A Good Memory Is Unpardonable: Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory
Margaret Anne Doody, University of Notre Dame
Volume 14, no. 1, October 2001
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Enlightenment depends upon memory. Indeed, the Enlightenment in a sense — in its very sensations of thought — loves memory. Memory in the Lockean world is the foundation of consciousness. The soul cannot think “before the Senses have furnish’d it with Ideas to think on.” Retaining these sensible ideas, so as to have them available for the process of thought, must be the province of Memory. And in a case of disease or disorder of Memory, the mind that thinks may as well not be thinking: “To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very useless sort of thinking: and the Soul in such a state of thinking, does very little, if at all, excel that of a Looking-glass, which constantly receives variety of Images, or Ideas, but retains none; they disappear and vanish, and there remain no footsteps of them; the Looking-glass is never the better for such Ideas, nor the Soul for such Thoughts” (p. 112). Locke’s primary (or at least overt) purpose in this passage is to get rid of the traditional idea that the Soul always thinks — though to us the passage may function less as abstract speculation than as a sharp reminder of the observable confusions and vagaries of minds lost to disease — as in cases of what we term “Alzheimer’s,” especially dreadful perhaps to academics and all writers and thinkers who live proudly in the castles of their own minds. Swift’s deathless Struldbruggs horrifically exemplify such useless continuance of the soul without understanding: “they forget the common Appellation of Things, and the Names of Persons” and they cannot read “because their Memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a Sentence to the End.” Locke himself always writes with an alert poetic horror of the fading of memory and the concomitant loss of the powers of the mind. The vanishing looking-glass world is indeed what all would be condemned to were it not for the underlying assurance of memory which, retaining the ideas supplied by sensation and reflection, permits consciousness to find itself.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
©McMaster University, 2015. This copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including in electronic forms, reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, or similar. While reading for personal use is encouraged, Eighteenth-Century Fiction articles may not be reproduced, broadcast, published, or re-disseminated without the prior written permission of Eighteenth-Century Fiction at McMaster University. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material is not allowed. The copyright in this website includes without limitation the text, computer code, artwork, photographs, images, music, audio, video, and audio-visual material on this website and is owned by McMaster University. ©McMaster University 2015.