What memory says about culture

Thinking a lot about memory this week, especially memory in regards to history. History is conventionally thought of as the record of events—it’s what happened once upon a time. And when an audience reads a history there is a strong tendency to see it as truth. That’s it; that’s the way it happened. It seems the more complete view of history is constructed through looking at the historical footnotes and trying to determine why they have been relegated to footnotes. So why is Aspasia lesser known than Socrates? We have the same amount of written material from here as we do Socrates; she was incredibly influential; she even ran with the right crowd.

            It’s too easy to throw the “well women weren’t prominent enough at the time” argument at Aspasia’s exclusion from history. (Plus, dismissing the historical role of women with that sort of argument makes it suspect if we are willing to change our method of constructing histories.) Jarrett and Ong note that women are often defined by their relation to men (12). They also go onto note that Aspasia—a woman most unusual for her time—fit none of the traditional roles of a Greek woman. And right there, it seems, we have an answer: Aspasia is recorded because she was an oddity. This line of reasoning just doesn’t work.

            Just as Welch decries the current state of writing as a “Romantic devolution in with clichés of an important intellectual movement prevent[s] students and other writers from participating fully in literacy as consciousness,” I am making a case for overly simplified systems of memory as shutting out the critical thought needed to examine culture both past and present. Sure, Aspasia does not fit the mold of the traditional Greek philosopher/rhetorician. Is the record of her presence a way of exoticizing her? Is she playing the part of the mystery woman—a level of sexual and cultural intrigue—in much the same way more modern literature has contributed to colonial (mis)conceptions like “black wisdom”? Or has Aspasia fought her way into history—only to have her work diminished because of her gender? Either way, what we end up with as readers is a less complete, less dimensional history. When it comes to learning, we have less to build with and less to build on.

            The larger example here is of course Rhodes. As Enos notes in his chapter, “our history of Greek rhetoric is inordinately disproportional” (183). Most of the rhetoric studied in the modern context is born out of Athens and then labeled broadly as Greek, leading to the misconception of rhetoric as a whole. By broadly defining dynamic movements in history, we turn interaction into artifact—a move that, in turn, lessens our understanding of rhetorical nuance. At the present moment we see rhetoric as something handed down like a family heirloom—from Classical to Medieval to Renaissance. Just look at the title of our authoritative text, The Rhetorical Tradition. The—as in the one and only—singular Rhetorical Tradition. It’s almost to say, here is the one true path to rhetoric knowledge; now go on to study it as a holy text. (Ignore the part where the European Dark Ages rehashed Classical Rhetoric without progress while Mideastern Rhetorics exploded with new concepts like algebra by looking at—and engaging with—the “footnotes” of Classical rhetoric.) Why do we have this tradition if it is so stifling?

            Let me sidetrack for a moment: Look at our own conceptions of history. Who is the first president of the United States? It’s not George Washington. Yes, we might know him traditionally as Number 1. But a more discerning look at history shows some gaps: The US became independent in 1776. George was elected in 1789. So what happened for 13 years? Well, that was the period of time where we had the failed experiment of the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles we also had a president—a new one elected by congress every year. So the first president was a guy named John Hanson. There were a whole mess of other presidents before the Constitution was drafted and George came out of retirement for one last big job. It seems we’ve selected the successful parts of history and put them together to create a story that harkens back to the English Lady of the Lake.

            I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we record history to become a thing of myth. Aspasia’s presence as teacher and companion to Socrates ruins the holy (bearded) trinity of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Acknowledging the rhetoric of Rhodes also diminishes the mythic status of the birth of rhetoric. It’s a same really. At the end of his chapter, Enos contends that there are still “rhetorical riches yet to be discovered on the island of Rhodes” (194). They’ve been discovered; they just need to be remembered this time around.