A childhood dream that can be a memory: Magical Realism and Memory in the "Ocean at the End of the Lane"

Boulberhane Mona Postgraduate student, the faculty of Philology, the department of Russian and Foreign Literature, People’s Friendship University of Russia 117190, Russia, Moscow, Miklukho-Maklaya str., 6 boulberhanemouna@gmail.com Other publications by this author     Aouati Somia Postgraduate, Faculty of Philology, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, People’s Friendship University of Russia 117198, Russia, Moscow, Miklukho-Maklaya str., 6 aouati.somia@gmail.com Other publications by this author     Saad Haider Luaibi Postgraduate student, Faculty of Philology, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, People’s Friendship University of Russia 6 Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, 117198 halzamily@uowasit.edu.iq Other publications by this author     Ahmad Mahmood Mahmood Postgraduate student, Faculty of Philology, Peoples Friendship University of Russia 117198, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Miklukho-Maklaya str., 6 ab.mahmood55@gmail.com

Khezla Mohammed Postgraduate student, Department of Architecture, Peoples Friendship University of Russia 117198, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Miklukho-Maklaya str., 6 mohcsbv@gmail.com

Introduction

Relevance of the study. The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) is one of Neil Gaiman’s noticeable novels of magical realism, since it is considered by critics as an amalgamation of unlimited peculiar imagination and a real-world setting with an ordinary child protagonist ^[1]. Moreover, this novel «shows how magical realism relates to children and how they present alternate perception of the world» ^{[2, p. 417]}.

Based on the background above, the aim of this research is to highlight the juxtaposition of imagination and reality in the novel which echoes the child protagonist’s perception of the world in parallel to that of adults. This juxtaposition marks one of the five qualities of magical realism that Wendy Faris tackled in her book Ordinary Enchantments (2004). She argues that a work of magical realism should «contain ‘irreducible element’ of magic» ^{[3, p. 7]}. Faris explains the meaning of «irreducible element», quoting Robert Young and Keith Hollaman words; Young and Hollaman state that the ‘irreducible element’ is «something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as they have been formulated in Western empirically based discourse, that is, according to logic, familiar knowledge, or received belief» ^{[4, p. 7]}. Imagination and mystery in The Ocean are mostly represented through the child’s mind and his way to memorize happenings, since the way in which a seven year-old protagonist perceives the outside world is different from how his parents or he, as a middle-aged man, perceives and comprehends things. Adults seem to choose the same way in dealing with their realities without thinking to step off it, as children usually do. The narrator of this novel affirms this claim, as he notes: «Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences» ^{[5, p. 62]}. Children have their own unlimited ways in doing things, and therefore, their perception of reality and their way of memorizing happenings are certainly different. Furthermore,this article aims to draw the link between imagination and childhood memory in The Ocean. Actually, this novel is described by Gaiman himself as being about «memory and the imagination and standing up to the dark» ^[6]. Reading its story, one can notice that the protagonist’s memories are half remembered or not truly forgotten. The whole situation seems as if the protagonist experiences a kind of daydream about his childhood events. This makes some readers wonder if the memories are real or all made up by a child’s unlimited imagination. Some others might furthermore ask where reality ends and where imagination begins.

Research objectives:The article intends to find a link between the tendency to escape from reality and the mode of magical realism in the novel. It also aims to explain the narrator’s childhood imagination and its representation in the novel, using a magical realist style. As well, the association of magical realism with the confusion between real and false memorization is one of the main tasks, analyzing the novel.

Methods. These tasks are explored in the light of psychology and memory studies.

Research materials. There have been considerable works of writers and researchers all over the world devoted to the study of magical realism in this novel (Rata, 2017; Postrak, 2018; Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, Budaya, 2021; Wyver, 2021; Hasanah, Kuncara, Astuti, 2021).

Practical significance. Discussing how magical realism enhances the issue of memory alteration in the novel, the article contributes to children’s literature criticism, in the sense that it sheds light on children’ magic realist memory and its differences in comparison with adults’ one, relating to the plot, the setting, and the characters of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Discussion and results

The narrator of the story is an unnamed middle-aged man who goes to his hometown, and then drives away there to finds himself in his childhood house. He begins to trace his childhood when he finds the place where his old friend Lettie lived for a while. Walking there, the narrator finally finds the pond, which Lettie used to call an «ocean». This ocean is actually the key word in the novel. By remembering Lettie’s ocean, the narrator suddenly remembers every single memory of his seven-year-old life. His sudden remembering of things brings to our minds the memory process which is called «cued recall» ^[7]. According to McDermott and Roediger III, the piece of information that one can retrieve is accessible information, and «accessible information represents only a tiny slice of the information available in our brains. Most of us have had the experience of trying to remember some fact or event, giving up, and then – all of a sudden! – it comes to us at a later time, even after we’ve stopped trying to remember it» ^{[8, p. 21]}.This may certainly explain the narrator’s words in the prologue of the novel, where he states: «Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me» ^{[5, p. 6]}. While remembering Lettie Hempstock’s ocean, the narrators admits: «I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything» ^{[5, p. 6]}. In an interview, the experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving argued that «the key process in memory is retrieval» ^{[9, p. 91]}. The process of retrieval, that the narrator follows, stimulates long forgotten memories that were recessed in his mind for many years. Remembering Lettie’s Ocean, the narrator suddenly remembers his seventh birthday when he was alone. He remembers his family having financial difficulties, then remembers the opal miner boarder who killed himself in the car of the narrator’s family. That is the incident when he meets Lettie and the rest of the mysterious Hempstock women, who appear in the novel as a blurring line between what really happened in his childhood and everything he has ever imagined.

The narrator’s tendency to escape from reality appears in the beginning of the novel, as he states: «I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else» ^{[5, p. 14]}. Actually, this clarifies why he is always juxtaposing his dreams with real occurrences later on in the novel. He claims in the novel: «I did not want it to exist, the bridge between my dream and the waking world» ^{[5, p. 31]}. Wendy Faris claims that the fourth characteristic of magic realism is the experience of two combining realms, like past and future, real and imaginary, waking and dream…etc. She maintains: «We experience the closeness or near-merging of two realms, two worlds» ^{[10, p.172]}. The realms of waking/dream, that the protagonist goes through, are so near-merging that he cannot tell which is which. Dealing with childhood imagination, Gaiman tries to depict the traces of reality that are buried in oblivion and «forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet», as states in the novel ^{[5, p. 5]}. The narrator is confronted with his unique perspective as a child, which has affected his understanding of all the experiences he went through. As a child, he does not seem to be treated seriously by adults. He admits: «I wanted to tell someone about the shilling, but I did not know who to tell. I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?» ^{[5, p. 31]}. Believing that adults do not understand his conception of truth, the young narrator doesn’t seek help from his parents when he passes by some doubtful situations. Instead, he tries by himself to figure out the real meaning of what happens by escaping to imaginative experiences. The philosopher Nigel J. T. Thomas maintains:

Imagination is what makes our sensory experience meaningful, enabling us to interpret and make sense of it, whether from a conventional perspective or from a fresh, original, individual one. It is what makes perception more than the mere physical stimulation of sense organs. It also produces mental imagery, visual and otherwise, which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and possibilities for the future […] ^{[11, p. 47]}.

In other words, imagination is an efficient way that one can utilizes to add meaning to his experiences; it lets him see them outside the frame of the existing reality, and therefore, helps evaluating his past memories. One of the imaginative experiences in The Ocean starts when the young narrator dreams about being forced to swallow a sharp thing, and then wakes up choking on an old coin. Describing this dream, he says: «I knew it must be a dream (but in the dream I didn’t know this, it was real and it was true)» ^{[5, p. 30]}. This dream feels so real and scary that it confuses the narrator, and leads him to seek the Hempstock’s help to figure out everything. The other dream-reality confusion of the young narrator happens after the coming of the housekeeper Ursula Monkton, with whom he goes through difficulties and gets punished by his father as a consequence. Getting locked in his bedroom, the boy lies on bed helplessly and starts to live a dreamlike reality which he remembers in great detail. It is about escaping from the room’s window into outside the property. The action seems like a dream that intrudes on the boy’s waking life, making it hard for the reader to ascertain the reality of this adventure. The narrator states just before his adventure outside the property begins: «I’m in my bed and it’s time for me to sleep now . . . I can’t even keep my eyes open» ^{[5, p. 84]}. One more time, the boy turns to the Hempstocks, as he always finds them his only comforting shelter from his harsh reality. Evidently, the young narrator lets his imagination run free every time he finds himself unable to encounter or explain the powerful world of adults; and for sure, the Hempstocks represent this imaginative part of his mind.

From what precedes, one can notice that many doubts can be raised over the young narrator’s strange adventures. These doubts make the readers hesitate to whether believe that the boy is only dreaming, or just accept that he is going through some miraculous experiences. Faris claims, in Ordinary Enchantments, that raising unsettling doubts about the magical event is also one of the five primary characteristics of magical realism. She notes: «before categorizing the irreducible element as irreducible, the reader may hesitate between two contradictory understandings of events, and hence experience some unsettling doubts» ^{[11, p. 17]}. The reader in fact doubts the magical event itself, since it appears in the novel so irreducible that it is not clear if it is a character’s dream or a miraculous reality. Moreover, Tzofit Ofengenden explains that «we use imagination, for example, to fill gaps, to cope with our memories [...] However, the extent to which imagination is involved in memory exceeds our awareness […] Every time we are confronted with inconsistent information, external counter-evidence, or a reality that is incompatible with other memories» ^[12]. The inapprehensible experiences unconsciously cause the young protagonist to add imagination to his memories, in order to cope with their roughness. As well, he attempts to fill the gaps that are caused by his inability to understand some of occurrences in his young age. For instance, he tries to fill the gaps in his mind that are caused by strange occurrences, by adding to his memory the Hempstocks’ supernatural powers. As another good point in view, the young narrator’s traumatic experience, when he discovered his father’s adultery with Ursula, made a huge gap in his mind since he could not know what it means in his young age. He says in the novel: «I did not know exactly what they were doing» ^{[5, p. 86]}. Ofengenden furthermore explains: «we add or modify information to complement the event, reconciling the gaps and providing a coherent story. Absences and gaps in memories are filled automatically and without our awareness, making our conscious experiences comprehensible and palatable» ^[12]. The boy remembers Ursula as a «flea» that appears in the form of a tent-like piece of rotting canvas, and then takes the form of a worm. Finally, it comes to their house in the form of a blond beautiful woman. The narrator accordingly has two different memories of Ursula; the first memory is the one of an ugly creature, while the second one is related to a beautiful woman who probably represents the reality of this character. The boy asks Lettie in the novel: «Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?» ^{[5, p. 123]}. Lettie’s answers him, saying: «Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t» ^{[5, p. 123-124]}. Lettie clarifies to the young narrator that monsters do not only take the form of imaginary characters; they can also be frightening things or creepy people. This perfectly explains why the narrator recalls Ursula as an ugly monster. It is simply to make his conscious experience with her «comprehensible and palatable», since she is for him no less than an abusive adult, who constantly shows him rancor and hatred.

In the novel, Gaiman stresses the narrator’s process of memorizing past impressions and experiences. The narrator notes that «Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not» ^{[5, p. 191]}. When it comes to childhood memories, people are quite different in their ways of retrieving them. In fact, memory is something that indulges in ambiguity. People may go through the same exact experience; yet, they can possibly have dissimilar views of how things really happened. So in The Ocean, when the protagonist narrates the story of some unusual events that happened in a certain period of his childhood, we should bear in mind that all what he narrates is coming from his own distinctive autobiographical memory. Furthermore, remembering the past is such a complex procedure that some of our events and memories can be deeply buried in our conscious minds. The narrator states in the beginning of the novel that «Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet» ^{[5, p. 5]}. In fact, there is a complexity in memory retrieval when it comes to childhood experiences. The Protagonist’s Memories of his childhood are conveyed to him in fragments. They seem to be for him obscured, filtered, or repressed over time. They even blur and mix together so that they seem contradictory sometimes. The narrator says: «That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long […] And the memories fade and blend and smudge together…» ^{[5, p. 50]}. Most probably, the blend or the blur that the narrator is referring to is related to his real experienced memories and the ones that he imagined. This perfectly explains why Gaiman uses magical realism in this novel. The blend of the narrator’s memories is tightly associated with the blend of realism and fantasy in magical realist novels. Flores argues that magical realism involves the blend of the real and the fantastic, or as he states, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy» ^{[3, p. 112]}. The fragmented memories of the narrator can be undoubtedly lined to the fragmentations that are resulted for the amalgamation of both real and imaginary. It is believed that magical realism, through its use of both real and fantastical elements, makes fragmentations of the world from a blatantly postmodern logic ^{[13, p.163]}.

As mentioned above, memory is not a thing that can be trusted in this novel. This is mainly due to the unreliability of the narrator’s process of remembering his autobiographical memories. The power of imagination has been constantly and productively shown in the domain of autobiographical memories. In their article «Creating bizarre false memories through imagination», Thomas and Loftus reveal that «Garry, Manning, Loftus, and Sherman (1996) demonstrated that people show increased confidence ratings that a possibly fictitious childhood event occurred after imagining that event» ^{[14, p. 423]}. They add moreover that «Goff and Roediger (1998) provided strong evidence that imagination can lead to the creation of false memories. Their results did not, however, quiet the debate regarding the creation of false memories» ^{[14, p. 423]}. Many scholars and researchers have related imagination to false memories. However, the real debate has been about whether false memories themselves come from usual script-relevant information or from bizarre unusual events. Thomas and Loftus demonstrated through experiment that «repeated imagination can affect people’s ability to later determine whether an event actually took place». Additionally, they proved that the robust effect of bizarre-imagery «was eliminated after repeated imagination. And perhaps most importantly, bizarre actions were susceptible to false memory creation» ^{[14, p. 430]}. That is to say, the repetition of imagination makes the individual lose his ability in knowing if an even really happened or not. What is more, the bizarre events for someone who repeatedly uses imagination tend to become familiar to him, and therefore lead him to create false memories.

Reflecting on the novel, the young protagonist has a constant inclination towards using imagination, especially in the hard unexplained situations of his life. This results in the creation of some false memories. The narrator states: «I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible» ^{[5, p. 64]}. The previous statement asserts that the boy constantly creates an imaginary world to escape to whenever he cannot bear his reality, like his repeated escapes to the Hempstocks for instance. This repetition to live in an imaginary world leads the boy to get familiar with it, and thus, makes him falsely claim that all those bizarre actions in his childhood have been performed. Gaiman perfectly depicts the confusion between real and false memorization, using magical realism as a part of his narrative fiction. Bowers defines magical realism as a mode that «relies upon the presentation of real, imagined and magical elements as if they were real» ^{[15, p. 21]}. As well, Faris clarifies that «magical realism combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them» ^{[11, p. 1]}. The young protagonist’s real and imaginary occurrences seem to grow indistinguishably within an ordinary context, making the fantastical seems exactly as the real.

Memories, without a shadow of doubt, can be deeply repressed in our consciousness, especially when they are traumatic. In The Ocean, the narrative is based on many traumatic events, like his witness of the opal miner’s suicide, his tough experiences with Ursula and his father, and the disappearance of his only friend Lettie. Throughout the novel, the narrator tends to let his imagination run free whenever he feels threatened or passes by a traumatic event. The creation of the supernatural in his mind seems for him the only possible way to find peace and reassurance. Gaiman mentions in the epigraph of the novel a saying of the children’s author Maurice Sendak, which perfectly applies to his young protagonist’s situation. He states: «I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let the adults know I knew. It would scare them» ^[5]. For the child protagonist, seeking adults’ help is not a solution; instead, he frequently prefers to escape to the supernatural. Escaping to the Hempstocks, for instance, enables him to find reassurance again after his witness of the opal miner’s suicide, after his terrible dream, and also after his father’s cruel punishment. As well, the shocking disappearance of the boy’s only friend Lettie, closely at the end of the narrative, made him disturbed and traumatized. According to the narrator, it is not clear what happens to Lettie. As he remembered first, Lettie is terribly injured and placed in the pond, or what she had called an ocean, to rest until she can return back to the real world again. The boy is also told that Lettie has gone to Australia. Still, he seems like he remembers this traumatic event differently. He says: «A small part of my mind remembered an alternate pattern of events and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me, and returned to my dream» ^{[5, p. 186]}. Most likely, the narrator, being young and innocent, is incapable to link the traumatic reality of Lettie’s death to her resting in the ocean.

The effects of trauma on memory are not the same when the victim is in a young age. In the article titled «Children’s Memory for Traumatic Experience», Mark L. Howe claims:

Experiencing similar events subsequent to the critical traumatic incident leads to intrusions or retroactive interference. That is, memories for these events may «blend» in a manner consistent with what we know about the schematization of multiply experienced everyday events […] Memories for corporal punishment might become blended such that although the generic memory for being physically abused might not disappear, memories for specific details and individual events might become blurred ^{[16, p. 159]}.

In other words, there is a possibility that a child’s traumatic autobiographical memories do not disappear; yet, they blend with every day’s life events and might become blurry. This in fact explains why the boy cannot exactly remember what happened to Lettie in the end. Of utmost importance and speaking about blurred memories, Loftus criticized memory-retrieval techniques advocated by therapist Renee Fredrickson. These techniques include visualization, which is used by the narrator in the discussed novel. Loftus believes that these techniques can be dangerous in the sense that they encourage patients to blur the line between their imagination and memory ^{[17, p. 137]}. The narrator recalls many childhood events through visualization. As an instance, his mental images of Lettie’s ocean and the backwoods, as well as the Hempstocks’ house, were a useful way for him to retrieve several memories. Nevertheless, this technique may give a possibility to blur the line between the boy’s imagination and the memory itself. This is exactly why we are confused, as readers, about the reality of the experiences lived by the narrator in the novel. Visualization and its tendency to blur the line between imagination and memory remind us of magical realism and its concern with blurring those thin lines between fantasy and reality in a certain literary work. Zamora and Faris argue that magical realism resists «Mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female: these are boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred, brought together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned in magical realist texts» ^{[13, p. 6]}. In The Ocean, Gaiman successfully blurs the thin lines between the young narrator’s reality and his world of imagination. The narrator himself recalls when he wakes up, choking on the coin: «I don’t remember how the dreams started» ^{[5, p. 30]}. This sentence shows that the line between reality and dream is so thin to the narrator that he becomes unable to distinguish anymore when his reality ends and his dream begins. Accordingly, using magical realism as a dominant genre in the novel was, certainly, for the purpose of explaining the young protagonist’s unique world of and his unreliable memories.

Conclusion

In closing, Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is one of the prominent magical realist books that deal with the ambiguities of children’s memory. Reading the novel, it seems that the older the narrator gets, the more he discovers the fragments and the gaps in his memories.After all, the world of children is more flexible than the world of the grown-ups; they always use hidden paths, whereas adults prefer to take official paths, as Gaiman observes in the novel. Their experiences are so filled of unlimited possibilities that it makes them accept magic as real without questioning it. In a work of magical realism, magic is supposed to be treated and accepted as ordinary by the characters, exactly as children would do. By nature, children impressively succeed to mix magic with their ordinary experiences, especially in their attempt to run away from difficulties and traumatic situations as previously discussed.

In point of fact, reality is a matter of perspectives since it depends on the person’s subjective experiences. This is even the view that postmodernism advocates, since David Bel argues that «Postmodernism dispenses with any conception of truth, claiming that no distinction can be drawn between what is claimed as truth and preference or fashion» ^{[18, p. 2]}. In view of that, the case in The Ocean at the End of the Lane is not just about running away from reality to imagination from time to time; rather, it is looking at things differently. Memory itself differs just like reality; the narrator of the novel points: «[…] you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not» ^{[5, p. 191]}. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the protagonist’s memories in The Ocean are acknowledgments and assumptions that he makes about his mental subjective childhood experiences. Assumptions of memories differ according to our backgrounds, beliefs, and even our ages. Obviously, a child and an adult have very different thoughts of how things really happen. So, one can say The Ocean at the End of the Lane a representation of the world as seen from an adulthood’s perspective, as well as childhood’s one. The prospects for further research: This paper opens the door for further researches to focus on the criticism of children's magical realistic memory not only in postmodern novels, but also in other postmodern types of literature.