5 - Mind, text, and society: Self-memory in social context

Summary

We may begin by contrasting two personal recollections. The first is from the autobiography of the Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine. Consider Quine's description of the “romance” that preceded his second marriage:

Ensign Marjorie Boynton, ultimately Lieutenant, had been a Wave in my office in Washington and had waxed in my esteem. When I left, she was put in charge of the office in its continuing project of organizing the files for posterity. Now she was out of the Navy and counseling in Ruth Jean Eisenbud's summer camp for children in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. I drove there to see her in August. I visited her on subsequent occasions in New York, where she had taken a job, and we went to Greenwich Village for dancing, Mexican music, or Dixieland. It became clear that we would marry when circumstances permitted.

(1985, p. 195)

Although but a fragment of the work, this account is sufficient to reveal the contours of a particular orientation to self-remembrance. Note that each sentence contains “factual” information: names, places, dates, and activities. The sentences are short and rhetorically unadorned; the tone is flat and neutral. As it appears, autobiography for Quine is a matter of retrieving from memory the most accurate possible record of events as they actually occurred. The mind, then, serves as a repository for one's knowledge of the world, and the challenge to the autobiographer is, insofar as possible, to assay its knowledge of the past – unbiased by rhetoric or passion.