“Spiders […] stringing webs through her head”: Representations of memory in Anthony Doerr's “Memory Wall” and Meredith Westgate's The Shimmering State

Abstract

AbstractAlthough science has demonstrated that memories are flexible mental constructions, rather than a stable record of the past preserved in an internal archive, fiction keeps fantasizing about technologies that will locate memories in the brain and edit or download them into an external medium. Anthony Doerr's short story “Memory Wall” (2010) and Meredith Westgate's novel The Shimmering State (2021) continue this preoccupation. They portray treatments for memory‐related diseases that involve downloading memories into a portable medium so that they could be reexperienced, which makes them susceptible to commodification as prosthetic memories. To represent memory, the two texts blend neuroscientific explanations with the traditional conceptualizations of an archive and computer, subverting them in the process. The protagonists' experiences suggest the impossibility of the past's total preservation as a linear archive and explode the neuroscientific view of the self and memory as cerebral properties, highlighting instead the complex interchanges between body, mind, brain, and emotion, involved in the production of memory. A new model of memory informed by prosthetic memories violates privatized interiority and dislodges the temporal coordinates of the past, which leads to the ungrounding of subjectivity. This results in an ontological shift whereby memory is increasingly severed from personal identity.