تئاتر حافظه

by Simon Critchley, قاسم نجاری (Translator)

"تئاتر خاطره" نوشته سایمون کریچلی، یک رمان فلسفی است که تاریخ، ادبیات و تأملات شخصی را در هم می‌آمیزد. کریچلی که به عنوان فیلسوفی با رویکرد قابل دسترس به مفاهیم پیچیده شناخته می‌شود، در این اثر به بررسی مضامینی چون حافظه، مرگ و میر، و تلاش انسان‌ها برای درک هستی و زمان می‌پردازد. این رمان به طرز هنرمندانه‌ای داستانی را روایت می‌کند که با فلسفه و بازتاب‌های فکری همراه شده است.
داستان حول محور راوی‌ای است که مجموعه‌ای از اسناد و دست‌نوشته‌های یک فیلسوف متوفی را در اختیار می‌گیرد. در میان این اسناد، نموداری مرموز از «تئاتر حافظه» وجود دارد - مفهومی از رنسانس که در آن افراد برای نظم دادن به اطلاعات و خاطرات خود از ساختارهای معماری استفاده می‌کردند. راوی با بررسی این اسناد، به سفری فکری و شخصی وارد می‌شود که او را به تأمل در مورد زندگی، مرگ، و معنای هستی انسان هدایت می‌کند. این سفر نه تنها به کاوش در زندگی خود او، بلکه به درک عمیق‌تری از سرنوشت و ماهیت انسان منجر می‌شود. یکی از موضوعات اصلی در "تئاتر حافظه" ارتباط میان حافظه و هویت است. کریچلی از طریق روایت، به بررسی این مسئله می‌پردازد که چگونه هویت ما از طریق خاطرات شکل می‌گیرد و نقش فراموشی در فرآیند شکل‌دهی به خود را تحلیل می‌کند. مفهوم «تئاتر حافظه» در کتاب به عنوان نمادی از تلاش انسان برای ایجاد نظم و معنا در دنیایی پر از آشفتگی و بی‌ثباتی ظاهر می‌شود. موضوع دیگری که به طور برجسته در کتاب به آن پرداخته شده، مرگ و میر است. همانطور که راوی بیشتر در اسناد غرق می‌شود، او با سوالات فلسفی عمیقی در مورد فناپذیری و چگونگی مواجهه انسان با مرگ دست و پنجه نرم می‌کند. این تاملات فلسفی با بررسی ایده‌های تقدیر و سرنوشت همراه است و تئاتر حافظه به عنوان نمادی از تلاش انسان برای درک و تسلط بر زمان و سرنوشت دیده می‌شود.
"تئاتر حافظه" از سایمون کریچلی، اثری فلسفی و تفکر برانگیز است که از طریق ترکیب داستان و تحقیق فلسفی، پرسش‌های عمیقی در مورد حافظه، هویت، مرگ و میر و معنای زندگی مطرح می‌کند. کریچلی با استفاده از استعاره‌های تاریخی و فلسفی، کتابی کوتاه اما سرشار از اندیشه‌های عمیق را ارائه می‌دهد که خوانندگان را به تأمل در مورد شرایط انسانی و چگونگی کنار آمدن با گذر زمان و فناپذیری خود فرا می‌خواند.

Genres: Philosophy, Fiction, Essays, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novella, Contemporary

Paperback

First published September 24, 2014

About the author

Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960 in Hertfordshire) is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics [...]

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

How often are we as readers gifted with a story that is less than 100 pages? I saw this one in my local library and was intrigued by its premise. But to be honest, my greatest attraction was that it was a short book.

Never could I imagine that it would be one that would be filled with such philosophical musings. Certainly, something any of us can relate to given the right mood.

The beginning had our narrator, the author, sharing his fight with sleep over his fear with death. He declared…

“I was exhausted by exhaustion.”

I could relate to his thoughts so easily, especially in the early days when my medical care team was trying to define my symptoms, which turned out to be Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and Thymoma cancers. (Currently, and thankfully, they are respectively in remission and benign. Hopefully, further tests this week will have the same conclusion.) While all this testing was happening, there would be many nights where I would toss and turn as I attempted not to live in the future of the unknown, but stay present with hope for healing. Leaving me with many days where I would wake up ‘exhausted by exhaustion.’

The premise of this short novella is that the narrator, is left a series of boxes by a recently dead philosopher named Michel, who he had minimal involvement with in his past. The boxes were named after astrological signs. As the narrator goes through these boxes, he reflects on the art of memory. Especially as it relates to a variety of writers and other philosophers that are translated by Michel.

“Through the art of memory, we learn to see ourselves from the perspective of the whole, from the standpoint of totality. In so doing, we become infinite, divinely human.”

The more the narrator reads, the more reflective he becomes about the ‘idea of a memory theater.’

A memory theater ‘where the long path of the world’s historical development can be held in the storehouse of memory and obsessively replayed.’

So, what does this all really mean? And, what does this self-reflection do? How does it guide the value of our memories? And, how does it play into our present-future?

In many ways this book is a discussion in existentialism. What memories are grounded in truth? Should we be concerned with our human existence? What memory theater are we here to create in this life?

“Might not a landscape itself be seen as a memory theater? Might not the whole globe be viewed as a set of memory traces for life, organic and inorganic, past and future?”

Is it true that in order “to see the future, we must turn inward?”

Needless to say, this was not a simple ordinary short book to be read. It was one that expected readers to go inward along with the narrator, to consider: our present world, the memories we have experienced and created for ourselves; and, an opportunity to ‘recall the totality of our own knowledge’ of life itself. Especially as it relates to life decisions we have made and choose to still make.

This debut is profound, sometimes murky, thought-provoking, different, sometimes funny, and definitely odd. Who is this philosophical narrator and why are we having this discussion? But at the same time, in its quirkiness, it certainly opens the door for introspection. Which makes this book perfect for group discussion.

The author also includes ‘a partial glossary of potential obscurities’ at the end.

[Shaye Easton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have I just discovered a new all-time favourite? For lovers of Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and all things meta, philosophical, literary, mysterious, terrifying, formally experimental, existential and obsessive.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘I looked out the car window at the slow windings of the B1124 as it wended through the subtle hills of the Colne Valley and thought of the old Roman road between Colchester and Cambridge. Traders carrying oysters wrapped in damp sacks from Mersea Island. Might not a landscape itself be seen as a memory theatre?

Not sure why I like this so much. Feel like it might be a textural and tonal thing (which honestly just makes it all the more vague); full(er) RTC later?

‘—I found the idea of a memory theatre, even the Hegelian version, slightly droll, as I had lost much of my memory after the accident. All I remembered from that morning in the pharmaceutical factory was Jilted John playing on the radio – ‘Gordon is a moron’ – and blood all over the floor. I loved that song. It was even more stripped down than conventional punk: two chords instead of three. Then my hand got trapped in the machine by inch-thick steel paddles. Steel slicing flesh. After I pulled out my hand, horribly mangled and hanging by bloody tendons and shards of bone, I collapsed.’

‘I remember being blissfully out of my brain on Pethidine in a hospital bed—I blacked out. Then I remember going into the operating theatre. I blacked out again—my hand suspended above me and wrapped in vast bandages. It was dark and I told him that it wasn’t my fault this time. Then I lost consciousness again. After three operations and as many weeks in hospital, I was told by the specialist that my hand wouldn’t have to be amputated. Here it is in front of me right now, arthritic and disfigured with a huge skin-graft scar, but still capable of slow two-finger typing—A registered disability, no less. It’s like that bloody short story by Maupassant. I kept my hand, more or less, but lost large fields of my memory. This was the effect of the trauma, doctors told me. How reassuring. I would get flashbacks, for sure, but they were often vague and they didn’t necessarily feel like my memories. My self felt like a theatre with no memory. All the seats were empty. Nothing was happening onstage. I sat back in my office chair and closed my eyes.’

'Maybe the Hegelian memory theatre is not just a map of the past, but a plan of the future, a predictive memory theatre. Everyone could have their own memory theatre. Everyone was their own memory theatre. If I had no memory, had I ceased to really exist at the moment of the accident? Was this a kind of death in life where I was experiencing a kind of reverse dementia?’

‘Everything that I had done—was too two-dimensional. Too flat. Like this fucking landscape. Memory is repetition. Sure. But it is repetition with a difference. It is not a recitation. It is repetition that creates a felt variation in the way things appear. Repetition is what makes novelty possible. This is what Mark E. Smith meant. Memory needs to be imagination. Transfiguration. Now, I saw it. The whole thing. An endlessly recreating, re-enacting memory mechanism. A rotating eternity. Self-generating and self-altering.'

'We do not make ourselves. We cannot remake ourselves through memory. Such was the fallacy driving my memory theatre. We are not self-constituting beings. We are constituted through the vast movement of history of which we are the largely quiescent effects. Sundry epiphenomena. Symptoms of a millennia-long malaise whose cause escapes us. The theatre of memory cannot be reduced to my memory. It has to reach down into the deep immemorial strata that contain the latent collective energy of the past. The dead who still fill the air with their cries. The memory theatre would have to immerse itself in the monumentally forgotten. Like a dredging machine descending down through the lethean waters of the contemporary world into the sand, silt and sludge of the sedimented past. I had seen a machine like that once on the Essex coast. I watched it for hours. Dredging mud. The clanging noise it made. Water slipping through its metal teeth.'

'The problem with my memory theatre was that it was a theatre of death and it would die with me. What was the point of that? The new machine would continue forever. Forever repeating. Forever innovating. Not just the same. It would be an artifice, sure, a simulacrum, undoubtedly, but infinite and autonomous. Its autonomy, not mine. Not the same mistake again. It would be the perfect work of art. It would continue without me, in perpetuity. Endlessly. Eventually, it would be indistinguishable from life. It would become life itself.’

[Özgür Atmaca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Bizler kendi kendimizi yapmayız. Kendimizi bellek yoluyla yeniden yapamayız. Benim bellek tiyatromun düştüğü yanılgı buydu. Biz kendi kendini kuran varlıklar değiliz. Tarihin devasa hareketi kurar bizi, bu hareketin Büyük ölçüde hareketsiz sonuç­ larından ibaretiz. Muhtelif gölge-olaylanz. Nedenini bilemeyece­ ğimiz asırlık bir hastalığın semptomlarıyız. Bellek tiyatrosu be­ nim belleğime indirgenemez. Geçmişin örtük kolektif enerjisini içinde barındıran derinlerdeki çok eski katmanlara uzanması ge­ rekir. Havayı hâlâ çığlıklarıyla dolduran ölülere uzanması. Bellek tiyatrosu kendini muazzam biçimde unutulmuş olana gömmeli- dir. Günümüz dünyasının unutturucu sularının dibini tarayarak çökelmiş geçmişin kumuna, miline, çamuruna inen bir makine gibi. “

[Sinem A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hem felsefi bir metin hem de bir tür kısa novella gibi okunabilecek bu kitap hafıza üzerine çok şey söylüyor çok kısa olmasına rağmen.
Kitaptan kitaba iz sürerken Cenup'tan kuzeye doğru çıkınca karşılaştığımız bu kitabı büyük zevkle elimden bırakamadan okudum.
Bellke, hafıza gibi konularda felsefik yaklaşımları eğlenceli ve kompakt bir şekilde okumak isteyenlere tavsiye edebilirim.
"Bellek tekrarlamaktır. Ezberden okumak değildir. Şeylerin görünüşünde hissedilir bir çeşitleme yaratan tekrardır. Yeniliği mümkün kılan şeydir tekrar. Belleğin hayalgücü olması gerekir. Başkalaşım olması. Şimdi görüyordum. Her şeyi.Sosuzca yeniden yaratan yeniden canlandıran bir bellke mekanizması."

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

نوشتن از این کتاب به این شکل که بخوای بگی درباره‌ی چیه خیلی سخته. یه جمله تو کتاب هست که می‌گه ما به واسطه‌ی هنر حافظه یاد می‌گیریم که خودمان را از زاویه‌ی دیدِ کل بنگریم،از نقطه‌نظر کلیت. این‌گونه است که ما بدل می‌شویم به انسان بی‌نهایت، انسان الهی.
این کاریه که کتاب با شما می‌کنه. شما از طریق تجربه‌ی نویسنده به زندگی خودتون نگاه می‌کنید. یک رمان فلسفی برای هرکی که عاشق هزارتوی بورخسه.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ooo-la-la,


None of you suckers had heard about this baby. Don't worry I got the novellas of french philosophers covered!

I'm going to go out on a limb here and tentatively recommend this bad boy to the philosophers: Adage and Maxie (the narrator talks a lot about this Hegel fella)

Then I'll give it a thumbs up and nod to next tier, the group I call Readers and Crafters: The Dewster, Megalot, Lease

Then I'd float it onto the aloof circle: Ally, Triin with two i's, and The-uh Thea. (David, he's on another level. I don't got to worry about David)

I certainly enjoyed myself. I might vortex on the couch and skim some of the bumpier parts. I'm thinkin about, well, I guess I won't go into it, but once you've read it, I'm thinkin about doing it.

It's like a hundred pages.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and worthwhile. I think the book's greatest success is managing to represent the way in which an intellectual's life is populated by the books and ideas he (in this case) loves; it lets us in to see the deep fondness he has for thoughts and their thinkers. There are echoes of Eco (heh), Bernhard, and Sebald here, definitely the European intellectual thinking about his place in history and his inheritance and legacy. It's rewarding, even if it leaves an impression of thinness, and its obscurity at the end feels slightly self-important. Overall, I recommend it.

[kashish · Rating 2 out of 5]

I might be too dumb to understand this, but I really gained nothing.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Critchley is quite interesting when he's just giving us a potted version of what Frances Yates and others had to say. As a creative writer, his weakness (as he realises in himself) is that he is not a poet, and he lapses into cliche, triteness, and the tone of a rather desperate ageing trendy, several times in this quite short book. The project of the "memory theatre" for his life is dead-on-arrival from its appearance, so I couldn't possibly care at its formal failure. The tricksy business about mystery boxes and found manuscripts is now very stale and mouldy, and Simon is utterly perfunctory in unveiling it. The photos are nice, though. Do you notice they're in reverse order, to show the building seemingly being deconstructed, paralleling his idea about Hegel's "Phenomenology"? Clever stuff.

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

a slim, apparently somewhat autobiographical novella from philosopher simon critchley (see also nyt's "the stone"), memory theater is an enigmatic, enjoyable foray into memory and mortality. perhaps not unlike something one would expect from enrique vila-matas (or even a more mild-mannered césar aira), critchley's brief work entwines the history of philosophy with the cryptic leavings of his late colleague. critchley's erudition melds easily with an inviting humor, leaving the reader charmed and inquisitive (about both the idea of a memory theater and the philosophical issues raised in the text).

i was dying. that much was certain. the rest is fiction.

[P · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a bizarre little thing. What opens on the philosophy of memory (base knowledge of Hegel would be helpful) morphs into. . .something else. An attempt to explain/understand memory, a trip into madness, an attempt to face your own death/life?

A little bonkers, and probably all the better for it.

[Timothy Urban · Rating 4 out of 5]

Odd, brain-stretching, funny in places and quite different from anything I've read before. I wish I could find more books that are, like this, pleasing reads but at the same time not trying to conform to any obvious literary conventions.

[Carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

How cheeky of Fitzcarraldo Editions to bind this book in non-fiction white! But alas, I’ve been on book-centric social media for long enough not to have been fooled. This slim volume is nothing if not a deadpan comedy, as charming in its intents as Gulliver’s Travels, even if way too short to (probably) ever come to qualify as a classic. The best is to approach it with a straight face, sharing in on the joke silently. Indeed, we are all fancy high-brow intellectuals, we surely know our nietzsches and hegels, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a metafictional ghost story and poke fun at death and our mortality.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Irritating and pretentious. Also describes the demise of the dinosaurs as having taken place 15 million years ago, rather than 65 million. I wonder if Critchley's book on David Bowie thinks Bowie was born in 1998.

[Harold Eckett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of humor and deep philosophical history, The Memory Theater is a quick one-sit read for anyone looking to laugh, think and remember their past.

[Enes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kurgu mu, gerçek mi bilmem, oturun, okuyun, belleğiniz sancısın gibi bir kitap.

[Bert · Rating 3 out of 5]

'I was dying. That much was certain. The rest is fiction.' (p.7)

It took me a while to understand Hegel, the great philosopher of Idealism, ever since I started studying philosophy. Gradually I grasped some hints of what the big thinker had in mind. A lot of it eluded me invariably. If it's not for the craziness of Critchley's attempt to create a Memory Theatre of his own, it must be for his clear approach to Hegels phenomenology of mind I slightly enjoyed reading this book.

And yeah, what does it care if it is fiction or not. If everything else we do, is just die.

[Janina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Features hallucinations a lot more than I wanted. Interesting, my fascination with Critchley and philosophy and mythicism continues. Definitely not the best time for me to read this (considering my mental state) so even though I have already ordered Notes on Suicide I will not read it immediately and wait for a time when I feel better overall so I will not make myself feel worse.

tw/cw: death, mentioned suicide, hallucination, visions, mentioned insanity

[Natascha Eschweiler · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the more entertaining reads I had this year. Hilarious narrator, quite sassy, and just the right amount of shade thrown at my fellow countrymen.

[Julia Granestad]

Brags about sexual assault 0/5

[Eva Gahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars for linguistic interest and conceptual beauty. maybe i would get the joke if i’d ever actually read spinoza.

[Cali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through the art of memory, we learn to see ourselves from the perspective of the whole, from the standpoint of totality. In so doing, we become infinite, divinely human.

Postmodern... but also deeply classical. And Hegelian? Reeks of Calvino. Echoes Ivan Ilyich. And people say I'm annoying!

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Should be 4x longer. But shouldn't life? is that why it's good that it's not?

[Sıla Eren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mest olarak okudum. Tam da uzerinde düşünüp okumakta olduğum konularla boylesine ortustugu için belki, bu kadar iyi gelmesi. Muazzam.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit, no words.

[Swjohnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philosopher Simon Critchley was born in England, but his debut novel "Memory Theater" looks and smells continental. At first glance, it will remind most readers of a slim, epigrammatic work by Derrida. In the same spirit, it tackles topics of risible enormity: Death, memory, and the idea of a collective historical unconscious.

On closer examination, the real lodestar of the metafictional "Memory Theater" appears to be the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, with its playful evocation of esoteric theories and documents. Simon Critchley, or rather a fictionalized version of the author with the same name, discovers a series of boxes that belonged to Michel Haar, a dead philosophy professor. Critchley first uncovers a range of texts related to the idea of the “memory theater,” a physical space designed to evoke recollections through visual shorthand. The concept has a long and esoteric history, and Haar theorizes wildly on its applications, even employing Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” as a kind of textual memory theater to connect with a quasi-mystical universal consciousness.

Opening other boxes, Critchely then finds a series of "memory maps," biographical compendiums that predict several philosophers’ dates and causes of death, including his own. The discovery inspires Critchley to build his own memory theater before he dies, guided by a model of Giulio Camillo’s design for a 16th century theater. Mayhem ensues.

The novel’s technique is relatively straightforward. Critchley (ahem, the “real” author) uses Haar’s texts as a means to introduce the idea of the memory theater, which then expands into a riff that combines fiction, memoir and other texts. There are moments of maddening narrative unreliability, such as a section (not my original observation, by the way) where Critchley inaccurately discusses a Swedish acquaintance’s recollection of the lyrics of a 1978 Eurovision song contest entry. Whether other deliberate inaccuracies exist (and what the intent of those distortions might be) is virtually unknowable; not even the most erudite reader will be able to determine the full accuracy of Critchley’s granular esoterica.

Like the oracular continental philosophy that it imitates, "Memory Theater" requires the blind faith of the reader, and withers somewhat in the face of serious inquiry. In particular,its concept of “memory” is maddeningly fluid. The book's status as fiction relives it somewhat from the burdens of airtight argumentation, but that same freedom allows it play unfairly with the curious reader, who will be mystified by fanciful moments where argumentation all but evaporates.

Some readers will be impressed by Critchley’s ability to compile and comment on esoteric subjects. But I can't agree with Jonathan Lethem's blurb that praises Critchley as a figure of "startling brilliance." This is engaging and competent metafiction, nothing more.

[Alice Heiserman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderfully weird book that dropped in names of philosophers with brief summations of their ideas much like one would at a cocktail party--not too heavy but titillating. I read this short novella in one evening and wound up unable to sleep due to the excitement of the ideas. We know the author is playing with us due to the mixing of genres--novel, essay, autobiography, brief biographies--but the idea of knowing the date of one's death presents a fascinating dramatic scene preceded by a mysteriously delivered series of boxes filled with another philosopher's notes and strange astrological maps. Even the notes about the persons mentioned in the text are filled with a sly humor.

[Mina-Louise]

It's been almost a week since I finished this, and this book is making me re-evaluate how I'm rating books here. Memory Theatre was a quick read, sometimes beautiful-- but ultimately not a book that moved me or left any lasting impact. As a person I tend to feel strongly for or against something, and am rarely neutral, if I am it's usually because I dont know enough about a subject. This book, I guess, felt like a lukewarm shower. So changing it from 4 to 3 stars.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart, funny, frightening at times.