Indestructible Pasts and Paranoid Presents: John Franzen against Active Forgetting in Purity

Abstract

Forgetting and remembering are as inevitably linked as life
and death. Sometimes, forgetting is motivated by a biological disorder,
brain damage, or it is the product of an unconscious desire derived from a
traumatic event (psychological repression). But in some cases, we can motivate
forgetting consciously (thought suppression). It is through the conscious
repression of memories that we can find self-preservation and move forward,
although this means that we create a fable of our lives, as Nietzsche says in his
essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1997). In Jonathan
Franzen’s novel, Purity (2015), forgetting is an active and conscious process by
which the characters choose to forget certain episodes of their lives to be able
to construct new identities. The erased memories include murder, economical
privileges derived from illegal or unethical commercial processes, or dark sexual
episodes. The obsession with forgetting the past links the lives of the main
characters, and structures the narrative of the novel. The motivated erasure of
memories becomes, thus, a way that the characters have to survive and face
the present according to a (fake) narrative that they have constructed. But is
motivated forgetting possible? Can one completely suppress facts in an active
way? This paper analyses the role of forgetting in Franzen’s novel in relation to
the need in our contemporary society to deny, hide, or erase uncomfortable data
from our historical or personal archives; the need to make disappear stories
which we do not want to accept, recognize, and much less make known to the
public. This is related to how we manage information in the age of technology,
the “selection” of what is to be the official story, and how we rewrite our own
history