Memory ... at my time of life is gradually becoming one of her own reminiscences.
—James Russell Lowell, “Democracy” (1884)
In Absalom, Absalom! we read:
It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation—(Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore violently. And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which—(Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—without gentleness. Which should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age, only—(Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died)—and died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield says—(Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin Compson.1
Faulkner here presents a scene of remembering. But the remembering is notably different from anything that we have thus far encountered. To begin with, it is not a matter of recollecting—where this means remembering in visual images to and for oneself. Instead, two people, Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson, are remembering certain things together, and they are doing so in words, not in images. Something at once social and verbal is happening: and therefore something we have not yet considered explicitly and for its own sake. Nor does what is happening here involve any of the other forms of memory discussed in chapter 3: primary memory, remembering-how, remembering-as, remembering-on-the-occasion-of, etc. The two interlocutors are engaged in an activity so thoroughly conjoint that none of the models considered in Part One—each of which presumes enactment by a single, discrete rememberer—is applicable. As if to signal this fact, Faulkner alternates parenthetical thoughts and remarks in a complex interplay that echoes and intensifies the deeply dialogical character of the situation.
At the same time, there is a noticeable absence of any trace of what we have come to call “mentalism” in the co-remembering realized by Quentin and Rosa. Whatever remembering occurs arises between them, not within their minds taken in isolation from each other. Memory enters in the form of what the German language designates as Zweisprache, literally “two-talk.” Rather than minds spinning and projecting recollections, remembering occurs in and as colloquy, common discourse; and this circumstance is further reinforced by its conveyance to us in the written format of Faulkner’s graphic two-person dialogue.
No less than in the case of reminding, we here transcend a paradigm whose exclusive focus and vehicle is the human mind. As reminders move us resolutely into our professional and personal environs, so reminiscing takes place primarily in the interpersonal domain of concrete language. But in the case of reminders the extra-mental appears in and through iconic, indicative, and (especially) adumbrative signs that need not have any strict social basis—any foundation in consensus or convention. We have seen that reminders can be established and maintained entirely by individual remindees. Reminiscing, in contrast, is much more consistently social in origin and operation; it belongs to the realm of what Heidegger would term Mitsein (“being-with-others”). For in its central cases it arises as discourse in the company of others: Quentin with Rosa, you with me, and (as a limiting case) myself with myself. It is a matter, in short, of remembering with others.
It is a striking fact that whereas the verbs “to remember” and “to recollect” both take a direct object, “to reminisce” does not. We do not reminisce something, we reminisce about it. In this regard, reminiscing is comparable to reminding: we are reminded of X or Y. But there remains a critical difference. In a circumstance of reminding, I am characteristically in a passive position, as is signified in such expressions as “I am reminded” or “that reminds me.” I am always dependent on a particular reminder, even if it is one of my own devising. In reminiscing, I assume a more active posture: I, or more typically we, reminisce about Z. I or we get in touch with the past actively, thanks to concerted efforts at talking about it, musing on it, and so on. Such a difference between reminding and reminiscing is not just a verbal matter. It reflects the fundamental difference between being thrust into a world of the ready-to-hand—where I am willy-nilly parasitic on the pre-existence of given reminders arranged around me—and being a participant in an ongoing conversation in which I am responsible for articulating the past in quite particular ways. The difference is as basic and perspicuous as that between being put in mind of a trip I once made to the Parthenon by merely receiving a postcard from Athens and talking about this same trip with the person who accompanied me. As the former situation is instantaneous and involuntary—it emerges by virtue of my mere apprehension of the postcard—the latter is both diachronie and voluntary: it takes time and effort (at least the effort of speaking) and is ipso facto an activity or performance.
If reminiscing thus contrasts revealingly with reminding—as well as with recollecting and other fundamental forms of remembering—it is more difficult to distinguish from two activities with which it is quite often allied: recounting and telling a story. It is tempting to subsume reminiscing under recounting, itself a form of the still more generic activity of retelling, under which both recounting and reminiscing fall. To recount is to retell by giving an account of events and experiences in written or spoken words. Recounting almost always involves a regulative narrative form, a form that allows the original order to be preserved while permitting diversions along the way.2 The narrative order is crucial; if no semblance of it persisted, the recounting would dissolve into a purely random relating. Reminiscing, however, need not be narrative in format, nor is it constrained to repeat the original order of events it sets forth. A reminiscer may pick out events in any order and does not have to retell them in the sequence of their actual occurrence. When we speak of “the springing up again of reminiscences,” we are pointing to this uneven, unconsecutive, and unpredictable dimension of reminiscing, a dimension which contrasts markedly with the regular reliability of recounting.
Story-telling is itself a special form of recounting, but one that is not confined to the relating of actual incidents. Stories bear not only on the real but on the imaginary, which they help to create. Their verbal-cum-narrative format, which they share with all recounting, is correspondingly freer, particularly with respect to observance of chronological order. By means of such techniques as flashback or flashforward, they may upset this order, not only reversing it but confusing it to the point of unrecognizability—as Faulkner himself so masterfully demonstrates in the above passage. Nevertheless, within the story itself, an order is respected, however irregular it may appear to be when measured by continuous, chronometric world-time. Or more exactly, the manifest order narrated may be irregular, but the latent narrative order itself (i.e., beginning-development-end) remains intact and recognizable.3
In reminiscing, there need be neither a manifest nor a latent narrative structure. For one thing, a given reminiscence may be too brief or too condensed to allow for anything like the distension required by narrative time. For another, even when there is considerable continuity in, and prolongation of, a given reminiscence, it can rarely be considered a matter of sheer development, that is, of steadily increasing insight, tension, or complication. Instead, when we reminisce, a certain laxity of direction or purpose abounds that disallows, or at least discourages, the kind of intensified build-up which is so characteristic of story-telling and which, under the designation of “drama,” is what produces and holds our interest as listeners or readers. A skilled storyteller relies on this build-up within the story line because of its gradually augmenting dramatic intensity, whereas a reminiscer may adhere to his or her own reminiscing through motives as disparate as the simple joy of re-experiencing the past, the challenge of confronting the past as past, a specific need for catharsis, etc.4
This is not to deny the presence of deep affinities between story-telling and reminiscing. Indeed, the very telling of one’s reminiscences to others induces or encourages a storylike form, and few can resist the temptation to embroider storywise upon otherwise banal reminiscences. But the existence of the temptation or tendency does not establish the equivalence of the two activities. The truth of the matter is that everyone—even someone as concerned with story as Faulkner—can reminisce without telling stories and tell stories without reminiscing.
It is one thing to say what reminiscing is not. It is quite another to determine what it is as a distinctive phenomenon in its own right, especially in the case of something so open-ended and even tenuous in its presentation. Let us single out four of its basic characteristics: reliving the past, reminiscentia, wistfulness, and its communal-discursive aspect.
Reliving the Past
To remember is to relive the past. But isn’t this true of all remembering? By no means! Some remembering is undertaken in order to recover information, either for its own sake or as an aid in various projects, e.g., those that involve relearning how to do something. But some remembering has no such utilitarian purpose; it just arises involuntarily and is savored as such: as sheer reliving of the past. Or if it is self-induced, it is undertaken for the simple joy of being able to recall something, quite apart from any given use or value: “I just like recalling those salad days, or that multiplication table,” etc. Reminiscing, whether involuntary or self-induced, is rarely undertaken for the sake of any particular concrete aim or gain. Insofar as it has any stateable aim at all, it is that of reliving the past.
To relive the past in reminiscence is not merely to re-present to ourselves certain experienced events or previously acquired items of information. Nor is it a question of searching for these things in memory or having them displayed there spontaneously. Rather, it is a matter of actively re-entering the “no longer living worlds”5 of that which is irrevocably past. In reliving the past, we try to re-enter such worlds not just as they were—which is, strictly speaking, impossible—but as they are now rememberable in and through reminiscence. That we do not aspire to their full reinstatement is indicated by the fact that adequate and satisfying reminiscing can occur without our having any explicit images of that which is reminisced about. This happens especially when we reminisce by just talking about the past. But it can also arise mutely when we re-experience a certain ambiance, emotion, or mood for which there is no corresponding image. Moreover, we do not even need to re-feel the original affective elements per se.6 Reminiscing can occur in the absence of exactly answering imagery or any corresponding emotion:
It may be said that two old soldiers are reliving the past when they are discussing and joking about some terrible events which they lived through. These old men may be having neither mental imagery of the events, nor may the original horror be, as it were, felt again.7
It would be misleading to claim that reliving the past and reminiscing are two separate descriptions of such a case as this. Rather, the two comrades are reliving the past by reminiscing: it is their reminiscing together that allows them to relive the past as they do. In reminiscing about it, they are reliving it.
Reliving the past by reminiscing is normally a highly selective affair. In any case it is not a matter of re-experiencing the whole past—not even the entirety of that part of the past, that world, upon which we are momentarily focusing in reminiscence. When two soldiers reminisce about their wartime experiences together, the war-world they relive is by no means the complete scene of which they were the witnesses. Not only has much been forgotten or repressed, but in no way is it requisite that the total scene return in reminiscing. Indeed, a given act of reminiscence may become all the more moving or poignant if it does not attempt to scan the whole of the original experience. Concentrating on just a few details may be quite effective enough: “Remember when the weather suddenly cleared?”; “Wasn’t it strange how quickly we reached that hill?”; “What a sodden mess that trench was after the initial barrage!” Since reminiscing does not attempt to recount the total action or experience, the existence of considerable gaps in the reminiscing, of glaring discontinuities in time and space, and even of significant inconsistencies in the retelling do not occasion the anxiety or concern they would arouse if the situation were one of straightforward reconstruction—or even if it were a scene of sheer story-telling, which must retain a certain continuity of narration and consistency of detail in order to hold the attention of the storyteller’s audience.
Reminiscence, then, can be very “spotty” and yet still count as full-fledged reliving of the past. This is so for the reason that the past is not being relived as it unfolded in strict succession but only as certain happenings stood out and were remarked at the time. Consequently there is usually a marked restriction to two classes of events: what befell me or us; or what I or we accomplished, or failed to accomplish, in certain circumstances. Hence the tendency to reminisce about calamities of various kinds on the one hand and about diverse moments of triumph on the other. In either case, reminiscing seems to involve a certain ingrained egocentrism, a tendency to recount only what concerns one’s own being, one’s own fate (even if this is a fate shared with others).
Such self-centeredness, far from being a defect, is in fact essential to reliving the past through reminiscing about it. For this reliving amounts to insinuating ourselves back into the past—re-experiencing a peculiar cul-de-sac, a pocket of time into which only one’s own self, accompanied or not by immediate companions, can possibly fit. Indeed, it is the very snugness of this fit between the present self and its past experiences that we at once need (as a precondition) and seek (so as to strengthen the bond between the two). In this light, reminiscing can be said to be a way, an essentially privileged and especially powerful way, of getting back inside our own past more intimately, of reliving it from within.
This effort at infiltration is to be contrasted with ordinary recollection, in which we often seek merely to recall certain experiences, dates, or facts—where “recall” means quite literally to call back to mind again. In this re-collective activity of summoning something back into the state of consciousness, there is no concerted effort to enter more intimately into the specific content of what is remembered; we allow the mnemonic presentation to arise without feeling an urgent need to delve further into it. Reminiscing itself often employs recollected material, but instead of resting content with a contemplative mode of apprehension, it undertakes the very different tactic of revivifying a previous experience. In this way the reminiscer enters into a more active alliance with the remembered past.
By “revivifying” I mean the way in which reliving the past in reminiscence is in fact realized. It consists of three distinguishable factors:
(1) Myself-as reminiscer: I enter into reminiscence in the expectation of being refreshed or rekindled by the experience, though I need not do this in any deliberate way.
(2) The reminisced-about: This comes back to life (and not just to mind) in the activity of reminiscing, which revives remembered content in a peculiarly vivid way.
(3) Myself-in-relation-to-the-reminisced-about: When reminiscence is fulfilling or successful, there is a momentary merging of my mnemonic consciousness with that which is remembered, a sense of becoming one with what I remember.
When all three factors are in play and in animated interaction with each other, revivification occurs in its fullest format: each factor serves to validate the other two in the reminiscential reliving of the past. Thanks to this resuscitative action, I can more easily and spontaneously merge with my past in that intimate intro-involvement that is so characteristic of reminiscing.
It is largely due to the work of revivification that any connection with the past in reminiscing is more than academic—more than “antiquarian” in Nietzsche’s term.8 When we reminisce, we are not going back into the past to reconstitute it as an object of historiological inquiry. We return, rather, as persons whose present interests and needs are most fully met by reminiscing. I do the reminiscing not for the sake of the past as past but for the sake of myself: that is, for the pleasure of the good that it will effect in the present. Or more precisely, the revivifying of the past that occurs so prominently in reminiscing is at the same time a revitalizing of the present in which the reminiscing is taking place.9
Reminiscentia
It is a revealing fact about reminiscing that although it can take place wholly internally or psychically—as when we “just muse” about the past—it will sometimes be provoked by an external factor acting as a memorial support. Indeed, it may even seek out this support when it reaches an end of its own resources. An example will help to illustrate this point:
In sorting through some old family papers, I come upon several stacks of documents that bear on the death of my grandmother. Just perceiving a few items in these stacks sets in motion a train of reminiscences concerning circumstances at the time of her death. Seeming to have exhausted my reminiscential supply, I discover that I wish to delve into the documents more completely so as to foster further reminiscing—and this is exactly what happens as I look into the documents more carefully.
This example makes it clear that what can be called “reminiscentia” include anything that survives from the epoch reminisced about, including letters and photographs, relics and souvenirs of all kinds, indeed any object or trace of an object that remains and is presently available in perception. Each of these serves as an aide-mémoire of a particular kind. Rather than functioning strictly as reminders or as records of the past—that is, as directing us to take some action or as documentary evidence alone—they act as inducers of reminiscence. What counts here is not the accuracy with which they reproduce or suggest the past (as it would in the very different context of historical reconstruction); instead, it is their special aptitude for arousing a reminiscent state of mind that matters.
And in what does this aptitude consist? It consists in supplying just those cues that aid the reminiscer to relive the past in the manner described above. In particular, it is a question of providing details that augment revivification by increasing one’s sense of personal involvement with the period being reminisced about. In my example, this took quite specific forms, e.g., lists of names of those who had come to offer condolences upon my grandmother’s death. Perceiving these lists, I was not merely enabled but actively encouraged to reminisce in a quite definite way about those visitors. A “line” of reminiscence was thus opened up that might otherwise have remained closed off or been pursued much more dimly.
All pertinent cues, temporal or spatial, object-based or situational, deserve the appellation “reminiscentia” inasmuch as they offer appropriate supports for reminiscing. As such, they enlighten the present as mementos of things past. To come into more intimate contact with any of them is to be given material assistance in one’s reminiscential projects—projects which can be expanded, or at least clarified, with their aid. In this way, they supplement one’s already available, and normally quite intangible, resources, providing these resources with a touchstone in the spatio-temporally concrete. One caveat is in order, however. This is that such reminiscentia are rarely, if ever, necessary to reminiscing. Supplements, however valuable they may be as conducive cues, are not preconditions.10 We can still reminisce, and reminisce quite satisfactorily, in the absence of their solicitation:
A soap box covered with green cloth supported the dim little photographs in crumbling frames she liked to have near her couch. She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy beach, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.11
Thus even if we do not really have to have aides-mémoire in the form of concrete reminiscentia, it is nevertheless characteristically the case that, like the woman here described, we tend to surround ourselves with them and avail ourselves of their help whenever possible.
Recourse to reminiscentia has one further significance. We reach out, faute de mieux, for fragments surviving from the past as a response to knowing that what is now past has fled forever and thus cannot be recaptured intact in its pristine format. As Husserl says, “I can relive (nachleben) the present, but it [the present] can never be given again.”12 If it, the forever-flown past moment, cannot last as such, then we will characteristically cling in compensation (or consolation) to what is extant, however superficial or trivial this may appear when compared to past presence itself. Seeking out and holding onto reminiscentia is admittedly like clutching at straws cast into the corrosive wind of time. Chaff as they may be, these straws at least signify the fact that there was that particular past world from which they stem, and we often treasure them even—and precisely—in this minimalist role.
Wistfulness
Another aspect of the same circumstance is the peculiar wistfulness it may inspire in us. We are rendered wistful by the nonretrievability of certain experiences, and our reminiscing about them at once expresses this mood and represents an effort to deal with it constructively. One of the main meanings of “wistful” itself is “reminiscently evocative,” as in the phrase “deserted buildings above which wistful flags fly bravely.”13 Like brave but ultimately futile flags, our reminiscences evoke the many deserted buildings of past worlds. The acute wistfulness they can occasion constitutes an acknowledgment of the ineluctable transience of human experience: a transience which we often cope with by engaging in reminiscence itself.
It is revealing in this connection to notice that “wistful” derives originally from “wishful.” The basic wish at stake is, per impossible, to fuse fully with the past we reminisce about. What we know we cannot accomplish in reality, we can still wish for; and this wishing, a wishing in the face of acknowledged impossibility, becomes quite naturally wistful in character. Hence the common meanings of wistful as “full of timorous longing or unfulfilled desire”; “melancholy yearning”; “musingly sad: pensive, mournful.”14 Both sides of the circumstance of reminiscing are captured in these dictionary definitions. On the one hand, the sadness, mourning, and unfulfillment reflect the realization of the past’s very pastness, its being irrevocably over and done with. On the other hand, the longing, desire, and yearning point to the refractory presence of a wish to return to, and to be still present in, this now elapsed past. Such a wish, in such a situation, tends to be wistful indeed. If it is true that the present “can never be given again,” this is precisely because once it has been given once—once it has been lived through and has transpired—it has eo ipso become a past present. What occurs in any subsequent present can only be its revival in memory or its survival in traces, but it never revives or survives as the present, in the first-timeness of an aboriginal experience. Time may well be “the fluid cradle of events,”15 but it takes away as much as it gives rise to. We respond to its two-sided action with that ambivalent admixture of despair and hope so characteristic of wistful reminiscing.
Confronted with time’s permanently “passifying” power, one can hardly help but be ambivalent: sad that certain experiences have ended, even if we are hopeful as to their sequelae. The ambivalence is such that we can be wistful even when reminiscing about difficult or painful events: “Some day, perhaps, it will be a joy to remember even these things.”16 The pain inherent in “these things” is transmuted into the peculiar pleasure of reminiscing about them. Such pleasure, intrinsic to reminiscence, has little to do with hedonism. It is a peculiarly reflective or “ruminescent” pleasure that is composed equally of an acceptance of past pain and of a determination not to be overcome by it. Precisely the finality of the past itself—of the past qua past—comes to our aid as we realize that the pain, however excrutiating it was, is now over: now that we can reminisce about it in the present, taking pleasure in this very activity and perhaps gaining a sense of minor triumph as well.
On the basis of just such a realization, we often experience reminiscing as a “bittersweet” activity, one in which sadness, even fear and foreboding, is not unmixed with pleasure. Indeed, the melancholy tenor of some reminiscences, and the anxious or apprehensive character of others, is not only tolerated but may be actively sought. Moreover, the complex phenomenon we call “nostalgia” indulges in much the same ambivalent, bittersweet sentiment: the pain (algos) of being absent merging with the pleasure of returning home (nostos).17 Bittersweetness pervades reminiscing of many kinds and lends body to its wistfulness. It is evident that the sweetness stems ultimately from the basic pleasure we take in recollecting things situated in the remote past—a past we can now afford to savor, thanks to its very distance from the present—while the bitterness bears on the fact of transience, on the past’s immutable closedness. It is also evident that in reminiscing wistfully, we combine the bitter with the sweet, cherishing or honoring a past we might otherwise regret or vilify.
Communal-Discursive Aspect
We tend to think of remembering in general as a mainly introspective affair carried out in the privacy of the psyche. We often consider it to be a search for information stored in some intrapsychic retreat to which the individual rememberer has a privileged, perhaps even a unique, mode of access. Thinking this way, we take the verbalizing and sharing of memories to be an adventitious activity. Why should we bother to put into words and relate to others what we possess so securely from within, at a level of experience that is at once pre-linguistic and pre-social? And yet when we reminisce we find ourselves doing both of these supposedly otiose things—and doing them spontaneously and unselfconsciously. Moreover, we do not feel ourselves to be merely “translating” private memories into public artifacts as if from some compunction to communicate. We sense ourselves to be fully engaged in an autonomous activity having its own formative, indeed transformative, power.
The most immediate, as well as the most telling, clue we have as to the inherently communal-discursive aspect of reminiscing is the mere fact that it fluorishes in the company of others. Not only does it frequently occur in a specifically social setting, it is also actively solicited by such a setting. Not that any explicit request is then required—indeed, it would be distinctly odd to say “let’s reminisce together now”—but just being together suffices, as it also does in the case of story-telling. Unlike the situation of story-telling, however, it matters deeply just who is together in the scene of reminiscing. Whether those present be relatives or friends, or mere acquaintances or even strangers, they must all share to some degree the experiences being reminisced about. For what evokes and sustains reminiscence is the possessing of certain common or like experiences. I say “common or like” in order to make clear that the reminiscer and those who are co-present with him or her need not have had literally the same experiences. In fact, we may distinguish between the following three circumstances:
STRICT COMMONALITY OF PAST EXPERIENCES
This is a condition, not of reminiscence in general but only of co-reminiscence, in which conjointly experienced events form the very topic of the reminiscence; indeed, one is here quite frequently comparing common experiences, sometimes with the explicit aim of making corrections or modifications in the details of the reminiscence (“I seem to remember that Jeffrey was there”; “No, he wasn’t since I remember seeing him leaving the building earlier that evening”). Because close friends or family members have more experiences strictly in common, they will tend to co-reminisce more than other groups, although people hitherto unknown to each other may co-reminisce about an event which they all happened to have experienced (“Woodstock,” or the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969). But even where experiences have been quite directly shared by members of a given group, it is not necessary that they all experienced precisely the same facts or features of the events in question. So long as all the co-reminiscers were present at the scene, the condition of sharing is met. What each person apprehended may vary considerably in exact detail, as may the memories that each person now recalls. One of the primary motives for co-reminiscing is no doubt that of checking out each other’s memories in view of differing experiential modes and perspectives. Furthermore, by reminiscing with others, we may construct a more complete tableau than we could ever effect in reminiscing while alone: “I remember him praising Locke’s Essay, whereas you recall his irony in doing so—now a fuller picture emerges.”
DIFFUSE COMMONALITY OF ERA AND AMBIANCE
Instead of having been present together at precisely the same scene, co-reminiscers may share in a conjointly experienced era or epoch of their lives: “how it was to be a civilian at the time of the Vietnam War,” “the political climate in France under DeGaulle,” “growing up in Topeka in the 1950’s,” etc. In such cases there is a common participation not in particular events but in the ambiance or atmosphere attaching to the era in question. However diffuse it may be, this ambiance is at once the medium of the co-reminiscing and its explicit theme. For we are remembering together how it felt to imbibe a general atmosphere—to be present in its midst. Of course, this atmosphere is not independent of particular events, about which we can co-reminisce in the sense discussed above. But we can also recall together the atmosphere itself, the pervasive mood of the times.
LACK OF STRICT OR DIFFUSE COMMONALITY
Reminiscing, though not co-reminiscing, is possible in a group some of whose members were neither direct witnesses of an original scene nor participants in its overall ambiance. In this case, those who listen to the primary reminiscer must either actively liken the reminisced-about scene or atmosphere to something significantly similar in their own experience, or imagine the original scene or atmosphere vividly enough to feel that they might have been there, that they could very well have been there had circumstances conspired or permitted. Either way, the listener is drawn into the reminiscing, and assumes its specific content as if it were his or her own experience, though without coming to the point of actually believing that it was (as would be required in full-fledged co-reminiscing). An effective reminiscer is someone who can elicit such likening or imagining on the part of his or her listeners, even if these latter cannot be considered co-reminiscers in any strict sense.
Different as they are in their basic structure, all of the above three situations are interpersonal in nature. Each involves a minimal dyadic unit of reminiscer-cum-listener, and this unit is indefinitely expandable insofar as both reminiscer and listener may be plural in number. It is also modifiable by the substitution of co-reminiscer for listener—in which case, each party becomes at once reminiscer for and listener to the other, thereby realizing an intricate interplaying of roles as well as an equality of status. In the communal context, co-reminiscing may be considered something of an ideal type, perhaps even that toward which all reminiscing tends by its very nature. Reminiscers naturally seek partners in a common enterprise of reliving the past wistfully—partners who are not only listeners but themselves active contributors to the process of reminiscing.
However obvious it may seem, this observation nevertheless serves to distinguish reminiscing quite decisively from other forms of remembering so far considered, none of which exhibits any such pronounced communitarian tendency. Some of these forms even eschew an interpersonal setting—for example, primary memory, communion with one’s personal past in recollection, and the remembering done in the course of dreaming. Other forms involve interlocutors in various phases of their operation, though not in a manner essential to their structure: thus skillful remembering-how may be done with, in the presence of, and even for the sake of others, while reminding can arise in an interpersonal nexus of relations (e.g., when others leave reminders for us or vice versa). But both remembering-how and reminding can also take place successfully on a strictly solitary basis without any sense of anomaly or loss. In contrast, the primary thrust in reminiscing is toward others: so much so that we may even say that co-reminiscing is normative for reminiscing as a whole. And if this is so, two corollaries follow immediately:
COROLLARY #1: REMINISCING IS MAINLY ADDRESSED TO OTHERS
As an engagement with other rememberers, whether undertaken with others in person or only with them in mind, reminiscences are addressed—with an important exception to be treated in section IV—to others. In the ideal case, these others are themselves present, and a circle of co-reminiscers is constellated. But they may be implicated in other modes as well:
(1) as absent: when others are addressed as if present. This often occurs when those who figure into a particular reminiscence are absent from the actual scene of reminiscing but are nonetheless invoked as quasi-present during the reminiscing itself: “dear departed leader, be with us today as we remember your presence among us.”
(2) as fictitious: when others who make no claim to actuality even as absent are nonetheless potent presences as addressed in and by an author’s reminiscing. Such others may be generalized or typified (e.g., “anyone present at the [imagined] carnival”); or they may be depersonalized altogether (e.g., “a member of the Snopes family”); in these cases, the other may be addressed as judge, muse, or witness of one’s reminiscing as well as an equal or co-respondent.
The very diversity of others who can be addressed when we reminisce reinforces its status as an inherently interpersonal activity.
COROLLARY #2: REMINISCING IS MOST FULLY REALIZED IN LANGUAGE
Discourse, as Heidegger claims, is one of the “equiprimordial” structures of human existence and thus never entirely separable from it.18 Indeed, it is the main way in which human beings convey their experiences to each other: “In discourse Being-with (Mitsein) becomes ‘explicitly’ shared; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been taken hold of and appropriated.”19 Reminiscing, especially as co-reminiscing, involves resharing already shared experiences, and its discursive or verbal form aids in the full accomplishment of the resharing. It is possible to reminisce wordlessly—as when photographs of a shared-in scene are passed around among the original participants—but we naturally resort to language on most occasions. We do so for two major reasons.
On the one hand, words facilitate reminiscing by allowing it to become independent of particular material supports connected with the original scene—supports that can erode and vanish altogether. Words, in contrast, are much less perishable because they are not material entities in the first place.20 As the most effective and enduring form of symbolism which human beings have devised, words provide a collective and massive framework for communication and expression at many levels. To have recourse to this framework is of inestimable advantage in conveying one’s reminiscences to others.
On the other hand, this same system makes possible a considerable refinement of expression: an exactitude of reference as well as a subtlety of insight unmatched by nonverbal systems of signification. If it is true that “to significations, words accrue,”21 it is also the case that words delineate and develop significations far beyond the point at which other forms of semiosis leave them. Verbal language has an extraordinary capacity for clarifying and conjoining otherwise dim and disjointed meanings or thoughts. As such, it is an unmatched “articulation of intelligibility,”22 and it is not surprising that reminiscing, in its zeal to convey itself to others in a maximally communicative manner, assumes a predominantly discursive-verbal format. For the most part, reminiscing is talking the past out; it is teasing the past into talk, reliving it in and by words.
There is a final aspect of this matter that deserves our attention. We reminisce not only to savor but to understand, or re-understand, the past more adequately—where “understand” retains something of its root meaning of “standing under,” gaining an intimate perspective not otherwise attainable. In reminiscing, we try to get back inside a given experience—to insinuate ourselves into it, as I have said—so as to come to know it better. Better, perhaps, than we knew it in its first flurry, which may well have been more disorienting than clarifying. The sudden onset of the experience—the “immediate rush of transition,”23 as Whitehead called it—may have been such as to leave us breathless. And speechless! Without words to specify various parts and points of an experience, it tends to fuse with other experiences in a flux of indetermination. Thanks to its discursiveness, reminiscing transforms mere experiences into articulate and enduring wholes possessing sufficient integrity to be understood in memory.
“Understanding and discourse,” said Plato, “are one and the same thing.”24 However exaggerated this claim may be in certain respects,25 it is a fitting description of what is accomplished in reminiscing. For our understanding of the past in and through reminiscing occurs mainly by means of its discursive ex-plication: its unfolding in fully articulated words. Such articulation is the primary way a past experience comes to be comprehended in reminiscing. The reminiscential return to the past is a return via discourse—via the word, logos—and as such it is an understanding remembering of it.
Just here you may find yourself asking: Can I not reminisce to myself? Granting that reminiscing as a discursive and wistful reliving of the past prospers in the company of others, may it not take place in private as well? What do we make of those situations in which I simply “muse” upon the past by myself, pensively reliving it in a ruminescent mood? Would we wish to dismiss this as an inauthentic case of reminiscing? Surely not. Just as we have had to allow that reminiscing can occur between people who have not shared precisely the same experiences, so we must now admit that it can arise in the absence of any others at all. There is such a thing as reminiscing to myself, “auto-reminiscing.”
As with psychical reminders—with which it can in fact be closely allied on occasion—auto-reminiscing may be considered as a privative, but quite legitimate, form of reminiscing in general. This is evident when we realize that in reminiscing to ourselves we encounter versions of all four features that characterize more central instances of reminiscing and co-reminiscing. We relive the past wistfully in reflective moments of self-musing. Further, we are provoked to do so by various reminiscentia in the immediate environs, including our own memories acting as reminiscential cues: as is signified in the epigraph by Lowell cited at the beginning of this chapter. And there is even, perhaps contrary to our expectations, a communal-discursive aspect of auto-reminiscing. When I reminisce to myself, I am treating myself as a reminiscential partner—as an other who listens to himself. Rimbaud’s dictum finds striking application here: “le je est un autre.”26 Moreover, in self-engaged and self-engaging reminiscing, I am not falling short of language, whether I auto-reminisce in inner speech or out loud. If all thinking is a “dialogue of the soul with itself,”27 auto-reminiscing can be considered a matter of proto-communal discourse. When I talk the past out to myself in auto-reminiscing, I establish an intra-dyadic community within my own soul.
The discursive dimension of auto-reminiscing is not limited to speech alone. As with other forms of reminiscing, it can also occur as writing. Indeed, writing may even be its optimal mode of realization. Let us consider several cases in point. Thanks to the essentially public status of writing as a graphic and thus fully visible medium—as a matter of tracing, of what Derrida calls “espacement”28—we shall see that each of these cases bursts the bounds of strict privacy and pursues, even if unwittingly or unwillingly, a communal telos.
DIARIES AND JOURNALS
Whether destined for publication or not, diaries and journals are instances of auto-reminiscence in which the written form is essential. As written, they fix and stabilize an author’s understanding of his or her life, making it available not only to the author but to others as well. Diaries and journals are therefore always at least potentially communal, sometimes against the express intent of those who compose them. Being in principle open to inspection by friends, relatives, or future biographers, they represent a curious blend of pensées intimes and pensées ouvertes. They are intensely intimate insofar as they record ideas and impressions that would not normally be announced overtly to others,29 and yet, precisely as written, they are something to which these same others ultimately have access. Hence the ambivalence with which many diary or journal entries are written down in the first place and in which one sees at once a desire to reveal and to conceal. Hence, too, a tendency to address the diary as if it were itself an interlocutor: “My diary. I have managed to confide all my thoughts freely to you; you are my best friend on this earth, the most faithful, the most sincere.”30 In the auto-reminiscing of diaries and journals we can therefore detect, in the form of intrapersonal self-address, an essentially interpersonal tendency toward discourse-with-another, albeit another part of one’s own self. Such self-directed discourse is itself a form of reliving the past—reliving it by and in writing—and it differs from other reminiscential types of reliving only insofar as it usually bears on events of the immediate past, much as a dream will incorporate the day’s residues into its own manifest content.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS
Although these two forms of writing are also self-focused—in each case one is giving an extensive account of one’s own life—one is now directing one’s discourse not to oneself but to others, i.e., those others who will read one’s account in print. The communalizing penchant which is tacit and self-enclosed in the auto-reminiscing of diaries and journals here becomes explicit, since “publication,” the public disclosure of one’s life, is now an express aim. This move into the overtly public domain brings about two corresponding modifications. On the one hand, as an entire life-time is often the subject matter of an autobiography or memoir, the time-scope of reminiscing is characteristically more distended. Hence whole chapters, covering whole years, decades, or epochs, replace the daily entries of diaries and journals; and an effort is usually made to touch upon each significant segment of a lifetime—if not in one volume, then in six or seven!31 On the other hand, a concern for accuracy of detail often manifests itself in this more exposed form of self-revelation, open as it is to public scrutiny and criticism from the very first moment of publication. It is not at all surprising, then, to find that Vladimir Nabokov avidly sought out relatives and other close witnesses of his personal past before publishing his autobiography entitled Speak, Memory!32
Despite the considerable interest and power inherent in written reminiscences—and apart from their value in showing us how the communal-discursive dimension emerges even in the most private forms of auto-reminiscing—it remains the case that reminiscing in the oral mode is most fully paradigmatic for the phenomenon as a whole. Such a claim is based on the straightforward observation that reminiscing in speech is the most thoroughly dialectical form of reminiscing. In full-blown co-reminiscing, the interlocutors can “trade” reminiscences more completely and more flexibly than in other reminiscential situations. They can do so more completely insofar as they can correct and augment each other, something that is difficult or impossible to achieve in silent or written auto-reminiscing; and this is done more flexibly because of the ebb and flow of the dialogue itself, allowing for more nuanced assessments. The understanding of the past attained in such dialectically structured co-reminiscing is a genuine co-understanding that cannot be accomplished in solitude or by proffering writing to an anonymous public.
The special virtue of reminiscing out loud is evident even in circumstances that lack any intersubjective reciprocity or dialogue. In eulogies, for example, the speaker will often employ reminiscences as a primary topic of his or her discourse. Such overtly unilateral reminiscing can be entirely appropriate and efficacious on the occasion, even though the person eulogized may be absent or dead and members of the audience are reduced to silence. The latter could doubtless co-reminisce, and may well do so before or after the formal ceremony; but they need not do so for the situation to be thoroughly reminiscential. Much the same one-sided circumstance obtains in psychoanalysis, in which the patient’s open reminiscing is often met with by silence on the part of the analyst. As in the eulogy, the reminiscing that is realized in this apparently inequitable setting is no less forceful or insightful for failing to achieve co-reminiscing in any strict sense. In both circumstances, the past is talked out in a closely-knit (if temporary) communitas composed of speaker and listener(s). Even in the absence of dialogical interchange, the reminiscing remains valid and effective.
The psychoanalytic situation, considered as a scene of reminiscence, has yet another significance. It repeats, in considerable intensity and depth, experiences and processes that occur in the course of everyday life, especially in the setting of one’s family or close friends. These latter, our proximate associates, are often, perhaps always, reminiscential presences themselves. We reminisce not merely about them (in isolated auto-reminiscence) and with them (in full co-reminiscence) but through them (when they present themselves to us as reminiscent of persons other than themselves). Aspects of all three options are in evidence in the dialogue between Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson with which this chapter opened. Any interpersonal situation may include or intimate complexity of this order. But psychoanalysis thrives on it. As in so many other ways as well—some of which will be explored later in this book33—the psychoanalytic situation represents a highly condensed, and highly revealing, version of extra-analytic experience. In particular, it is a prototype of reminiscential experience realized in the presence of intimates who not only reminisce together but reminisce in and beyond each other—in the presence and person of one another and beyond the merely conscious cognition and recognition of each by the other.
Reminiscing in this extended sense is at once a transcending of the historical and perceptual limits of the immediate situation—the present discourse and its actual or virtual interlocutors—and a return to a past of which one has been forgetful up to this point. Such a past pre-exists the present, and yet it is resuscitable in reminiscence: in that communalized discourse which relives the past in question, often wistfully and just as often aided by reminiscentia of various kinds. As the slave in the Meno recovered knowledge he had so thoroughly forgotten that he never realized he possessed it in the first place—the recovery owing much to his dialectical cross-examination by Socrates and to reminiscentia in the shape of diagrams drawn in the sand—in psychoanalysis we recover an acquaintance with the past which we have long since repressed. Something similar occurs in the co-reminiscing we do with friends and family; and it also happens in intense auto-reminiscence. Through all these forms of reminiscing, we become reacquainted with the past, gaining an intimacy with it that we may not have experienced when we first encountered it. Retelling this past in discourse of several sorts—Platonic dialogues themselves combine spoken with written reminiscing—we articulate its structure and come to know it from within again. We come to know it better, more completely and more poignantly, than if we had left it unreminisced, un-unfolded in logos, un-explicated in “the dark backward and abysm of time.”34