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Toward a Poetics of Nostalgia: An Aristotelian Model of
Aesthetic Episodic Memory
Hal McDonald
Abstract
It is widely believed that episodic memory is constructive rather than
reproductive. This constructive conception of memory helps to explain why our
recollections of past events in our lives—even very important ones— so often
prove to be riddled with factual inaccuracies. The constructive model also offers
insight into the strange metamorphosis through which the raw, often unpleasant
episodes of our daily lives are transmuted into the stuff of nostalgic reverie,
especially if we think of nostalgia an aesthetic rather than utilitarian form of
cognition.
The self-contained nature of nostalgia, existing for its own sake as an
object of pleasure and contemplation rather than serving some practical purpose,
makes it far more like a poem or a play than like a set of instructions. A nostalgic
memory is, in essence, an aesthetic text “constructed” from the raw materials of
our episodic memories in the same way that a written text is constructed out of
words and images. As such, a nostalgic memory presumably follows a composition
process not all that different from that behind the creation of a work of literature—
a process as much concerned with what it omits as what it includes. In his Poetics,
Aristotle draws this distinction according to the aesthetic vision behind the text:
“…it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may
happen,--what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.” For the
poet, this “law” is the ideal work of art the text is striving to become. For the
nostalgic mind, the law involves the “self”—the elements of one’s identity that
define one, and endure over time. While the resulting text in each case may depart
significantly from factual reality, it serves the aesthetic purpose which is its sole
reason for being.
Key Words: Nostalgia, aesthetics, Aristotle, memory.
*****
Consider the following scenario. Among the myriad of memories you
carried away with you from that tumultuous time known as “the high school
years,” one golden carefree day stands out among the rest, and you frequently
replay the memory in your mind just to savor the experience once again. It was the
spring of your senior year, and a day dawned that was so beautiful and full of new
life that it seemed a crime to waste it sitting in a classroom breathing chalk dust
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Toward a Poetics of Nostalgia
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and conjugating French verbs. To this day you can’t remember whose idea it was,
but you and three friends decided to forge your parents’ signatures on permission
slips and skip school to spend the day communing with nature (the fact that such
an act of juvenile delinquency was completely out of keeping with your normally
responsible behavior only sweetened the prospect, adding a savor of reckless
abandon to the adventure). As all your unfortunate classmates dutifully took their
places in dreary classrooms, you and your friends loaded up the car with picnic
foods and drinks and headed out to a state park famous for its stunning 360 degree
views of the surrounding countryside. The day passed in a golden blur of
sandwiches, sodas, swimming, and sunning, and was topped off by a blazing sunset
viewed from the highest pinnacle in the park. On the way home, you paused at an
overlook to admire the stars, and a brilliant meteor shot through the sky overhead
to place an exclamation point at the end of a day that you knew even then would be
a special memory to you for the rest of your life.
Decades after that memorable jaunt, you pay a visit to your home town
and one of your first stops is an old diner you used to frequent when you were in
high school. Upon entering the front door, the first person you see is one of the
high school buddies with whom you spent that special day. Once the two of you
have finished catching up on the major life events that have transpired since you
parted ways after graduation, you bring up your senior excursion to the state park,
and verbally relive the experience as you remember it. As you approach the end of
your story, your old friend begins to frown and shake his head. “That’s not how it
happened,” he says, and then proceeds to relate his version of the story, which
differs markedly from your own. According to your friend, the episode took place
in the fall of your senior year rather than the spring, and the location was not the
state park, but a farm belonging to the grandparents of one of the two (not three)
other passengers in the car. There was no picnic lunch involved—just a package of
old cookies you found on the floor of the back seat, and the vision of the starry sky
and meteor you witnessed on the ride home was not viewed from an overlook
where you had paused to savor the few waning moments of your perfect day, but
from the side of the road where your friend driving the car had stopped to change a
flat tire. And as for the forged permission slips—source of the savory hint of
mischief in your memory—they were actually not necessary, since the excursion
occurred on scheduled school holiday.
This hypothetical but representative vignette illustrates a feature of
memory that is familiar to most ordinary human beings—namely, that it is not
perfect record of factual reality. As vividly as we may recall an event from our past
experience, the crystal clear details in our memory, when compared with a more
reliable record of the same event, may depart quite significantly from what actually
happened. To say that memory is not a perfect record of the past, however, is not to
say that it is an imperfect record of the past. According to a large number of
psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, an episodic memory (a memory of an
Hal McDonald
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event, as opposed to, say, a discrete fact, or a semantic concept) is not a record at
all, but rather a “construction” of a mental representation of events we have
experienced in our past.1 This theory of memory is called, appropriately, the
“constructivist” theory of memory.2 When we recall en event from our past, such
as a driving mishap or a special holiday from school, we don’t simply replay the
incident in our brains as we would a video recording, but rather construct a mental
representation out of bits and pieces of information stored in various parts of the
brain. Since this construction process takes place in a world removed in time and,
quite likely, in space from the autobiographical event that is being recalled,
numerous variables in both external and internal context intervene between the
event and the construction of the memory, slightly altering the details every time
the memory is constructed.
As unsettling as this realization may seem to people who pride themselves
on their “photographic memory,” recent studies suggest that the constructive nature
of memory, for all its fallibility, is in reality an adaptive feature of the human mind.
Constructive memory might actually be instrumental in our ability to imagine, and
plan for, future events.3 Whenever we look ahead in time to some planned event in
our future—remodeling our kitchen, for example, or travelling to a nostalgia
conference in Oxford—we are drawing from bits and pieces of stored information
from our past in precisely the same manner as when we construct a memory from
our past. What appears to us as fallibility when we think of memory as a literal
archive of our past is actually an adaptive flexibility when we conceive of it as a
mechanism for imagining the future. This Janus-headed tendency of memory to
operate in forward as well in reverse may hardly seem relevant to a discussion of
nostalgia, which is by definition a backward-looking phenomenon, but it portrays
the apparent fallibility of memory in a different and more positive light. Instead of
viewing memory as faulty, lamenting the omissions, additions, and transpositions
to which our autobiographical recollections are subject, it is more accurate, not to
mention more flattering, to view memory as creative. Out of the massive tangle of
synaptic connections that constitutes our cognitive world, our minds are able to
create meaningful pasts, presents, and futures. And being creative, our memories
are just as likely to take some liberty with the factual details when constructing a
remembered past as they are when constructing a projected future.
1
Daniel L. Schacter et al., “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive
Memory,” Annual Review of Psychology49: 290-91.
2
Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
(New York: Plume, 2006), 135.
3
Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 362 (2007), 773.
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Of course, to label the constructive nature of memory as “creative” is not
to deny the potential inconvenience of our memory’s tendency to depart from
factual reality. The gross inconsistencies among eyewitness accounts of a crime,
for example, make eyewitness testimony of practically no use in a criminal trial.
And in our daily lives outside the court room, discrepancies between our own
memories of an event and the memories of friends, family members, or co-workers
who also experienced it can be a potent source of interpersonal conflict (you and
your significant other each remembering a different song playing during your first
dance together, for instance). The source of conflict in cases such as these is the
complete credibility of our constructed mental representations of the past events in
question. Once the memory is constructed in our minds, it becomes reality for us,
and anyone who challenges that reality appears to us to be lying, just as we appear
to be lying if we challenge someone else’s account of it.
The basis for the seeming haphazardness of these mental representations
of past events is another adaptive feature of episodic memory—efficiency of
encoding. The amount of sensory detail involved in even the simplest and most
mundane experiences—brushing our teeth, for instance—is enormous, and for our
brains to indiscriminately store every last one of these details would be a prodigal
waste of mental storage and processing capacity. The brain encodes and stores the
“gist” of the experience, along with whatever sensory details are most closely
associated with it. When we later recall the experience, either voluntarily or
involuntarily, our episodic memory constructs a mental representation of the event
out of the stored information, but since the experience was not stored in its entirety
some gaps inevitably remain in the fabric of the representation.4 These gaps
subject the representation to distortion as a result of the combined influence of a
host of external and internal environmental factors (e.g. current circumstances,
experiences intervening between the earlier experience and its current mental
representation, etc.). The operation of these factors as a memory is being
constructed can turn the red car that rear-ended you into a white one, move the
swing-set of your childhood home from the front yard to the back, and take that set
of keys you accidentally left in your coat pocket and place them on the kitchen
counter where they belong.
Most such memory distortions are unwelcome--the erroneous key
memory leaving you without transportation until you happen to wear that coat
again, and the white car provoking a quarrel with your wife when she mentions the
“red” car that rear-ended you—while others, such as the transposed swing-set,
have little to no impact if they are ever even discovered. Their function is similar to
that of random genetic mutations, which most often produce a negative effect, if
they produce any effect at all, and only very rarely result in a desirable alteration in
4
Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “Constructive Memory: The Ghosts
of Past and Future,” Nature, 445, 27.
Hal McDonald
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the biological system in which they occur. There is a special class of episodic
memory, however, in which departures from factual reality almost always produce
a desirable effect –in which the creative nature of episodic memory is given full
license to work with the materials at hand. This type of memory is nostalgia—
memories of a departed past constructed and experienced for no other reason than
to savor the emotions which they evoke. There is no practical benefit in
remembering your first kiss, and whether it took place at the skating rink, or at the
cinema, as it plays out in your memory, makes little difference, since you won’t
find your car keys in either of those places. This distinctive character of nostalgia
of being valued for its own sake, without any regard for practical benefit or gain,
gives it a special ontological status as a form of cognition, making it an aesthetic,
rather than utilitarian form of episodic memory.
The aesthetic character of nostalgia, especially given the constructive, or
creative, nature of episodic memory in general, makes a nostalgic memory more
like a work of literature than a piece of expository prose. And just as we
consciously “read” a nostalgic memory for its aesthetic value, so we also, probably
more unconsciously than consciously, construct a nostalgic memory according to
aesthetic principles. Theoretical reflection on literary creation, then, should have
some relevance to, and shed some light upon, the process through which the raw
material of human experience is transformed into an aesthetic episodic memory. Of
course, millions of words have been devoted to the theoretical study of literature
over the past few millennia, but since most of those words owe some degree of
indebtedness to principles articulated by Aristotle over two thousand years ago in
his Poetics, this fountainhead of literary theory is as good a place as any to begin.
In his Poetics, Aristotle explores literary creation from every possible
angle, laying out the criteria for literary excellence, and the lack thereof, in each of
these areas. Since this paper is not intended to be a complete Aristotelian treatise,
but merely to work toward a poetics of nostalgia, one point of exploration should
suffice to draw the desired parallel. In his discussion of plot, and the related subject
of verisimilitude, Aristotle pointedly addresses the relationship between factual
reality and its portrayal in a work of literature. The material out of which a
nostalgic memory is created being the factual reality of our personal experience,
this seems to be a particularly relevant point to explore. Delineating between
history and poetry, Aristotle writes, “The poet and the historian differ not by
writing in verse or in prose….The true difference is that one relates what has
happened, the other what may happen.”5 Elaborating on the distinction between
what “has happened” and what “may happen,” he writes, “With respect to the
requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing possible
and yet improbable,” a “probably impossibility” being “what is possible according
5
Aristotle, “Poetics,” Criticism: The Major Statements, (New York: St. Martins,
1986), 30.
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to the law of probability or necessity.”6 In other words, a writer must always
perceive the work as an organic whole, and consistently follow the aesthetic
demands required to maintain organic unity. When a plot requires that a writer
choose between what actually happened in reality, and what must happen to
maintain the organic unity of the work as a whole, factual reality must take a back
seat to the aesthetic demands of the work—to “the law of probability or
necessity.”
In terms of human memory, our practical, day-to-day episodic memory—
our recollection of the drive to work, the red or white car that may or may not have
hit us, where we left our keys when we arrived at home—functions much as
Aristotle’s historian, trying to record the factual details as faithfully as possible.
Departures from factual reality in this record are flaws, and the resulting
inaccuracies represent potential inconvenience to us as we go about our daily
business. Our aesthetic episodic memory, on the other hand—our nostalgia—plays
the role of Aristotle’s poet, following “the law of probability or necessity,” and
favoring “probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.” In the plays that
Aristotle reviews as examples , the organic whole determining “the law of
probability and necessity” that the successful poet was required to observe was the
downward or upward arc followed by the protagonist in his journey toward
destruction or redemption. The events that made up the plot had to lead the
protagonist causally and inevitably toward his fate, even if these events had to take
poetic license with the factual story upon which the play was based.
When the human mind plays poet with the raw materials of episodic
memory, what principle determines the law of probability and necessity that must
be observed during the composition process, and what sort of poetic license must it
take with factual autobiographical experience? The answers to these questions
revolve around the almost universally positive emotional states associated with
nostalgic memories.”7 Whether a nostalgic memory is triggered automatically by
some external stimulus (a smell or a song, for example), or purposefully called up
into the conscious mind, we pause to savor the emotions the memory evokes
because experiencing these emotions brings us pleasure. The near universality of
pleasurable response to nostalgic memories does not mean that the
autobiographical events that provide the source material for the memories in
universally pleasurable—far from it, in fact. Many positive nostalgic memories are
linked to autobiographical events that were largely negative when they were
actually lived. When the raw factual material of these events is processed through
the aesthetic memory, however, an emotional transformation occurs, as has been
observed in a psychological study of numerous “nostalgic narratives”:
6
Ibid, 51.
Tim Wildschut et al., “Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Function,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 91 (5), 976.
7
Hal McDonald
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Many narratives contained descriptions of disappointments and losses,
and some touched on issues such as physical injury, separation, and even
death of loved ones. Nevertheless, positive and negative elements were
often juxtaposed so as to create a redemption sequence—a narrative
pattern that progresses from a negative to a redeeming, or mitigating,
positive life scene. 8
Unlike the haphazard distortions characteristic of memories constructed by our
more literal, utilitarian episodic memory, the license taken by the aesthetic episodic
memory is purely poetic.
So what sort of over-arching aesthetic principle dictates the law of
probability and necessity governing the constructions of nostalgic memories? In
addition to producing a generally “positive” emotional response, is there any more
specific criterion involved? Psychologists studying nostalgia have identified a
number of functions for nostalgic memories, but one in particular goes a long way
toward providing a common denominator to the wide variety of “probable
impossibilities” that aesthetic memory chooses over “possible improbabilities” in
its construction of memories: “We propose that nostalgia offers a way to protect
and increase self-regard by affirming valued aspects of the self that ‘reinforce
one’s overall self-adequacy.’”9 In short, the selection of episodes from our lives as
potential nostalgic material, and the poetic license taken by our aesthetic episodic
memories as it constructs a memory out of this material, are both governed by our
conception of a “self” that endures over time and makes us who we are.
To return to the vignette with which this paper began, the constructed
memory of that special day in the park differs from the actual lived experience in
ways calculated to maximize its aesthetic appeal. Aspects of the experience that
threaten the positive emotional value associated with it are edited out, or replaced
with more pleasant details. The added element of truancy provides a combined
sense of daring and camaraderie, since the unexcused absence is shared among the
day trippers. All of these editorial amendments serve to support a sense of self as
our hypothetical consciousness views it, providing a pleasurable perception of
integral wholeness in the remembered present, and enduring unity over time. It is
such a whole and unified self that we all seek, consciously or otherwise, to sustain
over our lifetimes, and those aesthetic episodic creations that we call nostalgic
memories play an integral role in this endeavor.
8
Tim Wildschut et al., “Nostalgia: From Cowbells to the Meaning of Life,” The
Psychologist, 21 (1), 21.
9
Tim Wildschut et al., “Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Function,” 986.
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Bibliography
Aristotle. “From The Poetics.” Criticism: The Major Statements. Ed. Charles
Kaplan. New York: St, Martins, 1986.
Levitin, Daniel. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
New York: Plume, 2006.
Schacter, Daniel, and Donna Rose Addis. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future.”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (2007) 362, 773-786.
---. “Constructive Memory: The Ghosts of Past and Future.” Nature, 445 (7123),
27.
Schacter, Daniel, L., Kenneth A. Norman, and Wilma Koutstaal. The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Constructive Memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 289318.
Wildschut, Tim, Constantine Sedikides, and Clay. “Nostalgia: From Cowbells to
the Meaning of Life.” The Psychologist, 21 (1), 20-23.
Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, Clay. “Nostalgia: Content,
Triggers, Functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 975-993.
Hal McDonald is a Professor of English at Mars Hill University. His research
interests include American literature and linguistics. He is also a fiction writer,
having published a medical mystery novel, The Anatomists, with Harper Collins in
2008.