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| Memory interconnected and disconnecting bits falling away |
In the beginning of novel development, I tend to research every teensy-weensy little thing. For THE VALLEN, I went over memory and walls and how to build walls, and where and why walls were built, and how memory is stored, the latest neurological science, how technology enhances or impairs our memory, whether all of this translates to knowledge—and if it does—then what kind of knowledge?
Encyclopedic, trivia-type knowledge is what Google and other search engines are perfect for; gleaning the kind of user-information that corporations large and small and governments large and small pay an arm and a leg for. But this type of knowledge engenders a false sense of knowing anything beyond its fact- or face-value (or data at market value), which, in turn, engenders a false sense of security that one is informed.
No, there lies a deeper knowing bought and paid for, and earned, through experience and tragedy and suffering. That's seared into the bones and the heart and the mind...
That's really when we learn something...that's knowledge...
So, beginning with these sentiments, I dove into memory development and the accumulation of knowledge or know-how or whatever you want to call it. I searched for and read articles, such as this one from the New Yorker, and took snippets such as:
To be deprived of our past is to be deprived of our future; without memory, we are automatons, not fully human. This may be Ishiguro’s greatest theme, his flatness as a writer a way to represent our collusion with our own lack of freedom.Encouraged, I chose Kazuo Ishiguro as an author to study in preparation for writing my own novel, THE VALLEN. His novels seem to deal with memory, or incorporate memory in a very unique way, and I wanted to do the same or similar thing with THE VALLEN.
My notes are voluminous so I won't overwhelm you with them here, but I did especially listen to The Remains of the Day on audiobook, which inspired a prior post about Character Dilemmas. But I also read this article, and took these important notes from it:
Today, memories are controlled by media propaganda. In a country like ours, how do we actually go about looking at the past? It’s something to do with popular entertainment — books, museums, the royal days we have — all these things have a huge impact on what one age group of people thinks happened in the past...And:
I don’t come down on one side or the other about remembering or forgetting...Too much remembering about what had happened would just lead to civil war and violence, and the country just couldn’t cope.Spurred on, I continued delving into other areas, such as looking at neuroscience journals and how memory is encoded, long-term vs short-term, physically in the brain. I harkened back to my college courses in industrial engineering and recalled lessons about human cognition and how the brain, usually through the eyes, can only intake so much "chunks" of information at a time; how to design screens so they're user-friendly; how we, humans, store and encode knowledge, and so on.
I furthermore researched this article, and pulled this from it:
The novel’s [Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go] intelligibility and effect relies heavily on what Brooks terms ‘anticipation of retrospection,’ an awareness on the reader’s part that ‘what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read.’ The way readers develop a full understanding of the story resembles the process by which the students comprehend their fate. It is a winding process with many happenings making sense only in hindsight.To summarize: this is how memory serves the novel, it's the reader's own memory interacting with the novel. The trick, as an author, is to anticipate expertly how readers ingest novels (usually by being an avid reader yourself), how plots and storylines and words all blend together in a reader's mind. There's a constant feedback loop between the reader reading, thinking in their head, imagining, remembering what was already read, judging the author, anticipating the author's next moves, and that author's words written on the page.
It's a fascinating process.
So, there you have it. In THE VALLEN, it is Essa's voice which comes through the page. It is her telling her own story—the retelling of it; the remembering of it—in her own voice, that I endeavored to capture.