Memory and Present-Dystopia in Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House

by Natasha Roy

The Candy House (2022) by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan’s new novel, The Candy House, borrows its title from a warning, à la Hansel and Gretel, to Never trust a candy house. But Egan understands that trust is no longer a useful way to think about technology; in our reality, trust is already handed over. Instead, The Candy House works to reconsider how to cultivate meaning in our digital age. Her narrative begins in 2010 and unfurls for decades thereafter in a fictional near-future defined by new forms of surveillance and technology. Through her writing, Egan shows that these fictional technologies are only window dressings to an emotional reality we are already living. 

Each of the novels imagined technological developments’ gestures toward the total digitization of human memory. The interwoven narratives cohere around the consequences of new technology, “Own Your Unconscious,” which counterintuitively creates a world in which you lose ownership of your memories. This is a future in which we don’t merely photograph and archive our past (as we do already on social media), but we go a step further to digitize the totality of our consciousness. By exploring this sci-fi, yet patently believable near-future, Egan asks us to connect memory and technology as the present, rather than future, problems.  

“Own Your Unconscious” grants its users access to each memory they’ve ever experienced. Users upload their memories onto a “Consciousness Cube,” a small device onto which you upload, store, and externalize your consciousness. The Cube materializes the mind-body split, disembodying memory from the  mortal, physical form. In Egan’s imagination, this eerie process allows you to peruse through a deceased parent’s mindscape as if watching a voyeuristic film (naturally, the characters who do so find themselves simultaneously closer and more severed from their parents). These details encourage readers to consider the novel’s broader promise: by imagining these sci-fi memory digitization platforms, we can better hope to understand consciousness as it exists for us in reality. 

The novel grows stranger still when Egan introduces “The Collective Consciousness.” This is a more advanced iteration of the “Consciousness Cube”; it resembles an information cloud onto which each person uploads their consciousness, thereby producing a shared human history to be rewound and replayed. Phonetically, it sounds like Carl Jung’s “Collective Unconscious,” the famous exaltation in psychoanalysis of humanity’s inherited, collective experience. This technology draws our attention to the collective versus individual consciousness: what do we lose by privileging one over the other? It’s a crucial difference to pay attention to now, within the ambient haze of the pandemic. This prolonged crisis experience and memory have crafted a veritable collective consciousness even as we struggle to put language to this phenomenon.

The Candy House is not a dystopian novel; these technologies produce predictably eerie issues, but Egan implies that these developments have been liberating, too. Even the term “Own Your Unconscious” implies a sense of agency, as though this innovation returns to you an autonomy that was previously stripped away by programmatic civil society. After externalizing her consciousness, a character felt “as if her brain has been released from a cell it outgrew.”

In fact: “Own Your Unconscious would solve…memory problems,” as it does for one character who suffers memory loss after years of heavy drinking. Egan also writes that the technology eradicates Alzheimer’s—since patients can now digitally re-access lost memories. With such details, Egan scrupulously avoids envisioning a simple dystopia; technology wouldn’t be so compelling if it didn’t offer solutions. She takes great care to write a probing, concerning novel about an uncertain future that holds within it kernels of hope. 

But we’re still left to grapple with the reality that, over time, the Collective Unconscious brings about “the end of private life.” Egan’s characters find that the collectivization of memory and experience requires a deeply invasive process of “data gathering and manipulation [that threatens] the deeply private nature of human experience.” One character laments: “The collective is like gravity: Almost no one can withstand it. In the end, they give it everything. Then the collective is that much more omniscient”. Naturally, each technological triumph contains an opposite—a Jungian shadow. In this case, the characters lose privacy and resign themselves to life under a surveillance state. 

The Candy House features a deeply provocative plotline because the inventions discussed are not merely a futuristic projection of Egan’s technological imagination; they are an inescapable outcome of our mass society. Moreover, by exploring these doubled potentials of digitized memory in good faith, The Candy House forces us to engage with technology’s dual capacity to connect and alienate. Most of the technology’s users find themselves lost in the face of its god-like power, as one character admits:

“The Cube is her, in a way. It contains the entire contents of her mind: all the things she can and can’t remember, every thought and feeling she has had. At last, she is the owner of her unconscious. She knows where everything can be found…She feels it as a natural force, a current drawing her consciousness beyond the limits of her self into a wider sphere. To converge, to be subsumed—how she longs for this! The prospect shimmers before her: a fulfillment of everything she has wanted in her life. Make my mark” (158).

The Candy House is beautiful and clever—but I expect this from the Pulitzer-winning Egan. It is another achievement that the novel is also useful: it functions as a cipher for our tech-borne anxieties.