Scripture or other foundational texts of each point
or idea presented within a text, probably did more
than any other group to construct memory as a
literary theme of supreme importance in its own
right. Through compendia, or collections of writ-
ings, religious authors sought to establish validity
of thought in their writings; through catalogs based
on ancient Greek and Roman models, religious
and secular authors alike sought to establish tex-
tual authority and to craft a memory tradition of
thinking and cultural identity. Geoffrey Chau-
cer provides an excellent example of this in The
canterbury taLes, in which assorted travelers on
pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett at
Canterbury Cathedral stop at an inn and conduct a
storytelling contest. In this work, Chaucer not only
creates a fictional cross-section of British society in
his time but does so by having each of his travelers
tell his or her story in a literary genre suited to his or
her station in life. For example, the Knight, a noble,
tells a romance; the lower-class Miller tells a fabliau,
or dirty tale; the middle-class Wife of Bath tells
an Arthurian legend; the Nun’s Priest tells a beast
fable, or story with personified animals as the main
characters; and the Second Nun tells of a saint’s life.
In this fashion, Chaucer creates a compendium of
literary genres fashionable in his time, in addition
to providing a glimpse of British attitudes toward
social, political, and religious issues in his day, and
his work therefore serves as an excellent example of
the use of memory to construct collective identity.
The British romantics transformed the use of
memory in literature, often basing their writing on
earlier forms and themes, upon which they embroi-
dered a highly personal nostalgia and quest for
identity. William Wordsworth’s “Lines Com-
posed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is
widely acknowledged as the work that ushered in
the romantic movement. As the narrator returns
to a spot he visited years earlier, he is swept away
by the changes in the abbey and in himself, while
simultaneously delighting in the eternal quality of
the countryside surrounding him. The inclusion of
personal memory in the form of nostalgia, mar-
ried to collective memory in the public form of the
abbey itself, demonstrates the power of memory to
evoke strong emotion. John Keats similarly makes
use of the individual/collective dichotomy in his
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which he observes the
eternal images painted on an ancient vase, constructs
stories about them derived from his knowledge of
ancient culture, and simultaneously considers his
own ephemeral place in time. His recollection of
history, fused with his own mortality, render the
poem highly emotional. Rather than using mem-
ory to underscore textual legitimacy or to convey
national ideology, the romantics employed it to
evoke nostalgia and to highlight personal conflicts
in the search for identity.
Marcel Proust furthered the evolution of
memory in his monumental autobiographical novel
reMeMbrance oF thinGs past. In this work, Proust
is plunged into memories of his childhood through
the taste of a madeleine (small cake) dipped in tea.
From the original flashback evoked by the taste of
the cake, he maps an inner landscape of the mind
through further mental associations with that first,
sense-based moment, thus evolving the story from a
single memory to a vast panorama of identity con-
structed through memory. This work more than any
other has profoundly impacted the use of memory in
modern literature; with it, Proust wrested memory
entirely from its original use as a means of establish-
ing textual authority and national character, recreat-
ing it as a means of personal exploration of self and
the world.
Twentieth-century writers have tended to follow
Proust’s use of association in the construction of
memory. Perhaps the single best example of this is
T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” A modern poem
about the collapse of tradition and history and the
struggle for identity in the wake of World War I,
“The Waste Land” is a masterwork of association,
employing allusions to historical events, contem-
porary affairs, literature, music, art, the occult, sci-
ence, astronomy, important centers of learning and
culture, and various figures (both real and fictional)
to underscore the impoverished state of postwar
society. Eliot’s use of memory is a subversion of
the traditional; his is a construction of memory as
that which has been forgotten. He employs vast
references to the past in order to underscore their
absence in the present. Panoramas of ancient cit-
ies such as Alexandria and cultural centers such as70 memory