Body, Remember

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores how memory operates as an embodied experience in the Sonnets. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis, the argument examines how Shakespeare viewed the body as a repository for memory and an access point for an archive of erotic experience. The chapter examines the vexed operations of bodily memory as a conduit for sexuality by placing contemporary poetry by C. P. Cavafy, and Michael Ondaatje in dialogue with Sonnet 135, Sonnet 69, Sonnet 141, Sonnet 138, Sonnet 116, and Sonnet 117. In doing so, the chapter surveys this array of poems to interrogate the successes and failures of the bodily ego to master memory, especially in light of Freud’s notion of “undoing.”