Montaigne and Memory

If memory plays a role in how we construct our identity, how do we deal with faulty memories?

Photo by Mandell Smock on Unsplash

This is Part 27 of an extended, paragraph by paragraph, commentary on Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” an essay that helped to establish the genre of the personal essay. Montaigne and the personal essay show us how to study the self and find ways to lead a full and meaningful life, even how to live authentically in a dangerous world. Each post can be read separately. If, however, you want to read the series in sequence, consult the Table of Contents below, by the thumbnail of Punk Rock Montaigne:

Montaigne's "Of Experience": Table of Contents

Montaigne’s text:

The false steps of my memory, which often bother me, even at times when she seemed most reliable, have not been idly lost. She may swear and assure me so long that I shake my head at her, but the first opposition made in witness of her makes me suspect. And I do not trust her in a matter of consequence, nor vouch for her, when dealing with others’ affairs. What I do for lack of memory others more often do the same for lack of faith. In matters of fact, I would rather take the truth from another’s mouth than from my own.

[For comparison, see Frame’s translation, p. 1002; Atkinson and Sices’ translation, p. 238.]

Commentary:

Montaigne admits that his memory often fails him.

This is another area of Montaigne’s skepticism. If our memory is bad, if Reason builds upon what we remember from our reading and education, how can we, given the limits of memory, trust our judgement? In How to Live (2010), Sarah Bakewell wrote:

Whenever Montaigne did exert himself to flick through a book, according to him, he promptly forgot everything he read. “Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it, judgment does its work with difficulty,” he wrote, before adding, “it is entirely lacking in me.” . . . As he wrote, quoting Terence, “I’m full of cracks, and leak out on all sides.” (p. 69)

Bakewell says that Montaigne might have exaggerated his struggles with memory. After all, he often inserts quotations into his essays, seemingly from memory.

By acknowledging his bad memory, Montaigne initiated a long tradition of testing out memories in personal essays and memoirs. Montaigne says of memory that the “first opposition made in witness of her makes me suspect.” The “first opposition” is someone raising questions about his memory. In the personal essay and memoir, the “first opposition” that questions an important memory might be a document, a visit to the site of a memory, or an interview with someone who was there. It might be an analysis of the memory to see if it could have possibly happened.

Part of exploring the self, thus, is testing out memories. In the personal essay and memoir, memory becomes a central character. The author often establishes a dialogue with the faculty of memory as if interviewing a witness to the event. In his Confessions, Augustine devotes an entire chapter to memory. His analysis remains remarkably sound, even sixteen centuries later, even when compared to recent empirical research on memory.

In “Memory and Imagination” (1985), Patricia Hampl wrote that “no memoirist writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.” The something else that comes with memories is often an emotion or a complex of emotions. Think of the nostalgia, the pleasure and sense of loss, that comes with a good memory. Think of the anxiety and even terror that comes when unresolved trauma, maybe only partially remembered, erupts into our thoughts.

Time for our musical interlude. This song always brings me back to good memories. It makes me grateful but also a little sad about family and friends I have lost. It doesn’t evoke one emotion. It evokes an entire complex of emotions. The sadness part is not a bad thing. There is a kind of sadness that makes us feel alone. There is also a kind of sadness that connects us to the ones we love, even if they are no longer with us.

This “disbelief about the reliability of memory” is laid bare in Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which began as a series of articles in The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. She used the essays to create a memoir by stitching them together with italicized sections that serve as both filler for the gaps between essays and postscript reflections on what had been written earlier. The first essay was published in 1953 and the memoir in 1957, so only a few years separate the original casting of a memory and McCarthy’s return to it. Yet, in “To the Reader,” the first of the italicized sections, in the first few sentences of the memoir, McCarthy problematizes the boundaries between author and reader, fiction and nonfiction, memory and narration: “These memories of mine have been collected slowly, over a period of years. Some readers, finding them in a magazine, have taken them for stories. The assumption that I have ‘made them up’ is surprisingly prevalent, even among people who know me” (3). Story, here, means fiction, which she seems to set against memory, as if it were a synonym for fact.

But, as we continue to read, memory itself is questioned until it becomes more uncertain than even fiction. McCarthy seems to vacillate between truth claims (her characters are “not composite portraits”) and doubt about our ability to know truth (“there are cases where I am not sure myself whether or not I am making something up”). As we move into the memoir proper, the previously published magazine pieces (in roman) are followed by reflections (in italics) that undercut the narrative: “There are several dubious points in this memoir” (47). And, “There are some semi-fictional touches here” (164). It is easy enough, McCarthy seems to say, to construct a story from memories, as long as we don’t think long about the nature of memory and how it works.

But it is hard, as Hampl says, to ignore our relationship with memory. This is the first line of Jim W. Corder’s Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne (1993): “I carry a spiral notebook in my shirt pocket.” Corder was a friend, and we would sometimes have coffee when attending an academic conference. As we talked, he often pulled the notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote down a few notes. He never told me what he was writing, but I am sure that some idea popped into his head as we talked and he didn’t want to forget it. This practice, a version of the commonplace book, goes back to the origins of writing. Sarah Bakewell believes that Montaigne’s Essais began as a commonplace book. I see Montaigne’s inclusion of quotations, typically inserted without connective tissue, with neither a transition into the quote or an analysis of it, as a residue of this original intention, as a homage to the practice of writing down quotations and thoughts in a notebook. If one writes down bits of wisdom, rereads them, eventually commits them to memory, they becomes part of an identity.

In his book, Corder constructs a memoir around letters that Theodore Lincoln Chadbourne wrote to Corder’s ancestors during the Mexican-American war. Corder is, in his book, testing out family memories about the young lieutenant, passed on orally, as part of his family history. In a chapter titled “Memory and History,” Corder writes:

When memory fails, do I fail? Memory is the tale we tell of ourselves; it is the selves we keep constructing in our continuing narratives. We can’t deny memory, can we, without feeling the cold on our backs, the shivers in our shoulders? Have I told myself wrongly, constructed the wrong self? If I didn’t see what I thought I saw and then misremembered it all in the telling, have I lost my existence? If I got it all wrong in memory, did I get myself wrong? Am I not who I was? (10)

I was thinking of this passage when I wrote a section of my own memoir, Some of the Words are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family (2009), a chapter titled “Memories, First and Last” (pp. 19-22). There, as I wrote about my mother’s loss of memory when she was slipping into Alzheimer’s, I say that my first memory and my mother’s last memory are related to the same event.

That needs some explanation. This is what I think was my first memory, from the time that I was three or so: My family was living on island, a military base, not far from New York City. I remember being outside in a playpen, escaping from the playpen and going in search of my father. When they found me, I was walking along the top of a seawall, almost level with the ground on the land side, but with a significant drop on the water side. If this was an accurate memory, I am sure my mother was traumatized.

One day when I was visiting my mother in her care facility, she came up to me in a panic. She kept saying, “I’ve lost my baby!” I was confused. I told her that I was her “baby,” and I was standing in front of her. But, for weeks, she kept saying, “I lost my baby!” I eventually figured out she was referring to the day I wandered off.

In this short chapter, I tested out this shared memory, as well as I could, by analyzing it to see if it made sense and by checking it against documents, like a newspaper article about a boy who fell to his death from the same seawall. As far as I could determine, the memory seemed true, or at least as true as a first memory can be.

I wrote that chapter as if it were the methodology section of a scientific article. I wanted to show readers, early on, that I was not going to do a memory dump. I was going to test out my memories. It would not make sense to show readers how I tested out every memory I included in my memoir, but I felt it was important to show readers that I was not going to rely on memory as if it were infallible. The implication was that I would do something like this for other memories, even though I wouldn’t always include a description of my process.

In recent personal essays and memoirs, especially since about the late 1980s, you often find writers testing out their memories.

As this commentary progresses, we will see how memory, habits, and emotions can form a constellation that can trap us in an unsatisfying life. Reworking memories can be like rewriting a life. It’s in Montaigne, if you look for it.

This might sound like sappy, New Age, hippie bullshit, but Montaigne was a sixteenth century version of a just-figure-out-how-to-be-happy kind of guy. As will be covered in future post, Nietzsche also writes about all this.