Human beings remember and have a memory. But what happens when memories figure in literary narrative? Narratological and poetological ideas on memory, history, and identity are brought together in this study to form a new approach to the problem: mnemonic writing is understood as archeology of the self. The ambitious novels by the French author Jean Rouaud (* 1952) employ all the resources of the post-modernist narrative repertory and humorously combine these central anthropological categories to weave a complex tapestry of the French past that poses existential issues and draws upon primal human experiences.