Michael C. Anderson and Simon Hanslmayr, ‘Neural Mechanisms of Motivated Forgetting’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 279-92.

It is widely agreed that we forget things because they decay over time, because memories interfere with one another, and because memories can be tied to physical contexts which, when removed, take the memory with them. This article assesses the evidence for more ‘motivated’ forgetting, whereby (for example) our brains work to make it harder for us to remember unpleasant experiences. They present evidence for neural activity (i) disrupting the representation and storage of these experiences in memory, and (ii) inhibiting their later retrieval. The lateral prefrontal cortex is especially associated with this means of ‘shaping the retention of our past’.

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Literature might seem to be more about memory than forgetting. It stores representations of things, and it enables us to retrieve them under particular circumstances. Its many forms, devices, techniques, and strategies are mnemonic, then, in the ways in which they make both representation and retrieval more dynamic and appealing experiences. Things might slip away, but the effort aims at memory.
      However, there may be circumstances in which literature investigates the need to forget, and performs or inculcates a sort of ‘motivated forgetting’. Anderson and Hanslmayr give an interesting list of ‘motives’ for doing this: regulating negative affect, justifying inappropriate behaviour, maintaining beliefs and attitudes, deceiving oneself and others, preserving self-image, forgiving others, maintaining attachment. Any of these might arise as part of, or in tension with, a literary work; it might be helpful, for example, to a scene of mercy, for a certain amount of forgetting to complement the forgiving.

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I shall offer a couple of examples: first, the end of Measure for Measure. Amongst the various participants in the denouement, perhaps the strangest is the unapologetic criminal Barnardine. We have met him before, in prison, where he was (understandably, but inconveniently) unwilling to provide his own head to convince Angelo that the death sentence had been carried out on Claudio. In the last scene, head still attached, he gets drawn into the merciful mood. The Duke turns to him:

      There was a friar told me of this man.
      Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul.
      That ,
      And squarest thy life according. Thou’rt condemn’d:
      But, for those earthly faults, I quit them all;
      And pray thee take this mercy to provide
      For better times to come. Friar, advise him;
      I leave him to your hand.

The other acts of forgiveness in this scene are much more meaningful to an audience, and there are some difficult things to take on. Whereas the Duke says he will ‘quit’ at least the earthly crimes of Barnardine, forgiving him, he and the audience might need instead to forget him. He reminds us of the strange plotting that has only just averted disaster, and he reminds that amnesty saves the bad as well as the good. The friar is interesting: for much of the play the Duke himself has taken on this role in disguise. Perhaps the friar acts like activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex, preventing us having to store or re-address much about Barnardine.

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And there’s something going on in The Winter’s Tale, which ends like this (with King Leontes, who has just had his wife and daughter restored to him after his earlier fits of destructive jealousy, speaking). If you hover your mouse over the highlighted words you’ll see me try to trace a process through the speech:

      O, , Paulina!
      Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent,
      As I by thine a wife: this is a match,
      And made between’s by vows. Thou hast found mine;
      But how, is to be question’d; for I saw her,
      As I thought, , and have in vain said many
      A prayer upon her grave. I’ll not far –
      For him, I partly know his mind – to find thee
      An honourable husband. Come, Camillo,
      And take her by the hand, whose worth and honesty
      Is richly noted and here justified
      By us, a pair of kings. Let’s from this place.
      What! : both your pardons,
      That e’er I put between your holy looks
      My ill suspicion. This is your son-in-law,
      And son unto the king, who, heavens directing,
      Is troth-plight to your daughter. Good Paulina,
      Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
      Each one to his part
      Perform’d in this wide gap of time since first
      We were dissever’d: lead away.

If this speech does perform a sort of motivated forgetting, it matters that we can see it happening. Leontes is trying to brush over things, perhaps with the best intentions. We can observe and assess this process as it happens in front of us, and possibly also to us at the same time. It may even be counter-productive: plenty of people remember Mamillius, the dead son of Leontes and Hermione, during these final moments. The King’s ‘haste’ might make us think more slowly. I do have my doubts about some aspects of the motivated forgetting article. Some of the things that my lateral prefrontal cortex is supposed to help with, past embarrassments especially, seem to come into my mind with alarming regularity. Perhaps the mechanism can backfire in reality as well as in fiction.

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In future posts I hope to come back to this, to look at how motivated forgetting might be seen in other works. I would like to say something about lyric as well as drama; about something other than endings; and a bit more about what literature knows about this.