Memory

Memory and oral tradition plays a very important role, I think, the all of the foundational literature, especially mythical and whimsical. I thik this is primarily due to the fact that they were, and needed to be, comitted to memory. This is most especially true with those canonical texts that were contrived before the printing press. It seems interesting to me, though, that everything that is worth remembering is written down, and promptly forgotten because it has been written. Most of the fairy tales that I know (and not very well at that)I have never read but have remembered from my childhood. Incidentally, I was making enemies and losing friends the other day as I was explaining that Memory, or Mnemosyne to someone who wasn't particularly interested. I had recommended to her Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and we were discussing it. Nabokov, I told her, was also a lepidopterist (butterfly enthusiast and collector) and discovered his own butterfly which is named after him. Nabokov has written several other books, including one entitled Speak Memory, which he was forced to title so because his original title, Speak Mnemosyne, would have been unprounancable by his readers. "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Nabokov, Lolita. What Humbert Humbert is saying in the final lines of Lolita is that through the everlastingness of art, its durable pigments of paint and ink, immortlity may be had. The only way Humbert's love for Lolita may last forever is if he writes it down (while in jail). It seems that would be the same for the literature of our childhood. Had it not been written, and magically illustrated, it certainly would not have had the same effect, would not have been so salient in our imaginations and our sensibilities.