I am immediately struck by the different ways that the authors chose to manifest the amnesia in each piece. In many of the pieces, I did not realize until the end who the amnesiac was or what the instance of memory loss was until I got to the end of the piece and had a moment to think about it. This could very well be a reflection of me, but I like to think that it is reminiscent of the many different ways we use memory and how it can be affected.
I was especially intrigued by Philip Dick's "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon". I certainly, upon first reading it, would not have grouped it as part of literature on amnesia. But, I love the idea that memory, however concrete we all would like to believe it is, is malleable; also, the thought that memory is more about the general feeling than it is the exact event. Kemmings is so overcome with the guilt he felt during each instance that there is nothing strange to him in remembering the cat eating the bird in conjunction with his French wife and their crumbling house. Though the types of guilt are different, he doesn't necessarily remember the specific instances. Instead, he jumbles them all together into one blanket of guilt spanning many many years. I know it's true for myself that if there wasn't some sort of intense feeling, be it excitement, outrage, or something else, I tend to forget the details of an even fairly easily. This is interesting though, because on many of the occasions where such feeling is involved, I am so overcome by the memory of that feeling that I could not, in a million years, accurately describe the events that preceded it.
LeDoux, in Synaptic Self, supports the idea that working memory serves as temporary storage and each memory can be interrupted when another process "bumps" it out of it's spot. So why don't we continuously replace long term memories instead of just pushing older memories deeper into our subconscious? How did Kemmings memories get jumbled? Was it really just because he was so overcome with guilt that he couldn't enjoy a good memory without something in it triggering the bad memories of his past? Or is it something similar to the working memory -- can one memory bump it's way into another? I'm reminded of the way S. remembers things in Mind of Mnemonist -- by placing them in rows along streets and in their respective countries. Clearly that is an extreme form of memory, exacerbated by his synesthesia, but could that same idea be applied to "normal" memory? Who's to say that the reason Kemmings associates all these guilty memories and mixes them all up couldn't be that he has placed them all in the same general area, and his "view" of each of them is over-shadowed by the next memory?
If memory is so malleable, and it is so easy to mix together a group of thoughts no matter how old they are, is it still something to be trusted?I can't imagine that even with the faults memory is not beneficial to humans and animals alike, but I do find myself questioning the authenticity of my memories now more than ever before. With regards to this piece especially, I have a much greater appreciation for the way my brain processes my memories and what "amnesia" actually is, as well as a more prevalent distrust of what I've recorded as fact.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A major theme throughout the stories in The Vintage Book of Amnesia is time and how the present, the now, is all that these amnesiac patients have. It is as if time becomes its own character. In “The Second Coming,” the girl separates her time “into good times and bad times” (106) and only “lived by forest time” (106). When she is doing nothing, time seems to stand still and at one point it turns into something that she wishes to escape and to “curl away from” (106). In the black curtain, time becomes a something that loses its “sharpness of identity” (134). The narrator explains how the week, for Townsend, becomes blurred. In Synaptic Self LeDoux speaks about how “damage to the frontal lobe interferes with the ability to plan and execute goal directed behavior” (179) and that “executive functions are carried out by the…prefrontal cortex” (183). It becomes clear that these areas are being depicted in these short stories where the characters have trouble planning for the future and are really only able to live in the moment because their lack of memory does not “allow” them to be at all in the past.
ReplyDelete