AtD amnesia

[Bled Welder]

Along with Eco's Queen there is also Powers' Echo Maker, which also deals with the most fascinating form of clinical paranoia, when someone comes to believe that someone close to them is a total fraud but near replica.

Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2012 10:23:24 -0500
Subject: Re: AtD amnesia
From: barbiegaze at gmail.com
To: pynchon-l at waste.org

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?
 


 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120304/27c5d743/attachment.html>