I have read The Candy House (2022) fairly recently for teaching Contemporary Literature course. This is a networked novel, presenting interlocking characters and their life stories through an advanced technology, named Own Your Unconscious. Based on the character Miranda Kline’s book Patterns of Affinity, Bix Bouton invented a cloud technology where everyone can upload their unconscious, watch their memories as films and share them in the general digital platform The Collective Consciousness. A group of people falls for this tech at once and use and promote them. Another group known as Eluders try to dodge the platform and the way this digitisation of human mind and memory destroys emotions, relationship and imagination.
This plotline jerks and fascinates me concurrently. I was just wondering whether the current Facebook or Instagram are like this digital tech. Don’t we upload our life, our unconscious and our memories to these aerial platforms and sharing them across the known and the unknown? From such feelings, I asked my students whether they like to upload their unconscious to such platform. Many said yes, many said no, many said, they will share them in cloud but not in the Collective. The swing between preservation of memory and protection of privacy becomes apparent in their choices.
I love the book for its placing us in front of such deeply existential and philosophical question and dilemma. I got stuck in some quotations that lift the fictional fabric towards a deep vision of life and living such as “knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information” (333) or “Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves” (86). Or “To a human, a goose’s wish to return to its Canadian home may seem sentimental, but “wish” and “home” don’t mean to a goose what they mean to a human” (46).
These pronouncements challenge the digital shaping of knowledge, mind and emotions in the current world. I feel like I know a lot through scrolling people’s walls every day but I don’t know anything about their lives. I have a lot of information but not stories that speak of real people, real mind. I got shocked and emotionally guilty when a well established classmate with a shiny face in Facebook committed suicide. His friends knew him without knowing him at all. What’s the value of such knowing that cannot let people know that human mind is unfathomable like a cosmos? If such is the case how will people come home, a home as a space of love, understanding and protection? Do we have only walls now, not homes?
Egan brought me a bit more closure to these hard truths and awake me to care and search for emotional authenticity in a digitally stimulated world. I feel like the character Rebecca, “I’m the only person in the world as obsessed with authenticity as you are” (29).
A great read for those in my line of thought.😊.
3 October 2022, Brissy.
Salma Seclusion 