New Literary History

Memory and Imagination

It is undeniable that memory, in the larger sense of the term, plays an important role in the act of spectating (the act of watching a film). For example, in order to construct a narrative form and comprehend the characters’ actions, the spectator must be able to recall faces, places, and situations from one segment of a film to another. Further, cognitive science has shown us how greatly the understanding of discursive forms depends on prior knowledge, memorized through such knowledge structures as frames, scripts, MOPs (Memory Organization Packets), and so on. As a result, it is becoming more and more difficult for semioticians to conceive of memory outside the artificial intelligence paradigm. But one must be careful not to reduce memory in its totality to this model, which accounts only partially for the work done by human memory and for its semiotic or representational function. In fact, computer memory does not represent, it re-presents or reproduces data. Information stored in computer memory is stable and not subject to transformation. In contrast, human memory can represent, that is it can translate data into a semiotic system and, by the same token, transform it and render it more complex (even if this implies some forgetting). It is able, in other words, to produce a memoria. Seen in this light, memory is no longer duplication but amplification, enrichment, complexification.

This way of looking at memory is not recent and has its roots in ancient philosophy and rhetoric where it blends with imagination, the two faculties being intimately connected. In fact, the story behind the invention of the ars memoriae, as told by Cicero, clearly demonstrates the role of imagination and of mental imagery with regard to memory. ² [End Page 479] Moreover, the anonymous author of Ad Herennium points out that the images in one’s memory are “figure[s], mark[s], or portrait[s] of the object we wish to remember.” They are signs produced by the orator’s imagination so as to stand in for the various things which he is attempting to memorize. ³ These signs are situated in space, in a site, a topos or locus memoriae.

As a result of the work done by the imagination, the orator constructs a memoria of the discourse or of the notions which he is trying to retain. Consequently, the memoria is to be distinguished from the recollections obtained by way of one’s natural memory. For the memoria is not a simple transposition or even duplication of “things” or “words,” which might then engrave themselves, unchanged, in one’s mind; rather, it results from a process of appropriation and integration which is simultaneously symbolic and imaginary.

At this point, one may wonder what benefit a semiotician interested in the cinema and, more specifically, in film spectatorship may reap from this conception of memory and from its association with the imagination. To put it simply, I believe the process described by the rhetoricians of antiquity to be equally applicable to the film spectator. It is not that the latter tries actively to memorize what he is watching by means of a consciously constructed mnemonic device, but rather that what he retains from a film, what makes an impression on him while leaving a trace in the “soft wax” of his memory, implies equally the work of the imagination and the creation of a memoria or as I call it, a figure. The figure corresponds to that which the spectator and, by extension, to what a culture retains from a film. It relies on the aspect of spectating which involves the integration of the cinematic text to the spectator’s imaginary, an aspect which can be referred to as a “symbolic process.” ⁴ More precisely, the figure is the result of an interaction between the film, on the one hand, and the memory and imagination of the spectator, on the other. It pertains to the appropriation of the film by the spectator for whom certain images, certain sounds make an impression and bring out new (mental...