Memory Theater

by Simon Critchley

  Yates tries to show how a counter-history of the Occident can be traced through the cultivation of mnemotechnic systems, the textual basis for which can be traced back at least as far as Socrates’ denunciation of writing as a form of artificial, external memory in the Phaedrus. The idea begins with the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was reciting a poem in a house when the ceiling collapsed. Somehow he escaped, although everybody else was crushed to death. Although the bodies of the victims were unrecognizably mangled by the gravity of the fall, Simonides was able to recall the precise places where the guests were sitting. With the association of memory with locus and location, the idea of a memory house, memory palace, or memory theater was born. The time of speech could be mastered by the spatial recollections of loci, of topoi. One would walk around in one’s memory as if in a building or, better, storehouse, inspecting the objects therein. Saint Augustine, trained as a teacher of rhetoric, even went looking for God in memory, only to discover there was “no place” where he could be found.

  Very singular is this art of the memory theater. Records suggest that the construction of such theaters in antiquity reflected the proportions of classical architecture, but in an unclassical spirit, concentrating their choices on irregular places and avoiding symmetrical orders. They were full of human imagery, active and dramatic, beautiful or grotesque. In all cases, memorable. They remind one more of figures in some Gothic cathedral rather than classical art proper. Appearing utterly amoral, the purpose of the images is to give an emotional impetus to memory by means of their idiosyncrasy or strangeness. This kind of artificial memory was common in antiquity. Seneca, a teacher of rhetoric, could recite two thousand names in the order in which they had been given. Simplicius, a friend of Saint Augustine, could recite Virgil backwards. (I once met a Swede at a party in Stockholm who could sing every Swedish entry to the Eurovision Song Contest since 1958—you just said the year, 1978 say, and he would begin: “Dinga, dinga dong / Binga, binga bong”.) The striking images in a memory theater would arouse intense inner powers of visualization to aid recollection.

  There was always an ancient connection between the art of memory and forms of occult Hermeticism, especially astrology. Metrodorus of Skepsis is said to have written on the order of the images of the zodiac all that he wanted to remember. But Yates shows how this ancient memory tradition is powerfully reanimated in the classicism and occultism of the Italian Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato into Latin, also translated the Corpus Hermeticum and the dialogues with Hermes Trismegistus. When the art of memory met the new teachings of the Renaissance with their belief in the divinity of man, then recollection became the via regia for recalling the entirety of knowledge from its first principles. With the mastery of the right techniques of memory, total recall would be possible and the human would become divine. The memory theater was the microcosm of the divine macrocosm of the universe.

  The Renaissance memory theater announces a novel juncture in the history of memory. The architecture is no longer the Gothic cathedral by which the human creature might recall the totality of God’s creation, from the Fall to Incarnation and Resurrection through to the Last Judgment. On the contrary, the mind and memory of man are divine, having the powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination. The art of memory becomes a Hermetic, occult, and implicitly heretical art. For the Catholic Church, incarnation is not a two-way street.

  The most audacious and, indeed, memorable version of a Renaissance memory theater is that of Giulio Delminio Camillo, who was born around 1480. Although facts are scarce, Camillo reportedly built a small wooden version of his memory theater in Venice, which various luminaries visited. In a letter to Erasmus, Viglius Zuichemus writes, “They say that Giulio Camillo has constructed a certain Amphitheater, a work of wonderful skill, in which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.” The eminently rational Erasmus was not amused.

  In 1530, Camillo went to Paris at the request of King Francis I of France. He had been given a large pension in order to build a full-scale version of the memory theater. Apparently, it was never finished, although there were reports of various maquettes being produced. In 1554, after Camillo’s death, a manuscript was published in Venice with the title L’Idea del Theatro dell’eccellen. M. Giulio Camillo. The text gives a prose description of the proposed theater divided into seven chapters, which describe the nature of the seven grades or steps of the theater. Yates produced a detailed two-dimensional schema of the theater where the seven steps are intersected by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The normal theater function is reversed. The solitary spectator of the spectacle stands onstage gazing at the images in the auditorium. And, as in ancient theaters, the most distinguished guests sat at the front; the most important items of recollection would be in the lowest place in the theater, il primo grado del Theatro.

  The theater in some ways resembled a vast and highly ornamental filing cabinet. The auditorium of the wooden theater was filled with many various and striking figures bedecked with seemingly obscure details and decorations: some symbols simply reflected the elements of the trivium and quadrivium that constituted the canon of the liberal arts. But other symbols were more obscure: a blindfolded woman standing on a serpent bearing scales in one hand denoted the various elements of natural law and its triumph over criminality; a bloodied pelican represented the mystery of the Eucharist and a reminder of the doctrine of Christ’s kenosis; and so on. Interestingly, the theater was circular and globe-like. It obviously recalled the Vitruvian circle that circumscribes the perfection of human form, which is itself an image and reflection of the cosmos. On this view, the very idea of theater, at the core of the Italian Renaissance with the construction of the Teatro Olympico in Vicenza in the 1580s, is heresy: the unity of the human and the divine.

  The ancient art of memory found its most powerful advocate in the formidable personage of Giordano Bruno, born in 1548. If Copernicus ignited a revolution in astronomy and our entire thinking about the universe, then it was Bruno who spread that fire all across Europe and who was finally engulfed by the conflagration. His theories of an infinite universe and a multiplicity of worlds, combined with his fascination with the Hermetic tradition of magic and the arts of memory, led to multiple charges of heresy.

  Following his excommunication in Italy and an accusation of murder, Bruno settled for a time in Paris, London, Oxford, and various university towns in Germany. In 1591, he made the fatal move of returning to Italy, where he was tried for heresy, briefly in Venice and for seven long years in Rome. After being condemned to death for refusing to retract his views, he famously said to his judges, “Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it.” He was gagged and burned alive on the Campo de’ Fiori. Bruno has also always been seen as the dissenting enemy of a repressive Catholic Church. In many small Italian towns the Piazza Giordano Bruno stands directly opposite the main Catholic Church, often at the initiative of the local communist party.

  Bruno was the Simon Magus figure of a Hermetic tradition of the arts of memory. In Frances Yates’s words, its central doctrine is, “All is in all in nature. So in the intellect all is in all. And memory can memorize all in all.” Through techniques of memory, the human being can achieve absolute knowledge and become divine. For Bruno, to understand is to speculate with images, where the human mind is the mirror of the cosmos which functions through powerful, proto-Jungian archetypes. Through the divine power of the imagination, the intellect can seize hold of the whole.

  Bruno’s art of memory is enshrined in texts like Torch of the Thirty Statues from 1588, where towering mythological statues embody a Michelangelesque memory: Apollo, naked in his chariot, his head nimbed with solar rays, is the Monad or One; Saturn, brandishing his sickle, is the Beginning or Time; Minerva is the divine in man reflecting the divine universe; the infigurable Orcus or Abyss signifies the
thirst for divine infinity.

  Bruno was an occupant of the French embassy in London between 1583 and 1586, the key years for the inception of the English poetic renaissance, ushered in by Fulke Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, and his group. These people were close to Bruno during his London years and he also met with John Dee, the Hermetic philosopher and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, who was the teacher of Sidney and Greville. Indeed, some believe that Greville was the author of plays attributed to Shakespeare, some of which were lost. Although such speculations are dubious, there is documentary evidence connecting Greville to Shakespeare and indeed mentioning that the former was the latter’s “master” (they both hailed from Warwickshire). Maybe the young Will found admittance into the circles of the Hermetic art of memory.

  Such speculations find some anchor in history if we consider the writings of another Hermetic philosopher of the period, Robert Fludd. One of Yates’s most far-reaching contentions in The Art of Memory is that the memory space described in Fludd’s obscure treatises on the two worlds (the Utriusque Cosmi), and which he describes as “public theaters,” may reflect or even anticipate the circular architecture of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

  Is it not at least plausible to speculate that the Globe Theatre, with its heavens over part of the stage, complete with zodiacal symbols, was not some adapted bear pit or inn yard, as is commonly thought, but an elaborate and geometrically exacting theater of memory, a kind of machine for recalling the whole, a mortal portal for touching the divine, a microcosm for the cosmic macrocosm. Shakespearean theater might thus be the continuation of ancient and Renaissance traditions of the art of memory, a concrete building that embodied the operations of occult memory. If “all the world’s a stage,” then the theater is the stage of the world itself: its mirror and key.

  The wilder excesses of Yates’s book fascinated me in the mid-1980s, as they had attracted Michel in the late 1960s. For example, the idea that there might be a connection between the “Giordanisti” (the followers of Bruno) and the Rosicrucians, the mysterious brotherhood of the Rosy Cross announced by manifestos published in Germany in the early 1600s and who might never have existed, and with the Freemasons, who first surface in 1646 in England. Indeed, the speculative masonry of this cult, with its emphasis on architecture and building, is also a tributary of the art of memory.

  Yates ends her book by claiming that the art of memory does not disappear with Elizabethan theater, but reappears in a more secular and respectable guise in the various seventeenth-century projects for an encyclopedia of knowledge that would reflect the world and make it available to memory. We find such projects in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz—indeed, Leibniz took over from Bruno the concept of the “monad,” the simplest substance or unit of existence out of which the entire universe was constructed.

  The seventeenth-century fascination with the idea of a universal language, stimulated by Bacon’s demand for “real characters” for expressing notions, comes straight out of the tradition of the art of memory and is a rationalization of the occult and magical memory images of Bruno. This led to Leibniz’s plans for a “characteristica”: a system of universal signs based on the invention of infinitesimal calculus, a kind of modern hieroglyphics, an attempted recovery of the language of Adam against the Babel of the world. These signs would be placed onto a vast combinatorial machine, a proto-computer, the calculations of which would provide all possible permutations of the knowable.

  As with Camillo’s stupendous memory theater, Leibniz never completed his plan for the universal characteristic and ended his life in failure, an unwanted and ignored courtier abandoned by his patron, Duke Georg Ludwig, who went off to become King George I of England in 1714, leaving Leibniz in Hannover. But their hybris lives on in the idea of a universal key, a clavis universalis, that will unlock the secrets of nature, an arcane encyclopedia that would arrive at universal knowledge through the right combination of the constituent, abstracted features of reality. And what subtends this desire for an encyclopedia, Yates contends, is an ecumenical drive for an ethic of universal love and charity that would overcome all the religious differences that lead to intolerance and war, a kind of Rosicrucian effort at a universal reformation of man, the occult humanist strand at the heart of the Northern European Enlightenment.

  Michel’s simple but brilliant idea was to read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a memory theater, namely as a continuation of Yates’s tradition of the art of memory. The main protagonist in Hegel’s book—the book that nearly ruined my life when I first read it when I was twenty-three (I thought it was too incontestably true and it ruined everything else I read)—is a personage called Geist or Spirit. By Spirit, Hegel means no less than the entire cultural development of the world. His basic thought is that Spirit requires a series of appearances or phenomena in arresting, dramatic, and memorable images. These images, or what Hegel calls “shapes,” by which world history is traced as if in silhouette, have to be seized by the self and made our own. The stated goal of Hegel’s philosophy is that substance becomes subject: namely, that the knowledge of the whole which exists externally in its historical movement has to be grasped internally by the self. This is the process of education whereby a self ascends to an experience of self-determination.

  This grasping of the whole is what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge,” and he insists that this is possible only as recollection. This is why Hegel fills his book with vivid and indeed bloody images, such as the life-and-death struggle between master and slave, the unhappy consciousness, the vapidly legislating Stoic, the beautiful soul made mad by the world, and the terroristic reign of virtue in the French Revolution, where death had no more meaning than cutting the head off a cabbage or swallowing a gulp of water. Hegel’s pages are full of exaggerated and powerfully visual images, aids to recollection, like Bruno’s statues or the icons in the seats of Camillo’s theater. The Phenomenology of Spirit is a memory theater where the long path of the world’s historical development can be held in the storehouse of memory and obsessively replayed. Hegel insists that the movement of Spirit is the circle that returns into itself, a circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end. The theater of Spirit is a globe.

  Hegel’s philosophy is a mnemotechnic system in the ancient and Renaissance tradition. The difference is that what Hegel adds to his memory theater is time, that is, the experience of becoming. Rather than the static ensemble of Camillo, Hegel’s is a moving theater, a kind of proto-cinema. In the final paragraph of the Phenomenology, Hegel talks of becoming as a slow-moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each of which is endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moving slowly so that the self can penetrate and digest the entire wealth of its substance. This is why the Phenomenology can only be read in reverse. It’s like driving a car while constantly looking in the rearview mirror.

  The German Erinnerung denotes both recollection and the active experience of making inward. As such, it can be opposed to forms of external, mechanical, technologized, or even neurophysiological memory, captured in the word Gedächtnis. The Hegelian art of memory is the inwardizing of all the shapes of Spirit. In memory, the whole world of history is emptied into subjectivity, filling up the void of the self. This fulfillment is what is meant by absolute knowledge: the unity of the divine and the human, what Hegel calls in the final words of the book “the Calvary of absolute Spirit.”

  Absolute knowledge is the final shape of Spirit, the end that returns to the beginning where the movie show begins again, and again, and again. Repetition, repetition, repetition—I thought of Mark E. Smith of the mighty Fall. Perhaps the task of each subsequent generation would be the construction of its own living memory theater, its own construction of the past in thought and image. The difference from Camillo’s theater, which has the subject onstage and the items to be remembered filling the auditorium, is that in Hegel’s theater the subject sits in an auditorium alone and views the shapes of spirit passing onstage in su
ccession on a vast reel, trying to recall them all. For Hegel, what is being recalled is the history of Spirit, namely the very history that implicitly constitutes the viewing subject. What happens onstage is the entire spiritual drama of subjectivity, our drama. Through the art of memory, we learn to see ourselves from the perspective of the whole, from the standpoint of totality. In so doing, we become infinite, divinely human.

  Michel’s essay was astonishing, far and away the best thing I’d ever read by him. I had no idea why he didn’t publish it. It was admittedly the sketch of a larger argument. Maybe he moved on or just lost interest. Typical of him. However, I found the idea of a memory theater, even the Hegelian version, slightly droll, as I had lost much of my memory after the accident. All I remembered from that morning in the pharmaceutical factory was Jilted John playing on the radio—“Gordon is a moron”—and blood all over the floor. I loved that song. It was even more stripped down than conventional punk: two chords instead of three. Then my hand got trapped in the machine by inch-thick steel paddles. Steel slicing flesh. After I pulled out my hand, horribly mangled and hanging by what looked like bloody tendons, threads, and shards of bone, I collapsed.

  I remember being blissfully out of my brain on pethidine in a hospital bed and trying to put my hand up a nurse’s skirt. Then I blacked out. Then I remember going into the operating theater. I blacked out again. My dad was by my bedside as I came around, my hand suspended above me and wrapped in vast bandages. It was dark and I told him that it wasn’t my fault this time. Then I lost consciousness again.