In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris a scholar, deep in meditation in his study . . . gazes at the first printed book which has come to disturb his collection of manuscripts. Then . . . he gazes at the vast cathedral, silhouetted against the starry sky . . . 'Ceci tuera cela,' he says. The printed book will destroy the building. The parable which Hugo develops out of the comparison of the building, crowded with images, with the arrival in his library of a printed book might be applied to the effect on the invisible cathedrals of memory of the past of the spread of printing. The printed book will make such huge built-up memories, crowded with images, unnecessary. It will do away with habits of immemorial antiquity whereby a "thing" is immediately invested with an image and stored in the places of memory. (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 131)Near the end of her book Eisenstein writes: "As previous remarks suggest, the effects produced by printing may be plausibly related to an increased incidence of creative acts, to internally transformed speculative traditions, to exchanges between intellectuals and artisans, and indeed to each of the contested factors in current disputes" (293).
Vico gives us the following in terms of memory: "In that human indigence, the peoples, who were almost all body and almost no reflection, must have been all vivid sensation in perceiving particulars, strong imagination in apprehending and enlarging them, sharp wit in referring them to their imaginative genera, and robust memory in retaining them . . .” In this passage Vico identifies memory as having three forms: traditionally understood memory, imagination when it “lathers or imitates”, and invention when it “gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship” (819).
Descartes says that he stopped reading text altogether for purposes of ingenuity:
I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it. (Descartes, Discourse on the Method)If we accept Vico's theory, memory and imagination give us an inside relation to things, a "for us". Creating something seems to be a necessary part of abstracting from it. Verene brings up the idea of the imaginative universal as a theory of conditions for thought--he says of the intelligible universal: "it can grasp none of the terror of formlessness which accompanies the attempt to make a new intelligibility, the attempt to perform an original conversion of the true and made . . . Any genuine beginning in thought requires the power of fantasia (imagination) to produce true speech." (93)
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