Dead Memory

 
Dead Memory
by Marc-Antoine Mathieu
translated by Helge Dascher

Dark Horse Comics

2004

 

 

I really liked Marc-Antoine Mathieu's The Museum Vaults, a comic about an explorer mapping a giant, endless Louvre, when I read it a few years ago. Unfortunately, I found Dead Memory, which I just finished, unsatisfying.

 
Dead Memory is a relatively short graphic novel set in an infinite city that's beset by crisis. It's told in voiceover flashback as an ineffectual bureaucrat listens to a recording that narrates his failed efforts.
The city is densely built and mostly laid out like a grid. One night, a brick wall appears and blocks a road. It goes straight from the edge of a building on one side of the street across to the other, so no one can go around without going around the buildings, and it's too tall to easily climb.

 
More walls appear, then lots more. The city government wants to study the problem, but not do anything so rash as to act on it. They assign the bureaucrat to take measurements of the new walls that are quickly strangling everyday life. We keep seeing overhead maps with more and more diagonal walls chaotically carving up the grid of the city.

 
Also, everyone is losing their memories and forgetting how to talk. Somehow the two problems are related?
 

The most interesting scene, I thought, was when the bureaucrat went to the observatory to look through a telescope at a further-away part of the city to understand the extent of the problem. But in looking out over space, he's also looking back in time. All he can say for sure is that there weren't any walls over there at that point in the past. I thought this was a fun reimagining of how astronomy works.

 
Anyway, eventually the bureaucrat goes to the central computer, who like, sort of runs things, and sort of acts as advisor to the human government. It turns out, the computer did it! The computer also made the recording the guy will start listening to in the next scene. The computer resented being the responsible for remembering everything and making all our decisions, so it somehow engineered both the walls and the progressive amnesia. 

 
This is maybe a metaphor for the internet, I guess? Or the way writing and then printing supplanted the oral tradition and ended the ability of any one person to hold all their culture's knowledge inside their head? I don't really know what point Mathieu was trying to make here.

 
Anyway, then the bureaucrat turns off the computer, the walls fall down, people get their memory's back, the guy starts listening to the recording, and everyone starts using the bricks to build new walls that intersect the city grid in the form of concentric circles. What this is supposed to metaphorically illustrate, I have no idea. The end. 

 
Don't bother with this one, go read The Museum Vaults instead.