English 20th-Century First-Person Memory Novel and Henri Bergson’s Theory of Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the development of the English novel is viewed through the prism of Henri Bergson’s ideas on memory, the past and the present. A turn to the French philosopher’s system is explained by the necessity to design a historical and poetological model for the genre of memory novel, which, in the author’s opinion, is very typical of 20 th -century literature in general and of English literature in particular. As the influence of Bergson on the British literature of the 1900s–1920s is well-studied, the author focuses on the subsequent period. The article analyses eight novels and a twelve-volume cycle of novels written between the 1930s and 1990s. The scope of the research is also limited to first-person novels which the author considers to be more representative for the genre. He aims to prove that in its evolution, the English first-person memory novel comes closer to Bergson’s ideas of memory being the synthesis of the past and the present and of progressive movement of memory directed from the past to the present — not only the other way round. Such understanding of memory and the temporal planes explains the composition of the novels, the relations between the narrator, character and narratee, the problems, ideas and style of the authors under investigation. It is established that it is very characteristic of the memory novels of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell) to compositionally separate the past and the present, giving ontological priority to one of the time planes (but not to both) and also to strictly distinguish between the narrating and the narrated selves, giving the leading role to the former. In the novels of the second half (William Golding, Iris Murdoch) and especially of the end of the century (Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Hilary Mantel), the boundaries between the past, present, and future in terms of plot and composition become more transparent; the positions of the narrator, character, and narratee are more relativised; the system of narrative and grammatical tenses is more heterogeneous.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".