48 pages • 1 hour read
The Memory Police
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Themes
Memory and Manufacturing the Uncanny
The disappearances cause familiar things to become “strange”; this is an example of the uncanny, a major theme in gothic and science fiction genres. When the islanders forget an object, it loses scientific explanations and becomes mystical. For instance, a simple music box, once forgotten, is “like magic.” Many works of fantasy, like the famous Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien, are about magic leaving the world, but the dystopian disappearances in Ogawa’s novel are a way of re-enchanting the world.
Even body parts that have disappeared are “all illusions.” People become unfamiliar with legs and arms: “They all seemed to be wondering how to deal with their own bodies” (247). In other examples of genre fiction, bodies become uncanny through mechanization (like China Miéville’s Remade characters in Perdido Street Station) or through separation from the mind by machines (as in The Matrix). Ogawa does not physically replace or remove body parts but takes away muscle memory.
Language—words and phrases—become unfamiliar through the disappearances. While objects sometimes remain in the world, the names for them are forgotten. What was once a native tongue becomes a foreign language. For example, when R tells the narrator the word for harmonica, she replies “as though drinking each syllable from his mouth. ‘It’s a romantic name, don’t you think? The kind you’d give to a fluffy, snow-white kitten’” (214).
In a novel about the craft of writing, one of the most significant disappearances is novels. The protagonist becomes unfamiliar with her own work; when R reads her manuscript to her, it sounds “like a fairy tale from a distant land” (192). The manuscript is partially a critique of the Memory Police, and making it uncanny to its author hinders her artistic act of resistance.
The Craft of Writing
The story-within-a-story structure of Ogawa’s novel allows the reader to see how the unnamed protagonist is inspired by events in her life and how she sometimes predicts events in her manuscript. After novels disappear, R must explain the concept of writing fiction to the narrator, and the narrator, in turn, explains this concept to the old man:
‘[N]o one blames you for lying in a novel. You can make up the story out of nothing, starting from zero. You write something you can’t see as though you can see it. You make up something that doesn’t exist just by using words. That’s why R says we shouldn’t give up, even if our memories disappear’ (196).
This passage emphasizes the power of words and of creation. What the islanders create, as opposed to what they lose, is minimal. The relationship of lying to fiction is also discussed in the science fiction novel Embassytown by China Miéville. Not only are stories fabricated, but literary devices, like metaphors, are also lies.
Writing becomes more difficult as words are forgotten; the medium of the protagonist’s art disappears. After books are burned, and the narrator continues writing, she slowly arrives at:
[…] the point where the shapes of certain words seemed to be returning. I could vaguely recall the fingers of the typist locked away in the clock tower, the pattern of the parquet floor, the mountain of typewriters, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs (254).
Fiction is rooted in sensory experience for Ogawa’s protagonist. Her process of remembering how to write includes reacting to forgotten objects that she sees, holds, listens to, tastes, and smells. These sensory acts evoke emotions and memories, and the narrator wants “to leave a record of what I saw in that dimly illuminated void of my memories” (244). The record, an immortal document, is what many real-life as well as fictional writers desire. It is their mark on the world.
Alienation Within a Police State
The novel’s island setting allows for extreme isolation once the Memory Police have made ferries disappear. Islanders are alienated from surrounding locations; one of the objects hidden in the protagonist’s mother’s sculptures is a ferry ticket to “a very big island” (212) north of the unnamed island. The old man, as a former ferry worker who can’t remember ferries, is a representation of an interlinked past that can no longer be accessed. After his death, the narrator thinks, “The laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged” (242). She loses him corporeally as well as through memories connected to other forgotten things because of “laws.”
Dystopias and utopias often need remote settings to play out a system of governance. For instance, the utopian and dystopian societies in Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed are set on a planet and its moon. The Memory Police’s ultimate power is an inversion of 1984: There can be no thought-crimes when thoughts have disappeared as a police-state action. After novels disappear, the protagonist realizes she “could no longer remember what [her manuscript] had been about” (178), which makes writing as an act of resistance difficult. The Memory Police only resort to physical force on those who can remember everything (and those who help them); they can genetically control most of the people living on an island.
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