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The Memory Police

A disappearance begins internally, experienced en masse, but with each one—roses, photographs, and fruit follow—long-coated, stone-faced Memory Police sweep through the village, ensuring that all traces of the disappeared concept or object is gone for good.

Each object that is disappeared takes layers of personal and shared knowledge with it.

The old man observes that, for most inhabitants, preserving something in memory will be “wasteful” because the mind is the space of greatest vulnerability, and has no natural armour. Therefore they must safeguard the calendars, maps and other objects themselves. R tries to prevent the novelist from burning photographs of her mother. “Important things remain important things,” he pleads, “no matter how much the world changes.”

Loss

Bereft of memories, words and associations, the inhabitants know that their hearts are growing “thinner”. The soul – personhood, selfhood – is hollowed out. In its losses, we see the aching removal of a person from their world. In the twilight of life, memories weaken, friends disappear, objects are lost. The things that once brought pleasure no longer move us. Parts of our bodies succumb, by stroke or paralysis; we can no longer feel our left leg, our right hand. We slip away. 

Totalitarianism

The Memory Police doesn’t lend itself to easy analysis; we cannot say the state is Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Nazi Germany, or wrap the novel neatly around any specific historical amnesia. It cuts across many centuries and places, reminding us of every people forced to give up possessions, memories, names, languages and words before they themselves were destroyed.

Some inhabitants retain their memories. Those suspected of remembering are harassed, detained and interrogated by the Memory Police. 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/23/the-memory-police-yoko-ogawa-review

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The Childhood of Jesus/ The Schooldays of Jesus/ The Death of Jesus by JM Coetzee

Set in a nameless country where everyone speaks Spanish and where refugees arrive on boats, are given new names and identities, and are “washed clean” of all their old memories and associations. This place stands for our embodied earthly life: “The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.” 

The capital city is Novilla, a socialist utopia whose citizens are without desires or appetites (the standard fare is bread and bean paste) but are fond of having ad hoc philosophical debates in their breaks from comradely manual labour. No one in the novel is called Jesus. The Jesus of the title alludes to a motherless refugee child named Davíd who, in the previous volume, is taken under the wing of Simón, an earnest middle-aged man not entirely happy with this brave new world. Simón recruits a suitably virginal young woman, Inés, to be Davíd’s new mother.

Passion

In Schooldays Davíd is enrolled in the local Academy of Dance, run by the severe Ana Magdalena, who has the “alabaster” beauty of a classical statue and who instructs her pupils in a mystical “dance of the universe” that purports to map out “a higher realm where the numbers dwell”. With her “perfect features, perfect skin, perfect figure, perfect bearing”, and chilly commitment to Platonic mumbo-jumbo, Ana Magdalena is the ultimate representative of this strange utopia’s idealising tendency. “Bloodless, sexless, lifeless”, she has all the detachment of the ideologue. Ideologies do not equal passion.

Throughout the books, it is Simón who champions the “primacy of the personal” over the communal, abstract ideal; of clay over marble. As the novel’s Joseph figure and Davíd’s protector, Simón is an indefatigable guide through these Socratic dialogues, always ready to “produce the correct, patient, educative words”. The paradox is that, in spite of being the voice of individualism, he is another of Coetzee’s self-abnegating protagonists, who approaches passion at a slant, dispassionately. Simón is a prim pedant, a killjoy, disapproving of dogs and sausages and inventing one’s own stories to go with the pictures in a book.

Fiction

Don Quixote is used to consider philosophies of fiction. Which is more “real”, more useful in navigating our existence: Quixote’s reckless romancing or Sancho Panza’s stolid pragmatism? Don Quixote is the book David uses to read. “You can look at the page and move your lips and make up stories in your head, but that is not reading,” warns Simón. “For real reading you have to submit yourself to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies. You have to stop being silly. You have to stop being a baby.” Davíd (who roots for Don Quixote, the fantasist, rather than for Sancho Panza, the drab realist) knows instinctively that it is “the hole between the pages”, the tapping into our own fantasies, that makes fiction fiction and makes reading pleasurable.

Plato was famously dismissive of the seductive properties of mimetic literature, which urge us to make an imaginative identification with a fictional world. On the evidence of this austere, barely realised mise-en-scène, it is difficult not to feel that Coetzee, like Plato, is no longer much interested in the accidents of our quotidian human world, the shadows on the cave wall. He is after essence alone, the pure, ungraspable fire. In his fidelity to ideas, to telling rather than showing, to instructing rather than seducing us, he does not actually write fiction any more. 

Challenging ideas

For these novels, then, “Jesus” is the name for a phenomenon that arrives from out of nowhere and challenges our received ideas to breaking point, as David does for the adults around him. (He arrived at the academy as a student of dance, Arroyo says, “but soon revealed himself to be not a student but a teacher, a teacher to all of us.”) “Jesus” is the label for a “wild creature” (as someone calls David) with a gentle contempt for the norms of civilisation; a disruptive force of ceaseless questioning that irrupts into ordinary domestic existence but is not of it – as David insists, “I don’t have to be in the universe. I can be an exception.”

And he speaks of having a “message” that he needs to convey to the world before it is too late, but what is it?

Jesus 

David is an inspired, mystical boy, oddly authoritative, disruptive at school. Told to write “I must tell the truth” on the blackboard, he writes instead “Yo soy la verdad. I am the truth” (John 14.6). 

There is almost nothing in the Bible about the childhood of Jesus. Luke alone describes him at the age of 12 debating with the doctors in the temple at Jerusalem. In part Coetzee’s trilogy can be understood as a genuine attempt to imagine what it might be like to care for such a child, possessed of the uncompromised truth. 

David does not claim supernatural ancestry, though there are hints scattered through the books that he has been able to perform impossible acts off stage: in the first novel, for instance, he announces that he walked unscathed through barbed wire; in this one, people claim to have seen him flip an ordinary coin and cause it to land heads-up 30 times in a row. David inspires those around him through his remarkable dancing, which may recall the Gnostic tradition of Jesus as a dancing-master, as described in the Acts of John. And there is one electric moment that is explicitly biblical. David requests that the orphanage’s pet lamb be brought to his hospital bed, and shows it to his pet dog, Bolívar, silently commanding the beast not to attack. Or, as Isaiah 11.6 has it: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” But this child then falls asleep, and the dog is no longer subject to his mastery, so the potential miracle ends in bloody deniability.

Numbers

The trilogy is a work of speculative fiction, geared towards answering a particular question: what kind of Christ might grow from the Enlightenment? In other words, if a figure like Jesus were to appear in a world that was like ours, had developed in exactly the same way as ours had but without Christianity, what religion would he give us?

Against this mechanistic background, David appears as a disruptive influence. Coetzee emphasises the fact that religious thought comes into being when the order of the world is broken. One of the key images throughout the trilogy is the fight between the ideas of numbers and mathematics: ‘I know all the numbers,’ the five-year-old David says in the first novel. ‘Do you want to hear them? I know 134 and I know 7 and I know’ – he draws a deep breath – ‘4623551 and I know 888 and I know 92 and I know –’. Such individual attention, which sees these elements as worthy of consideration in themselves rather than simply as tools to obtain results, is the basis of David’s childish thinking and, we are invited to think, of the religious conception of the world.

Childhood

Coetzee believes that nearly all relationships in adult life are an exchange of fictions and children alone are free from this falsity. In an odd address to the University of Witwatersrand in 2012, urging young men to become primary school teachers, he told them that “most of the people you deal with in your work are not real human beings but shadowy figures playing roles and wearing masks”, whereas children are “never anything but their full human selves”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/04/the-death-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/18/the-schooldays-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review

https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-would-david-do

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/the-death-of-jesus-by-jm-coetzee-review-a4324681.html

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The Long Story - Julian Barnes

Paul begins, as if in essay form, with a wide, philosophical question: “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more, or love the less, and suffer the less?” The novel is the life story of Paul Roberts who as a 19 year old in 1960s suburbia joins the tennis club and meets a 48 year old married woman named Susan MacLeod. Paul and Susan become lovers, which is presented to the reader from dual perspectives – both the 19-year-old’s hot, naive experience of it and then the sour reflections of the older man looking back half a century later. She eventually leaves her abusive husband and daughters to live with Paul in South London. Susan descends into alcoholism and dementia. Susan’s downward slide is charted in painful detail, where the affectless, almost creepy detachment of the narrative serves to accentuate Paul’s horror at her descent.

Love

“love feels like the vast and sudden easing of a lifelong frown ... as if the lungs of my soul have been inflated with pure oxygen”

“You are on your own. You have no theories of life yet, you only know some of its pleasures and pains. You still believe, however, in love, and in what love can do, how it can transform a life…”

Over Paul’s shoulder, and especially in his anxiously recounted fantasies, we glimpse other kinds of love, less romantic, more commonplace, but also more generative: his friend Eric’s kindness; his girlfriend Anna’s hopeful positivity and firmness; above all, Susan’s daughter Martha’s shining patience with her ill mother, which does not speak of “emotional diminution”, but of family love given, at least at some point, freely and generously.

“And who does not want their love authenticated?”

First love and its consequences

“We were together – under the same roof, that is – for 10 or more years… When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close.” 

“First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”

“As he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb, him.“

Heartbreak

“But what shocked him was that the emotions which replaced it were just as violent as the love which had previously stood in his heart. And so his life and his heart were just as agitated as before, except that she was no longer able to assuage his heart.“

Self destruction

It’s clear soon enough that Susan is hurtling on a path of unstoppable self-destruction. What we’re left guessing until the very end is why she does it, only to be frustrated in our quest for understanding in the resolution too. In true postmodernist indeterminacy, the issue of what Susan feels for the three or four men in her life is left partly in doubt, as is her possible frigidity. Until the end, she remains opaque and unknowable to Paul and through him as the narrator, to us. 

The end of Paul and Susan’s relationship is foreshadowed early in the book and throughout the second, doom-laden half of the book, the relationship is blighted by something enraging and elusive.

Memory

n Paul’s narrative, experiences deconstruct themselves and personalities decay in a devastatingly convincing way. Susan is at first an alluring, rich, potent presence, full of ironic turns of speech from which we infer great intelligence; but she becomes reduced, by the middle of the book, to a series of repetitive tropes (“A played-out generation … this has all been frightfully interesting”), while even her nicknames, a vital part of her charm, are reduced to verbal tics: “Mr EP” for the man who hits her, “Mr Badger” for Paul. She carries on asking desperate questions until we, not just Paul, wonder if we ever knew her at all.

Events in the novel are also strangely distanced. There are actually no central defining dramatic moments. Just as Paul has difficulty remembering their first kiss, the reader fails to remember exactly the moment that initiated the heroine’s decline. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be one. Barnes’s rendering of psychological realism is such that he manages to hold your attention without drama or epiphany.

“I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going.”

Naivety and experience

“You are angry with the books you have read, none of which have prepared you for this. No doubt you were reading the wrong books. Or reading them in the wrong way.“

“Well, I have learned to become careful over the years. As careful now as I was careless then. Or do I mean carefree? Can a word have two opposites?”

Ego

“There was a hideous false virtue to anger: look at me, angry, look how I boil over because I am so filled with emotion, look how I am really alive (unlike all those cold fish over there), look how I am going to prove it by grabbing your hair and smashing your face into a door. And now look what you made me do! I’m angry about that too!“

Form

There is a continual, delicate play with personal nouns: Paul is “I” only when he is with his love; elsewhere, he wears himself away to a generalised “you”, and at the end, a conventionalised “he” who can only flick back to his “I” at moments of extreme pain. 

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“It took us a while/ 'Cause we were young and unsure/ With love on the line/ What if we both would need more/ But all your flaws and scars are mine/ Still falling for you” “And just like that/ All I breathe/ All I feel/ You are all for me/ I'm in”

[nightthoughtsdaylightdreams]

Queens College | Jesus College | Trinity Hall | Magdalene College | Pembroke College | Sidney Sussex College

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I don't wanna buy no more Your shit ain't getting me high no more

Skyfall, Travis Scott

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Your intrapersonal intelligence dominates your brain. You are extremely self-aware and reflective. You have a strong moral compass and passionate opinions on what you believe is right or wrong. You constantly contemplate life on a deeper level and take pride in expressing yourself through creative processes. This means that you also have very high levels of linguistic and existentialist intelligence. You see life through a more intense lens than many people and this allows you to create meaningful relationships in your personal and professional life.

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O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger; do not punish me, Lord in your rage. Your arrows have sunk deep in me; your hand has come down upon me. Through your anger all my body is sick: through my sin, there is no health in my limbs. My guilt towers higher than my head; it is a weight too heavy to bear. My wounds are foul and festering, the result of my own folly. I am bowed and brought to my knees. I go mourning all the day long. All my frame bums with fever; all my body is sick. Spent and utterly crushed, I cry aloud in anguish of heart. O Lord, you know all my longing: my groans are not hidden from you. My heart throbs, my strength is spent; the very light has gone from my eyes. My friends avoid me like a leper; those closest to me stand afar off. Those who plot against my life lay snares; those who seek my ruin speak of harm, planning treachery all the day long. But I am like the deaf who cannot hear, like the dumb unable to speak. I am like a man who hears nothing in whose mouth is no defense. I count on you, O Lord: it is you, Lord God, who will answer. I pray: “Do not let them mock me, those who triumph if my foot should slip.” For I am on the point of falling and my pain is always before me. I confess that I am guilty and my sin fills me with dismay. My wanton enemies are numberless and my lying foes are many. They repay me evil for good and attack me for seeking what is right. O Lord, do not forsake me! My God, do not stay afar off! Make haste and come to my help, O Lord, my God, my saviour!

Psalm 38: Domine, ne in furore

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Satisfaction with my soul lulls me to sleep at night, daylight dreams awake me in the morning.

Deepalurie