AtD amnesia

[Paul Mackin]

On 3/4/2012 10:23 AM, barbie gaze wrote:
> 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.

Not long ago I went though a series of books featuring the popular topic 
of memory loss.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante  (protagonist with rapidly progressing
dementia)

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta (protagonist who fears oncoming Alzheimer's
because of family history)

Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson (protagonist with trauma induced
amnesia of a very peculiar kind}



P


>
> http://www.smith.edu/calc/amnesia/manifesto.html
> On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com
> <mailto: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 <mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com>>
>     *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org <mailto: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?
>
>
>