Necessary Forgetting: On Pandemic Autofiction

This essay considers how the literary mode of forgetting can produce and perform collective cultural memory in pandemic autofiction, using Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables and Padma Viswanathan's The Charterhouse of Padma as key examples. The former encourages its reader to forget all works of fiction, while the latter asks the reader to remember that which the text itself purports to forget. I suggest that forgetting as literary mode can render incidental the figure of the individual remembering subject, and instead serve historically and politically ameliorative aims, such as disavowing the idea that the COVID pandemic was unprecedented.