So I still love The Following Story, and the goal is to finish it for the coming week today. While I was catching up on the life as fiction/déjà vu blog I kept returning to this work and the focus that Nooteboom seems to have on the power of memory and dreams. His work also seems to encompass many of the themes we are discussing in class, but I won’t get into that until I finish it for the second time.
The reoccurrence of memory and dreams I noticed I marked quite a bit while reading it the first time and I am struck by it again as I continue to read on. Some of my favorite quotes that address memory and dreams are as follows:
“There’s nothing better than a full-blown déjà vu…”
“…I must settle down to the business of memory…”
“Dreams are closed systems, in which everything fits to perfection.”
“I had a thousand lives and I took only one…”
“To a large extent, you already existed before you had anything to do with it at all.”
“The world is a never-ending cross-reference.”
“Some people are fated to have been everywhere before.”
Nooteboom recognizes, as did Nabokov whom he seems to be a fan of, that memories and dreams have the power to change the world we encounter and how we view it. He frequently writes about eternal recurrence and being where we have been before. As he writes “the world is a never-ending cross-reference” for something we have experienced before. And it is not just some people that are “fated to have been everywhere before,” but all of us are experiencing déjà vu whether we realize it or not.
Nooteboom’s work combines all three tenses into the tale of one man and his remembrance of things past and his own realization of his future. Musserr through his journey is living through the past, present and future, and we as readers experience it as well. We all are within all tenses when we experience déjà vu. A realization/remembrance of something within one moment about our past and in turn our future as well, because we will return to that moment time and time again whether we realize it or not.
We have been everywhere before and our whole life is an act of remembering everything we have forgotten. These memories often return as dreams and then are realized in a more jumbled form in our waking reality. As Nooteboom writes, ““Dreams are closed systems, in which everything fits to perfection,” and it seems that only when we wake to they become misunderstood.
P.S. Nooteboom also mentions Mnemosyne on page 64. Speak, Mnemosyne for all you Nabokovians.
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