Doomsday

Last week, I wrote about dreams, and how the father denied himself the escape offered by good dreams, instead preferring nightmares, or better yet, reality. In this week’s reading I was again struck by the father’s refusal to let go of his chokehold on reality, this time by refusing to relive good memories.

The father in The Road strives not to remember. “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins…So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (McCarthy 131).

I think the father’s reluctance to remember is more than just concern for the origins of the memory. If he allows himself to be distracted by a memory, even for a second, it could be fatal.  This, I think, is why he leaves the mother’s picture in the road – to remember her would be to damage her even further, but more importantly, would damage himself.

In The Albertine Notes, the junkies are forever chasing good memories, looking for relief from life after the bomb. Either that, or they’re trying to jump into the future, desperately seeking to experience something, anything, other than the present. By using Albertine, they’re destroying their ability to remember, but they don’t care about the forgetting, the “brownout” in their brains caused by the drug (Moody 181-183).

The concept articulated by McCarthy, above, that remembering something inevitably causes the memory itself to change, is the basis of Moody’s ahistorical remembering phenomenon. If the act of recollection can change one’s experience of a memory (becoming numb to a painful experience, a first impression colored by the ensuing relationship, etc.) why stop there? Why not be able to change the very reality that created the memory in the first place?

This week, I was intrigued by the difference between coping methods in the post-apocalyptic worlds of The Albertine Notes and The Road. Everyone in The Albertine Notes seems consumed by escapism. The junkies are obsessed with using the drug, the dealers are obsessed with selling the drug, and even the Resistance movement is singlemindedly fighting in the past and the future to stop the spread of the drug. No one, it seems, is very interested in rebuilding present-day Manhattan, or even moving away from the wasteland and starting over.

I get this. When everything falls apart (even on a non-apocalyptic scale), it’s tempting to hide under the covers, self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, or food, obsess over controlling the little things, and refuse to acknowledge reality.

What I don’t understand is, in The Road, the father’s total rejection of the comfort of his dreams. He is living in a terrible, horrible, post-apocalyptic world, and he is “learning how to wake himself” from dreams of a world with flowering forests, birds, and bright blue skies. He mistrusts good dreams, believing “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death” (McCarthy 18).

I understand he has a responsibility to his son, and he can’t afford to get lost in a dream world, but I find it hard to believe that the best solution is to sleep with only nightmares for company. In a world where every-day waking life is a nightmare, wouldn’t it be more beneficial (to maintain humanity, sanity, hope, etc.) to take solace in whatever small comforts are available? I don’t think that’s a luxury, or too indulgent. Or is it just too much of a slippery slope?

“Our city was outside of history now, beyond surveillance (144).” The post-apocalyptic NYC is after the period of recorded events and what is happening will only exist in people’s memory. The memory of the surviving New Yorkers becomes the true landscape of the post-blast New York City.

It’s interested that the widespread use of Albertine suggests that people are trying to escape their presence in their memories. They are willing to risk experiencing unpleasant memories to get what they were after, whether it’s Kevin trying to recapture moments with a childhood crush or Cortez enduring a traumatic experience to find Addict Number One.

The value of memory is explicit in this narrative. Lee says,“Nobody wants to have anything to do with a forgetter (186).” Those with perfect recall are the most respected. Cortez wants to disguise the origins of the drug and those who know or trying to discover it are seen as valuable and targeted: Addict Number 1, Kevin Lee, and the Brooklyn College professors. People are disappeared by being murdered in memories, but the characters are not time traveling but traveling in their own mind and the collective unconscious of the city.

Chuck Klosterman says, “Life is rarely about what happens but it’s about what you thought happened? Which has more validity in the story? The real events or the memory of events? It seems with the disappearing of people that the memories are more real than the actual presence. The novella reflects on the imperfection of memory that society relies so heavily upon.

Here are the facts:

Post nuclear holocaust in the Big Apple, a nosey P.I. – ahem – journalist, snoops around for a scoop on Albertine, the mysterious drug that brings your memories to life.

You’ve heard it all before. “Right-Livelihoods” has voice-over narrative, investigation, a dark and dreary world, even a Femme Fatale, in the withered form of Cassandra. Kevin asks her for a kiss then justifies it by calling it a “reality-testing question” – right. She already “guessed” his name, hometown, scoop etc. it’s Kevin that should be testing his own reality.

Which brings us to the Cassandra complex, a psychosis put forth by Jung and explored in the film, 12 Monkeys, and plays a key role in the “Right-Livelihoods.” The Cassandra Complex directly challenges our notion of linear time, as any prophesy does, by positing a reality where the future or the past can be experienced in the present.

Sometimes I feel when I’ve planned a busy week in advance that I’m not actually living in the present, rather fulfilling a predetermined role or just putting my body in the right place at the right time. Our notions of free will seem to be based heavily on future consequences. Our notion of meaning often works the same way – for some, a meaningful dream turns sour when discovered it is a dream. What is meaningful for Kevin in his sad situation? The case? The explosion?

But all this veers away from the noir analogy.

The classic Bogart detective treads through the rain and night in his trench coat, finding temporary relief in the company of slinky red dresses and cigarettes and cares for no one but himself. Amidst murder and vice, he acts as if it’s the end of the world and he just doesn’t care. Noir rings true with a sort of neo-apocalypse the same way Westerns like “Pat Garret and Billy the Kid” do, by portraying single characters in the face of darkness and destruction all around them.

There is a sort of pathetic machismo that arises in these lonely survivors.

After reading the ending of Rick Moody’s “The Albertine Notes,” I wish I had something more to say than “wow!” At the end of this novella, I feel a bit disoriented and wonderfully shocked– just something I would imagine coming off of an Albertine high would feel like. This is mostly because of the non-linear form of storytelling Moody takes up in order to match the memories of the protagonist, Kevin Lee. The progression of the story reminds me of the movie “Memento” where the main character has lost the ability to create any new memories and, thus, resorts to tattooing notes on himself and avenging the misremembered murder of his wife several times. Memory is such an important aspect of our lives because, without it, we would have no way of even beginning to create a sense of self.

The issue of a loss of the sense of time is also very interesting in “The Albertine Notes” and makes this story just a little harder to grasp. At one point, Kevin Lee looks at his watch and says that he is amazed that Rolex-knockoff survived the electromagnetic impulse from the Blast. I wonder if  with the catastrophe, the sense of time among the survivors has changed to begin with because many timepieces and electronics that keep us in this fast paced world have been destroyed. Then, when Kevin Lee begins his addiction, this disparity between a “personal” time and the “real” time (which in and of itself is just a construct) evolves.

Finally, I really like the idea of Albertine as drug that can help us live and relive our memories while making us forget partly because it is such a beautiful paradox and partly because it is such a normal human desire. Living in the past is something we already do in order to keep ourselves from having to experience the Present. This drug seems possible in the not-so-distant future and this is just one aspect of this story that makes it a very good science fiction piece.

Albertine was an exciting read with Byzantines twists and a strange familiarity to the Book of Revelation. I loved  the parallels between Kevin’s “calling”/assignment and John’s calling to record a prophetic revelation. Of course there are some stark differences: Kevin was called by a drug lord with an abusive past, he consumes  harmful addictive substances and  focuses largely upon memories and the distant past. John on the other hand was summoned by God(a moral authority not the only authority as presented  by the character of  Cortez) and looks towards a “bright” future. Whether or not he was experiencing a drug induced vision, its not for me to judge but both men have other worldly experiences. Their assignments were very different but very similar on a fundamental level- a quest for truth.

On a side note the portrayal of women is also quite similar to that of Revelation. The image of the whore/prostitute,  Jezebel/deceiver appears in this seemingly secular rendition of the Apocalypse in New York City. I wonder if this was a result of the author’s prior social conditioning to the apocalyptic culture of the United States  and their protrayal of women? Or was this intentional on his part? I know we are not supposed to analyze literature based upon what the author might have intended but it would make a difference if he did this for example deliberately as opposed to occurring simply by accident.

The Albertine Notes invokes many of the common themes of apocalyptic thought. In many ways, I am reminded of “Twelve Monkeys.” Both the novella and the movie have a cyclical nature. In “Twelve Monkeys,” Bruce Willis relives his memory of seeing a man being shot in an airport only to find that he has witnessed his own death. In Albertine Notes, Kevin Lee is obsessed with Serena, a girl he loved who was dating another man. Eventually, he finds out that his mother, the microbiologist, gave him a drug, which he gave to Serena who gave it to her boyfriend, Irving, who became Addict Number One of the Albertine drug. It involves a twisted cycle of growing awareness, realization and remembering the truth. The epidemic ravaged Earth’s population in “Twelve Monkeys” while Albertine is referred to as an epidemic. Both Bruce Willis and Kevin Lee go back in time to try to prevent the catastrophe. Finally, both Bruce Willis and Kevin Lee will die in the attempt.

There is a haunting quality in Rick Moody’s post-apocalyptic world, in which we see just enough of ourselves to be convinced of its possible existence. The uranium bomb used by Cortez or some other man reflects the increasing public awareness of the nuclear arms race and the potential for destruction that so many countries now possess. The proliferation of drugs everywhere mimics the reliance on Albertine in Kevin’s world. (In my middle school, we all knew who the resident drug dealer was, and mind you, I went to one of the higher rated public schools in the city.) Finally, Moody touched on an interesting point when he chose memory to focus on. Everyone wants to relive moments in her own life, snippets of time and experience which would bore anyone else to tears. In that sense, Albertine increases urban isolation, further cementing the idea that we are alone, especially in an urban dystopia.