We Remain Largely Undefined

What are we without our memories? Who are we? And how can we be shaped? These are the questions implicitly posed by Matt Greene in his new novel, The Definitions.

The novel opens with the narrator talking about his orientation — along with a group of others — at the Center. They are housed at this boarding school or hospital-type institution because they have lost their memories. They have been told that their amnesia was caused by a virus that has wiped the memories of the general population and their stay at the institution is to rehabilitate them while they “convalesce.”

The Definitions 
By Matt Greene
Henry Holt and Co.; 176 pages

To that end, all inmates have regular classes, “Art, Physical, Politeness, Ethics, Math, The history of the Twenty-First Century: A Story of Progress, Biology” as well as “The Appreciation of Poetry.” The strangeness of these disciplines — “In Politeness we learned the Value of Restraint and the Importance of Decorum” — is echoed by the suspicious nature of the entire project. We don’t know what the project is but it seems odd. The residents of the Center themselves, whether they are students, inmates, patients or guinea pigs speculate about the truth of their guardians’ history or intentions.

What is not in doubt is that the students have, largely, lost their memories. Sometimes they recover fragments, but mostly they learn and remember words. The narrator gives us lists of words that are discovered or rediscovered. And the delight that he and his colleagues get from definitions is infectious beyond the book, leaping out into the reader.

We had a shared interest in definitions… there were so many we didn’t know…. It didn’t make sense for there to be two words with the same definition, like a collarbone and a clavicle and none for other things like the crease at the top of a nose, the day after tomorrow or the hot feeling at he back of your neck when something happened that didn’t feel fair. To make sense of this we decided there must be subtle differences between words that appeared the same that we’d failed to discern e.g., chair versus bench.

The book makes definitions — those crucial distinctions that allow us to understand our world and ourselves — suddenly feel less simple, less self-evident. This defamiliarization begins with words, but leads to the whole of our perceived reality. First year Philosophy undergraduates at Oxford in England famously walk around in an existential haze for the week that they learn these same lessons of how lines that are drawn between words fade into philosophical and practical differences. Common sense distinctions between “Chair” and “bench” and “table” (the examples that Greene and his narrator and those Oxford students all use) are undermined by examination. And without the thick slab of social norming that is absent from this isolated life, the strangeness lingers.

The thin, oddly twisted culture the insiders receive from teachers is supplemented by “cartridges.” These seem to be videos of twentieth century television shows which are so influential among the population that almost all of the characters are named for characters in the shows. Maria and Chino are straight out of West Side Story but from Friends come the majority including “countless Rachels, thirty or so Chandlers, twenty-six Phoebes… But only one Gunther.”

The nameless narrator is curious, child-like, and — as with most of the other residents — mostly ineffectual. Whether nameless or named, though, characters evince real identity to neither reader nor resident. We forget that Maria is just named for the Natalie Wood role in a long forgotten movie or that the sole Gunther is named for the surly waiter of the Friends Central Perk cafe. But, I suppose, we forget that our friends are named for their relatives or for random celebrities all the time.

As Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders point out in the final episode of their seminal podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, SF (whether it’s Science Fiction or Speculative Fiction) is not about predicting the future but rather about seeing the future seeing the present through half a turn of a futuristic lens. That is exactly what Greene is trying to do here in terms of how we understand ourselves, our history and our reasons for being here on earth in the face of the general amnesia provoked by ever faster cycles of propaganda, popular culture, and infotainment.

The lessons, though, are subtle, there’s no yelling didacticism here.

This short novel by Greene, author of Betty Trask Award winning novel Ostrich (2013) and a memoir, Jew(ish) (2020), is both elusive and thought-provoking. While we, as readers, grow frustrated by the characters’ inability to push through the veil of the kindergarten we also identify with them — their small epiphanies, their high school exploration of sexuality, their unwillingness to bite the hand that feeds them. We want them to revolt and find out the truth (like in Wayward) but the novel resists any such easy resolution.