Some Mutterings on Memory in the Stories of Ted Chiang

A subject originally represents nothing more than the following fact: he can forget.

—Jacques Lacan

            In the hypothetical reality of Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation,” a conscious automaton builds a surgical work station comprised of four prisms that reflect a light source in an angled circuit.  Seated at this station, the automaton has a clear view of the back of its own head, which it then proceeds to take apart with a set of remote-control manipulators in order to learn about its brain.  Placing pieces of its inner mechanisms on viewing platforms around the station, the automaton gradually displaces itself across the immediate space of the room.  In a beautifully alienating passage, Chiang describes the automaton’s experience:

As I contemplated this vista, I wondered where my body was.  The conduits which displaced my vision and action around the room were in principle no different from those which connected my original eyes and hands to my brain.  For the duration of this experiment, were these manipulators not essentially my hands?  Were the magnifying lenses at the end of my periscope not essentially my eyes?  I was an everted person, with my tiny, fragmented body situated at the center of my own distended brain.  It was in this unlikely configuration that I began to explore myself.

The automaton’s reason for conducting this experiment upon itself is because of “a great unsolved mystery” at the heart of automaton anatomy: “the question of memory.”  The image of the automaton’s skull carefully deconstructed, its internal components arranged around the work station, provides a striking contrast to what the robot actually seeks to locate: the original and irreducible source of memory.  The automaton explains through its narration that some automatons believe in the “inscription hypothesis,” which holds that all memory is mechanically inscribed on tiny flakes of gold contained within each automaton’s head.  The narrator rejects this theory, opting instead for the hypothesis that memories “were stored in some medium in which the process of erasure was no more difficult than recording: perhaps in the rotation of gears, or the positions of a series of switches.”  Unlike a Borgesian library of Babel, in which every possibility is inscribed somewhere in print, the automaton’s medium theory implies that possibilities vanish as easily and commonly as they appear, hence explaining why personal memories of the past are incomplete.

            “Exhalation” isn’t Chiang’s only venture into the mysterious ineluctability of memory and its loss.  His most well-known story, 1998’s “Story of Your Life” (on which Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival was based), dealt with the seemingly paradoxical experience of remembering the future.  Another entry in Chiang’s recently published second collection (also titled Exhalation), “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” deals with the relationship between memory and writing, and with the gut-wrenching shock of having our memories proven inaccurate.  Memory circulates like oxygen in Chiang’s stories, surfacing in various ways, from the intimately personal to the culturally collective: “Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently,” writes the narrator of “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction”; “for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself.  So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.”  In this tale, which juxtaposes a retelling of tribal dispute among oral cultures with an account of the social implications of Remem (a personal memory recording device), the narrator explores the various applications of memory at different social scales.  Depending on what memory is being used for, factual precision may not be ideal.

            The avenues of memory are a bit trickier in Chiang’s award-winning “Story of Your Life,” in which the narrator is tasked with translating an alien language.  In his story notes, Chiang writes that he conceived the story as an expression of the mystery of memory according to variational physics, in which (as Einstein’s relativity tells us) there is no absolute time.  Given this notion, scientists have asked why we experience time sequentially—as a present preceded by past moments that we can recall (to varying degrees), and followed by future moments that remain unknowable to us.  If time is, in reality, tenseless—having no objective orientation of past, present, and future—then, theoretically, we should be able to remember the future.  Chiang’s story explores the implications of this possibility, particularly as they relate to the premise of free will:

The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future.  And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it.  Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

            Or was it?  What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person?  What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

“Story of Your Life” is impressive for the beauty of its effort to give readers a sense of how one might accept knowledge of the future, which implies the absence of free will.  If one already knows how one will act, then one doesn’t choose the action.  The act is predetermined.  Chiang realizes the absurdity of this premise, which is why the implications are so profound.  It’s virtually impossible for us to square free will with knowledge of the future; the two just don’t go hand in hand.  For someone who knows the future, it wouldn’t make sense to ask about free will.  Such a question simply has no meaning in the context of “simultaneous consciousness,” as Chiang calls it.  One simply remembers the future, so to speak, and acts according to her memories.

            There is, however, an interesting conflation occurring within my own discussion of this topic—not a conflation on Chiang’s part, but on the phraseology I’ve adopted here for discussing sequential consciousness.  Specifically, we refer to our knowledge of the past as memory, when speaking personally, and history when speaking collectively; but at the basis of all knowledge is memory and commemoration.  Our histories depend on the recordings of those who remember events; but as Chiang’s narrator insists in “Exhalation,” our personal memories of the past are incomplete.  We do not remember every event that happened to us since our births.  Why, then, if we had memories of the future, should we expect those memories to be complete and infallible? 

            It’s worth pointing out that, when referring to the future in “Story of Your Life,” Chiang uses the word “knowledge” rather than “memory.”  What the narrator experiences in her “sequential consciousness” is less memory than a complete knowledge of her lifespan, which makes sense given that her simultaneous experience of past and future derives from her learning an alien language.  Once she internalizes the alien language, her personal history is effectively inscribed within it, and manifest in her performance of it.  It’s as though her consciousness is a script that she reads in every act she makes.  In other words, there’s a distinction between memory and knowledge, at least insofar as they operate in “Story of Your Life”; but this distinction is less defined in “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” in which one of the characters differentiates between two kinds of knowledge: rightness (presumably, moral rightness) and precision, or factual accuracy.  Both qualify as knowledge, but precision implies memory; the two overlap.  What we see emerging in these texts is a set of insinuations: that knowledge implies accumulation, whereas memory implies deletion.  Knowledge of the future is related to memory of the future, but the two are not interchangeable.

            I’m not suggesting that Chiang commits the error of treating these terms as interchangeable; rather, the way he employs them reveals where they diverge.  And here we may introduce another term, one that falls somewhere between memory and knowledge: inscription—that is, writing, record, documentation.  As the automatons in “Exhalation” who believe the inscription theory proclaim, writing offers the possibility for perfect memory, all things that have happened in their pasts inscribed on gold filaments and available to them individually, if they can only access each filament.  Yet this is not the case, as the narrator of that story reminds us.  We forget, like the automatons of “Exhalation” forget.  Not only that, but we can recreate knowledge through the augmentation of memory, as the narrator of “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” suggests.  Throughout Chiang’s oeuvre, he revisits the question of memory and its relationship to knowledge and language, reminding readers of the strange pathways through which our memories manifest themselves.  It wouldn’t be misguided, I think, to say that memory just might be the thematic centerpiece of his perpetually delightful and moving prose.

*Ted Chiang's Exhalation: Stories was released earlier this month through Alfred A. Knopf