Evolving memories: Narrative habits and strategies of survival

In recent academia memory is studied with an emphasis on the "how." I turn to the "why" of memory. I examine a variety of memory narratives in the context of individual projects, treating them as strategies of survival.I begin with Charles Darwin who challenges the distinction between instincts and habits by highlighting their parallel mechanisms of acquisition. His theory of evolution is realized in a transition from a life of exploration to one of repetition through narration: it is the positive outcome of his personal habits of survival.Henri Bergson differentiates between authentic memory and habit. While his passive acceptance of the force of creation [elan] is a repetition of his personal drama (crippling arthritis), his shift to a "humanistic" discourse, coinciding with his activity at the League of Nations, signals a more active practice that recalls the mechanism of acquiring new habits.That Sigmund Freud "forgot" to differentiate between the process of remembering and memorizing is symptomatic of his therapeutic practice in which the two are conflated. Freud used a technique of memorizing to found the origins of his science but discovered that while striving to create a new home, he carried the old one with him.Aris Alexandrou's novel Mission Box is the fictional confession of a communist prisoner during the Greek civil war. Alexandrou uses the structure of interrogation where "remembering" becomes synonymous with reciting the memorized story. In a kafkaesque universe, however, where the interrogator remains unknown, the narrator resorts to a series of conflicting confessions and ends up scorning practical considerations and revealing his actual guilt.Vladimir Nabokov's Defense is based on chess strategies. A chess player must memorize old moves but also devise new ones. Luzhin's misfortune begins when chess ceases to be a pastime and becomes a survival strategy. He then starts experiencing life as a repetitive pattern. His final suicide is a return to origins granting him privileged access to knowledge which his memory has denied him.While Luzhin's strategy leads him to suicide, the strategy of Marcel Proust's (or his narrator in the Recherche) helps him accomplish his writing mission. Marcel knows how to stitch the memoirs of his life and develop a single life narrative. The repetition of his memorized habits, however, acquires compulsive dimensions proving that a strategy of progress or success may be incompatible with one of personal survival.