fuck the (memory) police

[hwarium]

Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is, oh dear. Another novel that is highly recommended but was unconvincing (to me), like it was grabbing connections to Nazi Germany! Forced Disappearances! State Media! The blurb also pulled at literary greats — George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book felt like it relied on those connections to create the narrative force without going through the effort of exploring it well.

Two reasons why I didn’t like it (1) I hate cheaters so I was just unsympathetic to the main character as soon as she slept with a married man and (2) I’ve learnt about the science of memory so the whole set-up felt like a farce, like a heavy-handed experiment. I read the first chapter and had all these expectations about where it could go, what it should explore, and the novel took the straightest, most elementary path.

It’s an interesting concept — in this town, ‘things’ disappear from people’s memory one at a time. The Memory Police come and take those things away. If you try to hang onto things which have been ‘disappeared’, the Memory Police comes for it. If the forgetting magic doesn’t affect you, the Memory Police comes for you.

I thought Ogawa only had a basic understanding of memory, or that the book only explored memory on a superficial level. Things are forgotten! People realise something is missing! Birds! Books! Bells! Everyone moves on, their lives a little emptier than before.

There was no discussion of the different types of memory — semantic vs episodic, conscious vs procedural, cumulative vs singular. Working memory. Muscle memory. God damn it, even something as simple as short-term memory was not explored. People just forgot things, and then that hole was there, forever. The consequences were so simple it made the whole story ridiculous because that is not how human memory works.

I wanted to see if there were differences in losing each type, if one left before the other, or if by taking an idea, the Memory Police only affected a certain type of memory. It would have been so cool to see characters go through the motions of a habit, without knowing why they were doing it.

I wanted to see how the disappearance of a thing affected the memory of an event. Our brains are versatile and fantastic at deluding itself that everything is okay. We don’t remember things accurately, we remember the key details and then our brain fills in the rest using stuff from its prop room. It’s common knowledge that false memories are a thing (the unreliability of witness recounts as legal evidence is well studied - Innocence Project, Magnussen, Fjell), so it would have been cool for the character not to realise they have forgotten, because the mind just substitutes something else (search: Constructive Nature of Memory). Ribbons were erased? Cool now the birthday present was tied with string. Roses were erased? Daffodils instead. Like the opportunity for dramatic irony was right there and Ogawa didn’t take it.

And she could have gone further and actually added the implantation of false memories, because that is the real scary stuff (Shaw & Porter’s work on interrogations). Create a counter-narrative, draw that link to propaganda and fake news. I wanted the Memory Police to come in and fuck around with everyone’s sense of self. It would have been even creepier if everyone was happy, oblivious to the authoritarian state messing with their minds (a la Brave New World).

This is not even going into how memory is connected to so many other life skills! Even something simple like navigation (characters getting more physically lost the more mentally lost they are), or an intangible skill like emotional regulation. Or even hope!!! I’m screaming because the science says that the processes which give us the vivid memories of the past is also the one that we use to imagine the future. There is also so much work about PTSD and memory - your ability to process trauma suffers if you have poor recall of happy memories, or depression and memory - people who have depression cannot imagine the future well. And amnesia patients too — they only have a vague vision of the future because they have a vague vision of the past (Suddenhorf). I was expecting the loss of memory to gradually seep into all aspects of the villager’s lives, but it didn’t. Things are forgotten, people wake up and go through the motions of feeling a little lost, they realise that something is missing but not quite knowing what. And it repeats. Again, and again.

Humans don't work like that!! Every character just felt like they were forced into this unrealistic dream state by the author. There are well-documented case studies of amnesia patients - Henry Molaison being the most famous (1950s), but the wiki for retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia has plenty. Sure, Memory Police was published in 1994, but most of the groundwork was done in the 20th century. The type of 'memory' in the novel felt like a writing exercise around a single trope - things disappear, rather than an exploration of human memory. And because of this, what the book had to say about memory, felt contrived and superficial.

Even that grossly unsubtle novel-within-a-novel thing. The main character is a novelist and there’s her novel inside the story about a girl with no voice which was An Obvious Metaphor about the whole thing. At one point the narrator was just unable to write because she had lost too much. (BUT) But what I expected was a gradual loss of ability, the loss of metaphors, shortening of the emotional range, flattening of temporality. If birds disappeared one day, I wanted her to feel the difficulty when writing about freedom, because that association is lost, that mental connection. I wanted her sentences to get shorter, the characters more one dimensional, the plot simpler. The loss of memory is also the loss of imagination. So for the writing to disappear all at once, felt artificial and constructed.

This meant that the world of Memory Police felt detached from reality, like an allegory that took place in a distant world with no resemblance to ours. And because it was a distant world, the extraordinary did not feel extraordinary at all. The people felt like straw men in a pastor’s sermon. So their suffering felt cheap, because they exist only to be an example.

The whole novel just felt like an allegory for an obvious message — we lose parts of our soul when we forget things, and we lose our voice when we lose memories. Memory is important to our sense of self. Duh.

Good fiction must evoke a visage of reality. you can be moved by the most fictional, outrageous, fantasy, as long as there is some semblance with your own lived truth. Poetically, curiosity about science will benefit the humanities; psychology, biology, neurochemistry, even something like behavioural economics — they are all theories which say things about our human experience. There is so much potential for cross-disciplinary inspiration, and stories will be enriched the more writers and editors learn. Ultimately, Memory Police was unconvincing for me because it claimed to speak on the human condition, without understanding the human condition.

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_{Edit: having spoken to ally and experienced a full night's sleep, I have made my final sentences more diplomatic and added some case study links.}

Comments

[furniished]

thank you so much for this.... i have been harboring my dislike for the memory police for literal YEARS, especially because i enjoyed ogawa's other novel, the housekeeper and the professor - which also deals with memory loss as a plot device, but in the context of a single character who has amnesia and has to interact/integrate with people who don't. i totally agree about the worldbuilding of the memory police just being... unsatisfying and heavy-handed, and oftentimes leaning into specific set dressing that held no weight for me. i think the novel falls into a floundering middle ground between solid speculative/science fiction and some type of magical realism (or abstraction) that ends up serving neither the concept or the reader, and i would have preferred if she leaned more into one (Say More!) or the other (Say Less!). the arc of the story wasn't particularly compelling because the novel kept hitting a singular note - memory and emotion are inextricably linked! ok, so...?
hwa i commend your bravery xD and really enjoyed your thoughts on the (myriad) other directions that the book could have taken! it's always gratifying to hear from writers on writers.

[hwarium]

omg jun <3 I'm not so humble as to not be pleased when someone agrees with my opinion!! thank you!! I feel so validated and YES you used all the words I was looking for. It didn't occur to me that 'world-building' as a term can also be used for magical realism and the memory mechanics, but you are absolutely right, thinking through the consequences of a trope is also world building. The details in the story never go above set-dressing which makes the setup embarrassingly transparent and exposes the authorial intention. And the authoritan intention is also embarrassingly simple - "memory and emotion are inextricably linked". YES AND?? I think if you're going to write a novel, it's a waste of the reader's time if your message is so obviously simple. There has to be some kind of contradiction or paradox, some /depth/ (which is absent in the memory police!!).

Haha thank you jun - but I really do feel like an armchair critic wallowing in my hubris!! Lets see if I can apply any of my own criticisms on myself next time I write!!