더블유 에스 머윈과 들뢰즈의 기억

W. S. Merwin and Deleuzean Memory

Unlike the modernist and postmodernist experimental poets, W. S. Merwin was one of the few to extensively reflect on and intensively study the phenomenon of memory, struggling to discover how to bring to light the ineffable, virtual items in the pure past or in the involuntary memory. Like Deleuze, Merwin considered that memory does not simply recover former perceptions or meanings, nor reproduce previous experiences. Rather, it creates new forms, which can be classified as voluntary or involuntary manifestations of memory. When we recall the past, our ‘voluntary memory’ is based on our conscious perceptions, whereas the ‘involuntary memory’ has a deeper, and an a priori, and primordial meaning, which appears like an epiphany on rare occasions and has the capacity to open the way to the essence, as in his poem “Unknown Age.” Two kinds of reminiscence, ‘recall of image’ and ‘appeal to recollection’ act in parallel with the above two kinds of memory. The first implies that recollection becomes actualized and embodied as in the poem “Recognition.” The second has more to do with primordial, immemorial times in the pure past, and with the virtual, like the old man in “The River of Bees.” Hence, in Merwin’s story “Laurie,” Alma’s memory of Laurie comes from an a priori, pure past, rather than from actual experience, and the self that Merwin meets in “Cold Spring Morning” is his unrecognized self itself, emerging from the pure past. Just as Deleuze sees duration as essentially memory, consciousness, and freedom, Merwin’s “The Drunk in the Fumace” shows ‘former present’ and ‘present present’ (as Deleuze calls them) through duration and memory, suggesting that the two tenses do not signify temporal sequence, so that the former present can be contemporaneous with, and be represented through the present present. Thus the wounds and bruises of the Vietnamese in “The Asians Dying” are hidden in the former present and contracted into a living present. As Deleuze points out, a scar is the sign not of a past wound but of ‘the present fact of having been wounded.’