Past and present interacting: A memory discourse in Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party

Past and present merge in the phenomenon that we call memory. Memory is a mode of re-presentation and belongs to the present — the act of remembering always being in and of the present, while its referent is of the past and thus absent. Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party is a perfect example of how every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting, and absence. The dynamics by which the protagonists’ brains work — shifting, modeling, connecting, changing — identify memory as process-dependent, sustaining its qualities to store data but also modifying it while some fragments of experience disappear from consciousness totally, demonstrating that both memory and forgetting are uneven, discontinuous temporalities