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Forgetting
Myths, Perils and Compensations
By DOUWE DRAAISMA, Liz Waters Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Douwe Draaisma
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21395-9
CHAPTER 1
First Memories: Islands in the Stream of Forgetting
Years ago I watched the Tunisian film Halfaouine, originally released in 1990. I could not recount much of the story now, but I do remember a few fragments about a little boy called Noura. He is 12, still young enough to be allowed into the women's bath house with his mother. Every week he enters a wonderful steaming world, in which women surge into view out of the clouds of vapour, kneel down beside him, soap him, soap themselves, rinse and then slowly rub their arms, legs and breasts with oil. Noura feasts his eyes. He is beginning to reach the age of curiosity about women's bodies. His gaze is becoming a stare, although he puts on his most innocent face. Naturally he cannot get away with that for long. One of the women spots something in his look. Next time he needs a bath he has to go with the men.
The boundary between still young enough and too old is hazy, but it is certainly a boundary and once across it there is no way back. Just as Noura at the age of six had no idea how he would look at women when he was 12, so the Noura ejected from the women's bath house can no longer remember what it was like to be surrounded by warm, naked bodies without even noticing, seeing nothing when there was so much to see. His awakening sexuality has created two Nouras who are mutually impenetrable.
But is that impenetrability truly mutual? Surely your memory allows you to summon up your former self and experience the world as you once did? Some writers of autobiographies almost convince us it does. In their opening chapters they evoke a child who sees the world through a child's eyes, thinks like a child and behaves like a child. Where could that child have come from if not from memory?
The question is naive. Children are not to be found in the memory; it is at best the place where they are engendered afresh. And even if memories are needed in order to get a child down on paper, they are not simply retrieved – they are dug up, often with great difficulty. They then need to be subjected to literary adaptation, since a collection of memories from childhood is not the same thing as the story of a childhood. Descriptions of childhood that are convincing, that seem authentic, that cause the reader's own childhood memories to resonate, are the product of literary craftsmanship and in that sense far removed from a child's experience. We are all at a distance from our own memories, but the writer of an autobiography is removed from them by that same distance squared, so to speak, because of the need to put those memories into words and arrange them into a narrative.
For the type of memory at issue here, psychologists invented a term in the 1980s: autobiographical memory. It has metaphorical associations that fit with ideas about autobiographies that emerged far earlier in literary theory. Philippe Lejeune wrote in 1975, 'Everyone carries with him a rough-draft account of his own life that is continually being revised.' A quarter of a century of psychological research later, the conclusion reached is roughly the same. Our memories are more reconstructions than recapitulations of our experiences, and those reconstructions are influenced not only by who we once were but by who we have become, not just by the past but by the time in which memories are called to mind. And yes, that notebook is continually being adjusted, in the passive tense. We do not rewrite our memories ourselves, it is done for us, and if confronted with all those adaptations, when reading old diaries or letters, for example, we are astonished at what has been deleted or recast in the intervening years.
Or indeed added. In his autobiography The Tongue Set Free Elias Canetti writes about his earliest memory:
I come out of a door on the arm of a maid, the floor in front of me is red, and to the left a staircase goes down, equally red. Across from us, at the same height, a door opens, and a smiling man steps forth, walking towards me in a friendly way. He steps right up close to me, halts, and says: 'Show me your tongue.' I stick out my tongue, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a jackknife, opens it, and brings the blade all the way to my tongue. He says: 'Now we'll cut off his tongue.' I don't dare pull back my tongue, he comes closer and closer, the blade will touch me any second. In the last moment, he pulls back the knife, saying: 'Not today, tomorrow.' He snaps the knife shut again and puts it back in his pocket.
Every morning that scene is repeated and every morning he is more fearful than the last, but he keeps all this to himself and only 10 years later does he ask his mother about it.
She could tell by the ubiquitous red that it was the guesthouse in Carlsbad, where she had spent the summer of 1907 with my father and me. To take care of the two-year-old baby, she had brought along a nanny from Bulgaria, a girl who wasn't even fifteen. Every morning at the crack of dawn, the girl went out holding the child on her arm; she spoke only Bulgarian, but got along fine in the lively town, and was always back punctually with the child. Once, she was seen on the street with an unknown young man, she couldn't say anything about him, a chance acquaintance. A few weeks later, it turned out that the young man lived in the room right across from us, on the other side of the corridor. At night, the girl sometimes went to his room quickly. My parents felt responsible for her and sent her back to Bulgaria immediately.
Elias Canetti, born on 25 July 1905, turned two that summer. The red, the girl, the man and the knife are components of a very early first memory, since on average our earliest recollections date from somewhere between our third and fourth birthdays. In fact first memories of an event like this, featuring a progression through time, usually come from later still. But even if we take this passage to be as unadulterated an account as possible of what Canetti came upon as a first note in his memory, it contains elements that cannot have been experienced as he describes them by an infant who had just turned two and was largely devoid of language. The three sentences spoken to him by the man must have been converted into language later. Every attempt to call experiences of childhood to mind relies upon instruments unavailable at the time. The fact that Canetti relates this memory in the first person and gives his explanation in the third person ('the two-year-old baby', 'the child'), suggests that a memory can be described independently of any explanation, as an original, pure experience. This is a bifurcation of perspective that does not exist in reality.
The Scheepmaker collection
The first notes in autobiographical memory are preceded and followed by empty pages. Although they mark the start of our existence as beings with memories, they also highlight the extent of the forgetfulness surrounding them. The first memory of Dutch author J. Bernlef is of looking through bars and shouting loudly 'Uilie, Uilie!'. His parents later explained to him that he must have been sitting in his playpen calling the German nursemaid, whose name was Uli. His next memory dates from a full three years later. The English author Frederick Forsyth was 18 months old when his parents left him in his pram for a moment, with the dog to guard him. Afraid of the dog, he climbed out, fell, and felt the animal licking his face. After that came a gap of a year and a half. The childhood memory resembles an engine that sputters briefly and then stalls.
These earliest memories of Bernlef and Forsyth can be found in a little book published in 1988 called De eerste herinnering (The First Memory). Over a period of six years, journalist Nico Scheepmaker asked everyone he came upon, whether privately or through his work, for their earliest memory. The result was a collection of 350 first memories. Scheepmaker had no scientific pretensions in compiling his collection. There are certain disadvantages to that – he did not always ask how old people were at the time, for example, so we can determine their approximate age in only 263 of the total – but certain advantages as well. He had not immersed himself in theories about childhood memory and he noted down the stories told to him without any commentary or adaptation. Over the past century, psychologists have put together several collections of earliest memories for research purposes, but they almost always rely on questionnaires given to students. The memories in the Scheepmaker collection are from people with extremely diverse jobs, backgrounds and ages. Its greatest asset as a collection, however, is its size. Ask 10 people for their earliest memory and you will hear 10 stories; ask 350 and you will start to see patterns.
Forgetting is an integral part of every first memory, which often turns out not to be the earliest after all. Scheepmaker thought that his own memory of the still warm white bread he fetched from the bakery on holiday was his earliest memory, until his mother told him the family returned from that holiday early because of the death of his grandfather and he realised he also had memories of Grandpa. Publisher Geert van Oorschot sent Scheepmaker a letter describing a first memory that was even older than his previous first memory. Often people had three or four early memories that belonged together, from before moving house, for example, or featuring someone who died a short time later. The chronology was impossible to recall.
Sometimes people had even forgotten precisely where their first memories originated. Were they recounting something they had actually experienced, or was it a dream, or a story told in the family? The photograph that becomes a memory is notorious. A black-and-white snap is fleetingly glimpsed, and a few years later the memory has brought that frozen moment to life and turned it into a colourful recollection, rather in the way that some films begin with a still image in sepia that suddenly starts to move. Journalist Henk Hofland was for years convinced that his first memory was a dream. In the drainage channel behind their house in Rotterdam, the Dutch ocean liner the Statendam with its three funnels came steaming past. Eventually he described that dream to his father and was told it was not a dream at all. 'The Statendam did actually steam along there. Our neighbour was a model builder and he once made a replica of the Statendam and put it in the water at the back of our house. You didn't dream that, you saw it!' Some people really do have a dream as their first memory. In the case of lexicographer Piet Hagers it was a classic waking-up dream. He dreamed he was falling off the swing and woke on the floor next to his bed. Artist Peter Vos had a dream as his earliest memory as well. 'I dreamed about one of those Mondrian trees with branches that got all tangled up, which was very frightening.'
In the Scheepmaker collection the child is on average three and a half at the time of the first memory, but there are outliers in both directions. Poet Neeltje Maria Min's first memory dates back to the liberation of the Netherlands from German occupation. Her mother held her as they looked out of the window at people celebrating. She was nine months old. Poet Kees Stip told Scheepmaker that in 1913, during celebrations to commemorate the centenary of Dutch independence from Napoleonic France, he was only three months old when he saw from his cradle, which had salmon-coloured curtains, a triumphal arch in the neighbour's hedge. These are details that immediately raise the question of how reliable very early first memories are, a matter to which we will return. Scheepmaker's book records five early memories from before the age of one. By contrast, nine of the earliest memories are from after the child's seventh birthday. Even with half an hour to think about it, Björn Borg could not recollect anything that happened before he stood on the steps of his school in Stockholm as a seven-year-old. Bertrand Flury, a cognac merchant, was walking with his grandfather at the age of seven when he was unexpectedly smacked for carelessly using the familiar form of address, 'tu,' instead of the polite 'vous'. Others could remember nothing beyond what they were given for their seventh or even eighth birthdays.
People who say that their earliest memory is from such a late stage are usually rather embarrassed and concerned about it, wondering whether they are normal. They introduce their memory by saying, 'It may sound crazy, but...'. All we can say is that they are a statistical aberration but not alone; every study turns up such late first memories in people who are otherwise completely normal. Embarrassment about a late first memory is misplaced, as is the remarkable pride seen at the other end of the normal distribution, in people convinced they were only seven, four or two months old at the time. In the Scheepmaker collection they are represented by conductor Claudio Abbado ('I still remember the chaconne by Bach that my father played when I was two months old') and by Dutch writer Jan Wolkers, who said he recalled the floral-patterned fabric of the hood of the pram he lay in as a six-month-old baby. Anyone who starts talking about first memories with a fair-sized group of people will notice that a kind of competition emerges to see whose is earliest. Those who drop out of the running, with their memories of events from when they were three or four, listen with growing disbelief to stories about the things people remember from before their second or first birthdays, until even they are trumped by someone who can recall their own birth. Fortunately no sensible person expects a psychologist to settle the issue. The competition usually ends, incidentally, in discreet hilarity when a lady of a certain age with long grey hair parted in the middle starts talking about what she recalls of a previous life.
More interesting is the connection between age and the type of first memory. In his introduction Scheepmaker mentions journalist Dieter Zimmer, who distinguished between three types of memory recalled by the 70 people he asked: images, scenes and episodes. The category 'image' denotes precisely that: a single image, a fragment, sometimes merely a fleeting sensory impression. A 'scene' involves rather more: the location, the surroundings, the other people present; this is a memory of a situation, although still short and fragmentary. With an 'episode' there is some kind of development, an incident, an event, and in some cases the child actually does something. The boundaries between the three are of course fluid, though it is easy to point to typical examples. In the Scheepmaker collection the image of a handful of chestnuts on a sheet of newspaper recalled by writer Harry Mulisch belongs in the first category, as does the earliest memory of poet Simon Vinkenoog: 'I lay on my back and watched the sun play on the ceiling.' Examples of scenes include that sudden slap for saying 'tu', being lifted onto someone's shoulders to watch a procession, or visiting the circus and suddenly seeing an elephant's foot close to you. An example of an episode is Greek tourist board director Sakis Ioannides's frightening memory of being bullied by his sisters:
I was lying in bed when they hit me on the head and pretended to be sawing my skull open. They pulled the straw out of my head (as they described it), saying that without that straw I'd no longer be able to stand upright. Then they started to bounce around on the bed so that I did indeed keep falling down and at the same time I was looking under the pillows to find out where the straw had got to. When I was finally crying loudly enough, they stuffed the straw back into my head and stopped bouncing, so I was able to stay on my feet again.
In research that predates Scheepmaker's book – including Zimmer's study – early first memories often turn out to be images, while late memories are usually episodes. Scene-like first memories fall somewhere in between. Scheepmaker writes that he did not see those links in his own collection, and he points to the fragment of an image recalled by Borg from when he was seven. But if you arrange the 263 dated memories according to the three categories and then look at ages, you see precisely that sequence. Images, which account for 17 per cent of all the datable first memories, are linked to an average age of two years and ten months, scenes (53 per cent) to an average of three years and two months, and episodes (30 per cent) to four years and three months. So the difference between images and scenes is only four months, but between scenes and episodes almost 13. The first memories from before the age of one are mostly images and they include no episodes. Of the nine first memories from after the child turned seven, Borg's is the only one that can really be described as an image; the others are predominantly episodes. This connection between the child's age and the type of memory must be even more pronounced than it appears from these statistics, since with memories that could be categorised as images, the age of the child was more often missing than with scenes and episodes, probably because when looking back to later childhood there are more milestones to go by, such as starting kindergarten or primary school.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forgetting by DOUWE DRAAISMA, Liz Waters. Copyright © 2010 Douwe Draaisma. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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