift saves the sting until the end: “and in a few years, not even those who live in London.” Memory traditionally is set in antithesis with imagination, often benefitting imagination according to those assumptions about creativity that led to and followed romanticism. If readers have agreed to celebrate the 185 186 / R KJIHGFEDCBA A B B artist for a “visionary” ability to re-make the world, opinions differ as to how the process occurs. The most common explanation is that imagina­ tion creates, transforms, bodies forth unknown shapes, articulates what has not yet been. The womb of imagination seems to have all the advan­ tages over the grave of memory. These are the terms in which the forget­ ful Moderns of fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A Tale of a Tub embrace imagination, suggesting some inadequacy in this point of view: [T]he Question is only this: Whether Things that have Place in the Imagination, may not as properly be said to exist, as those that are seated in the Memory: which may be justly held in the affirmative, and very much to the advantage of the former, since it is acknowledged to be the Womb of Things, and the other allowed to be no more than the Grave.2 To the contrary, Swift and Pope imply that memory acts vitally in artistic creativity. John Sitter has argued that Mnemosyne is the mother of the Augustan muse because she represents an allegiance to history.3 The artist’s inspiration and cultural legacy would then come from the past, often from ancient precedents and models. But the wish to preserve ideals from the past does not fully account for the role of memory. At times, it supplants imagination in explanations of the transformative powers of the mind. To a number of eighteenth-century writers, as Addison reminds us in The Spectator, imagination is not the only restless and fertile source of images and ideas: “The memory likewise may turn itself to an infinite multitude of objects” (Spectator, 600).4 Nor is imagination the only way to turn bushes into bears: “[W]rite immediately while the impression is fresh,” Johnson counsels Boswell, “for it will not be the same a week after” (Boswell for the Defense), That is, memory is strongly associated with processes of change. The past is not absolutely fixed, and its retrieval entails constant reshaping. Memory inevitably changes its absent original, and two people rarely remember the same thing in the same way. Hobbes believes that “imagination and memory are but one thing which for diverse considerations hath divers names.” “Fancy and memory differ only in this,” he explains, “that memory supposeth the time past, which fancy doth not.”5 Or, to pursue the implications of Locke’s emphasis on the human ability to “revive” the past, memory enables our sense of time, and time makes everything mutable.6 Swift and Pope agree that memory is...