All four texts share some notable elements: 1) They portray extreme instances of amnesia in order to explore philosophical and psychology questions about the role of forgetting in memory itself, 2) They offer detailed exploration of elements of identity that remain when memory is lost, and 3) They build worlds around their amnesiac characters, worlds designed to afford them respect, agency, and opportunities to express aspects of their identities that survive their failing memories.ĥ As neuronovels, then, Casey’s and Ishiguro’s fictions explore questions about amnesia as well as more ordinary acts of forgetting that shape both memory and identity. The result is literary exploration of psychological, neurological, philosophical, social, and ethical questions raised by both nonfiction accounts of amnesia and a history of memory research, particularly that which emphasizes the roles forgetting plays in the making of memories. (2013), and Alix Kates Shulman’s memoir To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (2009). They resonate with recent works of nonfiction documenting the lives of people with cases of severe, long-lasting and very real memory loss-including numerous short works by Oliver Sacks, Suzanne Corkin’s Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesiac Patient H.M. Like most neuronovels, Casey’s and Ishiguro’s fictions are engaged in urgent and unsettled debates about the brain and identity. In fact, the fictional techniques and ethical commitments of Casey’s and Ishiguro’s novels come into focus when they’re understood in dialogue with nonfiction amnesia narratives and memory research. So what cultural work does fictional amnesia do? The answer will vary, of course, but Casey’s and Ishiguro’s novel operate like philosophical thought experiments, portraying fictional-or hypothetical-scenarios in order to address difficult questions.Ĥ It’s not quite true that amnesia is “just a rumor,” though it is rare. Lethem makes the point that a fictional character has no memory, is “conjured out of the void by a thin thread of sentences” (xiv). Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, The Buried Giant (2015), imagines an Anglo-Saxon world in which collective amnesia produces political peace but leaves its protagonists searching for personal histories. Francis Literary Prize, fictionalizes a nineteenth-century case history about Frenchman Albert Dadas, whose fugue states propelled extraordinary walks across great swaths of Europe. A cluster of recent, high-profile fiction and nonfiction amnesia narratives join a rapidly evolving tradition of neuronovels and brain memoirs, drawing on neuroscience to explore philosophical and social questions about the brain, identity, social relations, and history (Tougaw 5).ģ Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2013), winner of the 2015 St. In that sense, amnesia fictions may be the most abundant precursors to the contemporary neuronovel. It’s a tradition with a long history, including William Shakespeare, Wilkie Collins, Daphne DuMaurier, Octavia Butler, and Jonathan Lethem himself. His collection includes amnesia fictions by twentieth-century writers: Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Kavan, Edmund White, and Haruki Murakami. In literature, film, and television, amnesia has a reputation as a cheap plot device that exaggerates and sensationalizes severe memory loss, often portraying forms of global transient amnesia, whereby a person loses all memory, but only temporarily.Ģ Lethem’s anthology demonstrates that amnesia is just as often a vehicle for literary innovation, philosophical exploration, psychological insight, and social critique. Lethem is differentiating outlandish or comical forms of literary amnesia, various forms of memory loss associated with a condition like Alzheimer’s or certain brain injuries-particularly retrograde amnesia, whereby a person loses memories already formed, and anterograde amnesia, whereby a person loses the ability to make new memories. In books and movies, though, versions of amnesia lurk everywhere” (xiii).
It’s a rare condition, and usually a brief one.
1 As Jonathan Lethem observes in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, “Real, diagnosable amnesia-people getting knocked on the head and forgetting their names-is mostly just a rumor in the world.
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