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?