Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon
When Chaos decides to leave Hartford, a small mid-American town, to find the truth behind the Disaster that has occurred. His friend, Edge, informs him that he is looking for a “whole new paradigm” (p 28) when he leaves with Melinda, the seal girl who is covered in fur. The world unfolds like a sideshow, a typical American myth, as Chaos moves into another, the road trip. The world promises a variety of narratives and stories that need to be discovered. Rather than colliding with each other, they co-exist in a fragile state of making a whole. Lethem looks for different ways of exploring the world, with the idea of the horse replaced by the car and or walking between the worlds. The wild frontier of the Western is replaced by the idea of the open road.
In a sense the apocalypse provides Lethem with the perfect post-lapsarian world. After paradise has disappeared, Kellogg has the chance to discover and remake the world. As he and Melinda move across in America in search of something that he cannot quite comprehend. He sees new tribes like the McDonaldonians, who make burgers but have to make a certain amount each time, regardless of the demand. The aliens could equally be seen as the tribes of small town America, like Sherrill’s M, all equally strange and wonderful, as if the world can be anew. Perhaps it can, as it is remade by the author. The cowboy’s trip on the horses, the open road and science fiction all come back to seeing the world in a different light and moving away from a comfort zone.
As he is constantly reminded, Chaos cannot remember anything outside of some dreams. As he moves through the word he comes across a computer which insists on calling him Everett. As he travels, he dreams which affect him, he does think that “the dreams seem designed, either by the computer or some part of his sleeping self, to nudge him towards speculations about his life before” (p 69). Since they affect everybody, the dreams are a way if him re-working the world and fashioning it into something different. It reminds me of Wednesday’s dreams in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the dreamscape shattering ones which alert him to the potential futures. His dreams force him to leave the safety of the community.
When he reaches San Francisco, the spiritual home of hippies, Chaos is told that the world had come to an end and that he is living in his own dream which is also a construct. The revelation echoes the end of John Crowley’s Engine Summer, though he moves forward and decides to continue living the dream. Rather than being afraid, he takes the world and decides to make it his own. Escaping the confines of one genre gives Amnesia Moon a sense of forgetting itself and finding itself, which perhaps is the point of the post-lapsarian world. He sees the maker in the sun, visible only by squinting, but merely moves on rather than being scared of him, taking the promise of free will to its full.
Earlier post on Jonathan Lethem.