The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism

Lorna Martens's The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism is very carefully titled. Certainly this book is a study of memory, but its purpose is not to extol memory's accuracy or psychoanalytic properties, but rather to demonstrate through literature how three modernists lay bare the functioning of childhood memory in their writing. Moreover, Martens proposes that modernist discoveries predate the later similar findings of experimental psychology. At the same time, Martens is mostly interested in how adult thinkers have reported what they have remembered from childhood, and yet she cautions us against childhood memories that are constructed from the point of view of the adult the child has become. It is with an astute sensitivity toward this ultimate conundrum in remembering that Martens sometimes uses the less loaded word recollection. This word does not make the same weighty promises as memory is purported to have done around the turn of the twentieth century when the cult of the child is flourishing. Finally, Martens makes it clear that it is the objects of the recollection that are her subject, but not unless they are represented in literary modernism. Though recollected objects can be represented in other genres and in other ways, Martens is concise: Marcel Proust “alters his life story”; Rainer Maria Rilke “fictionalizes even more”; and Walter Benjamin's “plotless work is closer to autobiography than to the novel” (192–93). Although these authors share time and some space, Benjamin does fall outside the triad and may actually have been chosen for this reason. The book then will be of interest to scholars of literary modernism, childhood autobiography, and interdisciplinary memory studies.Martens's methodology is persuasive: each modernist writer is situated in relation to historical and literary context, and to aspects of Freud's theory of childhood and childhood memory. Proust and Rilke, she argues, provide innovations on theories of memory before Freud has stolen the show; Benjamin, she argues, engages with Freudian ideas and comes up short, so he reframes the memory question in light of his regard or his intellectual need for a standard of historical truth.Martens's pioneering study also records influences between her writers: for example, how Benjamin critiqued Proust; how Proust's claim to “involuntary memory” emerging from a cup of tea sidesteps the issue of historical accuracy. All of which leads Martens to say that Benjamin's theory of memory uniquely relies on the wise axiom that memory “endlessly” rewrites the past. Because Martens is fascinated by what she identifies as a modernist intensification of the use of childhood memory in childhood autobiography, she demonstrates historical attitudes toward children and their status as a central site from which to formulate research questions about the workings of the mind over time, including the remembering mind. In numerous close readings, she shows that the pre-Freudian modernists tended not to question the veracity of childhood memory; after Freud, she argues, modernist writers were influenced by the idea that autobiographical memory constructed or reconstructed the past, including childhood, so much so that fiction and memory have much in common. Benjamin is her most salient example, as he uses aspects of Freudian ideas about the construction of memory and self-consciousness, and then later in his work revises Freud for his own purposes. Martens contends that we learn at least four lessons about remembering from modernists' literary memories: repeated events are better remembered by her authors; “emotionally charged events” are better remembered; images are better remembered; and all three authors remember through association (193–94). A current memory, Martens demonstrates, may be more “dependably promising,” but older memories are also revelatory of the adult mind.Using aspects of Freud's theory of memory as a lynchpin, Martens holds each of her modernists up to the light, and turns them around—just as Virginia Woolf's Peter Walsh had done with “experience” in Mrs. Dalloway. Her knowledge of Freud, of his contemporaries, of modernism, of modernist authors and artists in their original languages, enriches the narration, and builds a world in which influences foment and recede, repeat and collapse. It is easy to imagine how Rilke manipulated his objects in order to write out his memory of childhood, but what becomes obvious as one reads on is that taking liberties with one's childhood recollections bears resemblance to the creative process itself. To write literature is to represent remembered objects with a poet's license, whether that literature is fictional or autobiographical.In the last section on Benjamin, Martens's inspired close reading yields interesting results. Here Martens focuses on past and present in Benjamin's work, on cities that inspire memories—Paris, and especially his Berlin. Martens argues that Benjamin actually “transposes insights about Paris onto Berlin” in his Berlin Chronicle (148), that he is attentive to his own predilection to remember “things and places, not people” (149). Martens demonstrates the features of repetition in Benjamin's narrative, and in his writerly expectations. Still as complicated as always, however, Martens explains how in Benjamin, the Freud trail fades, and we encounter an irony in Benjamin that is marked by the “de-Freudianization” of the theme of memory (153).Indeed, Martens's deeply thoughtful, comparative, multilingual, and meticulous close reading of canonical philosophical, literary, and autobiographical texts generates profound textual and intertextual discoveries that are tantamount to theoretical while also declaring their commitment to text as an “independent body of writing” (153), and less to the obvious signs of context. In fact, Martens demonstrates how Benjamin, the last of the three major writers, “ingeniously bends Freud's ideas” so that he can espouse a theory of memory that is friendlier to memory itself, one that celebrates its efficacies and not its unreliability (206). Martens demonstrates how her subjects presage Freud with creative interpretations of the functions of childhood memory, such as, following on Winnicott, the insistence of her authors on the attachment to the object, and to places, better remembered than persons. (They “resist the Freud-initiated discourse of repression” 205). She invokes Proust, Rilke, Pierre Loti, and other writers at the turn of the twentieth century to speculate on the value of a remembered object as a fetish, or at least as an adult treasure. It is a difficult task to reconcile Freud's enormous influence with non-psychoanalytic interpretations of childhood memory, but the evidence, and its accompanying stories, are fresh, and force us to think again about what indeed the adult remembers about his childhood years. The unique triangle of European writers in The Promise of Memory adds new material to the study of childhood autobiography and its inscription of memory from the adult's point of view, and its characteristic and endlessly revealing yearnings.

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