Free City and the Art of Memory: The Novel as Artificial Reality

In this article, the author relates artificial reality to the Art of Memory, a rhetorical technique that originated in Greece in the fourth century B.C. involving the creation of a mental schema corresponding to a real or imagined topography. This schema was then impressed with images, phrases or words chosen by the user. The Art of Memory is discussed as an aspect of the author’s fable Free City, set in a northern European port in the seventeenth century. Its protagonist uses the Art as both a rhetorical discipline and a survival strategy. The article concludes with comments on the relationship between artificial reality, history and fiction.