The Candy House

In Part 2, Egan explores how people define themselves in relation to others. This motivates the desire to dive into software programs like Own Your Unconscious because these collective consciousness data programs give people access to the intimate perspectives of other people, which one can identify themselves with or against.

In Chapter 5, Melora struggles to understand herself as a sister and a daughter. She identifies herself in parallel with her sister and her mother, who were once a trifecta of love. Several external pressures created distance between them, ultimately leaving Melora on her own. Her relationship with her father as an adult mends the fences of a lost childhood, but her desire to help him leads her to sacrifice her sense of self. She sells her mother’s intellectual property to keep her father’s dying business alive. Both parents are threatened by the rise of Mandala and the development of social media and collective consciousness, but Melora doesn’t see that this cultural shift connects her parents. She chooses her father over her mother because of her father’s tragic life, but Melora loses her mother and sister to the “eluders,” data defiers who are depicted as a secret organization that works to minimize the impact of collective consciousness. Through Melora’s story, Egan explores the benefits and consequences of building an identity on others; Melora seeks to understand her father better, but ultimately, she loses the rest of her family.

Melora alludes to the classic Faustian bargain and is the first character to reference Egan’s title, The Candy House, when developing an argument against the seduction of modern online technology. Melora compares the popular influence of streaming services and social media to the candy house in Hansel and Gretel, in which children are distracted from morality by the deliciousness of a façade. In the fairy tale, two children are abandoned by their parents in the forest and are distracted from their quest by a house constructed out of gingerbread and candy. But this house is a trap that the witch uses to lure children and feast on them. This tale is intended to warn people against trusting something that looks good on the outside. Egan makes the allusion to Hansel and Gretel to point out that the fast fame, easy access, and escapism of social media are dangerous facades as well. The Candy House’s Faustian bargain alludes to the classic German tale of Faust, who makes a deal with the devil so he can gain access to unlimited knowledge despite having a successful life. Faust’s dissatisfaction pushes him to give up his moral code to access something he believes will progress his life. In The Candy House, people give up their social and moral codes to have full access to the collective consciousness. While it can be mesmerizing to know everything, this knowledge isn’t necessarily useful or beneficial, as demonstrated by Drew’s traumatized reaction to seeing Bix’s memories of Rob’s death. Knowledge is good, but it isn’t everything. Egan uses the allusion to the Faustian bargain to ask her reader what the limitations of endless knowledge are. Though social media and collective conscious can give us the intimate knowledge that we desire, this knowledge can unveil truths we’d rather not know.

The Possibilities and Limitations of Collective Consciousness are emphasized in Chapter 6, when Lou’s daughter Charlie taps into the collective consciousness to access her father’s memories, believing his past might unveil some fundamental revelation about her past. She explores Lou’s memories of moving to California, hiking through the forest, and smoking weed, but this ultimately leads to no revelations that give Charlie positive affirmation. Therefore, not only can the collective consciousness be negative, but it can also be boring and irrelevant. According to Egan, people are inherently mysterious, and access to their memories cannot fulfill our desire to know them. People are unknowable, to themselves and to others. In this chapter, the forest is personified as the source of true memory because of its objective, indifferent witnessing.

In Chapter 7, Roxy, another one of Lou’s children, continues this conversation about the relevancy of memory and knowledge to the human experience. Roxy notes that with Bix’s software, the omniscient becomes collective. But when our memories become part of an omniscient, all-knowing narrator, then we give up the personal intimacy of our memories. Roxy also tries to identify herself in parallel with her father, Lou. She taps into the collective consciousness to access her father’s memory of a shared experience, and she discovers that their trip to London meant more to her than it did to him. In fact, she sees that he resented her presence. Thus, Roxy’s happy memory with her father is shattered by the reality of his perspective, and this cements her low self-esteem in relation to him. Just as her half-sister Melora strives to identify with their father, so too does Roxy long for a connection with him that can surpass her chaotic and often traumatic life. Perhaps access to memory can solve mysteries such as repressed abuse, but it can also do the opposite and turn a memory of established happiness into a rejection of that happiness. Roxy wants to understand her past, but she sees her past as inextricably linked to Lou. Roxy’s drug addiction is personified as a friend in her mind; while everyone else has disappeared from her life, her addiction is the only thing that she can rely on. Here, social media and collective consciousness can’t save Roxy.

These chapters also ask what happens to imagination when a person can have access to endless knowledge, like Faust. Imagination separates the human consciousness from other animals—and artificial intelligence—but when we give up our ability to imagine, we cognitively regress. This is especially prescient for Egan as an author. The Candy House is a composition of imagination, but when knowledge becomes endless and contextless, there is no use for imagination. Along with this being a limitation of collective consciousness, it highlights The Importance of Human Connection and Understanding for fulfillment.

Chris is indirectly related to Lou through his family’s friendship with him. Chris is, by his own admission, a side character in other people’s stories. He is never his own main character and identifies himself in parallel or juxtaposition with others. The death of his friend and the break-up with his girlfriend hits him particularly hard because, in the identities of others, Chris loses a sense of himself. Chris embodies Egan’s point about the importance of imagination because his job is to algebraize plot and character tropes in a database for future storytellers. In creating formulas out of stories, Chris helps deconstruct the magic of storytelling into a mathematical algorithm that dismisses and therefore dehumanizes the soul of the story. This is ironic because Chris himself is a character within a story that he can analyze but not control. The suitcase he inherits from the mysterious Comstock is a symbol of the emotional baggage Chris carries for others, and he can’t decide to simply leave it behind. Chris represents the danger of living in the shadow of other people.

The characters in Part 2 are connected through their direct or indirect connections to Lou Kline, as well as through their struggles to find identities that make them unique. Social media and modern online technology can enhance this loss of identity because one can easily lose their sense of self in the deep well of carefully curated images online. As Faust discovers, knowing something doesn’t mean understanding that thing, nor does it mean that knowledge can help an individual navigate the self.