Mnemosyne was not only the goddess of memory; she was also the mother of the Muses, the goddesses of the various arts. Thus, there is a link between memory and literature (including history, whose Muse was Clio) and the other arts. Three particularly good sources on the relationship between memory and literature, and the literature of memory beyond psychology and the other cognitive sciences, are:
The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology, edited by James McConkey (Oxford University Press, 1996). Originally conceived as the "Oxford Companion to Memory", part of the famous Oxford series, this anthology is "an engrossing treasury of commentaries on memory as the necessary condition of individual and cultural identity, and as the provider of the materials and themes of our philosophies, religions, and literary creations" (M.H. Abrams, from the book jacket).
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, by Patricia Hampl (Norton, 1999). A shorter book that "looks so deeply into the relation between memory and imagination as to become a guide, for both writers and readers, to what Virginia Woolf called 'life writing'" (Mark Doty, from the book jacket).
Click here for a webcast of Patricia Hampl reading from her book, as well as a question-and-answer session with students, both presented under the auspices of the "Living Writers" course taught by the late Prof. Frederick Busch at Colgate University.
On the "Living Writers Wired" webpage
scroll down to September 20, 2001.
Webcast Requires Windows Media Player.
The literature of memory encompasses as literature of forgetting as well as a literature of remembering. For examples of the former, see:
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss, edited by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage Books, 2000). Part of the 'Black Lizard" crime series, this book does "nothing less than define a new genre of literature -- the amnesia story" (from the book description on www.amazon.com). As Lethem noted (in an interview with Kevin Canfield of the Hartford Courant, 2001), amnesia "isolates the basic question people are asking all the time -- even if they're not aware they're asking it -- which is, 'Who am I?' and 'Where do I come from?' The function of amnesia is that it helps make that question super-literal, super-explicit."
Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering (2022) by Scott Small and A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (2022) by Lewis Hyde (both reviewed by Gavin Francis in "The Dream of Forgetfulness", New York Review of Books (03/09/2023). Francis begins his review by Quoting Jorge Luis Borges: "Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it's the only vengeance and the only punishment". He also notes that in Borges's story, "Funes, the Memorious", a Uraguayan gaucho suffers a head injury which curses him with the inability to forget. "My memory, sir", Funes says to the story's narrator, "is like a rubbish heap." He has lost the ability to forget what is unimportant, or what no longer makes a difference, or what is too particular to be bothered to remember.
Here is an ongoing list of books, classic and recent, good and bad, in which memory or amnesia play a prominent role in the plot.
Amnesia, by Andrew Niederman. In an interview with Kevin Canfield of the Hartford Courant (2001), Niederman (who also writes under the pen name V.C. Andrews), notes that "Anybody who suffers from amnesia is in a very vulnerable state. They have to accept on faith what they're being told about themselves and their past and their history. That sort of situation will lend itself to so many different plot lines and character problems that it's an interesting condition for a writer to exploit."
Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson (2011). Inspired by the case of H.M., this psychological thriller centers on Christine, a woman who wakes up in bed next to a stranger, looks in the bathroom mirror, and discovers that she's aged 20 years. She's suffered brain damage in an accident, and while she's asleep at night she forgets everything that happened to her during the day before. Christine then tries to recover her memory and her identity -- and to find out what her husband is up to.
The Bone Diaries by Frances Itani (2008). A woman has an accident on the way to Queen Elizabeth's birthday lunch. Reviewing her grandfather's edition of Gray's Anatomy, each of her broken bones serves as a cue for the retrieval of an important autobiographical memory. The result is chronicle of her life. It's the Crovitz-Galton technique turned into literature.
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum (1980). First of a series of thrillers about a CIA black-operations agent who has been rendered amnesic for his jobs (sort of an American Manchurian Candidate). Made into a TV movie starring Richard Chamberlain. Followed by The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, which chronicle the agent's attempts to recover his past and take revenge on those who deprived him of his identity. The original three novels were made into films starring Matt Damon. After Ludlum's death, the series continued with Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Betrayal, by Eric Van Lustbader.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (2015). Querig, a dragon, creates a mist which envelops Arthurian Britain, causing people to lose their memories. Only if the dragon is killed will memory be restored. Meanwhile, an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, search for their lost son without being able to remember very much about him -- or anyone else, or anything else, or even each other. Reviewing the book in the New Yorker ("The Uses of Oblivion", 03/23/2015), James Wood wrote:
One of the monks, Father Jonus... suggests that God is angry with his people, and that the time has come to "uncover what's been hidden and face the past"..... Father Jonus asks Beatrice if she is afraid of the return of her unhappy memories. She is not, because she and Axl love each other, and as we are constituted by our memories, for good and for ill, so is her marriage. In the same way, although the mist has maintained a frail truce between Britons and Saxons, it is clearly right, if not desirable, that historical memory should be restored, even if the cost is a return to old warfare.
The
Candy House (2022) by Jennifer Egan. Not
exactly a sequel to Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A
Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), but it does feature some
of the same characters; Egan herself calls it a "sibling"
novel. A tech genius has invented an appplication called
"Own Your Unconscious", which provides a way to upload people's
memories to an online collective called the Mandala Cube, a
Cloud-like data-storage center, which also gives them anonymous
access to all the thoughts and memories of other participants,
living or dead. Another feature is the MemoryShop, which
allows people to erase memories of painful events. Then
there are the "eluders", a dissident faction who refuse to
participate. "For Egan, [Mandala's creations are] a way to
explore the present quandaries of an Internet that doesn't let
anyone escape the past" (Erin Somers, in "Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon", The Nation, 04/30/2022). Reviewed by Mark
O'Connell in "Total Recall", New York Review of Books,
11/24/2022. See also The Immortal King Rao by
Vauhini Vara, below.
Delirium
by Laura Restrepo (2007). This novel, set in Colombia,
features both a woman with amnesia and a country that has
forgotten its past -- or is trying to do so.
Encircling
by Carl Frode Tiller (2007; translated from the Norwegian by
Barbara Haveland, 2015; reviewed in "The Possessed" by Clair
Wills, New York Review of Books, 07/22/2021).
David, a Norwegian in his thirties who has lost most of his
memory, places a newspaper advertisement asking for people who
knew him to write to him and fill in the gaps in memory.
Vol. 1 covers his teenage years; Vol. 2, childhood; Vol. 3,
young adulthood. David's recent memories have been spared
(so far), so in all there are nine different accounts of his
life (as well as nine different perspectives on the recent
social history of rural Norway). The result is what Endel
Tulving (and I) have called remembering by knowing --
abstract knowledge of the past, knowing the events of one's own
life much as one can recount the major battles of the Civil
War. Because autobiographical memory is an important part
of identity, David constructs (or maybe reconstructs)
his self-concept the same time. On the jacket of Vol., 3, a
blurb states that "Identity is not a monolith but a collage",
built up of fragments. On the other hand, David's
therapist suggests that (quoting Wills quoting the book) "we are
little more than 'situation-appropriate personas', with no
coherent identity at all". Wills herself has a different
take: that Tiller "is not so much interested in how we are
formed by the perspectives of other people as in how we are
destroyed by them. Again and again his characters battle
to maintain a sense of self in their encounters with others, and
again and again they lose the battle".
Face of a
Stranger, by Anne Perry. First in a series of
murder mysteries set in Victorian England featuring an a
brilliant but amnesic detective, William Monk. The series,
covers more than a dozen books, and reaches a sort of climax in
Death of a Stranger (2002), "in which William Monk
breaks through the wall of amnesia and discovers at last who he
once was" (from the book jacket). Link to Anne Perry's
website.
Giant's
Bread, a mystery by Agatha Christie, writing under
the pseudonym Mary Westmacott (1930), is a fictionalized account
of Christie's apparent lapse into a two-week-long fugue state,
in December 1926. For more on the novel and the fugue state (if
that is what it was), see Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman
(2022) by Lucy Worsley, reviewed by Francis Wilson in "Agatha
Christie's Nightmares", New York Review of Books,
10/20/2022). A musician goes off to World War I; his wife,
believing him to have been killed, remarries. When the
musician discovers this, he attempts suicide and falls into an
amnesic state. But with therapy, he recovers his
past. Wilson notes that "Christie's lifelong preoccupation
was with memory rather than murder. Our capacity to forget,
Christie believed, is essential to human happiness." In
one of her Poirot novels, the detective says "Elephants can
remember, but we are human beings, and mercifully human beings
can forget".
The
Guest Lecture by Martin Riker (2023), reviewed by
Meghan O'Gieblyn in "The Life of the Mind", New York Review
of Books, 03/23/2023. An entire novel built on the
method of loci. Abby, a feminist economist preparing to
deliver a lecture on John Maynard Keynes, lies awake in med
organizing her thoughts. She is mentally locating each of
her points in a separate room of her house, and when she
lectures she will mentally walk through her house, picking up
points as she goes along. She's also just been denied
tenure, which means that she's going to have to sell that
house. So as she organizes her lecture, walking through
the house, she reflects on the house itself, and the events that
occurred while she's been living there (think: Proust and The
Remembrance of Things Past). To ice the cake, she
engages in a dialogue with Keynes himself. All of this
goes on in her mind while she lies awake in her hotel room,
trying not to disturb the sleep of her husband and daughter, who
are staying with her. O'Gieblyn writes" "It's difficult to
think of a recent novel that's gone as doggedly as Riker's does
into the tunnel of pure interiority".
The
Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa.
Inspired by the story of H.M., this novel (also produced as a
movie in Japan) concerns a housekeeper for a mathematician who,
as a result of a car accident, can only retain new memories for
80 minutes (which was about 79.5 minutes longer than H.M.), it
addresses the question of whether you can love someone you can't
remember.
The
Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. "King" Rao
isn't a king -- that's the name of an Indian techie, child of
low-caste farmers, who invents a technology called the Coconut
(his parents were coconut farmers) permitting him to upload the
entire contents of his conscious mind to the Cloud.
There's also a related technology called the Harmonica which
allows human minds to be directly connected to each other
through the Internet. As a result, he lives forever in the
memory of his daughter, Athena. Reviewed by Mark O'Connell in "Total
Recall", New York Review of Books, 11/24/2022. See
also The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, above (also
reviewed by O'Connell.
Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation (2005) by Robert Littell. In this post-Cold War spy thriller, Martin Odum is a former CIA operative diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, with some memories still unconscious despite psychotherapy. "Along with his well-remembered roles..., there are hints of a legend, an alter ego, beyond his memory's reach" (John Updike, reviewing the book in "The Great Game Gone", New Yorker, 06/13-20/05).
The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War (2004) by Jean-Yves Le Naour. Nonfiction, rather than fiction. "Put simply, the soldier in question was an amnesiac [known as Anthelme Mangin, because that's what he seemed to say when asked his name] repatriated to France along with 64 other mentally disturbed prisoners of war. After his photograph was published, dozens of families claimed to recognize him as their missing relative. And as the effort to identify him dragged on, he became a living symbol of France's wartime sacrifice" ("A Lost Soul Who Symbolized France's Trauma" by Alan Riding, New York Times, 08/23/04). There is a little bit of implicit memory here: medical authorities came to believe that Mangin was actually Octave Monjoin, son of Joseph Monjoin, of St.-Maur-sur-Indre; when he was dropped off at the town's train station, Mangin walked unaided to Monjoin's house. The story formed the basis for Jean Anouilh's play, Traveler Without Luggage (1937); there are also resemblances to Pirandello's Right You Are, The Return of Martin Guerre (both the book by Natalie Zemon Davis and the film, starring Gerard Depardieu), and the more recent movie, the Majestic, starring Jim Carrey.
Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and its sequels, Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), all by Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), who has been called has been called "the most autobiographical of writers" ("A House Restored, an Author Revisited" by Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times, 06/05/03). Blumenthal notes Wolfe's "stupendous powers of recall..., reimagining all he had ever seen and felt...". The first two books, in particular, are based on Wolfe's reminiscences of his childhood and youth in Asheville, North Carolina. Despite the title of Wolfe's last (posthumously published) book, he did in fact go home again, and wrote about the experience in "Return", an article originally commissioned by a local newspaper, the Asheville Citizen.
Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss (Doubleday, 2002). Sampson Greene, an Ivy-League English professor is found wandering, disheveled, in the Nevada desert, after a brain tumor deprives him of his memory. He remembers nothing after his first kiss, at age 12, and the amnesia covers his academic specialty knowledge as well as his personal identity.
"Rather than putting her protagonist through a thrillerish wringer of recovered memory and a recomposed normal life..., Krauss... asks not how Samson can remember, but what would happen if he simply chose not to remember. If he embraced blankness as a new kind of free will, would we envy his sudden lack of obligation? Or would we shy away from his irresponsibility?" (from "Memory -- Who Needs It?" by Jesse Berrett, San Francisco Chronicle, 06/16/02).
"Even as he struggles to connect with his wife, Anna, he thinks that he might prefer the blankness of his new life. Sampson's loss takes place against a backdrop of secret experiments on human memory and the social implications of atomic testing, but it is his shadow-filled scrutiny of intimacy -- as he wonders why he might have married this beautiful stranger, and whether he can love her -- that is the book's real strength" (from the "Briefly Noted" column, New Yorker, 08/05/02.
Mary Modern by Camille DeAngelis. When a scientist clones her deceased grandmother, she expects to get a baby. Instead, she gets a young woman, with a full-fledged set of memories.
The
Memory Artists by Jeffrey Moore (2006). Draws
on hypermnesia, synesthesia, and the memory disorder associated
with Alzheimer's disease to examine memory and identity
(noted in "Fiction Chronicle" by Michael Agovino, New York
Times Book Review, 05/14/06).
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (2019; originally published in Japan in 1994). Shades of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, except it's memories, not books, that the authorities are after. Inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank, the novel takes place on an island ruled by an authoritarian government, where a mysterious force makes people forget whole categories of objects or animals; then the Memory Police arrive to eliminate the objects themselves -- as well as those who are immune to the force, and therefore continue to remember, so that all that is left are "absences and holes". The narrator, a novelist whose mother was taken by the MPs, hides her editor, who is one of those immune to the force, under the floorboards of her house (this is the Anne Frank connection). The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. Reviewing the book in The New Yorker, Jia Tollentino writes that "There are components to forgetting: the thing disappears, and then the memory of that thing disappears, and then the memory of forgetting that thing disappears, too" ("How 'The Memory Police' Makes You See", 11/06/201).
Memory's
Last Breath by Gerda Saunders (2017). A
"memoir of amnesia", written by a professor of gender studies
who gradually lost her memory due to microvascular disease.
Mother
Daughter Widow Wife by Robin Wasserman (2020).
Set in the fictional Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research,
Lizzie Epstein works with Wendy Doe, who has no memory and no
identification. Chandler Baker, reviewing the novel in the
New York Times, writes that "The polyphonic narrative
structure... draws heavily on musical composition, particularly
Bach's fugues, which Wasserman adeptly uses to illustrate the
tractile nature of memory. And though the middle of the
book requires some patience, there are plenty of philosophical
threads to tease out and ponder along the way: Why do we
assume continuity across time, but not space? Is it
logical to assume that our past self is the same as our present
one? Can there be a self with no memory? Why
do we forget some memories and remember others and if what we
remember shapes us, would we be entirely different if we
remembered differently?" ("What if You Didn't Know Who You
Were? What if No One Did?", 07/26/2020).
Mr.
Nobody by Catherine Steadman (2020). A
psychiatrist deals with a patient who may (or may not) have lost
his memory. One of 10 new books recommended in the New
York Times Book Review, 02/09/2020.
My Life, Deleted by Scott Bolzan, Joan Bolzan, and Caitlin Rother (2010). After a concussive blow to the head, Bolzan loses every memory of his past, and has to relearn the story of his life, marriage, and children.
Nineteen
Eighty Four by George Orwell (written 1948;
published 1949). More about collective memory and amnesia
than the individual case. Winston Smith, a clerk in the
Ministry of Truth, alters newspapers and other documents in
accordance with the pronouncements of Big Brother and the Party,
and destroys the old versions by dropping them down the "memory
hole". In Orwell's vision, political control is exercised
through the control of information, including the control of
memory: "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who
controls the present, controls the past."
The
One Memory of Flora Banks (2017) by Emily Barr, a
teenage girl, who suffers from anterograde amnesia following
brain surgery at age 10, searches for the boy who might hold the
key to her identity.
Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick (1949). See also Paycheck and Total Recall, both of which were made into films. "dick's favorite idea... is that the lives we think we're living are illusions, based not on our actual histories but on made-to-order pasts cooked up by the powers that be and then force-fed to our brains. (If Dick had had the foresight to patent this notion, he could have collected fat licensing fees from, among others, the makers of "The Truman Show" and the "Matrix" movies)" (Terrence Rafferty, "The Last Word in Alienation: I Just Don't Remember" (New York Times, 11/02/03).
The
Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory, and Love
(2017) by Michael Lemonick tells the true story of Lonni Sue
Johnson, who suffered both retrograde and anterograde amnesia
following an episode of encephalitis, but who retained her
personality, attitudes, and interests even so.
The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate, 2007) by Steven Hall.
Recovered Memories (Xlibris, 2003) by Elaine Hatfield & Richard L. Rapson. Hatfield is a distinguished social psychologist, an expert on interpersonal attraction; Rapson is a social historian.
"Recovered Memories is the story of Reza Guerrero and Sam Chavez, a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, whose brief love affair is shattered by the ethnic, social, and class confusions of the 21st century. When Reza's father is falsely accused of sexual molestation, the young couple's family relationships are shattered. But unlike their predecessors from Verona, Reza and Sam find an ingenious, thoroughly modern way to salvage their romance. This is a love affair that does not end in tragedy. Recovered Memories is a story of romantic obsession, secrets, and of memory in all its self-deceptive, fragile elusiveness" (from the back cover).
In a letter (10/13/03), Hatfield adds: "This novel, inspired by a real-life incident, recounts the attempt of the family members to cope with this devastating "revelation" -- sadly reminiscent of the difficulties that all families face when confronted with such false accusations."
Also in 2003, Hatfield and Rapson published (again with Xlibris) a sequel of sorts, Darwin's Law, on themes of love, mate selection, and life as seen through the lenses of evolutionary psychology and feminism.
Remainder
(Vintage Books, 2007) by Tom McCarthy. A man emerges from a coma
with no memory, and with the fortune from the lawsuit goes about
the process of reconstructing his identity -- and, in the
process, to convince himself that he actually exists. "I
remember, therefore I am". For a review, see Liesl
Schillinger, "Play It Again", New York Times Book Review,
02/25/07.
The Reminders (2017), by Val Emmerich, features a child with "highly superior autobiographical memory".
The Return of the Soldier (Century, 1918), by Rebecca West. Perhaps one of the earliest novels to use traumatic amnesia as a plot device. During World War I, Chris Baldry, a British Officer, is discharged with a psychogenic amnesia covering the previous 15 years of his life. He does not remember Kitty, but accepts that she is his wife and resumes his marriage; but at the same time he loves Margaret, the daughter of an innkeeper, and previously unknown to Kitty. "For Chris, the sober reality of marriage... is an illusion, and the bright illusion of romance is a reality (Edward Mendelson, "Five Best" Wall Street Journal, 01/05-06/08).
Somebody, Please Tell Me Who I Am (Simon & Schuster, 2012) by Harry Mazer & Peter Lerangis. In this novel intended for "young adults" a soldier wounded in Iraq by an IED loses his memory, and can't recognize fiance, family, or friends.
The
Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block
(2008). A novel of remembering and forgetting whose plot
is built around a genetic mutation, EOA-23, which is a
predisposition to early onset Alzheimer's disease (and thus, the
loss of memory). There's also a subplot, perhaps inspired
by Kurt Vonnegut's mythical planet Trafalmadore, of Isidora, a
parallel universe "where memory doesn't matter and therefore
anything is possible" ("You Promised That You'd Forget Me Not,
but You Forgot to Remember", book review by Janet Maslin, New
York Times, 03/27/08).
Total
Recall (2021) by Sara Paretsky. A mystery in
the "V.I. Warshawski" series. V.I., a private
investigator, has a friend, Lotty, who is a Holocaust
survivor. At demonstration concerning the recovery of
Holocaust assets, a man Paul Radbuka, claims to have learned his
true identity as a Holocaust survivor through the offices of a
recovered memory therapist. His story intersects with
Lotty's, and so V.I. investigates whether Paul's claim is
genuine, victim of the implantation of a false memory, or simply
an imposter.
Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore (Grove Press, 2004) by Ray Loriga. The protagonist sells a drug that erases bad memories.
Unconscious Truths (Avon, 1998) by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser. Kiecolt-Glaser is a distinguished clinical psychologist, an expert on the relationship between stress and disease. Part of a series of detective novels featuring Dr. Haley McAlister, a psychologist-detective who is an expert on memory and lie-detection, the plot turns on a conversation that a patient heard while under general anesthesia; now she's dead, and Dr. McAlister must solve the murder.
The
Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits (Doubleday,
2006). With its title taken from Bruno Bettelheim's
psychoanalytic treatise on the psychological importance of fairy
tales (1976), and its multiple references to Freud's case of
"Dora", this novel is apparently inspired by the
recovered-memory movement. Mary Veal, a high-school girl,
disappears after field-hockey practice, and turns up six weeks
later claiming not to remember what happened to her.
Fourteen years later, at age 30, Mary tries to reconstruct the
event.
Yesterday
by Felicia Yap (2017) is thriller which imagines a world in
which the classes are divided by memory: Monos, who can
only remember what happened yesterday, and Duos, who can
also remember the day before. Both groups, however, are
completely dependent on their iDiaries to retain any
other knowledge of their past. Claire, a Mono, discovers
that the mistress of Mark, her Duo husband, has drowned, she
sets out to find out who did it. The novel is intended as
the first part of a trilogy, whose other entries are tentatively
entitled Today and Tomorrow (like the 1963 film
by Vittorio de Sica) so stay tuned.
This page last revised 07/27/2023.