Inspiring Older Readers
FMS in my library
I wonder if you’ve heard about a condition known as False Memory Syndrome (FMS)? I turned to good old Wikipedia for this usefully concise definition:
“False memory syndrome describes a condition in which a person's identity and relationships are affected by memories that are factually incorrect but that they strongly believe. Peter J. Freyd originated the term, which the False Memory Syndrome Foundation subsequently popularized. The term is not recognized as a psychiatric illness in any of the medical manuals, such as the ICD-10 or the DSM-5; however, the principle that memories can be altered by outside influences is overwhelmingly accepted by scientists.”
As this definition hints at, it’s a term that attracts plenty of controversy – chiefly, I suspect, because of the very sensitive issues it has been associated with, especially the collection of evidence in cases of abuse experienced by vulnerable children and adults.
However, without wishing to downplay the importance of the traumatic instances where FMS has been an alleged feature, there is one example where false memory is a constant issue – my library. There seems to be pretty compelling evidence that I suffer from a version of FMS that I am calling FRS or False Reading Syndrome.
Not so long ago on this site I wrote an appreciation of Adrian Mitchell’s To Whom It May Concern (Tell me Lies about Vietnam) and I said this:
“I first came across Mitchell when his work was included in the Penguin Modern Poets collection (number 22) which was published in 1973 and when I had just completed my first year at university. His urgent, direct, witty and accessible poetry went straight into my circulatory system and he seemed to me, at the time, a hero speaking truth to power on my behalf.
I read and reread his 1968 poem, To Whom It May Concern (Tell me lies about Vietnam) and I foolishly mistook his fantastic ability to speak directly to the reader as simplicity. I was even dim enough to think I could probably do that myself – but, of course I couldn’t because it’s really skilful and carefully constructed. Something this good needs talent."
I can vividly remember the book, its cover and the poem and I see myself sitting in my rented room at university reading it to myself and to some of my housemates. It’s one of my clearer, treasured memories – but I now have to confess that it couldn’t have happened in the way I remember it. A few days after publishing the article I was tidying-up around my poetry shelves when I was prompted by a wave of modest sentimentality to take the Penguin Modern Poets (22) volume down and read To Whom It May Concern again from those pages. But I couldn’t. That poem isn’t actually in that collection. And yet, I utterly believed it was and I even had a memory of reading it.
False Memory Syndrome it would seem can infest any part of the past that we’ve invested with emotional significance. Broadening this out, I’m forced to ask how many books, how many readings, have I misremembered (which seems to be just a fancy way of saying ‘made up’)? Just how bad is my False Reading Syndrome?
I think there must be some links here to another phenomenon that afflicts all readers – let’s call this one ‘No-Memory Syndrome’. There must now be a whole load of books I know I’ve read but about which I can remember pretty much nothing. Luckily, I’ve never really been someone who worries about this. I know I’ve read the book but I’m often at a total loss to remember what happened, names of characters, significant plot twists. Quite often it feels that I may as well never have read it because I remember virtually nothing.
But I don’t think reading books is a memory test. Often they do their best work subconsciously and over long, extended periods and just, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, in the same way as I can’t remember all the meals I’ve had that have been responsible for building this dodgy body of mine over the years, I can’t necessarily remember everything that’s contributed to building the equally dodgy brain and personality.
What does bother me a bit more is when I reread favourite books, books I may have read several times, and discover that things don’t happen in quite the order I remember or that characters were more or less substantial than I thought they were. And my ability to misremember the text and to misquote it is disturbing. To discover that what I thought was an author’s pithy prose isn’t in the book at all but that it’s a ‘quotation’ you’ve made up yourself, can put you on the back foot.
So what’s going on with False Reading Syndrome or No-memory Syndrome? I know from talking to others close to me that I’m not alone in these symptoms. False memories of books is, I think, commonplace and so there must be something else going on here.
I want to suggest that all this false memory around books is happening because reading is an example of a creative concept called co-construction. A book, I think, is made up of two elements – a writer who creates the book and a reader who collaborates in that creation by reading it. This means that no book can be read in the same way by different readers. Moreover, even the same reader can never read the same book twice because the reader is constantly changing as the influence of life and experience take their toll. It’s even possible – and legitimate – to stretch that reading creativity to mix books together and to shift text around as it suits.
And so there is never, I think, a fixed text but one which has infinite dimensions and infinite interpretations.
As for those books we think we’ve forgotten: well, we may think the details have disappeared but I suspect their contribution has been internalised and will make their influence felt over time and in different ways.
Ultimately, isn’t that what makes reading so exciting? It really doesn’t matter where or when you read something (one story is as good as another when it comes to that); what really matters is that you’ve read it and it’s become part of a personal reading history that isn’t dependent on a factually accurate chronology.
Terry Potter
July 2018