COPIES: the MIMETIC COMPONENT of REMEMBERING Introduction
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COPIES: THE MIMETIC COMPONENT OF REMEMBERING Introduction Monika Greenleaf and Luba Golburt A preoccupation with memory arises when fear of amnesia is in the air. It has often been observed that literature performs many of Russian cul ture's most crucial tasks of self-reflection, among them its long-standing examination of the autonomy, malleability, and specific forms of personal and national memory.1 Russia's repressive political history and censor ship, together with repeated state-sponsored surges of modernization, have made the threat of cultural amnesia or forced forgetting all the more concrete. While such a context has generated a conception of memory as a heroic act of consciousness, recent trends in memory studies have also looked to everyday life and material culture for ways to move be yond a heroic dissident narrative. Drawing on both approaches, the pres ent cluster of articles seeks to reanimate, in the Russian context, those aspects of memory that consciously or unreflectively represent the past precisely by repeating its patterns as well as the narrative commonplaces of its commemoration. When we consider the "mimetic" component of remembering, we are focusing on the repetitive cultural rituals, formal traditions, and bodily habits that cause past experience to be replicated in the present as "second nature"—not as heroic or transcendent acts of consciousness.2 The four papers in this cluster thus present copying, tra ditionally dismissed for its dead automatism, as an alternative, ubiquitous, and valuable mnemonic practice. We would like to thank Polina Barskova, Anna Muza, Irina Paperno, Lynn Patyk, and Mark D. Steinberg for their expert suggestions and Oksana Bulgakowa for her inspiring workshops on "visuality and literacy" and "memory and film" in twentieth-century Russian culture, conducted under the auspices of Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. 1. Gregory Freidin, "By the Walls of Church and State: On the Authority of Literature in Russia's Modern Tradition," Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993): 149-65. 2. This approach aligns with new trends in art history and film studies that examine the non-narrative, "figural" persistence of the past. See, for example, Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, 1993); and Stepha nie Sandler's recent reconsideration of the concept "fidelity" in the relation between the document and cinematic image in her Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, 2004), 136-74. An alarming instance of the erasure of image-history is explored in Larisa Maliukova, ed., 90-e: Kino, kotorye my poteriali (Moscow, 2007). Most rel evantly for our topic of involuntary mimetic memory, see (literally!) Oksana Bulgakowa's analytical assemblage of culturally imprinted body language disseminated through film in her DVD, produced with Dietmar Hochmuth and Gregor Hochmuth, The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (Berlin, 2008). Slavic Review 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009) 744 Slavic Review When, in Lev Tolstoi's fictional memoir Detstvo (Childhood, 1852), the boy copies his tutor's verse and produces a scripted and traitorous image of his mother in place of his own flow of unrepeatable details and unique feelings, the author is intent on contrasting two models of memory: one ritualistic and imitative, the other spontaneous, innate, and creative.3 Tolstoi's parable pits the Platonic conception of mimesis as pernicious imitation, copying, and estrangement from truth against the Aristotelian view of mimesis as the child's natural, inborn faculty for absorbing the world through bodily mimicry. We will give a brief elaboration of these crucial concepts here, before returning to our account of Russian litera ture's particular and national rehabilitation of "involuntary memory." Plato makes the idealistic and political argument against mimesis in a number of his works, most famously and dramatically in The Republic? Arguing that truth exists only in the form of pure ideas or essences, of which natural phenomena are already a secondary reflection, Plato logi cally denounces artistic imitation for its twice-removed distortion of ideal truth, insisting that it is akin to releasing ever-more-spurious copies-of- copies into the world, corrupting the language in which men think and communicate. Recognizing the Poet as the masterful creator of sensuous and emotionally gripping images, Plato dramatically ejects him precisely for his power to subvert the Republic's orientation toward the single truth. Still more important for our purposes, the Poet's images evoke a different nonpresent locus of value: not in the domain of Reason and Idea, but in the domain of personal and shared emotional memory. Walter Ong sees Plato's attack on the Poet as a quarrel between Greece's newly literate and older oral cultures. The modernizing elite, intently transferring its memo ries to the written record and the kind of logical cognition that literacy enables, attempts to outlaw the bodily, mimetic rehearsal of its memory stores by the "conquered" preliterate culture.5 Postcolonial theory logi cally extrapolates the initial quarrel between Word and Image, (universal) Reason and (recalcitrant) Memory to the history of political conquest and cultural domination, in which the subaltern is often granted the expres- 3. L. N. Tolstoi, Detstvo, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh (Moscow, 1928-58; hereafter PSS), 1:46. 4. The other relevant texts are Plato's Cratylus, Theatetus, and Sophist, and Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia and On Interpretation. Plato, Complete Works (Indianapolis,1997), 101-293, 971-1223; Aristotle, Categories, and De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford, 1963), 113-55; and Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, in Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London, 1972), 47-60. For a clear and brief discussion of the philosophical dis tinctions involved, see Paul Ricoeur, "Passe, memoire et oubli," in Martine Verlhac, ed., Histoire et Memoire (Grenoble, 1998), 35-40; and Ricoeur, "Mimesis and Representation," in Mario J. Valdes and Paul Ricoeur eds., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York, 1991), 137-55. Rene Girard has given us many far-reaching theorizations of mime sis: see "Innovation and Repetition," in Rene Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford, 2008), 230-45; and Girard, "From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double," in Timothy Murray, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor, 1997), 87-111. 5. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), 79-100. Introduction 745 sive domain of song, dance, exotic costume, and poetic memory precisely as an archaic, nostalgic reserve, distant from the rational and legal dis courses of power. Any subject fit for the modern world must symbolically sign the Descartian contract: 'Je pense, done je suis" (I think therefore I am)—where "suis," usually translated as "I am," also means "I follow." For Aristotle the mimetic capability plays a much more positive role in a system devoted to accurately perceiving and studying the reality of natural phenomena. Like Charles Darwin, Aristotle sees mimicry as the species-specific, human tool for absorbing empirical knowledge of the outside world.6 Making a fundamental distinction between epic (narra tive, past) poetry and dramatic (performed, present) poetry in his Poetics, Aristode assigns mimesis to the domain of drama and tragedy, specifying that theater's purpose is to arouse and bind the spectators' chaotic emo tions to the present performance but then provide a cathartic purge of those emotions by means of a strictly ordered developmental structure with a meaningful and chorally repeated resolution. The Poet is not pre emptively expelled but called upon to help citizens picture and expel their accumulated inner turbulence. Importantiy for later theoreticians of memory, Mary Carruthers writes, Aristotle insisted that "memorial phantasmata are both representations of things and 're-presentations' of experiences no longer present." In other words, "time is a dimension of all images in the memory." In fact, in De Memoria Aristotle betrays an ap prehensive attitude toward the potentially disordering power of the mem ory image, prescribing a procedure of conscious recollection in orderly mnemonic chains, and warning against "spontaneous recollection" as "too risky and irrational."7 One way to control the potentially dangerous importation of past time and emotional fluidity into the present was to tie memory to spatial im ages, to render it iconographically.8 Renaissance painting delivered tem poral phenomena to die spectator in a readable, clearly lit, geometri cally ordered iconographic display. Giordano Bruno's obscure memory images have been said to mark a post-Renaissance "crisis of mimesis" in that they subvert the Renaissance's strict rational and visual control over mimetic images, charging them with "magicized" and labile emotional affect.9 We see a parallel counterpoint in the eighteenth century's pre dilection for readable iconographic tableaux or sculptural compositions 6. Anthropologist Michael T. Taussig calls the mimetic faculty "an ineffable plastic ity in the face of the world's forms and forms of life," citing Walter Benjamin's still more lapidary definition: "the art of becoming other." Consequently,