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Article Excerpt
This essay brings together theories of writing as a technology and theories of cognitive semantics with the film Memento in order to make the case that cinema disembodies the human sense of story-time.
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Over the past decades, the profoundly important place of narrative in human life has been established in many ways in different disciplines, from literary studies to psychology, medicine, and philosophy. Literature itself has made a focal issue of the fundamental importance of narrative, especially, but not only, in postmodern fiction, which commonly works to make conscious the heretofore unconsciously operating structures of storytelling. One recent entry into this ongoing examination of narrative, Christopher Nolan's film Memento, has taken the literary investigation to a kind of extreme, for it explores narrativity by portraying a human being who is without it. Memento's protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), suffers a physical trauma that deprives him of what I will call human story-time capacity: he lacks the cognitive ability to situate himself in an ongoing beginning-middle-end. This, in itself, makes the film unusual and intriguing. But, as we shall see, even more intriguing is what Memento shows us in the process of telling Leonard's story, for we are also shown an exploration of the technologizing of story-time as a cognitive capacity. A close examination of Memento with respect to story-time helps us establish some useful generalizations about film as a kind of storytelling.
In order to set the stage for our study of this technologization, we first need to make clear the significance of story-time as cognition. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, among others (notably Grodal), have shown that there exists a core of conceptuality emerging directly from the physiological nature of the human species. (1) The support for their claims arises roughly from a method of surveying a very large array of linguistic samples, finding in these samples concepts that can reasonably be called universal, and relating these concepts to human motor and sensory capacities. They conclude that there must be a specifiable realm of semantics that precedes any manifestation of an actual language. The semantic core is built into our cognitive nature. It is one of our evolutionarily-provided capacities, and it is expressed linguistically in definable sets of cognitive metaphors. Over the years, they have made the case for various built-in cognitive conceptualities. I want to consider one of their strongest: time. They argue that our understanding of time, at least in its primordial sense, is not a function of culture but of nature: it is a feature of the "cognitive unconscious" and is "built into our conceptual systems" (137). Further, our knowledge of time depends on our "real experience of events" in space, and most commonly on motion, both our own and of others (139). On this level, we do not really have to think about temporality. We simply know it as a function of being human, in the same way that we know motion when we see it.
Mark Turner has taken the idea of cognitive conceptuality in a related but different direction, arguing that, in its most basic form, story, too, is a function of nature rather than culture. Because of our built-in cognitive apparatus, "story as a mental activity is essential to human thought" (12). We experience the world fundamentally in terms of "small stories of events in space" (13) before we have any particular words with which to speak or write stories. These stories are "the knowledge that goes unnoticed but makes life possible [...]. They are so essential to life that our mastery of them must be almost entirely unconscious" (14). Any actual storytelling, then, occurs as a secondary representation that takes on its fundamental qualities from our preexisting cognitive conceptuality. It seems to me that, in spite of some differences, what Lakoff and Johnson say about time and what Turner says about story are conceptually quite similar, which is not surprising. Diachrony is essential to narrative and time alike. In each case, a bottom-line conceptual capacity depends on the visual perception of motion in space. The "small stories" with which Turner begins are very much like the metaphors and mappings laid out by Lakoff and Johnson. So, taking the work of these three together, we have an established foundation for what we could call the human story-time cognitive capacity.
Now, given these claims, it would seem to me that we can look at cinema in a new light. For cinema is a unique medium for representing movement, and, thus, will entail a unique representation of story-time. (2) Though I have been using the familiar word "cinema," I should more properly be using the term cinematography because I want the etymological resonance: cinema, from the Greek for movement; graphy from the Greek, to write. Considered etymologically, cinematography, like all other words ending in "graphy," takes us back to the original form of writing: chirography, or handwriting. This will matter for our examination of Memento. Of course, as is well known, the poststructuralist understanding of the significance of writing, most famously put forth by Jacques Derrida, has been extremely influential in literary criticism. However, there exists another, equally robust, scholarly understanding of writing. For the past several decades, a substantial group of scholars in various fields have investigated the nature and effects of writing as an invented human technology. (3) Considered as a technology, writing has had a well-established set of profoundly positive and negative effects on human life. First and foremost, it disembodies language by converting the sounds of speech into a visual image. Writing renders the oral/aural nature of language into a kind of material object, so that our otherwise evanescent words may be held in hand, looked at, studied at length, recited verbatim, carried far and wide in their exact original form, etc. The upsides to this kind of innovation are fairly evident. But, of course, there are downsides. As Plato prophesied long ago, the importance of memory in human affairs changes drastically with writing. Over time, writing usurped the place of what we may call public or communal memory, the oral means of handing on the past that is the only kind of history accessible to non-literate humanity. Plato charged that writing is unnatural, in that if you ask questions of it, it cannot respond; said another way, with writing, our words are no longer a function of the body. Because writing removes our words from our voices and our faces and our histrionics and some specific flesh and blood communicative context, we cannot be as sure of the success of our linguistic intentions as we typically can be in speech. Needless to say, even in face-to-face speech, we can never be absolutely sure that our intended meanings are precisely understood by a given listener. But then, this notion of precision is simply a misbegotten idea (Jackson). The fact is that, given the bodies and physiologies by which...
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