COMPULSIVE REMEMBRANCE
Such compulsion was difficult for Renaissance theorists of memory to explain naturalistically, that is, without recourse to a notion of supernatural agency. Plato and Aristotle had set the principal terms for understanding memory, but those terms focused on sor. age and search functions, not on involuntary hauntings. Plato's most influential metaphor for memory was that of wax in which an impression is left. The metaphor expresses beautifully the way in which the mind can keep the image of something that is no longer present. It conveys, too, subtle variations, gradations, and effacements of impressions, some cut deeply, virtually perma nently, into the medium of memory, some others only lightly, most slowly losing their original distinctness of outline and eventually fading altogether. There are variations as well, as the metaphor suggests, in the medium itself: in some people memory is like warm wax, barely holding any impression at all; in others it is hard and dry, difficult to imprint but, once imprinted, remarkably stable; in still others, it is a well-tempered medium between these extremes.
But the unwilled, ghostly return and renewal of an old impression cannot be easily accommodated to this scheme—how could the impression be renewed without a material body to reinscribe it in the wax?—nor does it fit comfortably with Plato's other great metaphor for memory, the aviary. To be sure, we can imagine ghosts flitting and swooping, like birds in a huge cage, but the metaphor, as it is developed in the Theaetetus, is not about uncanny returns from oblivion but about frustrating evasions. Plato evidently felt obliged to supplement his primary image of the wax in order to convey what that image conspicuously misses: the sense that memories often seem alive, fluttering, and elusive. The aviary metaphor keeps a notion of storage—there is a particular place, a container, for those things that are recalled—but it eschews any notion of systematicity, the sense (later developed by Saint Augustine and others) that memory is like a treasure-house or strongbox with distinct compartments where one can look for particular objects. In the aviary, one must grope after memories that seem anxiously determined to fly out of one’s grasp.
For Aristotle it is the possibility of making a deliberate search whether we think of it as lunging about in an aviary or reading wax tablets or sorting through the compartments in a strongbox—that distinguishes the memory of humans from those of all other animals capable of remembering. Any animal, Aristotle observes, that perceives time can have memories, but among those animals with memories, only humans have the power of recollection. This is because recollection is a “mode of inference,” and inference involves deliberation, and deliberation implies reason, and reason is uniquely human. These incisive reflections enable Aristotle to explain, for example, why “things arranged in a fixed order, like the successive demonstrations in geometry, are easy to remember, while badly arranged subjects are remembered with difficulty” (718). But they seem to make his account of memory even less compatible than Plato’s with any notion of haunting.
Yet Aristotle—who observes that the moving force of recollection is particularly powerful in “persons of melancholic temperament” (720)—comes closest to the central issue immediately raised by the ghost in Hamlet, an issue inseparable from the ghost as memory and memory as ghost: the perception of likeness. For Aristotle this perception is the way one knows, when one is contemplating a mental image or phantasm that it is in facta memorythe remembrance of something that belongs irrevocably to the past—and not something that fully exists in the present. The mind is aware of a ratio between what is imagined and what actually once existed: a memory is grasped as a likeness, as he puts it, “re” something else” (716). To be sure, this likeness also not our babbling dreams affright our souls” (5.6.98). So, too, in Julius Caesar Brutus is horrified by the “monstrous apparition” in his tent, but a moment later he too recovers his poise: “Why, I will see thee at Philippi then.” The contrast to Hamlet, where there is no rallving of spirits and no recovery of poise, is extreme; indeed, in the case of Jultus Caesar, the contrast seems deliberate. Polonius memorably recalls that he once played Caesar and was killed in the Capitol, and Horatio invokes Caesar’s assassination just after the first apparition of the ghost:
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
In 1769 Lady Mary Wortley Montague speculated that by these allusions Shakespeare intended “to captivate our attention by demonstrating that the poet was not going to exhibit such idle and frivolous gambols as ghosts are by the vulgar often represented to perform.”’° This may well be true, but Shakespeare seems also to be emphasizing the particular horror and intensity of the apparition in Hamlet, in contrast to his own depiction of Brutus’s stoical response to Caesar’s ghost. The soldiers Marcellus and Barnardo are “distilled / Almost to jelly with the act of fear” (1.2.204-5), and Hamlet vows to wipe away “[a]ll saws of books, all forms, all pressures past” from his mind.
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