'Memory Theatre' by Simon Critchley

“I was dying. That much is certain. The rest is fiction.” I first came across Critchley in his Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, philosophy and literature, a consideration of the counterpull between nihilism and meaning in Blanchot and Beckett and others (I read this book in hospital, however, and now have difficulty in disentangling it from the location in which it was read (though I do remember thinking that the quoted material was often more interesting than the thesis itself)). In this novella, which presents as a memoir and occupies various positions in the triangle between fiction, biography and criticism, Critchley inherits from a fellow philosopher Michel Haar a set of boxes containing artefacts and papers concerning memory, as well as a set of charts graphing the events and deaths of philosophers through history. When Critchley discovers that Haar’s charts predicted the deaths of people who had dies since his demise, and when he finds a chart predicting his own death in 2010, Critchley scales down his academic work and devotes himself to building a memory theatre, of the kind described in Frances Yates’ thoroughly interesting The Art of Memory, in his back garden. This attempt to symbolically represent the totality of knowledge in an accessible way obsesses him until the fateful day arrives and the whole enterprise is undercut. The book reads somewhere between a Borgesian work-at-one-remove and an undergraduate name-dropping exercise. Critchley, along with Tom McCarthy, is a member of the mock-serious International Necronautical Society.

December 2015