Tony Lopez’s False Memory brings together eleven sequences, most of them published separately in magazines and chapbooks through the 1990s, but each identical in form – ten largely unrhymed sonnets, often but not always in pentameter or hexameter – and all interlinked, unquestionably part of a common project. It proceeds by quotation – it is possible that every one of the 1,540 lines is found, rather than authored – but these quasi-centos pick their materials from all the white noise of life in 1990s Britain; from style supplements to genetic science, from management slogans to critical theory, from advertising copy to sound engineering. These snatches of language are stitched back together in surreal and often amusing or satirical ways:
Hold fingers
Horizontally touching your forehead
To show the amount. Tongue and groove boarding
In a plausible context, one of the plots
Is newly dug. These are voluntary targets
A little nonplussed by your stoical charm
Having issued writs, free pens and mouse mats.
A strip of brain tissue that hugs the surface
Causing a massive increase in drag. Implants could
Translate prejudice directly into votes:
A whole panel of buttons that must be pushed.
Pain without cognition. No other network
Covers more of the UK population.
Throughout there appear fleeting analogies for Lopez’s own procedures: “We’d admit to a little steal or two / And call it literary allusion – now is that high class or what?”; “in those days it was paste-up or shut up / If you catch my drift: translation rights, short-term options. / Those dupes think Burroughs invented the cut-up / By spreading his payments over four months”; “whereas all we have here is a cheap ventriloquist routine / Which ought to hold down the ‘Care in the Community’ budget”.
The effect of reading these sequences is complex. On the one hand, the exchange of a single, personal voice for this barrage of severed quotations can feel sinister; a play of surfaces without substance, suggesting an almost nihilistic disgust at the vacuity of language. At the same time, Lopez has not removed himself entirely from the poem, since his selection of materials is evidently careful and significant. So one starts concentrating on those specific choices (the blending of economic, genetic, linguistic, political and commercial diction, for example) only to be nagged by echoes and repetitions, evidence of complex patterning. One of the early sonnets turns out to be completely rhymed: the next pair offer a chiasmus of full rhymes with one alteration (“pay” for “play”). A handful of pairs of sonnets echo a word in each matching line; sometimes these echoes are several pages apart, stretching recall.
For a while, when one first becomes aware of these structures and patterns, one pays less attention to specific details and more to their arrangement. Lopez seems to have anticipated this: “A complex pattern”, “Systems with many degrees of freedom”, “stabilise a chaotic array”, “You can split chaos from pure noise or fold it back in”: embedded lines like these (and there are many) keep in tension the ideas of order, chaos and complexity, simultaneously encouraging and discouraging the reader’s desire to find order in the flux.
False Memory is, in some ways, a dynamic picture of the information and disinformation (“a trillion bits per second”) available to cultural memory, amenable to all sorts of arrangement and disarrangement. Events once offered to us as a narrative – political decisions, for instance, or notions of development, whether in terms of real estate or of genetics and evolution – are unmoored, returned to us as detached units of data and language; and a related challenge is glimpsed, especially in “Studies in Classic American Literature”, as to what might constitute or construct a true epic.
The pleasure of False Memory is its consistent wit: its challenge is that, in presenting back to us the world we live in, but making it newly strange, it makes no prescriptions of its own, and indeed can be read wholly pessimistically, from its first line (“And I don’t see how we can win”) to the defeat and irony readable in its last words. It may, alternatively, be read as an act of defiance, suggesting that an abused public language can be repossessed to some degree. Either way, it is a strikingly accomplished work of art.