379 Mnemosyne Goes Electric Textus XXII (2009), pp. 379-394. Lucia Esposito Mnemosyne Goes Electric: Samuel Beckett and the Soundscapes of Memory From his juvenile essay on Proust (1931) onwards, the theme of memory (and forgetting) plays a prominent place in nearly all of Beckett’s works. As the equivalent of an interior excavation aimed at recovering and re-assembling a story hidden within the abys- mal depths of the Self, the process of memory coincides with what the author conceived as the process of artistic creation. It also seems to reproduce Beckett’s eternally conflictual express/express no more imperative in the no less conflictual desire to remember/ forget. However, Beckett’s skilled use of the media seems to allow him to explore more efficiently and to a greater extent memory’s mech- anisms and procedures in the works conceived for, or making use of, electro-acoustic technologies (phonography and radio broadcasting), inasmuch as they literally translate the metaphor of remembering as a past-time recording and transmitting process. These works also profitably explore the powerfully evocative, quasi-revelatory dimen- sions of disembodied voices and sounds, and the privileged relation- ship that the sense of hearing has with the profound interiority of the psyche (Zumthor 1984; Ong 1983).