TLS: I remember it too well

I remember it too well
Andrew Scull

review of WHY LIFE SPEEDS UP AS YOU GET OLDER. How memory shapes our past.
by Douwe Draaisma. Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans. 277pp. Cambridge University Press. £19.95 (US $28.99). - 0 521 83424 4.

Freud, we may recall, famously saw the selectivity of our individual recall as anything but accidental. Painful or unpleasant memories, unable to find conscious expression, were dealt with by repression, strangled when they sought to become overt. But murdered memories, on his account, were not so easily disposed of. Still lurking ominously beneath one's attempts to sustain the simulacrum of normality, they displaced themselves in striking and symbolically resonant directions, surfacing as strange and disabling symptoms whose meanings were recoverable only through the mysterious (though perhaps interminable) alchemy of psychoanalysis. Even on the analytic couch, rendering the unconscious conscious was, Freud insisted, a deeply and necessarily fraught process, for the psyche resisted any simple substitution of one for the other, employing all sorts of defences against a reality it found too painful to contemplate. On this account, our stored memories of our personal experiences are not just episodic, but unreliable, and systematically biased against the straightforward recollection of the traumatic.
If our earliest years are at once the most crucial for the formation of our character, they are simultaneously veiled in what Freud called infantile amnesia. The memories that escape this black hole are allegedly "screen memories", apparently benign and even trivial recollections that cover more disturbing traces of our past.
It is an appealing fairy tale. Like all such stories, it contains some familiar elements we can all recognize and assent to.
They lend it charm and plausibility. The episodic quality of our memories, and their unreliability (our tendency, for example, to conflate what others may have told us about the past with what we take to be memories of our own) are familiar to us all. Jean Piaget recorded a vivid first memory of his early childhood, an episode in which his nursemaid walked him in a pram down the Champs-Elysees and a man attempted to kidnap him, only to be repelled by the bravery of his nanny, who fought off the would-be thief. Piaget's memory was exact: he remembered the crowd that gathered in sympathy, the uniform of the policeman who showed up, the scratches on the brave woman's face, the location of the assault. And yet, years later, it turned out that the whole episode had been fabricated -not by Piaget, but by his nursemaid, who was converted by the Salvation Army and wrote to his parents to confess her sins (including the self-inflicted scratches) and return the gold watch she had been given for her bravery. What young Jean had heard as a child had silently passed into his memory, and had become what he later wryly termed "a memory of a memory, but false".
The tricks our memories can play with us, and, at the same time, the centrality of our powers of recollection to our sense of who we are, to the very possibility of our possessing self-consciousness and personal identity, lie at the heart of the graceful series of essays in Douwe Draaisma's new book, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older. Freud's claims about the sources of our memory's fallibility, and Piaget's story about his own deceived powers of recollection, occur in the first pages, when Draaisma takes up the theme of our earliest recall. But as Piaget's "memory" suggests -it is, after all, a story of fear and trauma -the Freudian account in some respects corresponds rather poorly with what research into this territory seems to uncover. So far from screening out the traumatic, most people's earliest memories consist largely of the frightening, the painful, the shocking.
There are, as Draaisma points out, competing accounts of childhood amnesia available to us. Some posit neurological causes: the immaturity of certain regions of the brain, notably the hippocampus, is alleged in some quarters to account for the impossibility of retrieving traces of early experiences. But children do remember from a very early age, and this casts doubt on sweeping claims. Others emphasize, perhaps more plausibly, the connection of memory to the development of linguistic skills. Language allows us to talk about past events, thus serving, like repetition, to increase our chances of remembering them. Yet, perversely, language allows the development of abstract reasoning capacities, and thereby increases the chances that we will rearrange individual experiences into categories. In turn, this can promote confusion about the particular, and the conflation of what were once separate events. Then there is the importance of a sense of self, without which memories "simply cannot be stored as personal recollections". On this account, a critical set of insights into the distinction between "..." and "you" must accumulate before one can begin to construct an autobiographical memory -a notion that Draaisma illustrates with passages from Nabokov and Edith Wharton.
Draaisma includes figures from nineteenth-and early twentieth-century psychology and psychiatry, their contemporary counterparts, neurologists and neuroscientists, and also novelists and ordinary people. The reader is encouraged to explore a variety of explanations of the phenomena under examination, and no single, encompassing explanation is proffered as the answer to the underlying puzzle.
Typical is Draaisma's inclination to range beyond the narrow confines of his disciplinary colleagues. Professional psychology, as he remarks on more than one occasion, has developed in ways that make issues of quantification, replication and measurement central to the intellectual enterprise. Academics rely on experiments and instruments. The directions of their work reflect more what their techniques allow and encourage than what the rest of us find interesting about human psychology. Findings about "learning and remembering, recognizing and reproducing" pile up, but they do so in a constipated, constricted universe, one that excludes "topics difficult to access by experiments and measurement (which) were kept off the research agenda, either temporarily or for good".
Draaisma ranges widely over the poorly explored territory that professionals too readily push aside, displaying his own delight in the puzzles he uncovers and the ways one can unpack them. Why, for example, to echo the nineteenth-century Oxford philosopher, F. H. Bradley, do we remember forwards, not backwards? We look back on past events from the viewpoint of the present, yet we play back our memories from the most distant past towards the present.
What would happen if we were to possess a perfect memory, instead of constructing our lives and identities on a foundation of forgetfulness, a background of shadows and darkness? Draaisma recounts a fable of Jorge Luis Borges about a man cursed with such powers, and then uncovers the case of a Russian Jew, Solomon Sherashevsky, who actually had a memory like Borges's fictional character. To remember too well, to carry with us the full burden of the past, is cognitively and emotionally overwhelming, to say nothing of being profoundly disturbing and disorientating.
At a considerable remove from Sherashevsky, what are we to make of children with severe handicaps -autism, or constricted intelligence -who nonetheless in very narrow directions possess stupendous powers of memory, children like the French calculating prodigies, Henri Mondeaux and Jacques Inaudi, who can calculate massively complicated arithmetic equations in their heads, or who can, like "Dave", a mentally handicapped boy with an IQ of about fifty, indicate on command what day of the week a particular date far in the future or the past falls upon, or who can, like Stephen Wiltshire, see a building and draw it freehand, with an astonishing mastery of perspective? What might explain such anomalies, and what do these cases reveal about the foundations of some sorts of human memory? To move to a more terrible scene, how can we account for the events surrounding the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian accused of being the unspeakably brutal concentration guard nicknamed Ivan the Terrible, and identified as such by those who had somehow survived the horrors of Treblinka and seen Ivan in action? Demjanjuk, it eventually materialized, was indeed a monster who had played a part in the Holocaust, but he was not that particular monster, though eyewitnesses repeatedly asserted that he was.
The witnesses, Draaisma shows, were not mendacious, they were merely mistaken.
The subjective sensation that life begins to whizz by at an ever-increasing pace as one ages (the effect that the title advertises as the book's theme) emerges only in the last pages. In our youth, we are impatient to get on with our lives; yet time moves slowly. As we near the end of our lives, the process inverts itself: unless wrecked by illness and debility, most people long to extend their days, only to find the perceived pace of existence quickening and ever more precious time running out. Draaisma borrows the metaphor of an hourglass from one of the most perceptive people to reflect on this melancholy reality, Ernst Junger:
In hourglasses the grains of sand increasingly rub one another smooth until finally they flow almost without friction from one bulb into the other, polishing the neck wider all the time. The older an hourglass the more quickly it runs.
Unnoticed, the hourglass measures out ever shorter hours.
It is easier, Douwe Draaisma acknowledges, to invent metaphors to illustrate the acceleration of time than to explain the phenomenon. He reviews the various attempts that have been made to do so, and even if one is left less than satisfied with the accounts he offers, one finishes the book with a heightened awareness of the complexity and the fickleness of human memory, and a genuine sense of pleasure at having encountered such a subtle, entertaining, and illuminating guide to the territory.