Conclusion: From the “Garbage Heap” of Memory to the Cyborg: The Exhaustion and Revitalization of Memory in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

I want to take advantage of and even abuse the freedom offered by an unabashedly speculative conclusion to violate the strict protocols of periodicity and nationality adhered to in the preceding four chapters and not only leap forward two centuries, but consider a more geographically diverse range of authors in bringing this book to a close. In terms of time, I am aware of the risks in simply eliding the intervening history of the nineteenth century, particularly because the evolution of the novel, the form with which I have ended my survey of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accompanied, figured, and, in many cases, celebrated the triumph of the British Empire, with all of its attendant monumental pomp and overweening visions of memorial hegemony. As Thomas Richards writes in The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (1993), one strand of the Victorian novel imagined “an imperial archive holding together the vast and various parts of the Empire. This archive was neither a library nor a museum … rather … a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire.”1