Tight Places
Two posts ago, I mentioned that the unnamed protagonist of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, is a fiction writer. That's right, Ms. Ogawa, who is a fiction writer, has written a novel about a woman writing a novel (Ow! My head hurts). In fact, her writing is central to the story and is quoted at length—always in italics. Her editor, identified as R, is the man she shelters in a hidden room in her house, as he is one of those people able to remember disappeared things and is thus at risk of being taken by the Memory Police. They also become lovers.
The protagonist’s writing tends to mirror and reflect what is going on in the story. I’ve mentioned how the first three books she’s published are about a woman searching for a vanished lover, a woman who loses her leg in an accident, and a young woman nursing a younger brother who suffers from an illness which is destroying his chromosomes. All three of these stories are reflected in the larger narrative.
The first quoted excerpt from the protagonist is in its own new chapter with the text in italics—this is the protagonist’s latest writing, which she claims isn’t going very well.
It begins: “I climbed the staircase, so narrow I wondered how I’d get past should I meet someone coming down.”
This story, written in first person, has to do with an unnamed protagonist climbing the stairs to a tower where she hopes to meet her lover, a typing instructor. However, “When I find myself there, I always feel as though I’m in a lighthouse.” Then the protagonist describes a memory of being a little girl and visiting a lighthouse with an older cousin. She imagines being pursued up a winding staircase by a frightening lighthouse keeper, and ultimately, that her cousin and the keeper have disappeared.
‘Kay.
We can see here the themes of the story—a hidden room where a lover waits, a feeling of dread focused on an ominous pursuer, and the disappearance of people. The story is dream-like, best B. Heavily, and also very fairy-tale/allegory-esque, as we mentioned last time. Can we also say it is a mise en abyme? —an embedded story that reflects a bigger one? Sure. The protagonist’s writing mirrors the larger narrative that she’s a part of. She is working on a novel about a young woman who enrolls in a typing school and who develops an erotic connection with the mercurial instructor. This man controls her, gently but firmly, moving her fingers to the correct position on the typewriter (remember those?) when she makes an error. He is enigmatic and one-dimensional, never revealing his own feelings. He and the protagonist embark on an affair conducted in a sort of tower reached by the narrow staircase—probably not such a good idea for the student. He eventually imprisons her there, using her sexually, a treatment she submits to. She loses her voice and begins to lose control over other faculties so that the instructor feeds her as if she’s an infant.
‘Kay.
The most concrete among us can perhaps see the themes here of control and disappearance. There’s also an interesting contrast between the very constrained and modest demeanor of the protagonist and the racy nature of her fiction writing, which reads at times almost like erotic fantasy.
After one excerpt from her story, the protagonist writes: “I realized the woman in my novel had also become trapped in a tight place…I had imagined that the two of them, bound by a warmer and more ordinary affection, would wander off to search for her voice in a typewriter factory or in a lighthouse…but somehow things had ended up like this. It happened quite often that my writing went far astray from what I’d imagined before I started…”
Here, Ms. Ogawa is describing a phenomenon many writers can identify with—the experience of characters seeming to take over their stories, despite the obvious control of the writer. And of course, this passage also relates to the themes of the story. Some mysterious and powerful force is in charge of the protagonist’s life.
The last excerpt is placed near the end of the novel. It begins: “Sometimes it strikes me as strange that I don’t hate him more. I should curse him and beat him, find any way I can to do him harm though I know it would do no good. After all, he deceived me, stole my voice and shut me up in this place.”
The character in the protagonist’s novel waits for the instructor to visit her but realizes he’s involved with a new woman. As she and the instructor approach the room where the character is imprisoned, the character is “absorbed silently into the room, leaving no trace…The final moment has arrived.”
This leads to the final chapter of The Memory Police where, as we will see, art imitates life (or art within art imitates life).
Till next time.
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