The Forgetting of Symons: Photographic Memory and Formal Reincarnation

Abstract

Memory is a form of conscience for Symons in London Nights and Silhouettes. As they fracture female dancers into disjointed abstractions, his lyrics demonstrate amnesiac perception. But such attempts to immobilize plot and to forget setting and character are frequently overcome by a shamefaced recollection of time, place, and selfhood. Alfano observes that many of the compact poems of the 1890s resemble photographs, truncating and distorting the experiences they capture. Yet the resurfacing of memory places many of Symons’s lyrical “snapshots” within a narrative context and draws revealing connections among them. Ironically, it is the return of detailed recollection and thus of plot—the return of a more typically masculine mode—that weaves quasi-erotic links among Symons’s voyeuristic male characters and returns some agency to his women.