Memory Multiplied

OTHER CITIES: LONDON MEMORYSCAPE

Memory Multiplied:
Personal Literary Associations

by Fuhito Endo

2 May 2024

Walking the streets of London, Fuhito Endo is reflecting on the complexity of memory and place: how do his memories of past visits to London shape his experience of the city now, on his latest visit? He is pondering these questions, how could it be otherwise, by way of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. But also by taking into account Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills; adding the question of how language and memory interact and influence our perception of place.

In a way reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, whilst walking in London in June and being reminded by a series of things she happens to see, hear, or feel of her girlhood in the country, or of more recent psychological events in Westminster (where she lives), both blissful and bitter, I cannot help but find my memories multiplied in a comparable fashion, especially when strolling in this city. London itself serves to evoke a powerful and affective release of my literary memories, which are amplified, accumulated, triggered, and thus generative of the following somewhat arbitrary associations. Inspired—with undeniable jealousy—by James Joyce’s recently published Ulysses, Woolf designed the novel Mrs Dalloway to suggest that a single day in June is structured by multiple memories, both individual and collective, of which one of the historical connotations is undoubtedly the First World War (in Joyce’s language, the temporal range extends, in Jungian fashion, to a series of ancient myths). In both Woolf and Joyce, this temporal construction can be read as a vertical one, in which a massive number of memories are stored and accumulated in an archaeological or geological manner; indeed, in writing this novel, Woolf used the metaphor of a ‘tunnel’ to emphasise her attempt to ‘excavate’ what lies deep within the minds of the characters.

Such a vertical and archaeological multi-layered spatiality at the same time evokes the temporal simultaneity of these memories, one example of which is Woolf’s reference to ‘shell-shock’ and another is her implicit allusion to Richard Strauss’s Allerseelen (All Souls’ Day), a day on which it is believed in Christian (especially Catholic) thought that the spirits of the deceased return. Both (trauma and ghost) can be said to contribute to the novel’s thematic concerns: the past never disappears but exists simultaneously, or events and people in the past can thus manifest themselves now as they were. Regarding the return of the dead, no further discussion is necessary, but Woolf’s interest in trauma recalls Freud’s observation that a neurotic patient does not recollect traumatic memories but re-enacts them physically. I am reminded of Septimus, the war veteran in Mrs Dalloway, whose body is constantly depicted as trembling, quivering, shuddering, shivering, reminiscent of the famous Pathé films of patients being treated for war neuroses, and thus re-physicalising his traumatic experience in the trenches. Woolf’s haunting temporality and spatiality coincide with these traumatic situations in the sense that Clarissa’s party, the central and final scene of the novel, is not only presented as the space and time in which her old friends, relatives, and acquaintances in her memory actually reassemble and reappear; at the same time, the novel’s allusion to ‘All Soul’s Day’ implies that this event is a collective return of the dead, resonating with Clarissa’s visionary identification with Septimus. This is a textual and historical re-emergence of the post-war preoccupation with the wishful psychic resurrection of dead soldiers, despite Woolf’s own lack of a tragic experience of losing her family to war (although a series of her traumatic bereavements is certainly worth mentioning). This haunting temporality and spatiality, along with that of trauma, leads one to imagine the potential coexistence of multiple past events or persons with the present, the simultaneity that allows what is deep in our minds to reappear in an involuntary, unexpected, devastating, uncontrollable, occasionally psychical, and Proustian way.

Such literary and partly psychoanalytical associations irresistibly tempt me to reflect on the way in which my own memories function, with their rather blissful multilayered simultaneity and (fortunately!) graceful immunity to any traumatic experience or psychic haunting, in London, Mrs Dalloway’s city, where I live and walk at the time of writing this piece. The fact that this is my third stay here and that I return to London every ten years or so allows me, at the simplest level, to regard my memory as a triple structure, the simplification of which, however, frustrates me and prevents me from observing what I would call the dynamics of my a/temporal sensations or experiences. What strikes me most is the way in which my three kinds of memory (2002-3, 2012-13 and 2023-24) are not segmented in a simply vertical or geological form, but rather their interactive and reciprocal effects work in such a way that my present consciousness affects the second (i.e. 2012) retroactively, thus redefining its meaning and vice versa. Their a/temporal, psychological, and sensory proximity is such that even my recollected experiences of 20 years ago are perceived as participating in such dynamic interactions, the intensity of which is particularly maximised when I am walking in Bloomsbury, a place strongly associated with my field of research (Roger Fry or Virginia Woolf, for example). This kind of interactive effect of redefinition between the three layers of memory makes my intellectual as well as affective perception of London so densely complicated that it modifies the meaning of my own memories of myself working on the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ as an undergraduate in Tokyo some 40 years ago and reminds me of how I imagined this place before my actual visit here. It is through the image and memory of Bloomsbury that the affectivity of my memory of London is charged with another spatial affective intensity—that of Tokyo—which rekindles another and arbitrary literary association with Kazuo Ishiguro, whose first novel, A Pale View of Hills, can be read in this context of temporal and spatial interactions between Tokyo and Britain.

What might be called a biographical irregularity complicates the temporality of this work; as is well known, Ishiguro moved from Japan to England as a very young child, which strengthens the argument that his first novel, set in both Japan and England and written in English, is an artistic attempt to translate his memories of Japan into that language. This biographical fact is reflected in this text, whose main character, Etsuko, also comes to England, and this fact necessarily causes her memories to be multi-layered and composed of those of both countries, the temporal simultaneity of which is described with a tragic and pathetic tone. One of the reasons for this tone is the suicide of one of Etsuko’s daughters, Keiko, who was born in Japan and whose father was Etsuko’s former Japanese husband, Jiro. What makes Ishiguro’s language rather pathetic (or, perhaps, pathos-etic), beyond or behind this literal level, is, I would argue, the fundamental impossibility of translating and redefining the author’s childhood memories into English, a textual sign of his ethnic and linguistic identity. The unique textuality of this novel—its obsessive and repetitive use of Japanese proper nouns of characters’ names or place names in Japan—can be understood as an explanation of this problem of his authorial identity. The text’s excessive repetition of names such as Etsuko, Keiko, Jiro, and the less frequent use of personal pronouns, despite the novelist’s stylistic reputation, serves to emphasise what could be perceived as a kind of unique but somewhat uncanny textuality. Phonetically, these names sound Japanese, but are spelled alphabetically, giving the impression that these words are simultaneously Japanese and English. This linguistic simultaneity corresponds exactly to the temporal simultaneity of Japan and England, and yet it does not work in a neutral way, because something Japanese is consumed within the linguistic system of English, with pathetic remnants of Japanese sound (although its sounds may be modified by English spelling). The paradox, and a pathetic one, is that the linguistic difference prevents the temporal simultaneity from being realised and re-emerging with a transparent or even traumatic vividness, the textual predicament discernible in the title of the novel—A Pale View of Hills—a description of the hills of Nagasaki without a clear vision or focus. Ishiguro’s Proustian project is thus frustrated by the linguistic obstacle; what is found instead is the text’s persistent search for past memories, its obsessive use of Japanese proper names, and their residual Japanese sounds in English. This may suggest Ishiguro’s unconscious defense mechanism in relation to his childhood memories, as temporal simultaneity is censored by the linguistic difference (recall the implicit thematisation of infanticide, including Keiko’s suicide). The affective ambivalence can also be read in the text’s recurring preoccupation with Japanese sounds and its linguistic gesture of what Freud would term ‘repetition compulsion’. This does not necessarily have anything to do with my own phonetic and linguistic sensation when I see Japanese names written in the alphabet and anglicised: ‘wasabi’, ‘muji’, ‘wagamama’, ‘ramen’, ‘katsu’-curry, and so forth. This may sound like an exaggeration, but, in a way somehow reminiscent of Ishiguro’s style, I would say that it has something to do with my sense of ontological, linguistic anxiety in London, or of being trapped in a linguistic and temporal limbo, from which even the possibility of escape is made unattainable by the very action of my simultaneous internalisation and externalisation of this trepidation.

These Japanese phonetic sounds, written alphabetically and anglicised in London, thus remind me almost viscerally of the textuality of A Pale View of Hills, whose author frequently uses the phrase ‘the texture of memory’ to describe how he remembers in English what he experienced in Japan (Nagasaki, to be precise) as a young child. The implication here, I think, is the way in which his ‘felt’ structure of memory is inextricably entangled with the linguistic negotiation between English and Japanese, a textual dialectic that at once divides and unites these languages. This linguistic and textual space deprives Ishiguro of the semantic vividness and proximity of what he saw, heard, and felt (touched) in Japan and Japanese—our perception and memory are always and already structured in a given language—where, in his case, the semantic meaning of everything Japanese as the signified is lost, whilst at the same time a set of Japanese sounds as the signifier is brought to the fore, a textual, existential, wistfully lingering indication or rather trace of the untranslatable resistance of Japanese proper nouns as the Freudian uncanniness of ‘the return of the repressed.’ What I feel happening to me when I see these anglicised Japanese words – ‘wasabi,’ ‘sushi,’ ‘wagamama,’ ‘ramen’… – on the streets of London seems to me to be the same kind of textual and linguistic experience as that perceived by Kazuo Ishiguro, which semantically and existentially removes me from the original tastes and flavour to which I am irresistibly drawn, whilst simultaneously and eerily foregrounding the semiotic, physical, and ‘pure’ sounds of the signifier without the signified; I say ‘pure’ in exactly the same sense as what Mallarmé terms the ‘pure poem,’ the textual phenomenon that Michel Foucault privileges as the exposure of language itself. The ‘purity’ of this textuality, essentially dissociated and cut off from semantic reference, is forced to drift as ‘language […] with no point of departure, no end, and no promise’ as Foucault puts it in Les Mots et les Choses, a linguistic and existential lack of ‘departure,’ ‘end,’ or ‘promise’ that is undeniably relevant to Ishiguro’s thematic obsession with memory and its simultaneous semantic ambiguity or ‘paleness,’ and to my own ontological, temporal, and linguistic sense of alienation and limbo in London, an uncanny sensation that generates this essay as necessarily arbitrary associations of Woolf, London, Tokyo, Ishiguro, and my own experiences in these two places.

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FUHITO ENDO is Professor of English at Seikei University, Tokyo, and a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the IAS, where he worked on a comparative study of modernist literature, contemporary spiritualism and art theories, and the history of British psychoanalysis between the wars.

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Edited and standfirst by MARTHE LISSON
Proofreading by JAGJEET LALLY

All images: Marthe Lisson