I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.
The novel is narrated in the first-person by an unidentified protagonist. The opening line sets the stage for the ambiguous dreamlike quality of the story in which not everything is made clear and the very absence of detail and explanation is vital to the enjoyment. The narrator has no name. Nor does the mysterious island which is referenced right off the bat and is of supreme importance. In both dreams and memory in real life, details blur and commingle and it becomes difficult at times to substantiate what actually occurred, but this aspect loses significance in the shadow of the larger picture. The same holds true the story being related here.
I was hiding away at home, working on my new novel. This one was about a typist who loses her voice. She goes off in search of it, accompanied by her lover, a teacher at the typing school. She consults a speech therapist. Her boyfriend massages her throat and warms her tongue with his lips, and plays songs that the two of them had recorded long before. But her voice doesn’t come back. She communicates her feelings to him by typing. The clack-clack of the keys flows between them like music, and then…
Part of the structural foundation of the narrative is a kind of story-within-a-story which takes the form of the latest novel being composed by the protagonist. The quick summary of what that story is about excerpted here is more than enough to reveal the strategic intent of this addition to the actual story being told. The novel being read is about the inherent expectations of the fragility of memory and the permanence of art. Memories which may be lost in the mind can remain forever tangible and concrete if recorded and maintained. The narrator’s novel is about losing one’s voice which is simply another formulation of the ability to compose and maintain memories by sharing them through discourse rather than the solitary act of writing. Of course, her character is forced into the act of writing as a means of preservation. This speaks to the larger idea of having police stealing memories which necessitates a host of other creative endeavors undertaken to keep them in intact.
“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men.”
Technically, the narrator at this point is engaged in conversation in which this line is an unattributed quote being recalled and said to another person. When the other person inquires as to the origin of the quote, the narrator replies quite tellingly: “I’ve forgotten, though I’m sure it was someone important.” The very fact that this quote itself can be recalled from memory, but not the origin of its source is significant in the larger thematic construction about disappearing memories. Another word for disappearing memories is censorship, of course, and nothing says censorship more starkly and in louder tones than book burning. The definitive form of memory policing is the destruction of the seemingly inherent permanence of art which reveals that seeming is not necessarily always the same as being.
