Holographic memory in Nabokov and Nestor

Abstract

From Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography. Speak, Memory, and from the oral narrative of aged Nestor in Ovid's Metamorphoses, this article argues that traditional research into rote and linear memory shows only the “competence” aspect of memory. It ignores how memory performs in the real world; its science strips memory of context, affect, and significance. It mechanizes and dehumanizes its research subjects. Relying on the work of researchers who have shown the brain and memory to be three-dimensional, not two-dimensional, the author suggests that the inability to ‘locate’ memory is not a failure but a sign that its nature is holographic, as Edward T. Hall understands the idea applied to epistemologies. The result is an increased respect for associative memory, the memory that not only generates literature but that also recognizes the creativity of the aged. This is a call for a less prescriptive memory research, and more descriptive, that is, letting the aged demonstrate their skills after the fashion of oral poets performing before anthropologists with recorders. Here we will team how memory works.