MONTALE'S DIALECTIC OF MEMORY

Abstract

Montale's views on the memory are based on a distinction between the active and passive forms of remembrance first discovered by Plato and Aristotle. This distinction is the functional one holding between the laying of an original memory trace in the mind and its subsequent recall; and, oddly enough, in the past poets and philosophers alike have tended to place greater emphasis on memorial consolidation within the tradition than on the dramatic process of recollection in the present. A traditionalist philosopher like Saint Thomas, for instance, even refers to the memory as a static repository and describes it as ‘the treasury and conservation-place of the species’. So, not unexpectedly, the changeover from the readily-grasped idea of the static nature of memory to the more fluid and intangible concept of recollection as a dynamic process was a gradual one, despite the fact that it was probably accelerated by Hume's discovery that the recollective process itself operates mainly as a result of our perception of resemblance, contiguity and causation between situations, objects and events. The first two modes of perception, namely, resemblance and contiguity have perhaps been crucial to the development of aesthetics ever since, because in direct opposition to the third they have offered the possibility of the creation of a ‘poetic logic’ involving associative and emotive techniques in place of the largely ‘reasoned’ discourse of traditional poets. When this change ultimately gathered momentum, the lyrical treatment of memory was also profoundly modified, until the point was reached when poets like Montale actually inverted traditional procedures by attaching greater value to the act of recollection than to that of memorial consolidation. In fact, the latter has probably taken the whole problem to its ultimate conclusion by elaborating an ethico-aesthetic doctrine of lyrical fulfilment relying almost completely upon a series of pious memorial recalls.