Fiction authors and their reliance on dredging up the past
If you spend a lot of time reading, you start to notice that authors have an entrenched habit of poring through the memories of their characters.
The story is here and now, but hold your horses for three and a half chapters, because Priscilla Kirsten Simmons, Deputy Supervising Officer for Derek & Sons Inc. is having a flashback to a 5-minute conversation she had on the playground in Year 8.
At a pragmatic level, memories and flashbacks, or the lack thereof, become vehicles for detail and dimensionality, easy methods of character development and motivational exploration. A negative or positive memory results in different approaches and responses to different archetypes, events, plot points, or character actions. This drives subsequent points of tensions and drama which further the narrative. So far, so obvious.
Memory as theme
But what I’m more interested in is where memory transitions from being a supporting wall for a narrative, and instead becomes a room in the narrative house. Stay with me, this already-tortured metaphor might be going somewhere. If our story house’s walls are things like character motivations and dramatic tension, then rooms can be thought of as themes and ideas. In this frame, one room, probably the basement because it’s always the goddamn basement, is linked to the concept of memory. But I’ve noticed that the problem with the memory room is that authors get trapped in it and it has a bad habit of eating the rest of the house, some kind of inverse Navidson residence. Sometimes it even devours the houses next door.
In Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore, memory is a through line. Nakata is an amnesiac cat whisperer who has to battle a guy named after a popular brand of whisky. His arc has been interpreted as a representation both of the absence of memory in an individual, as a counterpoint to the other characters in the story, and as a representation of cultural memory – specifically of a society deliberately attempting to forget its own past.
Miss Saeki is our repressed memory character, with trauma that she can only dredge up via a specific song, and then re-experienced via engaging in a sexual relationship with a troubled underage runaway who she may or may not be related to because there’s a whole Oedipus theme running through the novel, too. It’s debatable as to whether Murakami suggests that this relationship between Miss Saeki and Kafka Tamura, is in some way beneficial to one or both of them. I’ll leave it up to you to interpret it for yourself.
Murakami is a dirty memory centrist. Kafka on the Shore positions memory in an almost spectrum-like fashion – with the extremes in either direction being dangerous or self-defeating. On the one hand, forgetting provides freedom from suffering, a permanent anaesthetic immediacy. On the other hand, that numbness inhibits growth. If growth requires pain, one has to remember pain to grow because without memory one cannot learn. If one cannot learn, one cannot grow. At the other end of the spectrum, Murakami illustrates how clinging to memories is just as damning, suggesting that, as with Miss Saeki, one can become burdened and trapped by their own memories. Eventually, they are crushed under their weight.
John Updike’s Rabbit, Run illustrates a similar concept, but in reverse. A middle-aged Harry Angstrom cannot overcome the memories of previous greatness as a local basketball star. These memories of past glory damage his sense of perspective, and he cannot adjust to his life as an average bloke with a job as a sales rep, an alcoholic wife, and a house.
As with Miss Seiki, he is trapped by his own memories, but this time in the opposite direction. If Miss Seiki is trapped by echoes of her trauma, Mr. Angstrom is trapped by echoes of his past glory. While Miss Seiki hides from her memories, Harry Angstrom refuses to leave his – his memories become a safe haven by which he keeps the world at bay. In the same way that Nakata cannot grow because he cannot remember anything from his past, Angstrom cannot grow because he refuses to engage with his present.
And then, of course, there is Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro has more than earned his many awards and respect, he is a brilliant writer. But if you’ve noticed that he apparently cannot get away from the theme of memory… you’re not the only one. To rattle through three of his most famous novels very quickly:
- Never Let Me Go: The entirety of the first hundred pages is literally just a protracted wander down memory lane.
- The Remains of the Day: A full novel about an old bloke taking a road trip, going over his memories, and assessing his life up to that point.
- The Buried Giant: If Dark Souls were a literary fantasy novel, you’d get The Buried Giant. Only, instead of being linked to an undead curse, the omnipresent fog is one layer of the overarching metaphor for the process of ageing, memory loss, and fading mental acuity.
Memory as identity
Perhaps I’m at odds with these memory-obsessed ink-spitters; I learned to get good at avoiding mine. Repetitious grey matter archive trawling reveals an abortive attempt at a human. Like God was hungover that day, knocked out what he could as fast as he could, then crawled back into bed with a couple of aspirin and a bottle of water, and then rolled over and vomited on the floor.
Who we are is largely determined by our memories. It is not unusual to hear from the loved ones of Alzheimer’s sufferers that they don’t recognise the person the sufferer has become. Sometimes the sufferers say or do things that are completely out of character.
Anybody who has ever got blackout drunk has woken up and dealt with the unsettling oscillation between the possibilities that, given your body’s capacity to operate without “you”, you have either lost some sense of who you are, or you have the queasy notion that you know more about yourself than you wanted to.
The midlife crisis captured in the fragmented memory review and interrogation of Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ suggests that even when we lay out our memories, we still find it hard to fit them into a coherent picture. Or perhaps we just find that when we hold up the mirror, what we see is so far distant from the ego self-portrait that we refuse to recognise the reality and substitute it with the comforting falsehood.
Memory as immortality.
Waiting at the end of all things, ever patient, is the great leveller. See much, see little, the person with one story or the person with a thousand, the result is the same. We tend to see this inevitability as a trick, or as an inherent unfairness. How could it be fair that our memories of times that made us, moments that sustain us, events foundational to the core of our personalities, could, at the end of it all, just leak away. Our memories seem monumental to us. Our egos have an Ozymandias-style relationship with reality and the indifference of the cosmos.
Have you ever heard men talk about children? It’s always in hysterically grandiloquent terms. They speak about bloodlines and dynasties. As if Greg the Amazon Warehouse employee were the progenitor of some grand house of pharaonic magnitude, and not just another bloke who nutted in Carol the HR Manager after a few pints in the local ‘spoons.
But you don’t know they aren’t! Of course I don’t. But be a serious person: what are the odds? And don’t give me that ‘never tell me the odds’ bollocks. Han Solo was an idiot. The odds, and I cannot stress this enough, are not in your favour. You will, in all likelihood, not live on in any significant fashion through your children, or your children’s children. I certainly can’t claim to have added anything of note to the public legacies of my own family members, love them as I might.
To be frank even if the dice come down on your side, it’s unlikely that, where memory is concerned, any of it will matter anyway. That’s the whole point of Ozymandias, right? That you can convince yourself that you are the ‘king of kings’ and time will erase you with the same obliviousness that it erased thousands of cockroaches this morning.
I’m not trying to be edgy or nihilistic here, I’m just trying to keep things in perspective. As far as I can tell, these two things – breeding and creation – are, at least partially, symptomatic of a desire for immortality. One is evolutionarily programmed biological hardcoding, and the other is an emergent artefact of human sapience.
Writing is one such artefact.
If anybody should know the delusion of attempting to sidestep death in some way via sheer volume of creation, it is the artist. What else can a novelist or painter or musician seek, but to create something that outlasts its creator and, if possible, successive generations of progeny? Art ages far slower than flesh, is more easily accessible than an individual human, and acts as an icon, preservative, and seedling, to authorial and audience memory. If true immortality is, as Shelly suggests, impossible, then the game is simply to last for as long as possible before inevitable erasure.
Except, we all know that 99% of art is completely ignored. 0.5% of it only gets recognised a couple of hundred years after the artist is dead. The 0.5% who get any immediate returns on investment, probably didn’t produce anything ground-breaking, but played to the crowd.
What? Are we going to rank Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code alongside Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons? Didn’t think so. No shade; get that bag. The great deal of fantasy fiction follows the same ‘hero-dragon-save-the-world’ formula that we’re all allegedly sick of because people keep buying it. If it didn’t work, authors would write something else instead of Procedural Plot for the Magic Sword #5397. The whole genre of airport thrillers exists because people don’t want to beat their brains against dense layers of intertextual metaphor while they’re sipping beers at the beach. And why should they? You can’t hate them for wanting to unwind on the one or two weeks off work that they have every year.
Armchair pseudo-psychology
The authorial preoccupation with memory might suggest a crowd of people who have trouble with their own sense of identity. Sometimes it seems that some of them, ironically, got stuck trying to unpick the knot of messy concepts and influences that feed into it, and end up facing a far larger knot than they began with. Perhaps this ecosystem explains the origin of the ubiquitous and dreadful term, ‘the human experience’. Ever wheeled out whenever some large and nebulous agglomeration of themes emerges from the deep like the shadow of Cthulhu, and nobody really has a clue what they’re looking at but feel compelled to keep up the public perception of being clever all the same.
This suggests that memory becomes a kind of literary thematic Gleipnir-esque trap. They’re sure they can escape from it, just one more doorstopper novel and then they’ll really have the thing solved and put to bed.
Simultaneously, the preoccupation with memory suggests the more cliché flight from mortality. A group whose insular and often isolated work might presuppose their work as circular projective meditations on their own ends. Artists throughout history have existed in lamentable conditions or poverty and illness and desperation, only finding their audiences long after they are gone. Perhaps, surveying their unenviable state, they seek simply to produce something of greater status or value than themselves, and in creating such be remembered in greater terms than the lived conditions of their mortal existence.
The preoccupation of memory as a thematic narrative element might be considered a recurring projection. Unwitting cycles of anxiety reflecting tangles of social modules. Success as a symbolic triumph over thanatotic physicality.
Words and Chaos 
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