memory

I very much like that idea of an eclectic range of material being *layered* onto a map, which - I agree - seems like a beautiful image of human memory. I've recently been reading Le Jardin des Plantes by the French novelist, Claude Simon. It was his last novel - he published it in 1997 when he was 84 - and it represents a wonderful attempt to express something of the texture of human memory within the scope of the novel.

It consists of a series of recollected fragments and often he will return to the same material in a new fragment, developing it slightly or altering it a little in the way we do when we recall moments of the past. The fragments are not uniform in style - in fact they vary considerably - and again that evokes the lack of uniformity in actual memory (some memories are vivid; some are vague; some are detailed; and others are sketchy outlines). There is a pattern of assocation among the fragments, so the mention of, say, a tap in one fragment will be echoed by the mention of a tap in the next, even though the memories are otherwise unconnected. And there are sometimes multiple blocks of text on the page, bringing different fragments into some kind of assocation that is not explicit but implied by the structure of the page itself. Of course these page layouts aren't maps. But they *are* map-like in that they organise memories visually. Here's an example:



Maybe my description makes Simon's novel sound so avant-garde as to be unreadable. But the extraordinary thing about it is that it's *very* readable, despite its unusual organisation.

Thinking about a work that evokes the structure of memory in its own form made me think of Simon's novel, which has impressed me a lot.