The Palace of Memory

Surprising as it may seem given my sports-centric nature, in my time away from the world academia, I read at least a fair amount. Not as much as I used to, given the rigors of graduate study, but still enough to consider myself a rather literate person. One of the books I greatly enjoyed from my junior year of high school on was Thomas Harris’ Hannibal. Having read both Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, I was greatly intrigued at the idea of a tale centered on the enigmatic Hannibal Lecter. In Harris’ Hannibal, Lecter goes to great length to describe a concept that is also alluded to in Crowley & Hawhee’s chapter on memory. The concept both texts have in common is the idea of memories being linked to objects, signs and symbols.

Referred to as a “memory palace” in Hannibal, this idea is one Harris’ text explores in great detail. Harris goes to considerable length to explain that the memory palace was a system used by the ancient historians, namely during the Dark Ages when much history was lost to fire and general ignorance. These historians used the same method Quintillian described as “tappable” memory; they assigned bits of information to objects, items or people they could recognize for easy recall. This allowed them to store much knowledge of history within themselves to preserve it from the informational scourge that was the Dark Ages, storing it until it could be safely physically stored or passed on to the following generation.

In Harris’ text, Lecter not only had his own memory palace, but his served multiple purposes. In addition to having facts and memories keyed to different items throughout the rooms of the palace, Lecter also lived there, as much as one can live within an entirely psychological construct. He used it as an escape from his years on incarceration, a sanctuary from all of the awful things (and inevitable march of time) that happened while he resided in the violent ward of a psychiatric hospital.

I chose this over the other (and more directly-relatable) topics covered in ARCS’ chapter on memory because outside of Hannibal, I’ve never heard of this concept referenced before. The text refers to it as artificial memory, or memory that has been carefully trained to remember things (376). It also explains how Simonides was able to recall the exact places at the table of all the victims in order to identify the bodies following the banquet massacre described in Chapter 11’s introduction.

Of course, as the text describes, memory has less of a significance for us than it did for the ancients, given how technologically inclined we are as a society. In fact, many entertainment media we consume rely on the fact that our emphasis on memory has diminished over time. They count on you to overlook maybe that one character on a long-running series once had a short-lived storyline with another, for example. Or perhaps that a journalist’s ethos was severely damaged after mis-reporting a story, as illustrated in my Mitch Albom-Jason Whitlock example. Maybe it’s as simple as your friend or significant other being friendly with someone who treated them poorly in the past. In any event, memory is a trait that is becoming less and less important to us. This made the topic (especially the ancients usage of it) extremely interesting to me. Memory may be less important to us in this digital age, but we should not allow it to continue to atrophy.

You know what they say about history and memory, after all…