Letters as Prosthetic: A Reading of Subash Chandran’s a Preface to Man
Roshna N. S.1 & Aiswarya S. Babu2
1Research Scholar, Department of English, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India; 2Associate Professor, Department of English, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India.
10.46679/9789349926639ch11
This chapter is a part of: Cultural Memory in Translation: Revisiting Cultural Memory Through Interpretative Lens from India
ISBN (Ebook):978-93-49926-63-9
ISBN (Hardcover Print):978-93-49926-41-7
ISBN (Softcover Print):978-93-49926-75-2
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Published: November 10, 2025
Abstract
This paper examines Subash Chandran’s novel A Preface to Man through the theoretical lens of Alison Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory,” extending its application beyond mass cultural mediation to explore intimate, interpersonal trauma transmission. While Landsberg’s concept originally focused on how individuals acquire deeply felt memories of unwitnessed events through mass media encounters, this analysis demonstrates that prosthetic memory formation can occur through personal communication, fundamentally altering the subjectivity and identity of recipients. The study analyzes the epistolary exchanges between protagonists Jithendran and Ann Marie, revealing how letters function as memory prosthetics that externalize, transmit, and internalize traumatic experiences across the boundaries of lived experience. Jithendran serves as a traumatic memory encoder, channeling inherited ancestral violence through 365 letters, while Ann Marie becomes the decoder who transforms from an autonomous Christian woman into a bearer of Hindu familial trauma she never directly experienced. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory and concepts of “empathic unsettlement” and “proxy survivorship,” the paper illuminates how this memory transmission creates new categories of victimhood that blur the boundaries between victim and witness, self and other. Ann Marie’s psychological transformation—metaphorically described as a fish trapped in a bowl of artificial
reality—demonstrates the profound costs of prosthetic memory attachment, where recursive reflections between memories and reality fragment the self and create lasting psychological dependence on mediated trauma narratives.
Keywords: Prosthetic Memory, Trauma Transmission, Epistolary Fiction, Intergenerational Trauma, Memory Studies, Malayalam Literature
References
- Bruner, B. (2017). This, too, was myself”: Empathic unsettlement and the victim/perpetrator binary in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young University]. All Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6284
- Caruth, C. (2014). Listening to trauma: Conversations with leaders in the theory and treatment of catastrophic experience. The Johns Hopkins University Press. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB17078331
- Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. The Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.34-3723
- Chandran, S. (2016). A preface to man (Fathima E. V., Trans.). Harper Perennial. (Original work published 2010)
- LaCapra, D. (2014). Writing history, writing trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture. Columbia University Press.
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