This paper explores the complex relationship between literary art and artificial memory in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and its afterlife in Liz Moore's The Unseen World. Both works engage with artificial memory from its classical roots to its contemporary expression in representations of artificial intelligence. I suggest how and why artificial memory – the creation of mental places and images, often an imaginative building or book, used as an aid to memory and a spur to invention – provides a framework, at once theoretical and practical, with which to understand narrative as a space of memory and invention. Nabokov's novel is, among other things, a rich exploration of artificial memory and the central role that mnemonic poetics play in the history of literature: from Augustine's 6th-century memoir Confessions to Nabokov's own fictionalized memoir of Ada and her ardor. Moore's near-future representation of artificial intelligence in The Unseen World as told through her central narrator, Ada, builds upon Nabokov's Ada and the important place of artificial memory therein: both novels implicitly represent the afterlife of Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, who stands both for a Romantic poetic sensibility and who also holds a unique place in the early history of what she called the "computing machine." In her portrait of the "unseen world," a futuristic virtual world of artificial intelligence, Moore rewrites Nabokov's Ada anew: in Moore's hands, Ada is a computer scientist engaged in a quest to remember her father's past and, simultaneously, to create a computer program capable of keeping her memories alive through stories and conversation. The "unseen world" of Moore's title is a mnemonic space, the novel itself, built upon the ancient memory theaters of Augustine and his antecedents, and remade for 21st-century virtual reality. As I argue, both novels draw upon the history of artificial memory in order to represent fiction as a space in which to remember the past and imagine the future.
