On Forgetting
Alma Prelec, Emily Di Dodo
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‘Tutto avem veduto’? Enumeration and ‘Forgetfulness’ in Dante’s Commedia
J. C. Wiles
doi:10.59860/wph.a16512a

Despite the Commedia’s nominal aspiration towards encyclo­paedism, Dante consistently draws attention to the apparent incompleteness of his vision. One of the primary ways in which this is accomplished is, paradoxically, through Dante’s use of enumeration. Scholars have frequently interpreted the poem’s rosters of souls as symptomatic of its epic impulse towards totality, and though they have often examined Dante’s use of preterition in these cases, less attention has been given to those instances where they draw attention to characters ‘present’ in the afterlife, but conspicuously absent from the poem’s narrative. In this paper, I focus on two particularly suggestive cases. The first occurs in Inferno 6, where Ciacco informs Dante that he will meet a figure named ‘Arrigo’: an encounter that does not take place. The second is in Paradiso 15, in which Cacciaguida alludes to Dante’s ancestor Alighiero I, telling him that he is among the penitent prideful in Purgatorio. Though Dante spends a great deal of time on this terrace, he does not meet his namesake. I propose here that, far from being any kind of mistake, these ‘forgetful’ moments cast significant light on the poem’s shifting treatments of absence, as well as its overarching narrative strategies.

Lost and Found: Dream Memory on the Early Modern French Stage
Daniel Clark
doi:10.59860/wph.a274571

To speak of memory loss in the theatre most commonly evokes the image of actors fumbling their lines. Another type of theatrical forgetting can, however, be equally problematic: failing to forget dreams. While real-life dream recall is startlingly poor, early modern French characters ‘remember’ their night-time visions with remarkable lucidity. When these (non-existent) experiences from pre-theatrical time are narrated as veridical fact, the audience seems to gain privileged access to a doubly fictional world. In fact, as this paper will show, onstage dream narratives combine creation and recollection. In doing so, they further complicate the relationship between truth and fiction. Through analysis of two suitably peripheral dream narrations — Tristan l’Hermite’s Mariane and Jean de Schelandre’s Tyr et Sidon, Seconde Journée — this paper will probe the status of dream memory on the early modern stage.

(Mis)remembering Bertha Harris
Catherine Kelly
doi:10.59860/wph.a3839b8

A once influential writer, editor and theorist of lesbian identity, the North Carolina-born novelist Bertha Harris is today best remembered for Lover (1976), a fragmentary and difficult to summarise novel that explores questions of fabrication, memory, and queer desire through the lives of a shifting family of saints and art forgers. Harris expressed scepticism about the conventions of queer life-writing, arguing that writers who ‘continually reproduce the coming out process’ in their work were ‘act[ing] like a heterosexual’. In both her fiction and her life-writing, she articulates what she considered to be a specifically lesbian literary practise that prioritizes the pleasures of artifice and disguise over what she dismissed as the dull work of ‘telling it like it is’. How, then, should the literary historian seek to remember and reconstruct Harris’s life and work? This essay explores two, at times contradictory, threads. The first is the attempt to draw on the ephemeral genres of the mid-twentieth century lesbian archive — rumour, oral history, personal correspondence — to recover and remember Harris’s life and work. The second is Harris’s articulation of what she described as the ‘gay sensibility, whose practice hinges [...] on decisively choosing as if over is’, treating the queer past as a site of speculation and invention. Taking these threads together reveals the limits of feminist literary recovery and considers practises of misremembering and fabrication as queer archival method.

Commemoration and Forgetting: Lamartine’s Lost Afterlife
Tim Farrant
doi:10.59860/wph.a492d9b

Beginning with Kundera’s declaration ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, this article asks why, amongst a rash of anniversaries, Lamartine’s groundbreaking 1820 Méditations poétiques went virtually unremembered, and probes the implications of memory and forgetting for our futures. Finding a first reason in Lamartine’s association with failure, it links that failure with Lamartine’s great, if transient, political success, which gave a template for poètes maudits from Baudelaire onwards — something reflected by Flaubert’s derisory picture of Lamartine’s political and poetic agency in L’Education sentimentale. Spotlighting something Flaubert neglects, it finds oblivion in Lamartine’s genotype, in the earthly transience of the Christian, of little account against celestial transcendence, situating this, like Lamartine himself and subsequently Pierre Nora, in the lieu de mémoire — here, Lamartine’s house at Milly. Noting that Lamartine is seemingly the more forgotten for having more lieux de mémoire, memorial properties, than more remembered contemporaries, it attributes this to their being in private (albeit welcoming) rather than public hands, and to Lamartine’s own introspection and inwardness. Tensions between public and private, poetry and politics, are shown to be present since the beginning of Lamartine’s career, and have recurrently marked his work’s reception ever since. Taking as a litmus test his 1818 drama Saül, it juxtaposes Des Cognets’s 1918 centenary edition with Barrès’s 1914 polemic L’Abdication du poète to give contrasting readings of Lamartine’s drama and politico-poetic world-view: for Barrès, too ready to compromise doctrine for politics; for the more scholarly Des Cognets, revealing poetry-politics conflicts inherent in Lamartine’s make-up and his work. If oblivion is perhaps inevitable fate for those too prominent or controversial in their own time, Lamartine’s latent assimilation as one of the great uncommemorated, and unread, may give us pause, if memory is indeed our chief defence against oppression.

On Museums, Conflict, and Forgetting: An Immutable Cultural Heritage?
Stuart Bowes
doi:10.59860/wph.a589b42

Forgetfulness is not a trait generally associated with museums. In principle, they endeavour to cultivate a direct link with the past by safeguarding the surviving material fragments of our cultural inheritance. However, for every object or narrative that museums preserve, there are many more that they cannot retain. This paper explores the symbiotic relationship of remembering and forgetting within contemporary museological practice. Drawing on the fall of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and its subsequent afterlife as a museum object, it considers the pressures on all institutions to forget in a time of marked cultural upheaval. This process is particularly significant for museums concerned with human conflict, a subject whose legacy is often highly contentious. This study draws on the example of the Royal Armouries, the UK’s national museum of arms and armour, to explore the dynamics of forgetting in an institution whose work is inextricably bound up with conflict. It assesses the diverse reasons for forgetting at this institution, including the enduring influence of historical assumptions, the strength of public opinion, legal obligations, and the promotion of inclusivity. These processes are shown to highlight the plurality of forgetting in museums, which requires institutions to adopt a flexible approach to its challenges. Ultimately, this paper addresses a perpetual dilemma faced by museums, but one that has become especially pressing in the current climate of heightened cultural sensitivity: what is acceptable for a museum to forget?

Translating Traumatic Memories: What is Forgotten in the English Translation of Mercè Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies?
Daisy Towers
doi:10.59860/wph.a698ba1

This working paper explores trauma, memory, translation, and loss. The paper discusses the extent to which traumatic events impact memory retelling and the ways in which this can be conveyed in literary fiction, exploring how this also affects the narrative and its portrayal in translation. Through the analysis of extracts from the novel El carrer de les Camèlies by Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda (1908–83) and its English translation, the paper considers how the retelling of traumatic memories impacts a text, leading to repetition, fragmentation, and the breakdown of a linear narrative. Rodoreda’s work depicts women as victims of trauma and male violence, often against the background of the Spanish Civil War, with female protagonists who struggle to come to terms with or voice their experiences of trauma. Both personal and collective trauma is apparent within the texts, which are engaged with to varying degrees in translation. The paper will focus firstly on how trauma and its memory affect the literary narrative, considering then how this is conveyed and retold in translation. By drawing on the work of Siobhan Brownlie on memory studies and translation, and Sharon Deane-Cox and Helena Buffery on the role of the translator and the representation of trauma in translation, I consider how the English-language versions of Rodoreda’s work attempt to (re)create or (re)narrate the traumatic memories of the source text, and whether this contributes to a sense of loss.

Dwelling with Traumatic Memory through Embodied Drawing in the Structure of Graphic Novels
Gareth Brookes
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b3da8

Autobiographical graphic novels dealing with personal trauma have gained widespread popularity and critical recognition over the past ten years. The depiction of traumatic memory in graphic narrative has been characterized by writers such as Harriet Earle in terms of recurrence and non-integration. In this paper I will examine the difficulties of representing memories that occupy a space between forgetting and re-experience, and how these difficulties have led graphic novelists to foreground the materiality of the comics form and rethink elements of its formal structure. I will consider the representation of traumatic memory in two graphic novels, Lighter than my Shadow by Katie Green (2013), and Becoming Unbecoming by Una (2015), which tell stories of recovery from trauma related to eating disorders and sexual abuse. I will examine such representations through a discussion of the materials and processes used in the production of these works and argue that these works utilize a convergence of haptic visuality and embodied drawing to appeal to the reader’s embodied experience of memory through indexicality. Through a discussion of braided visual relationships, grounded in theory developed by Thierry Groensteen, I will argue that haptic forms of mark-making, which include soaking, scribbling, and folding, generate recurring networks of haptically charged engagement, allowing the reader to dwell with the trauma of the protagonist in spaces outside of the temporal logic of the main narrative. The central argument of this paper is that such networks are structurally embedded in the narrative of these works and constitute an overlooked modality through which unintegrated and unspeakable elements of traumatic experience can be expressed.