Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

by Laura Otis

How does the past live in us? Do we inherit our ancestors' memories as we do their physical characteristics? In the nineteenth century, mainstream science embraced a long-standing the belief that memory could be inherited. Scientists reasoned that, just as bodies were reproduced from generation to generation, so were thoughts, memories, and cultural achievements. Heredity and identity were no mere family matter, but the basis of nations. The glories and sins of the past were not they remained in the tissues of living people, who could be honored or blamed accordingly. Organic Memory surveys the literary and scientific history of an idea that will not go away. Focusing on the years between 1870 and 1918, Otis explores both the origins and the consequences of the idea that memories can be inherited. The organic memory theory contributed to the genocidal programs of the Third Reich, and it erupts in pop-psychology, racist propaganda, and ethnic cleansing. To track the spread, intensity, and endurance of this especially powerful idea, Otis singles out major authors whose work reinforced or ridiculed belief in organic memory. They include writers who were internationally influential yet who simultaneously represented their national Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The debates over the human genome project and the explosions of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, in Azerbaijan, Somalia, and elsewhere demonstrate how seriously organic memory continues to affect modern medicine and politics.

297 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 1994

About the author

Trained as a neuroscientist and literary scholar, Laura Otis, Ph.D., studies the ways that literature and science intersect. In her interdisciplinary research, she compares scientific and literary writers' descriptions of memory, identity, emotion, and thought. Her research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships. Otis earned her BS in Biochemistry at Yale University, her MA in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and her MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College. Since 2004 she has been a Professor of English at Emory University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on literature, neuroscience, cognitive science, and medicine. Otis is the author of Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), Networking (2001), Müller’s Lab (2007), Rethinking Thought (2016), and Banned Emotions (2019). She has also translated neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories (2001) into English and has edited Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2002). A fiction-writer as well as a scholar, she is the author of the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Tantalus Letters, and The Memory Hive. Her current project, The Neuroscience of Craft, examines what neuroscientists and creative writers can learn from each other about how sensations blend in people’s minds.