William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis By Lance Rub ...

To put this all another way, while Howells’s entire canon can be read as both a reaction to and a proposed solution for the politics of time and the obsession with memory, the forgotten short fiction makes this aspect of his writing especially clear, as it is focused on tropes of remembering and forgetting, populated by characters that are symptomatic of various memory crises: “A Sleep and a Forgetting” (1906) centers on a young woman who, after witnessing the death of her mother, loses her short-term memory which, suggestively, is seen as beneficial; in “The Eidolons of Brooks Alford” (1906), an archeologist cannot stop the flow of his personal memories from intruding upon, and crippling his ability to conduct, his day-to-day life in the present; “A Memory That Worked Overtime” (1907) focuses on a character whose recall and narration of past events turn out to be false, an unconscious imposition of what he thought or wished had happened. Howells’s so-called “Turkish Room” stories (written after 1900)—including “The Angel of the Lord” (1901), “His Apparition” (1902), “Though One Rose From the Dead” (1903), “A Case of Metaphantasmia” (1905), “Braybridge’s Offer” (1906), and others—focus on specters, visions, and unexplained psychic phenomenon, manifestations of memory that are sometimes willed, but often involuntary. Aside from their content, the late fiction also takes an unexpected turn from his more canonical work in its complex, multilayered narrative structure which raises questions about the reliability of memory in recalling the events of the past and draws attention to the inevitable use of selective editing, subjective interpretation, and preexisting narrative models that accompany any attempt to retell that past accurately.

These stories highlight Howells’s increasing acknowledgment that while an aesthetic insistence on reason and objectivity can awaken readers out of a distracting, amnesia-inducing romanticism, he also believes that our individual and collective memories are so fundamentally malleable, unstable, and subject to radical contingency that any attempt to account for the past in definitive, narrative form is destined to fail.