I love fiction and the particular way it allows us to enter another person’s consciousness, which makes Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House especially interesting.
At the center of the novel is “Own Your Unconscious,” a technology that allows people to externalize their memories and, eventually, exchange access to them. Imagine being able to know what someone else remembers? To see an experience from inside their consciousness rather than hear them describe it. In a world in which truth is already so difficult to ascertain, what would this technology contribute or further deconstruct?
Questions are fundamental to how I understand other people, and probably how you do too. They are also fundamental to the podcast. Although I think of each episode as a conversation, it is really a series of questions, each one offering another person an opportunity to tell us something about how they see, think, work, remember, love, fail, or live.
We included Larry Robertson’s Great Question in The Library, and posited asking as an act of attention. There is, of course, an exchange implicit in any question. We ask because we want to know, and we wait for whatever wants to be told or ignored.
The Candy House imagines what happens when technology promises to remove the exchange and thus the distance of unknowing between us. But what actually is knowing someone. Egan constructs immediate and extraordinary access to other people’s interior lives. If we can so easily know another’s consciousness, what might we learn about our own?
.JPG)
