Stan re-innaugurated a strain related to Mnemosyne and the
muses, while we were comemorating Nabokv's 211th birthday (a few
years more were accidentaly thrown in...) Fittingly, here is a Nabokov
sighting , which I hope hasn't been brought to the List before
and excusing myself for offering it a little belatedly. The book was
published by the Oxford University Press in 1996...
"The Anatomy of Memory, An Anthology." by
James McConkey (novelist, author of "Court of
Memory"), divided in six sections ( The Nature of Memory, the Memory of
Nature, Memory and Creativity, Memory,Culture, and Identity, Perspectives of
Memory and Beyond Memory). It begins and ends with St. Augustine.
Nabokov is brought up on chapter V ( Perspectives of Memory:
Childhood and the Middle Years) reproducing Speak,Memory's Chapter
One.
It presents a brief introduction and quotes VN's lines on
ch. 8: "the supreme achievement of memory... is the masterly
use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and
wandering tonalities of the past."
Freud has not been left out. He is presented in chapter One,
with a curious item, Freud's short paper titled "My Contact with Joseph
Popper-Lynkeus."
In the brief introduction McConkey writes: " Like
Augustine's Confessions, fifteen hundred years earlier, Interpretation of
Dreams is an innovative foray into the subjective genre of
autobiography...Freud primarily depends upon his own dreams and their causes as
means to illustrating the rules underlying dream interpretation. Memory is
crucial to his investigations - memory as instinct, as part of what he
calls...our "primitive, ungovernable nature" and memory of actual experiences
and desires, particularly from early childhood, that we distort or
repress."