Weaving the “Electric Loom of the Self”: Memory in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

 Explain “the electric loom of the self”

- The chapter you read from Jonah Lehrer’s book quotes this phrase.
- You also read parts of Mrs. Dalloway

 What my dissertation’s about, why and how I’m looking at To the Lighthouse

 The Modernist Project [slide title] (Edel), as a little background explanation

- transition from naturalism, the attempt to document life in literature
- So the modernists’ central question was: how do we capture the nature of mind in
verbal art, using words as our medium, as a painter uses lines and colors?

 Woolf’s technique of zooming in and out, “weaving” (Edel)

 Mrs. Dalloway: Clarissa’s and Septimus’s inability to feel

- Edel:

 Transition to Moments of Memory in To the Lighthouse [slide title]

- Transition from Mrs. Dalloway:

- James and the trip to the lighthouse
- Lily painting

 Woolf’s childhood abuse

 Transition to Foer: Woolf’s fiction reinforces some points Foer makes in Moonwalking
with Einstein

 Has anyone had a chance to read Moonwalking with Einstein?

- Lecture on March 4th in Campbell Hall, 8 p.m.

- Brief summary

 Endpoints from Foer:

If you do get a chance to read the book or if you’ve already read it, I want to draw your
attention to two points Foer makes:

“Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty
millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually
supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids
—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow
and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had
disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics,
science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of external memories.
If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also
painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a
sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off
mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea
to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to
brain in order to be sustained.
The externalization of memory not only changed how people think: it also led to a
profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory
became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing
how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. […] But as our
culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to
one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the
implications for ourselves and for our society? […] What does it mean that we’ve lost our
memory?” (19)

Foer’s reflections on winning the USA Memory Championship:

“What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more
mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if
you decide to take notice. […] Nobody would want to have their attention captured by
every triviality, but there is something to be said for the value of not merely passing
through the world, but also making some effort to capture it [as Clarissa Dalloway {…}
or as Lily Briscoe tries to capture it through painting]—if only because in trying to
capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating. […] It’s not that the
techniques didn’t work. I am walking proof that they do. It’s that it is so hard to find
occasion to use them in the real world in which paper, computers, cell phones, and Post-
its can handle the task of remembering for me.
So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? […]
[Because] [h]ow we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and
what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the
extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to
say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was
ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the
world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas,
to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now
more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever
before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are.
They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can
memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand
against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have
become estranged. […] [M]emory training is not just for the sake of performing party
tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human” (269-270).

My point is that Woolf’s (and other modernists’) fiction reinforces Foer’s point here.
 My question for them: Do you agree or disagree with Foer here? Why?

Thoughts on Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer