Memory Theater, by Simon Critchley
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Memory Theater, by Simon Critchley
Best Ebook PDF Memory Theater, by Simon Critchley
From this renowned philosopher comes a debut work of fiction, at once a brilliant précis of the history of philosophy, a semiautobiographical meditation on the absurd relationship between knowledge and memory, and a very funny storyA French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished papers mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley’s office. Rooting through them, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. While waiting for his friend’s prediction to come through, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo’s sixteenth-century Venetian memory theater, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. With nothing left to hope for, Critchley devotes himself to one final project before his death—the building of a structure to house his collective memories and document the remnants of his entire life.
Memory Theater, by Simon Critchley- Amazon Sales Rank: #841503 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-17
- Released on: 2015-11-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .50" w x 5.40" l, .38 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 112 pages
Review A Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2015 A Library Journal Best Fall Debut Novel 2015"Critchley's writing is uncommonly vital. He has a keen appreciation of literature and pop culture, and his analysis can skip nimbly from Heidegger to Wallace Stevens to Johnny Rotten...Charming...a brilliant parable." —The Wall Street Journal"This strange, mesmerizing novel is hard to shake, evoking lucidity, mortality, and weirdness in equally memorable measures." —Kirkus Reviews"Utterly readable, swiftly entertaining, and at moments blackly funny, though overall there’s great poignancy in the character’s cock-eyed determination to reach his goal; not a standard narrative but within any reader’s reach." —Library Journal“A winding dive into the nature of memory—the powers we ascribe to it, and the devices we use to bulwark it . . . fascinating . . . well worth the afternoon it'll take to read—and the lingering questions it'll leave with you long afterward." —Colin Dwyer, NPR"Critchley's prose is charming, funny, and clear; his voice is strong and honest...Memory Theater is entirely readable, even for someone who is new to the philosophers, poets, and poet-philosophers Critchley invokes...[R]efreshing...Memory Theater offers an author's idiosyncratic version of the truth." —Bookforum"Profoundly intriguing . . . a gripping tale . . . a fascinating mystery . . . It's light on pages and extremely heavy on content. Critchley has carefully chosen each and every word, crafting one of the most compelling stories I've ever experienced."—The News-Gazette"[O]riginal, observant, and unexpectedly moving...The novel is short enough to be absorbed in a single sitting, but the questions posed by author/character Simon regarding the full ramifications of the soul’s saturation in history will linger indefinitely." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"Tacks from abstract meditations on memory and thought to surreal, hilarious anecdotes involving Critchley’s bizarre life. Sample confession: ‘I couldn’t think of anything apart from death and the vague prospect of breakfast cereal.’” —Slate"Cleverly and admirably lays bare the fact that our memories are being gentrified."—Flavorwire“Simon Critchley is a figure of quite startling brilliance, and I can never begin to guess what he’ll do next, only that it is sure to sustain and nourish my appetite for his voice. His overall project may be that of returning philosophical inquiry, and “theory,” to a home in literature, yet without surrendering any of its incisive power, or ethical urgency. . . . I read Memory Theater and loved it.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Dissident Gardens“Memory Theater is a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind game occupying a strange frontier between philosophy, memoir, and fiction. Simon Critchley beguiles as he illuminates.” —David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas“Novella or essay, science fiction or memoir? Who cares. Chris Marker, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Frances Yates would all have been proud to have written Memory Theater.” —Tom McCarthy, author of C“Remarkable…suffused with an enthusiasm for its subject, and a humor that carries the text lightly along as Critchley’s frantic prose descends toward its conclusion.” —Los Angeles Review of Books“[Critchley’s] fiction debut is rich, profound, and very funny.” —The Guardian“Teasing, economical, ingenious” —Times Literary Supplement“A strange, affecting and stimulating book that's both a philosophical history and a personal memoir. Sifting through the archives of a dead friend, Critchley takes a fascinating journey through the philosophy and history of memory, and the technologies of remembering dreamed up by thinkers since classical times.” —Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men “With a sense of mischief combined with surprising reverie, Simon Critchley has braided together ideas about memory from the past with the latest thinking about unreliable narrative, altered states and the mysteries of consciousness. Memory Theater is a tantalizing, textual Moebius strip–philosophy, autobiography, and fiction twisted together.” —Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic
About the Author Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His previous books include On Humour; The Book of Dead Philosophers; How to Stop Living and Start Worrying; Impossible Objects; The Mattering of Matter (with Tom McCarthy); The Faith of the Faithless; Stay, Illusion! (with Jamieson Webster), and Bowie. He is series moderator of “The Stone,” a philosophy column in the New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The idea begins with the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was reciting a poem in a house when the ceiling collapsed. Somehow he escaped, although everybody else was crushed to death. Although the bodies of the victims were unrecognizably mangled by the gravity of the fall, Simonides was able to recall the precise places where the guests were sitting. With the association of memory with locus and location, the idea of a memory house, memory palace, or memory theater was born. The time of speech could be mastered by the spatial recollections of loci, of topoi. One would walk around in one’s memory as if in a building or, better, storehouse, inspecting the objects therein. Saint Augustine, trained as a teacher of rhetoric, even went looking for God in memory, only to discover there was “no place” where he could be found.[…] This kind of artificial memory was common in antiquity. Seneca, a teacher of rhetoric, could recite two thousand names in the order in which they had been given. Simplicius, a friend of Saint Augustine, could recite Virgil backwards. (I once met a Swede at a party in Stockholm who could sing every Swedish entry to the Eurovision Song Contest since 1958—you just said the year, 1978 say, and he would begin: “Dinga, dinga dong/ Binga, binga bong”). The striking images in a memory theater would arouse intense inner powers of visualization to aid recollection.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. As Refreshing as a Dry Martini By C.D. McKoy Simon Critchley's "Memory Theater" pries open the world with the vigor of a mind uncompromised. His use of language is ingenious, erudite yet personal, as he playfully plunders the treasure-trove of Western thought to illuminate one man's longing for transcendence.Like any good philosopher, Critchley will get your intellect itching, but not provide the balm. A gem of a story.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Couldn't put it down--I read it in a single-sitting. By Thomas Memory Theatre is a metaphysical thriller--somewhat in the tradition of Auster's New York City Trilogy, Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland etc. People who love metafictional thrillers usually REALLY love them, and I would be included in this group.A basic grasp of continentally inflected metaphysics (AKA 'critical theory': Hegel, Heidigger etc.) will help you to fall in love with this book but I don't think a grounding in that theoretical terrain is necessarily a pre-requisite.Interestingly and significantly this particular metaphysical thriller is also an intimate piece of 'autobiographical fiction'--most of the people and relationships mentioned in the book are real people, many of the life-events and situations are fictionalized versions of real events and situations germane to the actual lived experience of the author, Simon Critchley etc. Like the recent, quite different but equally fascinating, 'kinetic', 'frenetic', and psychoanalytic investigation of Hamlet (Stay Illusion!), co-authored with his wife, the analyst Jamieson Webster, Memory Theatre re-alienates relatively familiar existential territories via the use of a singularly ingenious formal conceit.(NOTE: Re-alienates? Is there a better word for this? He makes strange places in human experience strange again. I'm sure that there's a word for this.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Not Dead Yet By Roger Brunyate [SPOILER ALERT: This is a book about ideas, not plot. In order to discuss it, however, I felt I had to mention the simple story line on which the ideas are hung. If you would rather not know it, don't read on.]Simon Critchley is a British philosopher now living in New York, where he teaches at the New School and writes a philosophy column for the Times. He has written numerous non-fiction books on topics from Martin Heidegger to David Bowie. This is his first work of fiction. If fiction it can be called, for much of it is a lightning history of the philosophy of memory, and in particular the idea of building a mnemonic device -- a memory theater -- which will cue the recall of its builder's entire knowledge. Before he leaves the University of Essex to go to America, Critchley is sent a number of boxes left behind by his late mentor, the French philosopher Michel Haar. [Like all the other figures in the book, including the protagonist, Haar was a real person. Critchley's deadpan note in the twelve pages of bios at the end says: "Much of what is said about him above is true. Some of it isn't."] Among Haar's boxes, Critchley finds a number of astrological charts, each using known facts about its subject to predict the place, time, and manner of his death. He is alarmed to find that Haar wrote a chart for him, with his death set to take place in Holland in June 2010. As it happens, he is offered a visiting professorship in Holland [this bit is true], so he goes there, builds a memory theater of his own, and prepares to die, at the very moment when he has the entire span of his knowledge at his fingertips."My fantasy was doubtless that I could coincide with my fate, rise up to meet it, unify freedom and necessity and extinguish myself from existence like a glorious firefly. Contingency would be abolished. It was the dream of the perfect death, the Socratic death, the philosophical death: absolute self-coincidence at the point of disappearance. Autarchy. Autonomy. Authenticity. Autism. It was a delusion of control. Death as some erection without procreation. An obsessional's garden of delights. As you can see, I am still quite the thinker at times."Obviously, he doesn't die. As you can gather from the excerpt above, the whole thing is both intellectually serious and tongue-in-cheek. Were I anything other than a philosophical illiterate, I would probably love it; as it is, I was briefly fascinated and mildly amused, but perhaps I was reading it at the wrong time. By happenstance -- I picked this up at the library some weeks ago without knowing what it was about -- I read it directly after another book that pulls intellectual ideas out of the hat with the panache of a conjurer: SUDDEN DEATH by Álvaro Enrigue. Were they speakers rather than writers, you might think of Enrigue as someone you would buy tickets to go and see, Critchley as someone who would be interesting to meet at a dinner party, even if you didn't understand all that he said. As I certainly didn't. But it was a very short book, and I don't feel my time has been wasted.
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