The Structure of Memory II: Egan’s ‘Candy House’

Jennifer Egan’s two-book series (A Visit from the Goon Squad and Candy House) opens with a passage from Proust:

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years

In Part 1, we saw how prescient Proust’s model of memory was, how it prefigured later breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience. The notion that memories can be ‘contemporaneous with different years’ is one example. Before Proust, memory was conceived as a thing distinct from the present. Now we understand that it is as wrapped up in the present as our senses are.

With Proust as her starting point, Egan goes further, asking “what would happen if we were able digitise this process and access/ share any memory with anyone at anytime?”; what would that world look like?

Just as we examined Proust through the lens of his contemporary, Henri Bergson, we’ll examine…