In the stream of conscience: memory & ??

"Amnesiascope" By Steve Erickson

I'm late to Steve Erickson's oeuvre. The book, with its sleek cover design (UK's Quartet Books) and curious title, beckoned to me from the shelves of Paperbacks Plus. I read a couple of paragraphs in the store and decided to give it a try.

It's not exactly sci-fi and it's not exactly speculative, but the element of a setting that differs very much from the one we exist in is enough for me to pay the appropriate amount of attention (much like the futuristic vision of London in Tony Maylam's Split Second starring Rutger Hauer-- i.e., not very futuristic at all-- just different). Particularly of note is Erickson's "post-quake" rendering of L.A.

The narrator, apparently a  literary doppelganger semi-autobiographical representation of the author himself (referred to in a correspondence as 'S'), is a man in pursuit of memory. In existential terms, one could say he is in pursuit of that which is his very essence. There is mention of his past, his loves, his losses, regrets-- no chapters, only ellipses and divisions of streams by fancy marks-- but there is no real mention (nothing detailed) of the event that set his present in motion. He works as a movie critic for an unnamed paper and is part of a supposed "cabal" of writers and editors that conspire to do... (?) and he lives in an old hotel-- transformed into something like an apartment complex-- run by a suave Palestinian "terrorist" named Abdul.

Los Angeles is a shell of its former self, seemingly populated by shady men and seductive women, the latter of which being much more intelligent than their masculine counterparts. The reason for this, what Erickson does here, is not by design so much as it is by necessity. His narrator is bright, self searching, sensual by degrees of subtlety, and cannot function without a woman in his life. Viv, the most important of these women, his lover, departs for Holland to point a "Memoryscope" toward L.A. in an effort to "balance" her project, and as a result, his life becomes more complicated and devoid of meaning. His car is stolen, the paper he works for is falling into disarray, and his "fake review" of a "fake film" called "The Death of Marat" is turning into a nightmare of very real proportions.

Some of the better moments in the book involve the narrator's cinematic endeavors. He recalls his journey from novelist to critic, and even more interestingly, appropriates a chance meeting with an interesting woman in a bar in a screenplay for a project Viv conceived called, *White Whisper. Unlike many introspective efforts about artists, Erickson's narrator is active. He doesn't lounge in perpetuity. He doesn't idly ponder or too deeply intellectualize his search for meaning. For recovery of memory, his only bastion in a world that is difficult to define. Hell, he doesn't drink to the point of incoherent ramble or consume gargantuan quantities of drugs in this search. No. He's a workhorse. He simply exists.

When the female hotel residents seek to have the already demoted Abdul removed from the premises, he inquires to the veracity of their damning claims, saying that when the truth comes out-- if in fact the allegations are true-- he will sign their petition, but until then, it's a no go. He doesn't bow to bullying or reactionary mentalities. He is, for all intents, a creature of ethics.

In Viv's absence, he is impetuous and unsure. Erickson makes it apparent. The narrator kowtows to the bar seductress's (Jasper) need for him. Something is wrong. And he caves. He goes to her secluded residence and gets sucked into a strange interrogation that refers back to an event that may or may not have happened.

"It was you in Berlin."

Hmm.

At some point there is a loss of time, and he wakes up floating in a tank flooded with water. Jasper is with him. He later gets his stolen car back and drives across the western states, eventually ending up at a film festival he was invited to... in an absurd completion to his joke taken absurdly "too far," showing The Death of Marat.

Erickson's writing is sharp, intelligent, lacking in pretension, and most importantly, funny. *The film White Whisper is a confessional film wherein women are interview by an artist while she paints them. They are nude in the interview. At some point the narrator himself is injected into a scene, nude so he can feed the artist lines. The justification for it was a beautiful display of what feminism should be. Logical and equitable.