Dead Memory: Walls of Separation
A dystopian graphic novel and a cautionary tale with a strong architectural art.
Systems are living forms… they, too, are born and die.
The inhabitants of an immense and possibly infinite city governed by ROM, an omniscient supercomputer, one day wake up to find a huge wall built to separate two different neighborhoods. For building it, someone used a bylaw that states that the buildings constructed in a single night don't need a permit. ROM goes silent, and the bureaucrats of the city establish a commission to 'observe, analyze, evaluate, reflect, and weigh the options.' Soon more walls are built by latent competing factions carving the city and creating dead ends while the inhabitants start forgetting words. Firmin Huff, a civil servant, is assigned to find a solution.
Dead Memory is a French graphic novel created by the acclaimed artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu and published in 2000. In 2003, Dark Horse Comics published an English translation by Helge Dascher. The comic is a powerful allegory on modern human life that is getting progressively exclusive and increasingly dependent on technology. It reminded me of several books and movies, especially dystopic ones like Brazil and 1984. The influence of Kafka is obvious in the claustrophobic artwork and the depiction of bureaucratic indifference. Even though the book was released around twenty-five years ago, the themes are still relevant, like the other artworks mentioned here.
The book is narrated in first person by ROM, a supercomputer with an existential crisis. The narrative begins with an impactful image of architectural clutter seen from high above and then zooms in on a round castle-like structure. We find a person who is later revealed to be Firmin Huff, sitting on its top with a boxy device that narrates the plot to Huff, who apparently has forgotten his past. In eight chapters sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue, a story about forgetting and relearning, a journey from rectilinear to circular foundations, is revealed.
The author uses high-contrast black and white colors to produce striking and bold images that suit the subject. The cluttered frames that include a lot of details create an eerie and claustrophobic experience for the reader. Though the concept of the city is that of a metropolis managed by an efficient system, we feel an aimlessness and inefficiency in every frame. The overdetailed and ugly human faces that scream worthlessness and bureaucratic disregard in the plot give way to more normal humanistic figures towards the end. Architectural details form the foundation for all the illustrations, which perfectly complement the theme of the book.
The graphic novel is a powerful allegory about the human tendency to depend on systems, real or virtual, for their survival. The humans in the novel thought that by delegating the decision-making to a machine, they may get time for more creative endeavors. But instead, we find them getting more complacent and being more mechanical. They lose their agency to do anything drastic. The loss of creativity makes them more exclusive, forming groups and building walls to separate each other for petty reasons. When the machine stops working, the result is the loss of their language.
Dead Memory is an allegorical dystopian tale that mirrors our current human society, which delegates its decision-making to artificial constructs. The novel cautions about a situation where we lose our agency and judgment, which in the long run may even turn the civilizational wheel in reverse by eroding our acquired culture and even languages. The book focuses on artificial separations that we create among ourselves by using walls that appear overnight in the city as a metaphor. Its art perfectly complements the Kafkaesque world that it depicts.