More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  This book of literary amnesia began as an observation of certain resemblances in two or three novels I admired—a passing notion, a reader’s list. I had no intention of editing a book, let alone identifying a genre. But amnesia turned up more the harder I looked, and meant more the harder I thought about it. At first it was the obvious, gaudy cases, amnesia breaking out into an overt premise or plot symptom—there were more of these than I’d ever imagined (in fact I’d written more than one myself). Elsewhere amnesia appeared pulsing just beneath the surface, an existential syndrome that seemed to nag at fictional characters with increasing frequency, a floating metaphor very much in the air. Amnesia, it turned out when I began to pay attention, is a modern mood, and a very American one.

  Not that there’s any question that literary amnesia has European grandfathers: Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. If it’s usually felt that every compelling novel is in some sense a mystery, the examples of Kafka and Beckett suggest that amnesia can be seen as a basic condition for characters enmeshed in fiction’s web. Conjured out of the void by a thin thread of sentences, every fictional assertion exists as a speck on a background of consummate blankness. There’s a joke among writing teachers that apprentice writers, at a loss for an idea, will usually commit some version of the story that begins: “A man woke alone in a room with bare white walls…” unconsciously replicating their plight before the blank page and hoping that compositional momentum will garb the naked story in identity, meaning, and plot. Our hero might have blood on his hands, or answer a ringing phone, or find himself wiggling an antennae—we’ll improvise as we go along. Kafka and Beckett dance beautifully at the edge of that void which has always loomed for fiction, has always been waiting to be noticed and flirted with. They’re the very soul of amnesia.

  The body that soul would come to inhabit, however, was provided by pop culture’s appropriation of Freud. The explosion of psychotheraputic metaphors into the narrative arts in the twentieth century is so complete and pervasive it would be hard to overstate; a profound sense of before-and-after is traceable in nervous jokes about how well Gissing or Poe might have responded to a course of Prozac. Or, say, try imagining Emily Brontë if she’d scrutinized her characters with the neurological vocabulary available to writers like Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Shainberg, and Dennis Potter. The ease with which these writers—and their audiences—grasp those new vocabularies for human perceptual life creates fresh textures in fiction, both particular and universal. Anyone’s been Heathcliff on a bad day, but, unlike Heathcliff we’ve had our brooding shaped by diagnosis (either accepted or refused); had romance and faith decanted into symptom, codependence, and past-life trauma; seen childhood sexual abuse converted into alien abduction and back again.

  But what about that sharp blow to the head? And who fired this smoking gun in my hand if it wasn’t me? Amnesia is film noir, too, a vehicle made of pure plot, one that gobbles psychoanalysis passingly, for cheap fuel. Cornell Woolrich and John Franklin Bardin are collected here to stand for many others: David Goodis and Richard Neely and Orson Welles (in Lady From Shanghai and Mr. Arkadin), plus another thousand haunted, desperate protagonists wandering the black-and-white streets of the Noir Metropolis wondering if they really did something terrible during their boozy binge, and trying to persuade the cops to give them a chance, like O.J. Simpson, to hunt for the real killers and redeem the memory of that tragic, unworkable love affair. Amnesia plots are, however inadvertently, often stories about guilt—a trail which leads right back to Kafka, of course. (Maybe Kafka’s the real killer!)

  Beckett’s Amnesia, to give another strain its diagnostic name, is characterized by meditation on the absent, circular, and amnesiac nature of human existence, as well as on the vast indifference of the universe to matters of identity. His novella The Lost Ones is an eerily dispassionate meditation on the plight of a group of bereft human bodies stuck in a cramped metal cylinder. It prefigures the disembodied-brains-dreaming subgenre of amnesia, which often arises in science fiction. In stories like A. A. Attanasio’s Solis and Joseph McElroy’s Plus, brains implanted into machines are plagued into malfunction by sticky emotional residue from their forsaken human lives. Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is the most famous version of a closely related amnesia archetype, where a character discovers that the bewildering events of his story were only the strobelike hallucinations of a dying brain. A couple of the novels excerpted here or listed in the bibliography adopt this darn, I was dead the whole time template, but to name them would be to give away the endings to several wonderful ontological mystery stories—even if those endings are all essentially the same.

  Perhaps an even more disheartening realization for an amnesiac is that he’s only a fictional character. Call it Pirandello’s Syndrome. Those elusive memories never existed, because the author never bothered to imagine them, having abandoned the mimetic pretense—which is hard on those of us who prefer to believe we live in a three-dimensional world. Thomas Disch, Paul Auster and Vladimir Nabokov are among the writers prone to tipping their hands metafictionally—confessing authorial whim as readily as a Warner Brother’s animator depriving Daffy Duck of the ground he stands on, instead warping the edge of his celluloid prison inward to reveal the sprocket holes.

  Another form of amnesia is the collective political type, identified by Orwell, Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin and extended, refined and watered down by an army of science fiction writers ever since (“Soylent Green is—people!”). Taken in its direst and dryest sense, this version of amnesia points to theories of social or institutional knowing and forgetting, to theorists and critics like Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Fredric Jameson, Allan Bloom, and G.W.S. Trow. Obviously, I risk spilling my precious and only-recently-distilled vial of amnesia fiction into the broad streams of dystopian writing and cultural critique, but, well, that’s what genres do under study: merge and disappear into others. (Noir, dystopia, theory, metafiction: watch amnesia swirl and be lost in them, like James Stewart in Vertigo’s dream sequence.) Anyway, any good dystopian tyrant knows the use and value of controlled collective amnesia, or he loses his job.

  As I reread and weighed the fiction on my list, it was possible at times to enter into a state of forgetting what I’d meant by distinguishing amnesia from fiction—by declaring one the modifier of the other—in the first place. Genres are also like false oases, only visible in the middle distance. Get too close and they atomize into unrelated particles. Eventually, though, I achieved editorial déjà vu, remembering what I couldn’t have already known: I had in mind fiction that, more than just presenting a character who’d suffered memory loss, entered into an amnesiac state at some level of the narrative itself—and invited the reader to do the same. Fiction that made something of the white spaces which are fiction’s native habitat or somehow induced a dreamy state of loss of identity’s grip. I knew I’d identified a genre—even if I was its whole audience as well as its only scholar—when I came across an excellent book containing a scene of literal amnesia, yet which didn’t actually fit my parameters; in the same week I came across another novel that struck me as precious and airless yet provided a thrill of discovery: it perfectly exemplified the principles of amnesia fiction. Now I was an amnesia nerd!

  In gathering these stories, essays and excerpts I willfully ignored the boundaries of my new genre. There’s some real science in here, as well as cryptoscience, and reverse amnesia, and one straight-up alcoholic blackout. I followed the higher principle of pleasure, tried to end where I’d started: with writing I loved and wanted to recommend to someone else. That is to say, you. Let this introduction be a ghostly scrim in front of the stories, then, a vanishing scroll of words like the preamble of backstory before the start of an engrossing movie, or like the rantings of the captive amnesiac in Thomas Disch’s “The Squirrel Cage,” which vanish into air as they are typed. What good is a genre? Genres should vanish and be forgotten, this one especially—it was made for it. Forget this in
troduction. Here are some stories. Here’s a book.

  —Introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, 2000

  What’s Old Is New (NYRB)

  Funny how things call up their opposites. We’re in the age of radical damage to the attention-span-o-sphere, everyone knows that except the denialists. And web culture is distributed, collaborative, appropriative—fan fiction rules. So, right, naturally we crave long-quest immersion in vast narratives generated by a single brain—2666, 1Q84, Infinite Jest, My Struggle, etc. The long novel has never been better exalted. (We even dig pretending our television serials are generated by a similarly consummate and mysterious Authority, the showrunner.)

  Consideration of books and writing has never before been so oppressed by the tyranny of “The Long Now”—or “present shock,” to steal a phrase from Douglas Rushkoff. Or at least it seems that way to me, permanent retrograde citizen of the out of print and out of fashion; I developed my passion for novels while working in used bookstores. I’ve spent my life since that time being baffled at how difficult it is to get a conversation started about noncanonical writing that’s more than a few years old. Even the early novels of a towering figure still among us, DeLillo, say, can seem too dwindled in the rear-view mirror. Wasn’t this supposed to be the news that stayed news? This isn’t only crankiness about late-capitalist “Tweet or Perish” publishing, or about the killing-the-father imperative that collaborates with the former to make first novels more valued, per se, than fifth novels (which are so often better). It’s crankiness about both, and if you want to tell me that I’m yelling at kids to get off my lawn, my only defense is that I’ve been wanting them off my lawn since I was a kid. In other words, I know it wasn’t better before. But it’s certainly worse now.

  My vote, therefore, for the best development in the world of books and writing during the twenty-year span of Bookforum’s existence is the miraculous appearance and persistence of the New York Review of Books “Classics” imprint. If you love this sort of thing, you know how unlikely it is, and that the shelves of used bookstores are littered with the false starts and short reigns of similar “reissue” or “reintroduction” campaign. Yes, Faulkner and Henry James are both canonical due to being reintroduced (by Malcolm Cowley and James Laughlin’s New Directions, respectively), and we owe our awareness of Henry Roth and Paula Fox and Dawn Powell to similar efforts. But that was pretty much the whole head count, right there, until Edwin Frank of NYRB, and his brilliant helpers, began, in 1999, reinjecting dozens of lost books back into a literary bloodstream starved by “presentism.” Their list numbers into the hundreds now, many, like Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy or Oakley Hall’s Warlock or Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me, just hidden from view in the fatal middle distance of minor reputation and noncontroversy. The NYRB editions of John Williams’s Stoner and Renata Adler’s Speedboat were as much the “It Books” of their respective years of republication as anything actually new, which is pretty crazy, in a good way. For dessert on top of dinner, the books are gorgeous and well bound in good paper, and offer the most gently authoritative standard paperback-series design since the original Penguins. (Their nice physical form could be seen as another reaction against our current state of ether-reality.) In all, it’s practically as good as a world littered, as it once was, with used bookstores. The crank in me is chagrined to admit that for many purposes it might in fact be better.

  —Bookforum’s twentieth-anniversary issue, 2015

  To Catch a Beat

  Brooklyn in the early eighties, like all of New York City, could still sustain innumerable hole-in-the-wall used bookstores. These weren’t moneymaking enterprises, but, rather, outposts in a minor cultural ecosystem on the verge of disappearing. They were fronted by weary men who lived in bubbles of time-gone-by that hadn’t yet burst. These men had a haunted look. As a teenage book collector with a crush on a dying guild, I did my best to apprentice myself to every one of them. I’d buy books, then hang around the counter and strike up conversations designed to flaunt my expertise, trying to insinuate my voice into the house tone of these grumpy fiefdoms. A handful of the shops gave me work, though my pay was usually taken home entirely in books.

  Under gentrification, the storefronts that had housed the bookstores I’d worked in seemed to share the same fate: they all gave way first to dry-cleaning joints, then to real-estate agents’ offices. The storefront of Clinton Street Books, in Brooklyn Heights, went through precisely those iterations after the shop closed, sometime in the late eighties. I’ve forgotten the proprietor’s name, but for a while in high school I was his afternoon sidekick. He’d leave me to man the small counter while he skulked off for coffee on Montague Street. I’d sit and make sales and look up prices in Books In Print—mostly the latter, as the shop was awfully quiet.

  Like any such store, Clinton Street tolerated a few eccentric regulars. One of these was the Beat Generation icon Herbert Huncke, who, though he was known in the forties and fifties as “the mayor of Forty-Second Street,” and ended his life living in the Chelsea Hotel, was at that time a resident of the Heights. Huncke, a major and legendary junkie, hustler, vagrant, and muse, and a minor, though vivid, writer, may or may not have been the source of the term “Beat”; he appears in lightly fictionalized form in William S. Burroughs’s Junky, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and John Clellon Holmes’s Go. He was also one of the local guides on Alfred Kinsey’s safari into the sexual underground, ushering any number of his fellow Forty-Second Street denizens to Kinsey’s Manhattan hotel room for interviews.

  Huncke was still very much the squirrely ex-con and drug fiend, but he was also marvelously unthreatening, despite a certain doomy charisma. As for books, he wasn’t buying but selling, or trying to. At some point, demonstrating characteristic munificence, Allen Ginsberg had taken a carton of copies of his poetry collection Planet News, in the distinctive square, black-and-white City Lights format that Howl made famous, and autographed every copy “To Herbert, from Allen, with love.” He then gave them to Huncke to sell periodically, in order to alleviate a day’s or a week’s worth of his lifelong dire financial straits. In the bookseller’s or collector’s jargon, a copy inscribed thus, from one major Beat figure to another, was a singular and irreplaceable “association copy”: in principle, a valuable book. The fact that dozens existed was ticklish, though: that wasn’t the level of scarcity the signature implied.

  Sometime before I began working at Clinton Street, the proprietor had taken one off Huncke’s hands, to offer for sale on the shop’s “autographed and first editions” shelf. It hadn’t sold. I remember the proprietor having to lecture Huncke, more than once, on why we couldn’t purchase a second: two were less valuable than one. He’d have to wait until the first sold before we’d relieve him of another. For months, Huncke’s rounds included dropping in to see whether the copy had been snapped up yet, because he so wanted to sell us a second. Giving him the bad news that it still hadn’t been, so that he couldn’t unload another, became one of my own regular duties. Huncke would be crestfallen. I think it drove him nuts, feeling he had this carton of riches to liquidate, and being denied. I’d shrug and wait for him to slouch back onto the sidewalk. I’d also been warned that when I was alone in the shop I should watch Huncke like a hawk, for fear that he’d shoplift—not fear, really, but the certainty he’d try. This wasn’t unusual in a bookshop in Brooklyn in 1983. You watched every customer like a hawk.

  Sure enough, one day I had the honor of joining the long procession of those who, over the decades, had laid a bust on the sweet scoundrel Huncke. He’d been browsing while I paged through Books In Print. The rare-books shelf was to my back, but I sensed activity, and turned in time to see him hurrying an item into his coat. I held out my hand, and Huncke, with saintly intensity, surrendered the article and left the store. He could have filched any number of books priced more expensively, but no: it was Ginsberg’s Planet News. He just couldn’t wait a day longer for the mome
nt when he’d be able to come in and exclaim that it had sold.

  —The New Yorker, 2011

  Footnote1

  1. Best always to keep in mind you’d be lucky even to be one.2

  2. A footnote, that is.3

  3. I teach at Pomona College, where I occupy the Roy E. Disney ‘51 Chair in Creative Writing. I’m the second occupant of the Disney Chair; the first was David Foster Wallace.4 In this sense, I’m Wallace’s footnote. Roy E. Disney was Walt Disney’s brother and business partner, generally credited with building up the financial side of the business, rather than concerning himself with creative matters; Roy is his brother’s footnote. Arguably, therefore, I may be a more fitting occupant of Roy’s Chair than Wallace, though he’ll forever “own” it in the public imagination.5

  4. David Foster Wallace is generally understood to be contemporary writing’s master of the footnote as a literary device—to such an extent that he’s often taken in some sense to be the technique’s “originator,” which is, almost needless to say, absurd on its face.6 He’s instead the footnote’s triumphant popularizer. As it happens, though, his monolithic use of footnotes in the manuscript of his canonical book, the super-long novel Infinite Jest, was converted by his editor, against Wallace’s initial preference, into endnotes—almost a hundred pages of them.

  5. I never met Wallace.

  6. Most of those inclined to recall the immediate pre-Wallace context for the literary footnote point to Nicholson Baker’s7 The Mezzanine.8 Indeed, Baker’s prominent and dazzling use of footnotes is probably even more integral, formally, to his book’s intent and purposes than those in Wallace’s fiction.9 But it’s silly to pit these two writers against one another; they’re comrades-in-arms, I think, in employing the footnote ultimately as a signifier of cognition’s bursting the linear framework of temporality—an urgent correction to the hidebound moment-to-moment progress of stuff across a printed page. What Wallace calls “brain voice” and Baker calls “the shape of thoughts” are both, ultimately, names for each writer’s request that we acknowledge the polymorphous and disobedient nature of our attentive and ruminative selves, which refuse the prison-house of experience and behavior, at least as these are traditionally represented.10