False Memories: The Strange Return of the First World War in Contemporary British Fiction

From their very beginnings, theories of memory have regarded memory as an ordering principle that provides a framework of temporal and spatial reference. Connected with an attachment to subjectivity this framework projects sense and significance onto a contingent reality. This is already evident in the foundation myth of Western mnemonics, the story of the banquet in the house of Scopas as related in Cicero’s De Oratore. But this foundation myth also introduces into the theory of memory the ruptures that have challenged it to the present day, some of which become blatantly evident when the memory concerned is the memory of war. In Cicero’s story the orator Simonides is capable of restoring sense when he survives the catastrophe of a collapsing roof during a feast and manages to remember the seating arrangement of the guests, so that their disfigured bodies can be buried under their proper names. This foundation legend has been immensely influential, primarily in the sense of tying ars memoria to the concept of objects and space. Yet what has already retreated into the background in Cicero’s re-telling of the story is that in it the art of memory is also an art of dying – or rather that memory is linked with catastrophe, but also with the rituals that we need in order to master catastrophic contingency.

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