I used to wonder what it was like to be my mother, breathless and confused in a maternity ward, three times in a row. To push three defective children out from inside of her; to spend nine months dreaming in intricate detail of the pristine bundle of joy that awaited her, and each time, to wake up to a wriggling pink mass dangling out of a nurse’s arms and think oh no.



 



My granny likes to tell me that when she came to greet me in the hospital, she peered down into the mess of blankets perched on my mom’s chest and a great big pair of eyes stared back at her. Like Harry Potter’s first impression of Dobby, when he sees those two eyes and nothing else blinking at him through a bush, mine sort of hung there, round and earnest, eclipsing the rest of the infant body she knew must be attached.



 



This is what she says.



 



I was an Ohio baby, the first of her grandchildren to be born in the state where her grandparents plopped their Old Country trunks down and never left. So it’s fitting that when she stared down at me and cooed hello, Miss Big Eyes, her subtle midwestern dialect smushed the Miss so it sounded more like Ms., and the g didn’t come out all the way; and thus, I became Ms. Bigeyes.



 



The Ms. was important to me, because it matched my mom. Well before defects 1, 2, and 3 came along, just as second-wave feminism was coming to a close, my mom made my dad read A Room of One’s Own before he could marry her and kept her last name once he did.



 



A name that means Ohio like my granny, Ms. like my mama.



 



And Bigeyes like my dad. My father is a man who disposes of mouse carcasses with studied cool and pats his substantial belly like a good boy puppy and writes all his words in capital letters and compliments other men’s vehicles, but he is also a man who meticulously stitched the head back onto my teddy bear every time her fluffy pink torso went rogue, who gets dizzy after one glass of wine, who stores his toothbrush in a gold lamé dopp kit. And when he took me to see Marley and Me, I turned to look at him during the part where they put Marley down, and his eyes were so clear and shiny and full. And I understood that my eyes are his eyes, just a tiny bit greener, like my mom’s. But that mostly it didn’t matter that he was good at sweating and watching sports; we were Bigeyes and Bigeyes, Jr., and the world looked pretty much the same to us both.







But in the world of this maternity ward hospital room, where cinematic first impressions are the name of the game, I find Granny’s origin story hard to believe. She says the eyes were all she saw, but I’ve seen pictures of baby me. I know what I looked like.



 



Number One



 



Number one was my brother, who came out mostly fine, except that his left thigh was covered in a dark, swirly patch of skin. Shaped like an upsidedown Ohio, I used to think, as he massaged gallons of sunscreen into the area, which the doctors said was dangerous if it burnt. What happened was that God pressed too hard with the marker he was using to shade in my brother and colored that leg darker than the rest of my brother’s pale, Ashkenazi skin and was like whoops! My b. But it was chill. This defect wasn’t so bad. The nurse probably didn’t even notice right away; only my mom did.



 



People didn’t seem to notice it much, either, as he grew up. A leg is just an extremity, after all. I thought he looked fine, was in the clear, until he hit high school.



 



Meredith tells me that her sister, Lauren, who is in my older brother’s grade, has a crush on his friend, Bobby, and that another one of her sister’s friends is interested in another one of my brother’s friends, but that neither her sister nor her sister’s friends are much interested in my brother himself. According to Lauren, his nose is the dealbreaker. “It’s too big,” she says. “Lauren says that you guys have the same nose, actually, but you carry it better. She thinks he might grow into his, though.”



It’s a lot to process, because she talks fast and I think I am supposed to thank her and there are so many names and degrees of separation, but also because this nose stuff is all new to me. I understand that some noses look different than others, because when I stare in the mirror and push my nostrils up I look a lot like my first grade teacher, which is fun. But the “carrying it well” and “growing into it” thing; the idea of the bad nose/good nose dichotomy–this was not on my radar. I had no idea! Lucky for me that I have friends like Meredith to set me straight.



Further inquiry leads me to the phenomenon of the Jewish nose, which, Meredith again clarifies, I have but not as bad as my brother. Phew. I thought Jewish was just a religion, but it’s kind of cool that we have this genetic thing that we all share. I wish the Jewish nose looked more like Meredith’s, though, so that her sister wouldn’t think my brother was ugly.



I learn later that there are other genetic things about being Jewish, like owning all the money in the world and controlling the entertainment industry. Fascinating. What about people who convert? Do they get a new nose and money when they agree to wear a yarmulke? Meredith does not know the answer to this question.





I never met my grandpa, but based on pictures, I think that this nose that my brother and I share came from him. Apparently, he was obsessed with the Holocaust. In a freakish way. I wonder how he felt about the face-measurement tool the Nazis used. If your nose is too big you’re a dirty dirty Jew and it doesn’t matter that your family converted to Christianity in 1298. His Hitler books fill up four entire rows in our study, but not one bears any trace of underlining, notes, or highlights. When he flipped through these pages half a century ago, was he angry? Resigned? Did he wish his features were just a little less prominent, so that just this once, he could blend in? Or did he feel blazing pride, marked by God himself as a boy with a big fat nose?







 



Number Two



 



After my brother, there was me, Bigeyed and 80s-feminist-independent, but the defect crept north north north and plopped down smack in the center of my face. A giant red balloon growing on top of my mouth, puffed full of air but made out of lip, big enough to be a third eye. God was putting the finishing touches on my face when an angel or like wandering soul came by and bumped God’s elbow and God was like NIGEL dude we talked about this you really need to get control of yourself but there I was and there God was and there Nigel was and there my mom was with defective child number two. I’m sure the nurse noticed right away, this time. It is not a thing you can easily miss. I wonder if she gasped when she inspected my face. I wonder if my mom had to nudge my dad to smile weakly instead of the confused sort of grimace he had accidentally adopted. I wonder if my granny did her usual cough and politely said hello, Ms. Bigeyes so that everyone would stop feeling so weird about my face.



 



I know my lip was disgusting, objectively, because children tell the truth, and before my preschool peers learned that it is bad to point at someone’s face and say “what’s wrong with your lip?” they did exactly that, and after I explained it to the best of my primitive communication skills, they usually stared blankly for a while and then said “well, it’s disgusting,” and wandered off.







The interesting thing about this response is that physical and moral disgust are a two-way street. You see something immoral and you feel disgusted, but also sometimes you see something disgusting and then your brain interprets that as immorality. This is a real psychological thing that I do not know the official name of but is definitely a thing. Let’s call it Sins of the Ew.



 



Armed with the empirical evidence of my youth, then, I have concluded that had I been born four hundred years earlier, The Puritans would have thought I was a witch. They would see my face and consider it a Sin of the Ew and say TO THE COURT! and then I would get to give a long and dramatic woe is me monologue from the witness stand in my cute Puritan bonnet and everyone would be emotional and the whole town would be torn into pro- and anti-Eliya factions and riots would break out, but due to the fact that I am also left-handed and Jewish and do theatre, three historically wicked characteristics, the consensus would eventually be that I am in the Definitely Satanic camp, and I might end up burning at the stake but gosh darnit if they wouldn’t write my name in their diaries and court records and then hundreds of years later all the historians would be like wow who is this Eliya person she seems like a Big Fucking Deal.



 



I wonder what would have happened if granny had been honest with all of us when she took a gander at her first ohio grandchild. If she had said something like hello, Ms. Biglip. Maybe we all would have been cool with how my face looked, and I wouldn’t have minded in kindergarten when Rose said I was a dumb girl with a big fat lip and one person giggled and the name stuck. Maybe when she called hey, Big Fat Lip Girl across the playground, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep digging in the sandbox until the bottom fell out. Maybe when Mrs. Hiller heard what Rose was calling me, she wouldn’t have made Rose apologize in front of everyone, and I wouldn’t have stared around with my eyes bursting out of my head, petrified that this public proceeding would only make the name more popular.



 



In another world, I would’ve smiled and thought that my big fat lip was just like my grandpa’s big fat nose, and that would have been that.



 



The year I turn fifteen, a Buzzfeed quiz tells me that when a boy stares at your lips, it means he wants to kiss them. I am distrustful of this advice. Clearly whoever wrote this has a symmetrical face. And no witchy inclinations whatsoever. But a few weeks later, a boy is indeed staring at my lips. It makes me uncomfortable, at first, because I am used to people staring at my mouth and I know what it means. But he looks sort of happy when he stares. So I am thinking maybe Buzzfeed was right.



 



And then a year after that, I am standing in my living room with a lot of adults who have run out of things to say, and a very nice lady tries to make small talk by pointing to a picture on the mantel. What an adorable baby you must have been! she says. And I realize I am no longer Big Fat Lip Girl at all, because all of my baby pictures feature a prominent lip pillow, and I suppose that if the baby in this picture does not have a lip pillow and this lady still thinks it is a picture of me, it must mean that my big fat lip has shrunk beyond obvious notice.



 



But then I realize that this also means I must respond to her comment, I must correct her in front of everyone, and I feel angry. I wish I had my lip pillow back, I wish for burning at the stake or even Mrs. Hiller in front of the kindergarten class; I wish for anything that would prevent this moment. Can’t she tell that that baby is so obviously not me? Its mouth is medium and its nose is medium and its eyes are medium. I do not want to tell her who is in the picture. I do not want to tell her what happened.











Number Three



 



Number three was my sister. God was hungover and trying to catch the Sunday game but the remote wouldn’t work and he was also in a big fight with Moses and really he was just so distracted and stressed he would later tell someone, really wasn’t paying attention and he messed my sister up, he messed her up from the inside out in a horrible way. God didn’t say anything this time when he realized what he’d done. He felt bad. Really really bad.



 



She was born with perfect medium mouth and medium nose. Her name means beautiful in Hebrew and in English. She was picture perfect. Except that her eyes were medium, too. They did not focus, they did not fill with much of anything.



 



The nurse, this time, did not notice anything was wrong when she inspected my sister. I know this for a fact. My mom tells the story of Bella’s birth delicately, like she is dangling a piece of lint near her mouth and if she talks too loud or too fast it will blow away. But there is a flash of pride when she comes to the part about the nurse, a triumphant maternal flare of the nostrils. Like when Miss Clavelle turned on the light, my mom said something is not right! with my child and the nurse said no ma’am, it’s a beautiful baby girl and my mom said said SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY CHILD, MY CHILD IS NOT BREATHING, GET THE DOCTOR. And she was right, of course. Because my mom always knows everything.



 



I do not know what my granny said when she saw Bella for the first time. Probably a gentle cough and then nothing at all. Silent like God.



 

The Harvard Film Archive began this month with a three-day screening of the movies of Kenneth Anger. Anger, who grew up twenty minutes outside Hollywood in Santa Monica, California, is considered one of the fathers of American avant-garde film: David Lynch and Martin Scorsese count him as an antecedent. The first two days of screenings were devoted to Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, a nine-film series of thematically linked works that film critics tend to group together. All of them in some way concern the production of myth and mystery in Hollywood and elsewhere—the “magic lantern,” of course, being both the film projector and an object of the sort that might be used in a cultic ritual, with more than a whiff of the esoteric about it. (To call it a “magick lantern” both reinforces a connection to the occult and adds a touch of Anger’s characteristic camp.)



In Anger’s films, this production of myth and mystery is intimately linked with the idea of glamour. In his early films, this means the glamour of Hollywood. Scorpio Rising plays off the glamour of 1950s counterculture; in one of the film’s longest scenes, a biker (in sunglasses) lounges in bed and reads comics while Marlon Brando in The Wild One plays on the television. Photographs of James Dean stare down at him from the walls, and a “James Dean Memorial Foundation” button lies among the rings scattered on the dresser. The film’s audience understands that the elements of glamour here point to a single, definite cultural source—the glamour of the rebel biker figure which both Dean and Brando played (and who Dean in particular seemed to embody, in a glamorous conflation of actor and role). Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, filmed ten years earlier in 1954, has a more esoteric set of cultural referents. It is based on Anger’s experience at the Hollywood party “Come as Your Madness” and his fascination with the magician and self-proclaimed prophet Aleister Crowley’s religion, Thelema. Still, the actors in the film are all faces on the Hollywood social scene—these include Anaïs Nin, the famously erotic French novelist, and Sampson De Brier, a former actor who held salons and occult gatherings in his home—in its totality the glamour of the film is recognizably the glamour of the Hollywood occult scene and the circuit of pleasures trod by Anger and his actors.



Over the course of the Cycle, however, Anger begins to drain the glamour of his films of recognizable cultural referents, leaving bare glamour—now legible only as a form or style—where any content has been emptied out. In Lucifer Rising this decontextualized, effectively a-referential glamour is most evident. While the film once again displays an identifiable interest in the occult—a framed picture of Crowley hovers in the background in one scene—the visual elements of the film cannot be interpreted in relation to a single coherent referent. A scene of a priest or acolyte at his toilette clearly points to the occult motif again, as well as to the idea that glamour is prepared and artificial; but whereas Thelema was an obvious occult referent in earlier films, nothing in Lucifer Rising but the picture of Crowley points to any specific religion or cult. The sight of the singer Marianne Faithfull—if you can recognize her in her gray face-paint or hooded cloak—momentarily evokes the British rock scene of the 1960s and 70s, but after three minutes of watching her walk up a stone staircase, the cultural context of her celebrity becomes almost meaningless. The film’s Egyptian imagery is recognizable, but its camp use is bewildering. All of these images have an element of glamour, but this is not a culture-specific glamour that the viewer can decode—though these images originally had cultural referents, now they are almost completely hermetic.



In their book The Glamour System, Stephen Gundle and Clino Castelli cite the New Fowler’s Modern English Usage in designating glamour as an alteration of the old Scottish gramarye: this meant “occult learning, magic, necromancy.” When the word glamour entered English usage in the 1830s, Gundle and Castelli continue, “it did so with the meaning of ‘a delusive or alluring charm.’” Their definition of the word’s contemporary meaning retains this etymological connection: glamour is “an enticing image, a staged and constructed version of reality that invites consumption[...] it is primarily visual, it consists of a retouched or perfected version of a real person or situation, and it is predicated upon the gaze of a desiring audience.” Buried in this idea of glamour is the old notion of casting a spell, of seduction—of seducing with the visual. But what does it mean to seduce with pure glamour, glamour as form and aura alone, rather than with the fantasy of life as a kept woman or movie star?



 



*



 



Anger’s films and the way they treat glamour are of particular interest today in light of what seems to be a change in the media that surround fashion and fashion culture. His recognition of the self-sustaining interaction between glamour and visual media is canny and prescient. The current wave of interest in fashion has developed a telling degree of sophistication, focused on the fashion industry itself as a source of glamour rather than merely what “looks” are in next season. The New York Times now aggressively covers fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris both online and in print—positioning itself, perhaps, as the newspaper of record in this area. (Women’s Wear Daily is the newspaper of record for the fashion industry; the Times’s coverage is aimed at a more general readership.) Five years ago, almost no one outside of the fashion industry could have told you who Giovanna Battaglia (fashion editor of L’Uomo Vogue) or Carine Roitfeld (editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris) was; today if you ask a well-dressed young person in a major metropolitan center, you have a decent chance of getting an answer.



Perhaps the most impressive cultural shift accompanying the increasing visibility of the fashion industry itself has been the rise of the fashion photo blog. Five years ago, it didn’t exist. Today, ger-photographer-writers like Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, Tommy Ton of Jak and Jil, and fourteen-year old Tavi Gevison of Style Rookie receive tens of thousands of hits to their websites each day, merit front row seats at fashion shows, and attract major advertising and editorial commissions from top designers and magazines like Vogue. Fashion blogs generally fall into one of two categories. Street-style blogs like The Sartorialist and Jak and Jil feature snapshot (or snapshot-style) photos of attractive and interestingly dressed individuals caught “on the street.” (In fact, many of the most successful bloggers regularly photograph the same cadre of fashion editors and other industry insiders.) Personal style bloggers like Tavi, on the other hand, photograph their own outfits each day. Both types of blog can contain additional material like analysis of recent fashion shows, commentaries on favorite designers, and colorful outfit-inspiring collages called “mood boards.” Most importantly, all of these new fashion blogs are image-based. Even when a particular post does not feature images, some visual—a runway presentation, a trendy print or cut—is always referred to, because fashion is primarily a visual phenomenon.



Glamour in Europe had its roots in a bourgeois response to the splendor of a decaying aristocracy; in the United States, which never really had a hereditary aristocracy, it was associated from the beginning with images and products that an ordinary person could consume. But today, when collections are filled with contextless historical references and fashion coverage has become at least overtly democratic, glamour has become, even more than before, an a-referential aura, a form with no immediate content. Fashion once had a social logic; even the widely-commodified aura of glamour, which functioned primarily to market certain celebrities and products to the public, was pegged to certain celebrities and diffused among middle-class consumer-aspirants. The girl in the 1930s who bought a fur coat captured for herself a hazy emanation of Garbo’s glamour, not the aura at full strength. Today, the relation between media and glamour has become even more intimate than before. Capture in the right kind of media is the condition of glamour. The very environment of the fashion media has become a center of glamour.



This deepening of the connection between media and glamour created a new set of fantasies distinct from the old fantasies of glamour—the fantasy of becoming a Hollywood starlet, for instance, or of finding a wealthy man to support one’s tastes. First, of course, there is the fantasy of a job in fashion. Fashion world jobs seem glamorous not only because they have an aura of creativity, but because they are associated with a jet-setting lifestyle (attending fashion weeks or shooting ads in far-off locations), with physical allure, and with celebrities, socialites, and others whose wealth attends on high status.



Second, there is the fantasy of being “discovered.” But here the body or face is not (primarily) the thing being discovered, but rather one’s eye—the knack for analyzing high fashion or advertising or trends-in-the-making; the personal style and allure so compelling that it inspires others to fantasize. In an economy that lacks stability, where even college graduates are unlikely to find a stable and rewarding job, young people who have spent their lives looking at images in print, on television, online, and in the world around them want to be rewarded for their superlative visual skills. The internet is an open forum where anyone can work to get noticed, and where a handful—but only a handful—in fact have been.



The images that show up on fashion photo blogs feed a similar desire. Anyone can be captured by a street photographer if he has the “right look.” And anyone who posts photos of herself to her blog knows her eye too can be discovered if her blog becomes popular enough that the relevant people hear about it. Jane Aldrich, of the website Sea of Shoes, started posting photos of her daily outfit to her blog in April 2007. Two years later, at age seventeen, she had designed a collection of shoes for Urban Outfitters. In November 2009, she debuted at the Bal de Crillon in Paris alongside Princess Diana’s niece and the great-granddaughter of a maharajah despite being from a by-all-accounts-normal family in a planned community near Fort Worth.



 



*



 



An interesting facet of the fashion industry’s latest media moment is that among young people, a taste for fashion does not seem notably gender normative. It is more acceptable for heterosexual males to be interested in fashion now than seems to have been the case at almost any time since what Gundle and Castelli in The Glamour System call “the masculine renunciation of fashion and display” during the nineteenth century. The metrosexual, the male hipster, and various permutations thereof can be of any sexual orientation. Interest in appearance, or more specifically, in maintaining a particular aesthetic or personal style, is presumed by the mere fact of membership in one of these groups, prior to the fact of the individual’s sexuality.



Despite the reinscription of fashion as an acceptable interest for all sexes rather than a mere caprice, fashion and the spells it can cast still pose a particular danger for women. While men are featured on some style blogs—among them the all-men’s Urban Gentleman and the gender-balanced Sartorialist—the majority of the photos major bloggers take are of women. The women in these photos often (but not always) treat their dress in a different way from the men; while the men on these blogs are often held up as exemplifying the importance of fine tailoring, clever details, and investment in quality garments, the women are often more spectacular in their dress. For every woman whose sleeves hit at just the right place on the wrist, there are five in towering stilettos, leather pants, or blinding prints.



Producing these enchantments requires a considerable investment of energy and time: many of the women who are photographed clearly spend hours a day on “personal appearance” once exercise, hair, makeup, skin, clothing, and decisions about diet are factored in. (Not to mention the extra time it takes to walk places in heels over three inches.) One editor who is frequently photographed for fashion blogs is said to exercise for two hours and change outfits up to three times a day. While the efforts of these women can buy them a great deal of notice—and in the editor’s case, a form of internet celebrity—you have the feeling that they think there is an expressive dividend as well.



But is this tremendous investment of time in fashion as it relates to one’s own dress in fact a creative activity? The claim is often made in an off-hand way by fashion bloggers and other young people with an interest in the industry. However, change in a culture’s preexisting system of dress, which constitutes the only environment in which a woman’s clothing is legible as a set of choices with content, is determined by the need producers have to sell garments. The choices fashion-conscious women make about dress are almost never autonomous of the market, and are therefore creative in a sense so stunted as to be meaningless.



Here I am following Barthes, who (to radically simplify his argument) conceived of fashion in a culture as a complicated sign-system that evolves both synchronically and over time. Critically, the article of clothing or some detail of it only signifies in the context of this sign-system. Even when an instance of a gesture is initially unique to one woman or to a small group of them—say, the wearing of a jacket over the shoulders rather than with the arms through the sleeves—for outsiders, this gesture only signifies if it has had some identifiable historical association (the jacket over the shoulders signifying, perhaps, either casualness or fragility, depending on the execution). If this gesture is repeated by more women, it becomes legible to a broader audience, but it may also attract the attention of marketers and trend-spotters and in turn become a codified, marketed element of dress by the next season—with a fully fixed signification. (Street style blogs chronicle the eccentricities of dress that might become bottom-up cultural phenomena, thus accelerating the ability of corporate designers and marketers to invert them to top-down phenomena that will sell clothes.)



But if women have taken on the role of the ornamental sex, and if the signification of their dress is highly prescribed by cultural context—which, in turn, is highly if not primarily determined by the exigencies of market capitalism, which must drive periodic shifts in codes of dress in order to motivate consumption—then I at least would argue that dress for many fashionable women is not creative, despite being precisely the domain in which for the last 150 years the right to create has at least theoretically been ceded to women. Women—the reasoning goes—retain the ability to choose their dress, to style themselves, and the ultimate right to refuse a mode of dress for reasons of taste. But the dress of many fashionable women not only operates completely within a broader cultural code, but is also driven by the necessary cycling of the market to a far higher degree than even modern visual art. It is perhaps even worse for a woman who considers her elaborate everyday act of dressing creative to follow the styles in the magazines, than for an artist to painstakingly copy a certain style of painting the market has approved—at least the artist retains a degree of self-awareness. Glamour today is indeed a form without immediate cultural referent; the market can fill glamour with whatever content immediately suits its own needs. The style of Hollywood starlets was in some ways fixed, but in a world in which designers show five or six collections per year, style is completely mutable; to remain useful, the cultural content of glamour must be mutable as well.



 



*



 



Whether dressing up can actually become a creative act will not be resolved here, because I don’t know whether there is a way for dressing to totally leave market-driven networks of signification behind—or whether it is even worth it to attempt to do so.  At the least, it doesn’t seem to me that the historical place of women, pre-liberation, as keepers of personal objects—as homemakers, producers of household goods, and visual clues to their husbands’ social status—should necessarily lead them to treat a “feminine preoccupation” like adornment as a frivolity. Take the ground that is ceded to you, despite the stigma that attaches to it as an unserious (feminine) activity, and use the space a lack of male interest gives you to develop a practice that is interesting and worthy of analysis.



Since many young women do seem to feel that dressing is a creative act, I would like to point them to Anger’s later films for some indication of how the reality of dressing might match their fantasy. Glamour here is a form, still easily recognizable as a particular type of visual enchantment, but without the legible visual references to any market-driven cultural significance of the sort that dogs most “creative” dressers’ attempts to “say something” with what they wear. While these films appropriate certain cultural references only to blend them, they are not pastiche; the result does not have the quality of a montage, but rather of a closed system, one in which visual elements are in fact full of significance but in which their signification is only fully understood by the initiated—a category, in this case, that the viewer does not belong to. The priestess in Lucifer Rising understands the rules, rites, and icons of her religion, and their origin. Because we cannot read this visual code, we do not.



If women want to turn dress itself into a form of art, they need to create not just the outfits or even the garments that they wear but the very codes within which their dress can be interpreted. This requires the creation not just of things to wear or even of ideas for their design, but of a little world that these garments fit into and by which they are legible. In other words, it requires an act of fantasy that is both hermetic and theatrical: hermetic because the broader culture cannot be allowed to fully learn this code (otherwise, it can become popular and can be appropriated by fashion), theatrical because it requires the creation and constant maintenance of a fantasy world around the dresser so that the possibility of finding significance in the dress always exists (otherwise, it falls apart as a language.) There is no way to know what form this little world built up around the person who dresses would take, but I imagine an elaborate mythology and a set of personal rituals as in Anger’s Lucifer Rising. In other obvious ways, “parafashion” would take after performance art. But could it ever stand alone as a separate category of creative endeavor?

 



In his recently published memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, the novelist Julian Barnes offers a succinct view of memory:



 



Memory is identity. I have believed this since… oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life, you cease to be, even before death.



 



Memory is identity. The reader nods, in agreement. Barnes boils it down to three words and the equation is enticing in its simplicity. It defines two otherwise ambiguous concepts with finality; it is both compact enough to be remembered with ease and grand enough to impress in conversation.



Memory is identity. The letters and words combine to contain a myriad of concepts. The specific order suggests a clear connection. Yet, the phrase ultimately reveals itself to be a paradox, rather than a definition.



Barnes’ definition is one of equating, presenting memory and identity as one in the same. His following logic implies that memory is the active variable, the prerequisite to identity and therefore existence. Yet, he cannot refer to memory without also giving agency to a higher sense of self. It is not memory, but the entity of “you” which dictates what is remembered and what is not. Memory is simultaneously in control of and controlled by identity. The phrase loses its appealing simplicity.



Barnes’ memoir is focused on his thanatophobia, an abnormal and excessive fear of death, and so his excerpt is focused on personal identity. But the connection between memory and the self resonates with the relationship of memory to collective identity, which encounters the same paradox. Archivists often use the metaphor of memory to describe their work of collecting and parsing through information, aiming to preserve the history of a culture, society, institution, or event.



In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, philosopher Jacques Derrida purports that an archive can only be defined as such if it is exterior to actual memory. The work of archivists is therefore bounded and largely directed by the technology of their times. The writing down of a memoir, for example, is a type of archive, as is a museum. In addition to these traditionally recognized archives, a word document, a saved text, or e-mail are also external forms of memory. Regardless of which technology is employed, it is clear that the archivist, if capable of controlling it, is also in control over what that given technology preserves or discards.



Derrida questions whether these new technological advances actually improve the external representation of an individual’s psychic interior or whether they affect the functioning of that interior, perhaps permanently altering it. Looking back at the history of memory, it seems that technology does have the powerful ability to change the psychic interior.



In the classical western world of the first century BC, when the simplest tools of external memory (paper and printing) were unavailable, actual internal memories functioned in an entirely different way. Memory was seen as an intensely visual and internal art that had to be mastered in the pursuit of spreading the art of rhetoric, meant to animate people to action through well-argued speeches, or orations.



Memory was divided into two categories, the natural and the artificial. Natural memory those captured spontaneously, during experiences. Artificial memory was that which could be organized and improved, a step-by-step mental process that orators were taught by their instructors of rhetoric.



First, a student of artificial memory chose an image of a place that they were familiar with. This place, called a locus was to be a common structure or building, such as a theatre or a house. Once the locus was visualized, powerful images, called simulacra, could be placed within the rooms of the house or on and between the columns of a theatre. It was possible to choose more than one locus, the number dependent on how much experience and material an orator had and aimed to possess.



Within this visual realm, the mood for memory was to be set with the perfect lighting, so as not to obscure or dazzle the images. And the actual structures themselves were subject to zoning, as they were not to be placed more than thirty feet apart.



The strict structure and organization of the art of memory implies control on the part of the individual. But teachers of rhetoric recognized that natural memory was not entirely in their hands. Instead, the method of artificial memory looked to makes use of how the natural memory functioned when free from intense concentration and study.



The orator and philosopher Cicero advised that cues be taken from the observed tendency of natural memory to discard images that were “petty, banal, or ordinary.” For Cicero, this meant sunsets and sunrises, because they happened everyday. Ultimately, whatever images were chosen, the art of memory was “inner writing,” as historian Frances Yates defines it. Images were used in place of words, the inner mind in place of paper.



It was ultimately the dissemination of knowledge in the form of moral rhetoric that the art of memory pursued, not collective or personal identity. Instead of looking to define the inner content of the self through an external archive, the art of memory looked to influence the external world by creating an inner archive in the expansive space of the mind.



In the age of an overflow of technology that can be used to compile external memory, archiving can be seen as a riff on the classical art of memory. Archivists themselves metaphorically acquire the role of natural memory, deciding whether to filter the sunsets and sunrises that Cicero marked for deletion. They decide what is to be most vividly preserved in the collective mind of a society. They also acquire the role of orator, compiling artifacts from the collective history of any given subject, and organizing them in their physical loci so that the public may access them.



This metaphor sheds light on one side of Barnes’ original equation. Yet, the meticulous organization of memory and history is not a bridge to identity. Jorge Luis Borges masterfully uses fantasy to bridge gaps between how reality is understood and experienced. He plays with the notion of the universe as an archive in his short story, “The Library of Babel.”



The library itself is enigmatic, its shape and size unknown to those who wander it, but its contents complete. It contains all books, organized to the best ability of its librarians. Some men organize by destroying useless work, others search for ciphers, and still others are designated as inquisitors, or official searchers:



 



I have observed them carrying out their functions: they are always exhausted. They speak of a staircase without steps where they were almost killed. They speak of galleries and stairs with the local librarian. From time to time they will pick up the nearest book and leaf through its pages, in search of infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.



 



Borges’ tale introduces the issue of discovery into the work of the archivist. It implies that something new would have to found among the unintelligible substance of the library, to free the searchers from their doomed exhaustion and failure. Derrida also addresses this issue of novelty stating that in order for the archiving of any knowledge to be worthwhile and not merely an indulgent act, it must introduce something new and be connected to the future in some way.



The archive of the universe does no such thing in Borges’ story. Is an archive of the collective self so expansive in its stated goal as to ultimately be useless, as well? Derrida offers a more hopeful assessment:



 



Like every history, the history of a culture no doubt presupposes an identifiable heading, a telos toward which the movement, the memory and the promise, the identity—even if it be as difference to itself—dreams of gathering itself.



 



With a telos, memory becomes a deliberate act-—used to moved history forward—largely through the work of the archivist. A telos separates identity, the second variable in Barnes’ equation, into three temporal types: past, present, and future. Of those three identities, it is the future that is most important. With the promise of an identity ahead, discovery is possible, not only the discovery of an evolving telos, but of how to arrive at that future identity as well.



Personal identities are driven by personal telos as well. But the speed of the development of personal identity leaves it vulnerable to volatility. In his short prose poem, “The Maker,” Borges describes a moment in which his protagonist, a man who might be interpreted as the poet Homer, discovers his telos. Borges’ description shows personal identity to depart from the temporal structure that Derrida offers to cultural memory. As Borges’ protagonist loses his sight, he dips into his well of memories, which are described in active terms, as springing forward, effectively overtaking the entity that contains them:



 



With sober surprise, he understood. Love and risk awaited him in this night of the mortal eyes into which he now descended: Ares and Aphrodite, for he now made out, since it was all around him, the sound of glory and hexameters, the sounds of men defending a temple the gods will do nothing to save and of black ships searching the sea for a beloved island, the sound of the Odysseys and Iliads that it was his destiny to sing and make resound reciprocally in the memories of men.



 



Here, personal identity is being driven by memory, rather than driving it. Yet it is only once the protagonist can no longer form new visual memories that he gains access to his most powerful memories and can develop a future telos. Essentially, he must be removed from the present in order to do so, and in this case, blindness is his route to this disengagement.



Borges takes the fantastical study of personal memory further in “Funes, the Memorious.” In comparison to the protagonist of “The Maker,” Ireneo Funes has the opposite relationship with his present reality. He is completely engaged with the present, a young man left physically paralyzed after falling off of a horse, an accident that also gives him perfect memory and perception, or perhaps more accurately, robs him of forgetfulness:



 



In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless.



 



In the narrator’s recollection of Funes before his accident, he describes the boy in very human terms. Funes is sharp and mocking, wears loose trousers, and is best known for his eccentricities, such as always knowing the time. When the narrator finally gets a glimpse of Funes’ face, when he meets with him after the accident, the boy seems ancient and monumental. His wit is absent, his eccentricities untraceable. Funes’ gift of perfect memory robs him of the ability to engage with it, and with that loss, his paralysis becomes mental as well. Without the gift of selectivity his inner being has no “dreams of gathering itself,” as Derrida puts it in Archive Fever.



In collective identity, remembering is an act driven by the knowledge of what future identity a culture or a society is moving toward. But personal identity is a less directed process, more informed by the past than in control of it. What is common between collective and personal identity is that both must be understood in relation to time, just as memory is.



Still, those relationships with time differ. If collective identity is more driven by a future telos than personal identity, it is logical that Julian Barnes’ preoccupation with personal mortality plays a role in this distinction. An archivist does not seek to establish a collective identity that will expire. An individual always faces an end date, when identity is no longer of the present or future, but a trace of what is left behind. It is then that memory can directly be equated with identity.



Until then, Barnes’ phrase is better interpreted as a representation of the three factors involved in the dynamic creation of identity: past memory, present existence, and the future self. Sixteen letters arranged into three words. An archive, but not a discovery: memory is identity.