AtD amnesia

[barbie gaze]

There is a woman in one of Marquez's short stories who has been counting
her heart beats but has lost count and a sleepwalker who undoes what she
has done during the day.



The last four decades have offered several examples of writers who have
treated the theme of amnesia. Among them we find Jorge Luis Borges, who in
his short story "The Immortal" presents men condemned to immortality,
decrepitude, and final oblivion of language. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in *One
Hundred Years of Solitude* (1967) presents a void in memory from which
language emerges and to which it returns. Milan Kundera in *The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting* (1978) turns the theme into a gashing tool of
political protest: we have forgotten because those in power have willed our
oblivion by altering recorded history, by erasing traces.

http://www.smith.edu/calc/amnesia/manifesto.html


On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  There is a more recent movie,  not so much a part of even pop culture
> as Ludlum, which I have forgotten to see,  I think...Memento? Irrelevant.
>
> But visited by two other thoughts. One starts with Henry Adams, who
> so famously in that autobiography proclaims over and over, at every new
> beginning in his successful-enough (to outsiders) life, that he has
> learned nothing
> to prepare him for the next phase.....America so ever-new, so unEuropean,
> that
> one must reinvent himself at each new adventure. Like Lew?
>
> And, in some kindred thematic sense, does Lew begin where Benny Profane
> ended? Having
> learned nothing so far?
>
> And at p. 527.we get a paragraph in which Kit loses his
> memory...."something had happened,
> something too terrible to remember, at least as momentous as the fate of
> the Stupendica,
> whereupon everything, along with memory had gone falling dizzily away, not
> only downward
> but out along other axes of space-time as well. This had been happening to
> him a lot lately"
>
>   *From:* Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Saturday, March 3, 2012 5:56 AM
> *Subject:* AtD amnesia
>
>   Taking Lew's amnesiac beginning at face value which unknown
> crime can bring to mind The Trial are there any other characters
> in fiction (or movies of) his amnesia can remind of?
>
> How about those R. Ludlum characters in such as Bourne Identity, etc.?
> (Seen movies not read books)
>
> Others?
>
>
>
>
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