Summary
"Theory of Memory" is the fifth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It recounts the story of a child going to a palm reader, who tells the child that they were once a "glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country." The fortune-teller then tells the child that "great things" are ahead of them, or perhaps behind them, since "it is difficult to be sure." As the poem ends, the fortune-teller then gestures towards the immediacy of the present and the indeterminacy of all else, saying that "Right now you are a child / holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.”
Analysis
"Theory of Memory" is the first of the short prose poems that pervade Faithful and Virtuous Night. Like a Zen Buddhist koan (i.e., a paradoxical story or riddle demonstrating the failures of logic and attempting to provoke enlightenment), the poem's elliptical structure makes a statement, backtracks on it, and ends in an unresolved fashion. In this way, it defies the standard prosaic function (i.e, conveying information) and thus takes on an ironic and whimsical tone as a prose poem. Moreover, the fact that the palm reader—whose profession it is to definitively predict or recount one's future or past—is unable to reach a definitive conclusion as to the speaker's own past or future lives adds to this tone of mystery, archness, and confusion in the poem.
Despite the wispiness of the poem in general, it makes quite a few sharp points that warrant further examination. First, there is the matter of the poem's title: most likely, Glück uses the fortune-teller as an allegory for the process of reconstructing memory. From looking at the self in the present (represented in the palm), the fortune-teller attempts to reconstruct any and all possible pasts in the same way that a thinking subject's present state influences their perceptions of the past, as well as their anticipations for the future. By pointing out the contingency of memory, however, Glück is not simply drawing attention to the embodied nature of the present and saying that it is superior to life at any other point in time. Rather, she seeks to draw out the tensions between actively living and recalling/predicting what was or is to come. Life is a constant process of negotiation between immanent fact and constructed truth, and the artificial nature of the latter does not diminish its importance to people: it is merely a categorical distinction.
Second, the temporal viewpoint of the poem is rather unique. The poem begins from what is ostensibly a point of middle age or maturity ("Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable / attachments" [1–2]), but by the poem's end, the fortune-teller reduces the speaker to a "child" (4). The idea that old age is a mirror image of childhood is prevalent elsewhere in the collection, but it is also possible that something different is meant by this change. With the clarity afforded to the speaker in old age, learning to recognize death as a threshold rather than terminus has perhaps forced time to blur and contract in unique ways. It is possible that the fortune-teller, really penetrating to the essence of the speaker's heart, sees as the speaker does—with their entire life up to this point seeming like a protracted childhood, brought out in full focus, while the more recent events of the speaker's life are blurred and mired in the haze of old age. The temporal shift of the poem, combined with the specificity of the fortune-teller's prediction, thus becomes yet another iteration of the tension between doubt and uncertainty in the collection. Is the speaker a child or mature artist? We know what lies before our speaker, but is it in their past or future. Glück leaves these questions unresolved, allowing readers to meditate on and return to them.
