Reflections on Ars Memoriae

by Shivani Arulalan Pillai

In what are now his oft-quoted lines, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel says: ‘You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.’ This absolute centrality of memory to the human experience that Buñuel’s quote points towards is a beautiful thing that deserves to be explored to its fullest. And it was to do precisely this that we started our memory studies reading group, ‘Ars Memoriae.’ With the support of TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and OCLW, we launched our reading group in Hilary Term 2024, and what an incredible term it has been!

            We wanted this reading group to be a space where everyone from across disciplines could gather for a communal and academic interrogation of memory, asking what it means to understand memory in its cultural, historical, political, and geographical contexts. We knew that critical and out-of-the-box thinking was essential to achieving this. But we hoped to take things a notch further and ask another, equally important question: to interrogate memory productively, do we really need a box to think out of? Somewhat inevitably, these aims and hopes wrote themselves into our reading list for Hilary Term. Over the four meetings this term, we used Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as our scaffolds while drawing on a rich array of secondary readings firmly rooted in interdisciplinary memory studies scholarship. The various benedictions of bringing literature in dialogue with memory studies became evident in the enthusiasm with which our participants responded to the reading list.

            Our first session involved stimulating discussions on photography and the texture of memories, which then segued into an analysis of the binaries of memory and lived experience, as well as of history and memory. As a group, we used the predominance of artists and art forms in The Memory Police to think about their relationship with memory cultures—a pattern of thought that often meandered into pondering censorship and its relationship with memory and forgetting on individual and collective levels. We also enjoyed parsing the terms ‘Erinnerung’ (memory) and ‘Gedachtnis’ (remembering) for their many layers of meaning. In the second session, our discussion of Ogawa’s novel continued, with the conversations hinging upon a different set of mnemonic concerns: the mnemonics of book burning and banning, the intimate embodiment of—and conversely—the borderlessness of memory, the nexus between colonialism, memory, and time.

            The third and fourth sessions allowed us to branch into a discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. On these occasions, we dismantled a host of other binaries through incisive questioning: Why is it that the inherent non-linearity of memory and time is always in tension with their linear constructions in societal discourse? What are the consequences of the seemingly infinite digital memory for the finitude of human memory? What does a failure to reconcile free will with national duties and responsibilities look like and mean? How do we best approach the triangulation of memory, history, and literature? Given the nature of the questions we were considering, most of them dominated our fourth session as well. In this final session of the term, we also looked at the paradoxes of presence and absence and orality and writing; we delved into the art of writing histories from below, memory’s hand-in-glove relationship with language, and the class elements of memory, concluding with insightful forays into the accessibility of gaze and the politics of looking.

            Across the four sessions, we also ‘read’ paintings (‘The Persistence of Memory’ and ‘Memory, 1948’) and the widely contested afterlives of monuments (The Valle del Cuelgamuros in Spain and the African Renaissance Monument in Senegal). Not only were our sessions interdisciplinary, but they were also multimodal. In Wolfson College’s Seminar Room 2, our communal and academic interrogations of memory truly took us places.

            None of this would have been possible without the passion, energy, and enthusiasm our participants brought to the reading group—they never shied away from asking the questions that needed answering by tackling memory by its horns in every session. In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization Michael Rothberg suggests that ‘comparison, like memory, should be thought of as productive—as producing new objects and new lines of sight’ (19). While still a fledgling, ‘Ars Memoriae’ has been incredibly generous in opening up new lines of inquiry for us—all of which we look forward to pursuing with more incredible people next term.