Proust's literary epic, À la recherche du temps perdu, Mahler's third symphony, and Ingmar Bergman's longest cinematic masterpiece, Fanny och Alexander, all attempt to capture the spectrum of human experience in a single artistic production. This aim, I argue, originates in the artist's panphilia (love of everything) yet ends with an inevitable and somewhat antithetical mnemophobia (fear of memory)--specifically the losing of memory--typical of other large-scale artistic projects. This tension is distinct from the more deliberate aesthetics-driven dread of a given medium (products of the horror and thriller genres, for example), creating a bifurcation of tension: (1) the deliberately manufactured tension; and (2) an unintentional personal tension imputed to the work. In this study, the unintentional tension is seen as an inevitable by-product of any attempt to produce a work of totality--that is, a work trying to contain all of life. And regardless of the skill of the artist, there is an ineluctable limit to art concomitant to the human epistemological limit: No human can possibly know all there is to include. There is always something lacking, something that cannot be explored, thereby rendering the Gesamtkunstwerk incomplete, despite its scope. As Tom LeClair points out in The Art of Excess, the closest the artist can come to such a feat is through synecdoche. And it is when we bump up against this limit that we come into contact with the unintentional dread or tension. We can only replicate in art that which is borne out of memory--yet we are always in the panta rei of memory, and therefore we can never capture all that memory continually processes and rewrites. We have, in effect, gone from panphilia to mnemophobia.