Violence in Mnemonic Practices
"However, if the process of recollection tends to be articulated by
images of violence, such violence may stem not only from ambivalence
toward the substance of what is being recollected but also from the very
necessities of the mnemonic process itself. As Frances Yates has shown,
it was customary for orators, from classical antiquity to the
Renaissance, to memorize a speech either by metonymically linking those
elements to be retrieved from memory with physical objects located in the
orator's immediate presence during the performance, or else by imagining
some spatial scene whose details were made as vivid as possible through
effects of violence and the grotesque so as to summon up more easily the
points the orator intended to expose. Violence may be seen not only as
the 'subject' of oral epic narrative, but also as an aide-memoire
or as a generative force in the production of such narrative. In a
commemorative culture, events of violence (sacrifices, circumcisions,
tortures, crucifixions, burnings, etc.) are given greater prominence so
that the collective memory will be duly impressed with the pathos
of 'history' as it is deployed: violence as semiosis" (Vance 53-54).
volume 2, issue 2
SN 220
