Remember Me as an Episode of The Twilight Zone: Media, Technology, and Memory in Rodrigo Fresán's Mantra

Rodrigo Fresán's Mantra is a hybrid novel, where high and low culture collide in Mexico City. The characters in the novel--from the suicidal narrator of the first section, whose brain is slowly being overrun by the childhood memory of his friend Martín Mantra, to the cyborg mummy that relives the opening scenes of Pedro Páramo in the final section--have memories so strongly influenced by the music, movies, comics, literature, and television that they have consumed that they are inextricable from their own personal memories. Mantra is the ultimate novel of a globalized, media-saturated world, one that illustrates in both its content and structure the way that the media the modern subject consumes, be it The Twilight Zone or Bob Dylan, shapes his memories and intercalates itself in them, creating a kind of memoria ajena that is just as real and important as first-hand experience.