Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T09:52:50.346Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Extract

When Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares first appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. In An Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the “memory of life” rather than the “theatrical archives of his mind” and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim:

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Stanislavski, Constantin, An Actor Prepares (hereafter AP), trans. Hapgood, E. R. (New York: Theatre Arts, 1936), 165; 170–71Google Scholar. See also Cousin, Geraldine, “A Note on Mimesis: Stanislavski's and Brecht's Street Scenes,” in Drama, Dance and Music, ed. Redmond, James, Themes in Drama, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. 236Google Scholar. On the controversy surrounding Hapgood's translation, see Gray, Paul, “From Russia to America: A Critical Chronology,” in Stanislavski and America: An Anthology from the Tulane Drama Review, ed. Munk, Erika (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 154155Google Scholar; and Benedetti, Jean, Stanislavski: A Biography (New York: Routledge, 1990), 315318Google Scholar. On the contemporaneous American responses to the Moscow Art Theater, see Chapter 8 of Edwards', ChristineThe Stanislavski Heritage: Its Contribution to the Russian and American Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. I wish to take this opportunity to thank Michal Kobialka for his incisive critique of the first version of this essay.

2. See, e.g. [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium (hereafter RAH), ed. and trans. Caplan, Harry, Loeb Classical Library (1954; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 3:30Google Scholar. The five rhetorical canons are invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery (e.g., RAH, 1:3). An actor in early rhetoric was originally a speaker, performer, legal advocate, or prosecutor. The finest introductions to the general history of rhetoric remain Murphy's, James J.Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (1974; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Kennedy's, George A.Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)Google Scholar. For memory, see Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Coleman, Janet, Ancient and Medieval Memories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. It bears mentioning that this legend really shows a short-term memory in action more than the long-term practices of mnemotechnics. It appears in numerous rhetorical treatises, including Cicero, , De oratore, ed. and trans. Rackham, H., Loeb Classical Library (1942; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 2:351355Google Scholar; and Quintilian, , lnstitutio oratoria (hereafter IO), ed. and trans. Butler, H.E., Loeb Classical Library (1920; reprint Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 11, 2.11–16Google Scholar. (I offer a detailed textual reading of the various texts of the Simonides legend in Chapter 2 of my Medieval Theater of Cruelty, hereafter MTOC (forthcoming Cornell University Press). While the Institutio oratoria was only partially accessible to the early Middle Ages in the mutilist tradition, it had a greater influence than was once thought. See, e.g., Ward, John O., “Quintilian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages,” Rhetorica 13 (1995): 231284CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Classical rhetorical treatises tend to privilege forensic over the other rhetorical genres (deliberative/political or epideictic/praise and blame). To these, the Middle Ages also added the ars praedicandi, or art of preaching, the best introduction to which remains Zink's, MichelLa prédication en langue romane: avant 1300 (Paris: Champion, 1976)Google Scholar.

5. I discuss the rhetorical ramifications of accidental vs. intentional and “natural” versus “unnatural” mnemonic violence in “Rhetoric, Coercion, and the Memory of Violence,” in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, 24–55, ed. Copeland, Rita (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; I argue at length for the fluidity of rhetorical and dramatic modes of representation in Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, hereafter ROMD, Rhetoric and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1Google ScholarPubMed.

6. My focus here on the rhetorical episteme of the most educated groups of society obviously sheds more light on learned conception and intention than on popular reception. My use of the term “episteme” follows Foucault's definition from “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” in which he describes it as “not a sort of grand underlying theory” but a “space of dispersion,” an “open and doubtless indefinitely describable field of relationships,” in The Foucault Effect, eds. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. By “learned” I mean medieval men who were trained in rhetoric during a formal, university education. I also hasten to underscore that medieval law was not identical to classical law nor always consistent.

7. I elaborate on these points in my MTOC, esp. Chapter 2. Important discussions of the conflation of violence, creation, and “mortuary circulation” include Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985; reprint New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 184Google Scholar; and Smith, D. Vance, “In Place of Memory: Remembering Practices after 1348 and 1983,” paper,International Congress for Medieval Studies,Kalamazoo, MI,5 May 1994.Google Scholar

8. For the classic discussion of the trope, “quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicole?” as a likely origin of medieval drama, see, e.g., Hardison, O. B. Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), especially essay 5Google Scholar.

9. Sarah Beck with sees an “extreme cultural ambivalence” in Christ's body, which was “loved and adored, but…also violated repeatedly,” Christ's Body (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 5Google ScholarPubMed.

10. Lydgate, John, Exortacion to prestys when they shall sey theyr masse, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. MacCracken, H. N., EETS ES, 107 (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), 86, II. 33–34Google Scholar; cited and discussed by Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, hereafter CC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 94Google Scholar.

11. I discuss memory as re-enactment at length in ROMD, 51–54.

12. Blau, Herbert, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater, hereafter BT (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982)Google Scholar; and Le Mystère de Saint Christofle, ed. Runnalls, Graham A., (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1973)Google Scholar: “Sire, par amour, je vous prie, / Si voulez la veue recouvrer, / Il vous convient agenoiller, / Et dorer le corps du geant, / Et oindre vostre oeil de son sang;/Si recouvrerés la veüe,” 2412–2417, emphasis mine. For dating, see Runnalls, vii.

13. Plato, , Laws, Loeb Classical Library (1926; reprint Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 817BCrossRefGoogle Scholar. On pleasure, pain, and the law, see also de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 140Google Scholar; and States, Bert, The Pleasure of the Play (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, Chapter 12, “The Pleasure of Pain.”

14. For an important discussion of the interconnected history of empathy and theatricality, see Marshall, David, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar, especially his introduction.

15. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, hereafter GM, trans. Golffing, Francis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 192193Google Scholar.

16. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar.

17. de Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Goldhill, Simon, “Violence in Greek Tragedy,” in Violence in Drama, ed. Redmond, James, Themes in Drama 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15Google Scholar.

19. Gatton, , “‘There must be blood:’ Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, in Redmond, ed., 77Google Scholar. It was Cohen, Gustave, however, who first proposed this idea in Histoire de la mise-en-scène dans le théâtre religieux français du moyen-âge, 2d ed. (Paris: Champion, 1951)Google Scholar when he wrote that “one may extend this epithet to all the mystery plays this stage direction (rubrique) which appears in the ‘Mystère du Vieil Testament:’ ‘il faut du sang’” (152).

20. Haidu, Peter, The Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993), 195Google Scholar.

21. Kubiak, Anthony, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History, hereafter ST (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 29, 24–25Google Scholar.

22. See, e.g., Lucian, , “Saltatio,” ed. and trans. Harmon, A. M., in Works, Loeb Classical Library (1936; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 5:36Google Scholar; on Martianus's muttering, see Yates, 52; and the citation from Geoffrey is from The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, ed. and trans. Gallo, Ernest (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 2022; 2036Google Scholar.

23. Longinus, , “On the Sublime,” ed. and trans. Fyfe, W. Hamilton, in Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius, Loeb Classical Library. (1927; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), 15, 1–2Google Scholar; see also RAH, 3:30. I demonstrate this at length in “The Mnemonic Alphabet of Dramatic Images,” ROMD, 44–54.

24. He also mentions that comic effects render images more memorable—a phenomenon with great potential for gallows humor that I cannot treat adequately within the scope of this study. Marjorie Curry Woods has recently published a superb essay on “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence,” in Criticism and Dissent, ed. Rita Copeland, which is devoted to the extreme violence of such works as Ovid's Ars amatoria, Statius's Achilleid, Claudian's De raptu Prosperpine, and the anonymous Pamphilus, which were compiled into a “basic reader for medieval boys” (58).

25. On ut pictura poesis, see, e.g., RAH, 4:39. The Pseudo-Cicero also uses the term simulacra when defining memory images as “formae quaedam et notae et simulacra eius rei quam meminisse volumus” (RAH, 3:29). For modern perspectives on simulacra, see Baudrillard, Jean, “Simulations,” in Selected Writings, ed. Poster, Mark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Artaud, Antonin, The Theater and its Double, trans. Richards, Mary Caroline (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), 71Google Scholar.

26. “Conformatio est cum aliqua quae non adest persona confingitur quasi adsit, aut cum res muta aut informis fit eloquens, et forma ei et oratio adtribuitur ad dignitatem adcommodata aut actio quaedam” (RAH, 4, 66; emphasis mine). For a superb discussion of this passage, see Paxson, James J., The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1315CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Yates' insight that memory images might have been “moralised into beautiful or hideous human figures as ‘corporeal similitudes’ of spiritual intentions of gaining Heaven or avoiding Hell” (Art of Memory, 77).

27. For a compelling reading of the terror of an absent presence, see Kubiak on Christ's empty tomb, ST, 53–56. For the larger perspective on the compatibility of “pagan” rhetoric with Christianity, see Kinneavy, James L., Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (New York: Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; and Jaeger, Werner, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Kinneavy, e.g., urges an investigation into Greek authors' use of words like “faith” and “persuasion” and supports Jaeger's theory that, “in calling Christianity the paideia of Christ, the imitator stresses the intention of the apostle to make Christianity to be a continuation of the classical paideia, which it would be logical for those who possessed the older one to accept” (Jaeger, 7; Kinneavy, 149).

28. For examples of training in mnemonic visualization exercises, see RAH, 3:31–32; and Yates, 50–76.

29. Christ is normally tied to a pillar, a classic memory image. For an excellent resumé of the key metaphors of mnemotechnics, see Carruthers, Chapter 1, “Models for Memory.”

30. “Puis souffri que sa char fust mise/Pour nous au plus crüel martire, / Que nulz puisse conter ne dire. / Or veul venir a ma memoire,” Le Mystère de la Passion Nostre Seigneur du manuscrit 1131 de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, ed. Runnalls, Graham A. (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 4851Google Scholar, emphasis mine. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to this text as the Saint Geneviève Passion. In Old French, the verb memorer and the noun memoire (which could be masculine or feminine) covered a wide range of terms, including remember, commemorate, memorialize, and custom, relics, and memoir. My reference to deception and disguise stems from the ambiguity of the term guise denoting either in the line: “Qui le deçoit en mainte guise.”

31. “Prïons ly tuit que par sa grace / De nos meffais pardon face, / Et nous doint cuer de ly servir / Par quoy nous puissons deservir / Sa tres haulte saintisme gloire, / Et nous manteigne en son memoire,” Saint Geneviève Passion, 4468–4473, emphasis mine.

32. “Las, aussi pleurer m'en convient / Souventesfoiz piteusement, / Quant me souvient du grant tourment / Qu'il souffrit,” emphasis mine; and “Je ne pourroye mes yeulx garder / De plourer, quant j'en ay memoire,” Le Mystère de la Résurrection Angers (1456), ed. Servet, Pierre (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 1:1160811611, 1:11640–11641Google Scholar.

33. “Quant pur home qui n'a rien / For de Dieu sa volenté france / Ne soubzmet toute a l'ordenance / Et a la volenté divine / N'est merveille se mal chemine, / Car Dieu sa grace ly soutrait / Et l'anemy a soy le trait / Qui le deçoit en mainte guise / Et a mal faire adez l'atise. / Ainssy fait l'un apostater / Et ly autres ydolatrer / Institüer mahommeries / Selonc diversses fantasies / Dont ly uns aourent figures / De pécheresses créatures, / Lez autres bestes ou serpens. / Et lez autres, les elemens, / Les autres, faintes vanitez / Afin que leur iniquitez / Puissent faire a leur apetis,“ Le Geu Saint Denis du Manuscrit 1131 de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, hereafter GSD, ed. Seubert, Bernard James (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 213228Google Scholar, emphasis mine. In modern French, momerie (from Old French momer) is mummery, masquerade, dance, farce, parody. But it is reasonable to speculate that the extra syllable in mahomerie (as opposed to momerie) would drop out, rendering the two terms identical. Contrary to Greimas' finding, in his Old French dictionary, that the origin of the term momer is obscure, and, in addition to Meyer-Lübke's etymological derivation of the term momerie from the Latin momo meaning “wry face or grimace,” the etymological origin might also have racist underpinnings. I am indebted to my colleague William Ashby for helping me to confirm this theory. Needless to say, the fear of the East is a topic far too vast to tackle in the scope of the present study.

34. A similar allusion to memoire and faintisce appears in the Mystère de la Passion à Amboise au moyen âge: représentations théâtrales et texte, ed. Runnalls, Graham A. (Montreal: CERES, 1990), 637639Google Scholar. Such passages echo the varying meanings of the Greek hypokrisis as delivery, counterfeit, theatrical acting, and even hypocrisy along with the medieval practice of using faintes or dummies to stage the most violent scenes. I discuss that topic at greater length in a forthcoming essay called “Medieval Snuff Drama,” Exemplaria 10.

35. Le Martire Saint Père et Saint Pol, in Le Cycle de Mystères des Premiers Martyrs, ed. Runnalls, Graham A. (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 13831385Google Scholar, emphasis mine. Runnalls did not include the Geu Saint Denis in his own edition, because Seubert's edition was already available; see his introduction, 16–18. In the intertext of the entire manuscript, however, these images “qui ne parlent ne ne cheminent” recall the worshiper of icons above, described as one “[qui] mal chemine.”

36. Gibson, Gail McMurray, “Writing Before the Eye: The N-Town Woman Taken in Adultery and the Medieval Ministry Play,” Comparative Drama 27 (1994): 401402Google Scholar.

37. “…et quiescente lingua ac silente gutture canto quantum volo.” Confessions, ed. and trans. Watts, William, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950): bk. 10, chap. 8Google Scholar.

38. Similar examples of the violent pairing of former/reformer within a pillared memory scene appear in Gréban, Arnoul, Le Mystère de la Passion, ed. Jodogne, Omer (Brussels: Académie Royale, 1965), 22705–22706Google Scholar; and Le Livre de conduite du Régisseur et Le Compte des dépenses pour le Mystère de la Passion joué à Mons en 1501, ed. Cohen, Gustave (Paris: Champion, 1925), 326327Google Scholar.

39. Brook, Peter, The Empty Space (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), 152Google Scholar; as discussed by Garner, Stanton B. Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 161Google Scholar. For an interesting discussion of the Derridaean trace in the history of memory, see Krell, David Farrell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 4. In GSD, the desire for and the desirability of violence is all the more apparent in the emphatic poetic alternation of lier (to bind) and liesse (joy), especially v. 62–70, in which variations of the term appear in every line.

40. “Doulz Jhesucrist, je vous rens graces / De cen [sic] qui vos plaist que les traces / De vostre sainte passion / Ont en mon corps impression,” GSD, 518–521, emphasis mine.

41. Fradenburg, Louise O. with Freccero, Carla, “The Pleasures of History,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 1 (1995): 371Google Scholar.

42. “Haquin, je voy de grosses bosses / Sus son dos que faictes luy as. … Je vueil que de moy ly souveigne,” Saint Geneviève Passion, 1624–1627, emphasis mine.

43. “Chascun congnoist ja vostre fait: / vous ne serés pas oblÿé,” Le Mystère de la Passion de Troyes, ed. Bibolet, Jean-Claude, (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 768769Google Scholar. An identical section appears in Gréban, 19736–19741.

44. “Batez le moy par tel party / que sur tout son corps n'y ait place / ou il n'appere playe ou trace,” Gréban, 22729–22731.

45. “Je le tesmoing, car bien m'en membre, / Qu'il n'y a celui qui ait membre / Ne soit lïé de feu ardant,” Saint Geneviève Passion, 879–881, emphasis mine.

46. This philological alternation between memory and dismemberment also proves highly compatible with recent work in feminist theology by such scholars as Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Reàemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991)Google Scholar, and Phyllis Trible, who offers a compelling reading of the mutilated concubine from the book of Judges in Chapter 3 of Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

47. De laude sanctorum 9, Patrologia latina 20.452A, cited and discussed by Roberts, Michael, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius, Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 191Google Scholar.

48. Alger, canon of Liège (1050-c. 1132), “De sacramento altrais,” PL, 180, cols. 786–787 (cited in Rubin, CC, 21, emphasis mine). Hence, observes Miri Rubin, the function of the Eucharist “was not the actual immolation of Christ, which had occurred hundreds of years earlier, but the sacrament which could bring forth an image of it” (CC, 21). This function is consistent with the dual status of memory as both birthplace and repository.

49. Tertullian, , De Spectaculis, ed. and trans. Glover, T. R., Loeb Classical Library (1931; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), Chapter 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 202Google Scholar.

51. A particularly vivid depiction of this figural process occurs in the fourteenth-century English Life of Saint Erkenwald, in which the saintly hero literally unearths from a crypt the perfectly preserved body of a pagan man of laws who “melts out of memory” and begins to speak. See The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, trans. Finch, Casey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially 39–180Google Scholar. I discuss this text at length in Chapter 2 of my MTOC.

52. So real that some of Stanislavski's actors apparently suffered psychological disorders, a phenomenon that would ultimately call the method into question. Yet there is an age-old tradition exemplified by Lucian of Samosata's story of an actor going mad while playing the role of Ajax (“Saltatio,” 83–84). On this topic, see Moore, Sonia, The Stanislavski Method: The Professional Training of an Actor (New York: Viking, 1960)Google Scholar. For a more general approach, see Riffaterre, Michael, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Gary Williams for bringing the former reference to my attention.

53. See, e.g., René Girard's famous comment that “evil and the violent measures taken to combat evil are essentially the same. … Ritual is nothing more than the regular exercise of ‘good’ violence,” Violence and the Sacred, trans. Gregory, Patrick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 37Google Scholar.

54. John of Garland, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland, ed. Lawler, Traugott, Yale Studies in English, 182 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 98105, emphasis mineGoogle Scholar.

55. Cited by Schechner, Richard, “Introduction: Exit Thirties, Enter Sixties,” in Stanislavski and America: An Anthology from the Tulane Drama Review, ed. Munk, Erika (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 18Google Scholar.

56. In Laws, 700–701, Plato argues that only the lawmaker could replace an anarchic theatrocracy with a civilized orthodoxy. In this connection, see Helen Solterer's fascinating discovery of a modern usage of this term by the Russian director Evreinov, who wrote in 1908: “We shall realize that the population of our planet is governed not by democracies, aristocracies or autocracies, but by a theatrocracy” (cited by Solterer, “A Sixth Sense: Evreinov, Artaud, and Medieval Theatricality,” paper, Third Colloquium on Medieval Theatricality, Bad Homburg, Germany, 28 March 1994.)

57. Augustine, , On Christine Doctrine, trans. Robertson, D.W. Jr. (1958; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1980), 61Google Scholar.

58. Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 123Google Scholar, emphasis mine. Pierre Bourdieu also enumerated the ways in which societies entrust the “arbitrary content of culture” to the body as memory “in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic form,” Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 94Google Scholar.

59. Excellent explorations of this paradox include DeLeuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 144145Google Scholar; Geary, Patrick J., Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Worsham, Lynn, “Eating History, Purging Memory, Killing Rhetoric,” in Writing Histories of Rhetoric, 139–155, ed. Vitanza, Victor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Umberto Eco's tongue-in-cheek An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!,” PMLA 103 (1988): 254261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.