Like many people of my generation I read Lois Lowry’s 1993 dystopian children’s novel The Giver for school. Without the Internet or a cabal of busybodies I was ignorant of any controversy surrounding its inclusion in middle school reading lists; to this day it continues to be among a small but pathologically challenged collection of banned books. I enjoyed the book even though at age eleven I rarely read for fun. Every few months or so I reflected on my memories of the book’s plot and themes. In my most recent reflection I realized something my eleven year old self never would have.
So the titular character, officially known in that society’s regimented occupational parlance, is called the “Receiver of Memory” because he or she psychically retains the memories of a purposefully forgotten barbarian age of difference, violence, and love; the Giver is essentially a living breathing archive. Intrigued, I borrowed a library copy (much thinner than I remembered) and read it over a few days.
The World of The Giver
The Giver follows the life of Jonas, an eleven year old boy (an “Eleven”) as he attends school, plays with friends, and undergoes an apprenticeship in the isolated “Community,” which has strict but easily accepted rules governing conduct and appearance. Children are chastened for using incorrect phrasing (saying “starving” instead of “hungry”), subconscious thoughts are shared each morning as family units recount their night’s dreams, the citizens accept constant monitoring, lifetime occupations and families are selected based on scientifically deduced compatibility, sexual desire is unknown because it is pharmaceutically quashed at puberty, repeated rule breakers are “released,” a mysterious procedure usually reserved for the aged, and the populace accepts these methods as de rigueur for any functioning society.
Except for the Giver and his apprentice the people of the Community cannot comprehend any of way of living and experience mental anguish when unpredictable events take place too much or too often. All knowledge and memories of this unordered life are the province of the Receiver of Memory. It is as if the future imagined by the character Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four materialized but evolved into an Ozzie and Harriet world with a poppy, idealist veneer. In Newspeak there is no word for “freedom” to cloud the mind with unneeded questions; in the society of The Giver the populace is beyond that phase. They are a closed system of self-policing citizens who employ peer pressure and shame rather than torture. They know that they should inform on friends and family but they do not know the why. Their shield against unintended consequences of their heedless ignorance is the Receiver of Memory.
Records
The bildungsroman reveals that the Community has two physical archives with two very different collection mandates. The Hall of Open Records as its name implies provides documentation of every person’s public life. For Jonas, whose early activities involve meeting the progressively demanding service requirements of the Community, the HOR is the repository that tracks completion of these requirements. No doubt it also records infractions of children and adults. During the ceremony where he is named the new Receiver of Memory Jonas recalls hearing of an Eleven (an 11 year old child) some years ago who became persona non grata when he failed to meet his required number of volunteer hours. Even though he was given additional time to finish, the Community’s collective shame effectively banished him.
The second archive is the once-mentioned Hall of Closed Records, which seems to document each person’s professional life. If the documentation in the Hall of Open Records is the face of a regimented community built on ritualized conduct and shame, the Hall of Closed Records is the documentation of the shameful but necessary tasks of the trade that make their society function; the implicit taboo of adults socializing and rudeness of asking personal questions are essential so that no person wholly learns the collective evils of their idyllic world. It is a video from this archive that Jonas witnesses something truly horrible committed by the hands of someone he loves and trusts, which turns him against the only community he ever knew.
The Receiver of Memory
The Receiver is an essential position to their society. Occupying a relatively decorated office in the House of the Old’s annex, the Receiver is entitled to otherwise unavailable volumes of books on non-Community topics and even switch off his personal public address speaker. When Jonas is publicly selected to be the next receiver the community administrator explained he will “[experience] pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The receiver himself was not able to describe it…” to them. For his training Jonas is given centuries old memories of familial joy and love at Christmas, the pleasure of sledding down a snowy hill, the discomfort of sunburn, the horrible pain of fire, and the grisly sights of war and starvation.
“Why do you have to hold these memories?” Jonas asked the Giver upon receiving yet another painful phantom memory. In reply, the Giver says “[i]t gives us wisdom…[w]ithout wisdom I could not fulfill my function of advising the Committee of Elders when they call upon me.” Jonas, failing to understand what wisdom is achieved by knowing hunger, is given an example where the Committee, considering petitions requesting a larger labor force, planned to increase the quota of children produced by Birthmothers from three to four; the Receiver knew this could lead to food shortages and starvation, conditions the Committee knew of but could not comprehend. The Giver advised against raising the quota and the Committee remained innocent. Although important to the Community, the Giver wishes he were consulted more often. “Only when they are faced with something that they have not experienced before [do they call upon me]. But it very seldom happens…there are so many things I could tell them; things that I wish they would change…Life here is so orderly, so predictable—so painless.”
The purpose and reality of the Receiver of Memory should be familiar to many archivists. The quiet, unassuming person in an office built almost as an afterthought tending to the records of their designated user group to be called upon only when needed but never as often as they would like. Once, when I explained to my girlfriend’s grandfather that I was earning a Masters of Library Science, he chuckled and bemoaned the proliferation of useless degrees. This was from a man who undoubtedly used city and county records in his role as Assessor. Just as Jonas did not understand how hunger would give him wisdom many people underutilize archives because they do not understand the importance of potential. Answers do not usually leap out at users but require hard work and interpretation.
Living Manuscript Repository
Unlike the Halls of Open and Closed Records the Receiver of Memory does not mind the Community’s documents. Despite his title as a “receiver” of memory his or her task as an adult is to hold and interpret the collective wisdom of hundreds or thousands of long dead persons. In this sense the Receiver is a living, breathing manuscript repository of carefully curated experiences without which the populace could not function.
The Community does not want or need to know the context and process of the past. When the Community was scared by a pilot flying over their city they considered shooting it down because it frightened them. However, on the advice of the Giver, they rejected this panicked response. Had they shot the plane down they would have witnessed intentional death and destruction. Afterward, upon learning the pilot simply erred, they would be traumatized with the knowledge they violently ended a life without the euthanasia ceremonial artifice of “release.” While they had the instruments and technique to destroy they did not understand the true consequences. Just as they know the difference between hunger and starvation as words, they cannot conceive a world in which starvation is even possible. The Community’s records, Open or Closed, do not contain references to death, destruction, or starvation and, if they did, they would not indexed as such.
Threads and plots of the story relevant to archives and archivists abound. The psychic release of all collected memory if the Receiver of Memory dies or leaves the community could be likened to improper disaster management; the unknown manner with which these deeply personal memories were acquired (voluntarily or by force) and the importance of deeds of gift or copyright/ownership laws; knowing intimate details of donors’ lives (surely Jonas would have learned about sex eventually); the prerequisite curiosity and analysis of contemporary activities through the lens of documented human experience; the struggle for relevance.
Whatever this community’s faults as a utopia its ignorance fostering founders understood the necessity of having a wise figure linger on the wings and offer counsel. That’s something lots of archivists can agree with.
Counterfactual Archivist 