I'd like to place these lessons on Memory and Creation under the sign of Claudel. From Le Soulier de Satin, I extract the sentences Rodrigue utters when, as Viceroy in Panama, he thinks of Prouhèze, of the past that the name reminds him of.
"Who was talking to me about memories just now?
I hate the past! I hate memories! That voice I thought I heard just now, deep inside me, behind me, it's not behind me, it's ahead of me that it's calling me; if it were behind me, it wouldn't have such bitterness and such sweetness!"
Isn't the past, the essential driving force of action, opposed to passive, impotent nostalgia, Claudel's own philosophy of literary creation? Just as, in a scene between Alberich and Hagen, between father and son - "Sei treu, Hagen, mein Sohn", "Be faithful, Hagen, my son" - Wagner suddenly seems to suggest a reflection on the permanence of the work of art, so Claudel strikingly analyzes the relationship between past and action, the force of what we have learned that propels us into the future, the permanent reciprocal relationship between memory and creation.
It could be said that every act of creation is founded on memory, rooted in it, while at the same time forging and reshaping it as and when required: the interplay of roots that shatter stone, the organic destroying the mineral.
All civilizations, or more precisely, the various civilizations at different stages of their evolution, have certainly not addressed the problem in the same way, and it would be futile to try and find a sufficiently general law to apply to all cases. The role and function of memory have constantly changed within a given culture and even within a limited territory; similarly, the sources, requirements and very functionability of creation have been considered in sometimes diametrically opposed ways.
Moreover, we are quickly called upon to distinguish between the memory of the creator and that of the listener, reader or spectator: a more or less specialized, more or less active memory, depending on whether one is producing or receiving - which leads us into the realms of spontaneous memory and cultivated memory. Finally, for the creator himself, the question arises of the memory of others and the memory of oneself, in other words: what are the real bases and irrefutable characteristics of personality and style in artistic achievements, whether they belong to any branch of invention whatsoever - not only artistic invention, but also scientific invention; heritage and time weigh perhaps even more heavily on the latter than on artistic creation. The logic of development and transmission seems to have a much more objective character in scientific matters, whereas artistic choices seem to be almost exclusively subjective.
It's clear that our civilization is currently very constrained by the problem of the relationship between memory and creation. Of course, there is a fashion phenomenon; and the so-called "post-modern" (the Italians use the more glittering expression "transavantgarde") has drawn attention to the end of the avant-garde, to the use of the known as an object taken out of its context and necessity, in an unusual, decorative or saucy environment, as the case may be. But if the solutions, neither in music nor in architecture, are convincing, the reality of this difficult relationship between heritage and invention is underlined with great precision, even unintentional cruelty, by these movements, which never cease to put history in brackets or quotation marks, and to tamper with quotations. However, it seems to me that the difficulties of the relationship between memory and creation have been artificially inflated to find some justification for what is sometimes no more than invention fatigue or laziness of mind. To reformulate a relationship between memory and creation, between history and becoming, seems to me to require resources both simpler and more radical than a trivial mise en présence.
P. B.