Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries John Limon Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Laura Otis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 297. $37.50. “Organic memory” is a tidy phrase for a messy confusion of what can be inherited and what can be remembered. Especially in the last third of the last century, according to Laura Otis’s [End Page 164] compendious study, scientists and litterateurs alike were preoccupied with bad analogies of genetic inheritance, cultural heritage, and memory. Lump them sufficiently, and peoples (defined by geography and /or culture and /or race and /or language) may be conceived as corporate people; just as human individuals are integrated by personal memories, nations may be united by racial ones. Not for nothing would the portentous muddles of organic memory seduce German polymaths. But wherever national identity was at issue in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, as for example in Spain after 1898, the organic memory idea was a temptation. Otis’s study is largely a history of that idea, born out of Lamarckian biology and Haeckel’s law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; refined at the border of experiment and prophecy by such thinkers as Ewald Hering and Théodule Ribot; adapted for fictional purposes by Emile Zola and ironized by Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; translated into twentieth-century intellectual culture by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (I have named only a few of the major players in Organic Memory. Otis’s book is nothing if not populated.) The book crosses several frontiers (national, epochal, disciplinary) with nonchalant courage. And Otis’s scholarship excavates a deep source of material on questions of transcendent modern importance. What is the relationship of individuals and nations? Can memory be located in a place? Can spatialized memories find their way to the genetic blueprint of bodies? All literary criticism must now, by a universally observed rule, pass as metacriticism; my only basic reservation about Otis’s book is that on that level, I am not sure what she has shown. Otis opens Organic Memory quoting an incredulous challenge from a graduate student in neuroscience: “Why would anyone want to study the literature from past times?” (vii) Metacriticism, apparently, is the first order of business; the working hypotheses of Organic Memory are that we study literature because it foregrounds metaphors that inform all thinking, even scientific thinking, and that we study “literature from past times” because the past hardly ever does us the favor of dying. Of course, some ideas do fade away, scientific ones, preëminently—for example, organic memory. But they fade away only as science. Done in as science by their essential metaphoricity, they may linger elsewhere precisely by virtue of metaphoric power. The study of literature brings that hidden source of power to light, where it can do us less damage. At the beginning and end of her book, Otis is explicit about what damage organic memory has already done: Nazis and Serbs are much on her mind. The unexamined assumption (barely qualified on a couple of occasions) is that bad ideas have bad consequences. But implicit throughout the book is a lesson murkier than the one Otis herself infers from it. Part of the problem is that “organic memory” conflates, I think, two ideas: first that genetic inheritance should be conceived as a kind of memory; second, that actual memories are transmitted genetically. The former is probably more conducive to racist appropriation: racial similarity would seem, in its terms, to imply national identity. The latter, Lamarckian conception could be essentially inclusive, since hundreds of years of shared memories (as by Germans and Jews) would begin to produce genetic overlap. No wonder that two German Jews, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, are near the center of Otis’s story. And the presence of Freud (with Jung—but not as distinct from Jung as one had thought) at the culmination of the narrative makes it clear that exclusive conceptions of race did not have to be, by any logical entailment, essential to conceptions of organic memory. Racial memories might be shared...