Volume 1 / Athens 1999 by Effi Gazi Review of Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England (for the University of Vermont), 1993 Patrick Hutton's book is a meditation on history and memory and on their interaction. Frances Yates' classic work The Art of Memory (first published in 1966) provided the source of inspiration for a research towards the relation of memory to history and vice versa. Yates' definition of the Renaissance practice of mnemonic skills not as a mere technical enterprise but as a deep philosophical trend that framed knowledge and understanding of the world is, to a great extent, Hutton's standpoint in his attempt to provide, grosso modo, an intellectual history of the concept of memory in Europe. The volume is made up of eight essays, each discussing different thinkers and their conceptualisation of the memory/history problem. Giambattista Vico, William Wordsworth, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Halbwachs, Philippe Ariés, and Michel Foucault are the dominant figures. Through their work, the author identifies and examines eight paths between history and memory: mnemonic, rhetorical, autobiographical, psychological, sociological, archaeological, and historiographical. Important issues are raised and discussed extensively in this work that focuses on one of the most engaging debates within (and outside) the historical profession. For Hutton, history stands as an art of memory in its effort to combine repetition and recollection with regard to the past. His discussion of the importance of the transition from oral to literate cultures and its impact of representations of the past are original and convincing. This is particularly so for the argument that refers to the textualisation of culture and its impact on the historicisation of - collective memory - especially since the Enlightenment, as the past acquired an ontological status and a primary importance for philosophical debates. His analysis of the function of historiography as a bearer of collective memory, especially after the 18th century, is also interesting and to the point. The way Hutton incorporates psychoanalytic aspects of the memory issue (and their role in autobiographical narratives) in the historiographical debate is innovative. The interaction between the conscious and the unconscious sides of the psyche within a process that turns each person into a "memory to himself/herself" is a crucial theme that is treated perceptively in the discussion. Hutton's interest in commemorative practices, in discursive schemes, in the social frameworks of commemorative traditions reveal an insightful meditation on some of the most crucial issues in the field (especially with regard to the constructed nature of commemorative traditions and to the impact of present discourses on the images of the past.) Less convincing, however, is his insistence on the function of history as an exclusive art of memory, as a way of remembering that seems to minimalise -if not exclude- its critical role and the possibility of political intervention. The second part of Hutton's work is somehow less sophisticated that the first. It attempts to offer an account of postmodern historiography and its relation to memory. Since, according to the author, postmodernism analyses ways of remembering rather than remembering itself, it seems to deny the concept of memory (especially the dimension of sympathetic recollection) on the whole. The romanticisation of memory that seems to underlie the argumentation makes very difficult any critical thinking about the uses of memories and of the "past." Hutton is concerned about the fading of collective memories in a postmodern age. The argument itself sounds rather paradoxical in a century that is largely characterised by the construction of a "memory industry." Hutton almost axiomatically argues that "we need the past and must maintain our living connections with it." By implication, he sets his work within a critical project that will intervene in "postmodern" historiography and that will make it possible to "represent the past in a way that the truth of its deep memory will not be forgotten by posterity" (p.72). The idealisation of the issue of memory cannot really stand as a counter-argument to postmodernism: especially because postmodernism does not deny the past itself, but rather an idealist ontology of it. The author's deep attachment to commemoration (the fact that he grew up in Princeton, an enchanted landscape as he points out [p. xi], has possibly played a role in that) has produced an interesting and perceptive piece of work on the nature of subjective and collective memory and on its close relation to historiographical practices. It is not quite clear however, whose past and whose memory he refers to, what uses a certain past and a certain memory may have and in which ways history (and memory) might sometimes not be an art but almost a burden. Return to Top