English 20th-Century First-Person Memory Novel and Henri Bergson’s Theory of Memory

• Main Author: Ivan Aleksandrovich Avramenko
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural Federal University Press 2019-12-01
• Series: Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки
• Subjects: память; роман-воспоминание; анри бергсон; время; английский роман хх в.; перволичный роман.
• Online Access: https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/Izvestia2/article/view/4302

In this article, the development of the English novel is viewed through the prism of Henri Bergson’s ideas on memory, the past and the present. A turn to the French philosopher’s system is explained by the necessity to design a historical and poetological model for the genre of memory novel, which, in the author’s opinion, is very typical of 20th-century literature in general and of English literature in particular. As the influence of Bergson on the British literature of the 1900s–1920s is well-studied, the author focuses on the subsequent period. The article analyses eight novels and a twelve-volume cycle of novels written between the 1930s and 1990s. The scope of the research is also limited to first-person novels which the author considers to be more representative for the genre. He aims to prove that in its evolution, the English first-person memory novel comes closer to Bergson’s ideas of memory being the synthesis of the past and the present and of progressive movement of memory directed from the past to the present — not only the other way round. Such understanding of memory and the temporal planes explains the composition of the novels, the relations between the narrator, character and narratee, the problems, ideas and style of the authors under investigation. It is established that it is very characteristic of the memory novels of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell) to compositionally separate the past and the present, giving ontological priority to one of the time planes (but not to both) and also to strictly distinguish between the narrating and the narrated selves, giving the leading role to the former. In the novels of the second half (William Golding, Iris Murdoch) and especially of the end of the century (Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Hilary Mantel), the boundaries between the past, present, and future in terms of plot and composition become more transparent; the positions of the narrator, character, and narratee are more relativised; the system of narrative and grammatical tenses is more heterogeneous.