Ruminations on the Canon of Memory
Not the last words, but the start of my conclusion:
Having begun this dissertation with a rumination on the definitions of memory, I want to end it with a rumination on the word mnemonic. While as a noun mnemonic refers to an aid to memory, as an adjective mnemonic has two definitions: “Aiding or designed to aid the memory” and “Of or relating to memory.” This dual meaning creates a level of ambiguity in usage. Consider, for example, “The canon of memory is about mnemonics.” Which form of the adjective is being used in that statement? While we’re more accustomed to “mnemonic” signifying an aid to memory, as I write this dissertation, I often find myself wanting to use mnemonic in the second sense, as an adjective for memory.
This ambiguity, I think, is indicative of our own ambiguous relationship to the word. While we use and rely upon memory in all that we do, we believe that mnemonics are for rote memorization, or worse, for parlor tricks. And memory’s status is itself not that much higher. At worst, we think of memory as rote memorization and at best we think of it as the repository of recollected experience which can be used as a point of departure or as an anecdotal example to help illustrate a point. The history of mnemonic’s decline in status is the history of the canon of memory’s status. Whether we look down on the idea of memory aides or on the idea of memory, because they are so intertwined, because they are each other’s double as the word mnemonic demonstrates, we can’t but help look down on the other as well.
But I think we can tease out a deeper issue here: the canon of memory, as it pertains to English Studies, is about how we engage, augment, and make use of memory. Whether we are considering the rhetorical use of imagery to help make a point memorable; the intertextuality of a work like “The Waste Land” or “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”; a lexical entry’s activation by a probe so that it is brought into working memory from long-term memory; or the use of the commonplaces as compositional tools; or a social commonplace as a site of memory, as an “ideographic” term, we are considering memory as a mediated process. While making distinctions between natural and artificial memory and internal and external memory can be useful, these distinctions also elide over fact that memory, at both the macro (textual) and micro (neurological) level, is always mnemonic, always involves the activation of mnemonic processes by a mnemonic. The canon of memory is, at its core, the technologizing of memory.
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