Mind over Matter: Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen

By Sarah Eron

How do we understand memory in the early novel? Departing from traditional empiricist conceptualizations of remembering, Mind over Matter uncovers a social model of memory in Enlightenment fiction that is fluid and evolving—one that has the capacity to alter personal histories. Memories are not merely imprints of first-hand experience stored in the mind, but composite stories transacted through dialogue and reading.

Through new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and others, Sarah Eron tracks the fictional qualities of memory as a force that, much like the Romantic imagination, transposes time and alters forms. From Crusoe’s island and Toby’s bowling green to Evelina’s garden and Fanny’s east room, memory can alter, reconstitute, and even overcome the conditions of the physical environment. Memory shapes the process and outcome of the novel’s imaginative world-making, drafting new realities to better endure trauma and crises. Bringing together philosophy of mind, formalism, and narrative theory, Eron highlights how eighteenth-century novelists explored remembering as a creative and curative force for literary characters and readers alike. If memory is where we fictionalize reality, fiction—and especially the novel—is where the truths of memory can be found.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813945682

Book preview

Mind over Matter

Mind over Matter

Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen

Sarah Eron

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2021

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eron, Sarah, author.

Title: Mind over matter : memory fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen / Sarah Eron.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020039063 (print) | LCCN 2020039064 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813945668 (hardcover ; acid free paper) | ISBN 9780813945675 (paperback ; acid free paper) | ISBN 9780813945682 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. | Memory in literature.

Classification: LCC PR858.M44 E76 2021 (print) | LCC PR858.M44 (ebook) | DDC 823/.509—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039063

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039064

Cover art: MF3d/iStock

In memory of Selma and Theodore Eron

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Memory Fictions

1 Accounting for Crusoe’s Survival: How Memory Matters

2 Re-membering the Real: Uncle Toby’s Maps and Models

3 Evelina and the Virtues of Memory

4 Strange Concussions of Nature: Celestina’s Mindscapes

5 Wistful Thinking: Fanny’s Absent Forms

Afterthoughts: Remembering the Archive

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The first image of a brain I ever saw was in the film-viewing room of my stepmother’s radiology office. Illumined from behind by bright light, the photograph, like all MRI technology in the 1980s, seemed to tell the whole story of a person, from his past history to his future fate. For me, that dark room was a source of knowledge and comfort. And yet brains would become objects of constant debate in my household in the years to come. My father, a psychologist, would spend a lifetime analyzing clinical narratives while extolling the virtues of William James; for him, family bonding consisted of quibbling with his stepson (the neurologist), his wife (the radiologist), and his daughter (the doctor of philosophy) about the mysteries of the conscious mind. In many ways, this book is a tribute to him.

You might say I was destined to write a book about literature and philosophy of the mind. But it was not until 2015 that my faith in that photograph of the brain was truly shaken. This is when I first became acquainted with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein and her work. For many reasons, Dr. Bernstein has made this book possible. But what I have learned from her about neurology sparked an insatiable interest to read more widely in the field of cognitive science: brains are fluid networks of information that change in time. In no way can we ever capture the working brain with a single, static picture.

Ideas emerge and change through the conversations we have with other people. In addition to those named above, other forums for intellectual exchange, such as the Harvard Humanities Center, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, have been instrumental in shaping the course of this book. Thanks are especially owed to the following people who organized some of those events and panels: Sue Lanser, Ruth Perry, Deidre Lynch, Yoon Sun Lee, Jacques Khalip, Mark Vareschi, Lisa Zunshine, Margaret Doody (respondent), and William Warner.

This book has seen many iterations. I especially want to extend my gratitude to friends and scholars who generously donated their time to reading draft portions of the original manuscript: Melinda Rabb, Sarah Ellenzweig, Deidre Lynch, Audrey Wasser, Rob Lehman, David Alvarez, and Laura Brown. I was fortunate to write this book while living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there remains a vibrant community of scholars. Among those are Jess Keiser and Andrew Warren. While each writing monographs, we coalesced to form a writing group that managed to survive over several years. A special thanks to Jess and Andrew for reading so much of this manuscript and offering so many important revisions and suggestions. Finally, I must thank my incredible readers at the University of Virginia Press for their gracious, meticulous, and intelligent feedback. You have truly made this a better book.

Research for Mind over Matter has been substantially funded by the University of Rhode Island’s Division of Research and Economic Development. This grant made travel to the British and Chawton House Libraries in England possible. Many thanks to all the staff at Chawton House for their assistance and hospitality in the summer of 2017. I am also grateful to the University of Rhode Island’s Department of English for a subvention grant that has assisted with the publication costs of this book.

An earlier, shortened version of chapter 3 appeared as More Than a Conscious Feeling: Reading Evelina’s Mind in Time, in Studies in the Novel 50, no. 2 (2018): 171–96. Additionally, a paragraph from chapter 1 appeared as a brief example in an essay titled Why Memory Matters: Surviving Intentions, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 47 (2018): 239–44. A portion of chapter 5 is also set to appear in the spring 2021 issue of Studies in Romanticism as Jane Austen’s Allegories of Mind: Memory Fiction in Mansfield Park. I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to use that material here.

Mind over Matter is evidence of what literature can teach us about the healing powers of the mind and brain when our bodies are in a state of crisis. A wise friend and mentor once told me, We are always only ever writing about ourselves. In truth, survival is more than a state of mind; it is a community state. Thanks, then, to the hardworking and caring few who were physically there so that this book could make into the world: Dr. Kip Mackenzie, Dr. Carolyn Bernstein, Lee Orsky, Jackie and Jonas Havens, Joseph Eron, Ruth Tilley, and Kathia Havens. Above all, I want to extend my love and gratitude to Caleb Goodhouse, my partner in all things difficult, joyful, and adventurous, for his amazing patience in learning to live with this inveterate writer.

Mind over Matter

Introduction

Memory Fictions

In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his father’s life time.

There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance.

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

In one of the most famous scenes in English literature, Elizabeth Bennet enters a family picture gallery only to emerge with a mind and a life forever changed. The gallery is housed on the Pemberley estate, where she has just arrived with mixed feelings. The grandeur of Pemberley impresses her almost enough to regret refusing Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal, but her worldly ambitions dissipate when she is reminded of her suitor’s pride, which might forever divide her from her beloved family. Elizabeth describes this self-rebuke as a lucky recollection that saved her from something like regret (159). This seemingly pristine and moralizing memory comes under scrutiny, however, once the reader travels inside to hear the housekeeper’s glowing account of Mr. Darcy. Just after hearing this praise, Elizabeth walks into the exhibit.

From the start of Pride and Prejudice, Austen parodies a model of retentive memory that first represents information only to form the basis of moral judgment. Her use of the gallery draws on an eighteenth-century philosophical archetype for a kind of memory that operates as a collection. Elizabeth enters the gallery like the ideal empiricist, searching the collection (her mind) for what she already knows. But the picture gallery is an aesthetic assemblage that also reveals the powers of art to alter our original impressions. Artistry here is less about the portrait’s painterly realism than it is about the literary context in which the portrait is hung. Finally arrested by the striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth claims that the picture jogs a memory of what she actually has never before observed in the novel. Where does this memory come from?

The account slyly indicates that Mrs. Reynolds’s flattering reflections of the young Fitzwilliam may be the source of Elizabeth’s newfound memory. The transacted remembrance causes a new and gentle sensation, one that supplants Elizabeth’s previous anxieties to keep Darcy at bay. The novel intimates that this new recollection may be what truly saves Elizabeth from something like regret (159). As though the happy feeling produced by the altered memory is not enough, Darcy himself (rendered in a new light) magically appears at Pemberley’s threshold immediately upon Elizabeth’s change of mind.

The passage is a literary trompe l’oeil that uses free indirect style as a vehicle for satirizing empirical assumptions about memory. For a moment, we may conflate our narrative memories with Elizabeth’s, failing to see the true source of the heroine’s impressions. Austen presents us with a gallery of curated memories that evolve through social networks; they are fictionalized as easily as they are penetrated by the remembrances and impressions of other persons. Most significantly, these memories have a powerful ability to soothe distress as they conjure up new feelings, circumstances, and events.

Mind over Matter changes how we think about personal memory within, and as the defining structure of, the early novel. Specifically, it revises our current understanding of memory in eighteenth-century novels, which have traditionally been associated with mimetic accounts of mental imprinting in philosophical empiricism.¹ Instead, I reveal a social model of memory in Enlightenment fiction that is fluid and evolving, one that has the capacity to alter personal histories. This book shows how memory shapes the process and outcome of the novel’s imaginative world-making. Through a close engagement with representative eighteenth-century texts, I track the force of memory’s transpositions and alterations. Persistently, I find that memory enables the creation of worlds that make it possible to endure and work through situations of crisis. Through new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and others, I revise our notions about early novelistic consciousness and how memories become socially integrated. This proto-Romantic history of the novel reveals the unexpected origins of William Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquillity in fictional biographies of distress. Crusoe’s island (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe), Toby’s bowling green (Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy), Evelina’s garden (Frances Burney, Evelina), and Fanny’s East room (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park) are all realms in which I investigate memory’s empowering and healing way of reconstituting worlds.

My readings expose the fictional qualities of memory as a force, much like that of the Romantic imagination, that transposes time and alters forms and places. For eighteenth-century novelists, memory embellishes more than it records, creating just as it retains and recalls. Mind over Matter is about how memory’s creative force empowers both characters and readers, how that force alters, reconstitutes, and even overcomes the conditions of our physical environment. Memory does not merely store up; it makes up.

I want to begin by elaborating on my claim that memory can operate as a force, a term derived more from theories of the imagination in phenomenological Romanticism than from eighteenth-century epistemic accounts of recollection. Imagination has long been heralded as that mystical quality of Romanticism and the eighteenth-century mind; it is transformational, metaphysical, and immaterial. The imagination offers the dynamic and active, James Engell writes. It is a force, an energy, not a state of being. It more easily explains the interchange of state and the transforming, organic qualities of psyche and nature.² Engell’s definition of the creative imagination as a force of mind stems from Coleridge’s use of the term to describe our mental faculties in his Biographia Literaria:

DES CARTES . . . said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe. We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, . . . Every other science pre-supposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity."³

For Coleridge, intelligence finds itself within infinite nature, and, like nature’s own organic force, it grows. As Engell captures in his account of the Romantic imagination, forces are dynamic, active, and transpositional. By definition, they move, transform, interchange, and mature, both within themselves and in their relationship to other things.

If imagination is a force, then Enlightenment philosophy generally treats memory as a thing. In one of the most seminal works on consciousness, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke’s famous aggregating mind presumes that knowledge and memory are part of the same process by which sensation becomes fact, and what was once subjective renders itself into an objective idea. For philosophers of the Enlightenment, memory is imagination’s shadowy counterweight. Samuel Johnson describes memory as a stronghold of the past, cast against the brighter light of imagination: It is . . . much more common for the solitary and thoughtful to amuse themselves with schemes of the future, than reviews of the past, Johnson writes. For the future is pliant and ductile, and will be easily moulded by a strong fancy into any form. But the images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of erasure or of change.⁴ For Johnson, mimetic memory leaves inert and indelible traces of objects that will always remain, in some vague sense, as they originally appear. In other words, Johnson argues, fancy alters form; memory copies it.

The purpose of this book is to expose memory’s capacity to fictionalize (or alter) experience as a power. In demonstrating the elusive nature of memory as something that evolves in slippery ways through the linguistic medium of fiction, I contend that for early novelists, it is this fictional quality of memory that allows us to adapt to and, more important, alter our environment. We survive sensation because we are apt to remember and fictionalize it, accepting always that feelings have the power to change.

In the introductory sections that follow, I situate this book in relation to other literary historical discussions of memory and imagination before tracing assumptions about the memory storehouse to its roots in empiricist philosophy. This book disrupts our categorical distinctions about these supposedly antithetical mental faculties in the fiction of the Enlightenment and proto-Romantic periods, arguing that for early novelists they work in tandem and often as the very same mental force. I depart from a logic of memory as mental repository to a more temporal theory of mind. To use Robinson Crusoe’s phrase, memory is a World of Time that takes us away from the realm of the present only to bestir the creative faculties. For Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne, memory perforates the boundaries between fact and fiction; it is a healing force that recreates and alters forms in the world. Memory is not a container of sensation but an electrical converter, as it were: the agent that seeks to fictionalize and transform human experiences and environments. There is a limit to how much bodies can feel. On that sublime edge of human feeling is where memory resides, teasing out the possibilities of a past remembered and realized into new and pleasing forms.

What Is a Real Memory?

Early novel studies has long been invested in the constructs of autobiographical thinking, so much so that for literary historians, the novel has practically become synonymous with cognition itself. Whereas older accounts of the novel’s origins heralded the genre as a representation of personal history and psychology, newer accounts consider how novels as mediating forms interact with readers in the real world.⁵ Nevertheless, literary scholars of the novel’s origins continue to treat memory as the great reservoir of human consciousness. Novel and memory studies have long been linked because of their historical interest in consciousness and fictional autobiography. According to Douwe Draaisma, psychologists began using the term autobiographical memory only in the 1980s. Suzanne Nalbantian traces the term’s equivalent in neuropsychology, episodic memory, to 1972.⁶ This term for the long-term memories of personal experience entered the canon of novel criticism at a much earlier date.⁷ Given that we typically locate the novel’s genesis in the same literary historical period (1700s) as the rise of philosophical empiricism (the epistemic belief in the efficacy of subjective, sensory experience) this comes as no surprise. Every student of the early novel knows of Ian Watt’s and Michael McKeon’s realist accounts of the genre of individual, autonomous minds.⁸ In The Rise of the Novel, Watt reads the literary realism of the eighteenth-century novel as associated with the empiricism of John Locke and René Descartes because of its emphasis on individual sense experience.⁹

Later readings of early novels are equally preoccupied with how novels think.¹⁰ But these more recent studies entertain the mediating roles that novels play for readers in social networks. No longer do we simply consider the novel as the great imitator of consciousness. Rather, it is understood to be part of a larger web of cognitive interplay.¹¹ However, early novel studies has not considered what such mediational accounts of novel reading might mean for memory. This oversight has much to do with the long-standing assumption in eighteenth-century studies that memory is a record of experiences written on the mind. But what happens to modernity when we discover that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are not our own? That they change through processes of reading, writing, and retelling, or that they defy notions of memory as empiricism’s great storehouse? My readings of early novels in this book reveal how memories become socially integrated, thereby prompting us to revise how we think about personal memory within, and as the defining structure of, the early novel.

To situate my work in the context of fictionality studies, I want briefly to invoke a more recent definition of memory. Contemporary science regards memories as neural associations that change and interact with histories, environments, and fictions. In other words, real memories do not represent our reality but rather mediate it and are in turn mediated by it. Such a limning of memory is reminiscent of recent shifts in the way reality has come to be parsed in Enlightenment studies of the novel. William Warner and Clifford Siskin’s notion of the Enlightenment as an event in the history of mediation disrupts the association of the Enlightenment with epistemic ideas and asks scholars to consider how knowledge is mediated in the eighteenth century. For Warner and Siskin, mediation is broadly defined as the work done by tools. This new theoretical history has essentially changed the way we view modernity’s treatment of the real in this period.¹²

Catherine Gallagher’s work on fictionality, which redefines the genre of the early novel as a paradox that simultaneously engages readerly speculation and disbelief, has had a similar effect.¹³ Gallagher’s conceptualization of the novel as a free space in which to temporarily indulge imaginative play but also as a protective enclosure that would cordon off imaginary yielding from any dangerous consequences assumes that novels have a mediational power to alter their readers’ mental states.¹⁴ Although Gallagher’s theory of fictionality in the Enlightenment implicates the reader’s use of judgment and imagination, it never explicitly tackles the novel’s capacity to mediate readers’ memories. Most likely this is due to her understanding of the novel as a temporary system of cognitive play, as a definitively circumscribed space of free thinking. Such a conception of the novel does not dovetail with what memory means in philosophical empiricism; the fact that memories cannot transpose or transform but only decay excludes them from any world, however tenuous, of mediational free play. In short, by implicitly continuing to think about memory through the frame of empirical discourse, eighteenth-century fictionality studies still depends to some extent on Watt’s early concept of realism in the novel insofar as it derives from eighteenth-century philosophies of mind. This book’s mediational approach to memory in the eighteenth-century novel thereby makes an important contribution to recent work in fictionality theory.¹⁵

I want to turn now to some of the ways in which scholars have accounted for memory in and around the eighteenth century. Literary scholars, scientists, and philosophers perpetually evoke bodily, spatial, and architectural metaphors as explanatory devices for memory. Enlightenment literary scholarship is no exception to this rule. In fact, the rising interest in metaphor in eighteenth-century studies practically constitutes our work on memory in the period.¹⁶ Brad Pasanek’s Metaphors of Mind reads the mind as a compendium of metaphors and thereby makes a capacious argument for seeing memory as a mere metaphor during this time period. My objective here is to disrupt categorical distinctions in the Enlightenment between the supposedly antithetical mental faculties of imagination and memory, arguing that they work in tandem and sometimes as the very same mental force.¹⁷ One avenue is to think about how we have historically leaned on metaphor as a way of understanding the abstract nature of the mind.¹⁸ Metaphor has been defined as a form constitutive of both memory and imagination.¹⁹ Our critical conception of Enlightenment memory as a thing most likely stems from its entanglement with the language of metaphor across eighteenth-century disciplines. Taking Pasanek’s notion of the mind as a vast conger[y] of metaphors to heart,²⁰ but likewise wishing to dispense with the notion of memory as mere matter, Mind over Matter considers the active nature of trope.

The close readings presented in this book suggest that literary devices like metaphor often provide an indexical map of memory’s own creative history, a way of tracking an otherwise elusive force of the mind. When it comes to memory in fiction, metaphor is the stuff of transformation—the linguistic thing that allows the mind to enact formal and emotional change. Gesturing toward the etymological root of metaphor as a crossing over,²¹ I consider it a mode through which memory works and identifies itself. Metaphor is an external sign that evinces memory’s power to alter form and environment. Toby’s bowling green and Fanny’s East room are the places wherein things index memory’s creative powers; they allow the reader to see memory’s tangible effects. In this sense, memory is made legible not merely in the way that the faithful Jane Austen student might assume—from, say, free indirect style, or what cognitive studies call mind reading²²—but through new semiotic systems.²³ In the world of objects, we are apt to find evidence of memory’s greatest mental powers.

Traditional approaches to memory and metaphor in literary studies, however, function rather differently from this book’s method. In her account of memory in the literature of the medieval period, Mary Carruthers compares memory to a book.²⁴ This is her dominant metaphor for the mind, and one that asks us to imagine the activity of remembrance as organized through cognitive systems of booklike collation, rereading, and recall: "The ‘art of memory’ is actually the ‘art of recollection.’ . . . The crucial task of recollection is investigatio, ‘tracking-down,’ a word related to vestigia, ‘tracks’ or ‘footprints.’ All mnemonic organizational schemes are heuristic in nature. They are retrieval schemes, for the purpose of inventio or ‘finding.’²⁵ This rhetorical art of memory, its commensurate status with knowledge, if striking to the modern reader, is rather familiar to the student of modernity. Eighteenth-century scholars typically consider memory in the tradition of empiricism—as a type of knowledge born out of sensation and recall; memory is a textual site within the mind that houses collected impressions, or inscriptions. As Margaret Doody has noted, 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.²⁶ For the student of Enlightenment, remembrance savors of the same kinds of activities that Carruthers describes in her depiction of medieval memory: it is an act of seeking or finding" out—inventio—that bears on the eighteenth-century notion of genius as invention or discovery.

To remember, for empiricists, is to revisit the mind’s long-established tracks and trains.²⁷ In his recent work, The Mind Is a Collection, Sean Silver likens eighteenth-century memory storage in John Locke’s tradition to a museum, cabinet, library, [or a] . . . heap of particulars.²⁸ In Enlightenment and medieval philosophy, memory and books were similar things. Imprinted, collated, circulated, searched, and read, they dominated the purview of knowledge systems much as the computer or internet has come to represent minds as networks of information today. (Take, for example, the word that neuroscience uses for memory formation: the encoding of information in the brain’s nervous system.)

Although Carruthers longs for a reprivileging of memory’s status in intellectual fields of inquiry, she maintains notions of imagination and memory as discrete mental faculties. Her book begins by underscoring the postmodern tendency to privilege imagination over memory: At best, for us, memory is a kind of photographic film, exposed . . . by an amateur and developed by a duffer, and so marred by scratches and inaccurate light-values. We make such judgments (even those of us who are hard scientists) because we have been formed in a post-Romantic, post-Freudian world, in which imagination has been identified with a mental unconscious of great, even dangerous, creative power.²⁹ Carruthers bemoans memory’s bad reputation, only to reclaim it in a history that seeks to identify memory with the institutional processes of learning. Memory, like imagination, has its own form of genius. For the modern reader, Carruthers’s account is surprising and instrumental. In essence, it provides us with a road map for how to preserve memory records and how to prevent memory errors. This too is thus far true for our studies of the Enlightenment period. Literary critical attempts to overturn memory’s place in theories of the early novel and empiricism never question its foundational efficacy as that great record-keeper of thoughts, sensations, and things. Rather, like Hobbes, many critics turn to memory’s decay, its lapses and absences.

Forgetting has taken on a new cachet in literary studies of the mind, posing a threat to what Margaret Doody depicts as the Enlightenment’s long-term love affair with memory. Perhaps this is because, as Carruthers points out, we live in a post-Romantic, posttraumatic age, wherein remembering too much or too acutely can be a painful event. (I address some of these more troubling accounts of memory, such as trauma and the nostalgia disease, in chapters 2 and 5.) In this manner, forgetfulness overshadows our previous historical interests in empiricist recollection. Nicholas Dames’s work on nostalgia in the nineteenth century glorifies the concept of forgetting by turning our attention to the death of memory within: pleasure arises from memory’s absence, erasure, and eradication.³⁰ Pitting Victorian forgetfulness against the later modernist interest in the everydayness of remembrance, encapsulated in a madeleine, a bar of soap, Dames turns away from what he describes as modernism’s capacity for [the] unlimited exfoliation of memory by calling attention to what is not or no longer there.³¹ Similarly, Margaret Doody intimates that forgetting may be the true power of empirical accounts of mind in the Enlightenment age when she writes, "Incidentally, what beautiful images Locke chooses for insubstantial wavering of personality, for forgetting—the flickering lights in a mirror, the waving shadows flying over a wheat-field. There is a sense of the beautiful—even of pleasure, though an unwilling pleasure—intruding into Locke’s vision of forgetting, even as there are strong marks of pain associated with Lockean memory."³² For Doody, forgetting speaks to a powerful human capacity for change. Still, memory is either mundane or a real pain; its oblivion is where these readers find bliss.

What these literary studies of forgetfulness do speak to is the pliable, flexible nature of mentality. For even in the Enlightenment novel, memory’s art is best described as no thing: it is not like the pages of a book that collect images and inscriptions. In attempting to disentangle memory from epistemology, the philosopher Annette Baier homes in on memory gaps as a site of distinction: "The gaps in my memory are not like the gaps in my knowledge of things I am and was ignorant of. The gaps constitute lapses of memory, whereas the gaps in my knowledge . . . can be, or be due to, mere absence of conviction."³³ In other words, forgetting itself is proof enough that a memory is not knowledge, for the latter depends not on recall but on a sense of certainty, a conviction. Curiously, it is through this pathway of distinguishing memory from knowledge, or fact, that Baier arrives at a picture of the conscious memory, one that finds a kinship between the structures of intending and remembering: It is memory with its distinctive failings, loss, and lapse, which shows the continuity and narcissism which parallels, in the past, that of the intended future.³⁴

I will not herald the memory lapse as the singular (albeit absent) aspect of remembrance that paves the way for obtaining our greatest fantasies and desires (or of revising our most difficult experiences). My readings of memory in the eighteenth-century novel underscore its reconstructive and transformative capabilities. However, studies of forgotten memories are the closest we get to that force of mind that has delighted Romantics across the ages: the imagination. Defining Enlightenment memory as a collection, Sean Silver posits it as imagination’s opposite: This is of course radically different from what the imagination has come to mean. The imagination in its Romantic form—the active, energetic faculty called in the late eighteenth century ‘the god within’—was largely fashioned through an extended episode of forgetting, slowly disentangling the productive work of creativity from the collecting and collating processes which, in the eighteenth century, were thought to make it work.³⁵ Only by way of forgetting, Silver suggests, does the Romantic imagination come to be. If we follow these snapshots in literary histories of the mind, they tell the following story of the late eighteenth century: memory, once the genius faculty of mind, was erased, forgotten. In its shadow, imagination provided a light for darker times. Only in the total absence of the past does fiction become a viable escape route. Imagination is the architect that benefits from a memory catastrophe. In other words, critics have argued that literary memory in the late eighteenth century transcribes or dissolves; it never transforms and reconstructs existent forms in the world.

But what memory or novel really works this way? To be sure, Enlightenment readers and characters may shed memories, or prune them, to use a neuroscientific term. Throughout the history of novelistic fiction, memories are associated, dropped, recalled, and revitalized—but they also create, and not just out of what is no longer there but out of what is readily at hand. Toby Shandy’s tobacco pipe, Leopold Bloom’s lemon soap, Marcel Proust’s shell-shaped cookie: these everyday things of endless exfoliation are the stuff of memory and imagination.³⁶ In them, we encounter the pleasures of then and now collapsed into a single moment. A casual thing sensualized out of thin air is remembered as it never was before.

When Molly Bloom sends James Joyce’s modern epic into a flourishing close, we are left with a resounding affirmation that weds past tense with future. The text is a comma-less hybrid that entangles historical feeling with present desire: and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.³⁷ What lies within grasp here is a memory drawn down to the touches of the imagination—an exquisite entangling of mental faculties that perfumes forms