Dementia and the Politics of Memory in Fiction. From the Condition as Narrative Experiment to the Patient as Plot Device

Abstract

This essay historically situates dementia fiction of the early 2000s that features Alzheimer’s disease or a similar type of dementia in the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It will delineate shifts that have occurred in how dementia is deployed in fiction that negotiates the various crimes committed and traumas predominantly caused by Nazi Germany. To do this, it will focus on the period from the 1980s onwards, commonly referred to as “Alzheimerisation” (Adelman 1995), when literary writing first employed the term “Alzheimer’s disease.” The period between 1980 and today is not distant enough to offer truly historicist conclusions. But to my mind, we can distinguish different phases of dementia literary writing (including significant periods of overlap), especially regarding how memory and forgetting have been explored and deployed in bestselling dementia fiction. I would distinguish: (i) literary fiction of the 1980s developed during what Jens Brockmeier (2015) refers to as the “memory boom” and Andreas Huyssen (2003, 4) sees as marked by an “explosion of memory discourses”; (ii) literary lifewriting by dementia caregivers of the 1990s as part of the continuation of the memory boom period; and (iii) bestselling literary fiction of the early 2000s. This essay brings a fictional text from the 1980s into conversation with several titles of the new century (for reflections on literary life-writing, I point to the contributions by Kristina Lucenko, Nina Schmidt and Dana Walrath in this volume). I take Debra Dean’s bestseller The Madonnas of Leningrad (2006) and Alice LaPlante’s acclaimed Turn of Mind (2011) as my present-day examples and read them against J. Bernlef’s bestselling novel Out of Mind, first published in