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"Ever
since Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, gave the wax tablet to mortals,
memory, writing and technology have been interconnected. "
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Three-Dimensional
Dementia -- Note 1
1. I should note that this will be a case study of how memory--or its absence--functions in one text, Califia. However, memory and forgetting are cognitive states that are frequently evoked in literary hypertexts, as in Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero, or Judy Malloy's Its Name was Penelope (to mention two of the better known ones). Michael Joyce's Twilight, for example, uses memory as a refuge and a source of nostalgia for simpler times. In Twilight, the air of the overload of present time leans heavily, closing in with all the weight of sky. Memory for Joyce's characters is something exhaustible: it is possible to run "out of memory" ("out of memory") and death's threshold is never far away, "to save is to forget," the sailor says, "therefore I must press to keep these words alive" ("What the sailor says"). There is a melancholia and a hopelessness that comes with Twilight's frozen window on the past and lowering ceilings of sky in the present. Forgetting is an event in and of itself in Joyce's text, whereas in Califia there is no such permanence to forgetfulness. |
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