Writers seem to find greatest expression when writing about the power of memories over the present. On the basis of your reading of Ishiguros The Remains of the Day and of your selection of Hardys poem

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“Writers seem to find greatest expression when writing about the power of memories over the present.” On the basis of your reading of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and of your selection of Hardy’s poems, discuss your response to this comment. In the course of your writing show how your ideas have been illuminated by your response to Gurney’s play Love Letters.

‘Veteris vestigia flammae’. Translated as ‘the sparkles of my former flame’, in just the epigraph of his poetry Thomas Hardy captured the allure that memories can hold for writers. It captures the past’s beauty and power, as Hardy reveals his regret at opportunities missed through his poetry of 1912-13, as Stevens denies the power of time and memories in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and as A.R. Gurney explores memories’ permanence in Love Letters. Each work is connected by loss, allowing the writers to access the deepest realms of human emotion as their characters deal with past mistakes.

        

This is evident where Hardy explores memories’ pain, particularly in The Phantom Horsewoman. This poem expresses his feelings during his pilgrimage to Cornwall after his wife Emma’s death to revisit his memories of their courtship that were so different from those of their eventual estrangement. The persona remains anonymous, watching a man and contemplating what thoughts torment him – although this device could represent Hardy stepping back and gaining a greater perspective on his own emotions.  In the first stanza, ‘careworn craze’ epitomises this turmoil, trying to reconcile himself with the deterioration that he allowed within their relationship. ‘Craze’ depicts the conflicting forces - trying to move forward while his memories hold him in the past – while ‘worn’ shows how this wears him down, breaking him as he is pushed to the brink of what he can cope with. Even the phrase’s dissonance highlights the disjointedness between the physical world and the land of his memories. Hardy continued writing about Emma even after his second marriage to Florence Dugdale, further proof that he could never move forward, perhaps due to guilt about his new-found love and happiness after denying Emma these very same things. This idea is continued in the third stanza by the simile ‘drawn rose-bright’, with ‘drawn’ suggesting the permanence of what he faces - as if the memories were etched onto his mind’s eye - and ‘bright’ highlighting how they shine out while everything else fades in comparison. The poem’s structure supports this as the first and last lines of each stanza rhyme, leaving the reader suspended as Hardy is within time and his created worlds. However, these ideas are perhaps best expressed in the second stanza: ‘a phantom of his own figuring’. This image shows how the memories haunt him, with ‘phantom’ suggesting that they lurk in the shadows of his thoughts yet with ‘his own’ showing how he holds the power. He has chosen this path, electing to live in his haunted mind.

A similar theme is present in Gurney’s Love Letters as in his last letter Andy writes of how Melissa’s death ‘fills [him] with an emptiness’. This shows how his memories of their time together have consumed him; however, the juxtaposition of ‘fills’ and ‘emptiness’ suggests that for him these memories represent a void that has engulfed him, rather than a new land.

        

Ishiguro also explores memories in The Remains of the Day, showing how living in the past controls the protagonist, Stevens. This is demonstrated through his memories’ details, retaining every action as if he had replayed it in his mind repeatedly, for example when Stevens recalls how, when he spoke to Miss Kenton after her aunt’s death, before she left she ‘closed the sideboard’. This is such a small event that his remembering it shows the details consuming him, as if trying desperately to pinpoint something that marked the ‘turning point’ in their relationship. This is highlighted by the use of ‘then’ to show the events’ progression in his mind as he replays each in order, afraid of missing anything which may be key. However, Stevens seems unwilling to define anything beyond the facts, using ambiguous terms like ‘as though’ and ‘something’ when delving into emotions. This highlights how he is unwilling to enter unknown territory, remaining with the definite rather than stepping into the dark by trying to define what he cannot comprehend. He claims to be ‘forever speculating’ about what might have been, with ‘forever’ highlighting how his memories are inescapable and ‘speculating’ showing how he can never be certain – he can only guess. His memories will always hold this power over him while he can turn them over in his mind, replaying the possible outcomes. James Lang argued that Ishiguro’s work explores ‘the conflict between public and private memory’, an idea demonstrated here as Stevens attempts to reconcile himself with the differences between what he saw at the time and what, in retrospect, he feels he should have seen. This could symbolise an attitude which Ishiguro saw after WWII as different nations attempted to come to terms with the atrocities that had been committed in their name. This topic was also addressed in Ishiguro’s novel The Artist of the Floating World which used memories to explore a Japanese painter’s conflict as he looked back on his role in the war. Both he and Stevens are at odds with themselves, their memories controlling their lives as they realise the impacts of their actions.

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In Love Letters memories’ power is shown through writing’s permanence as the letters that the characters write give the memories a physical presence to be shared, as Andy claims that when he writes he is ‘giving this piece of [himself]’ to Melissa.

In Hardy’s poetry this control that memories hold is again explained; however, the persona has gone further than writing his memories, instead seeing them played out in the surrounding world. This can be seen in The Spell of the Rose and At Castle Boterel, as the former’s final stanza explores how a rose’s ‘glow’ allows the persona to truly ...

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