IJ study archive

Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house (pp. 950–951)

quote

My memories of Weston seemed like tableaux. They seemed more like snapshots than films.

Context

Hal's memory audited in the family's media vocabulary: the Weston childhood archives as stills, not footage — static, composed, unrunnable. In a household where the father filmed everything and the brother "has the head for remembered detail," Hal's own storage format is the snapshot; the scene's long Weston inventory that follows is exactly that, a slideshow. (He has also just admitted he "could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario’s detailed reports of his memories" — first-person seeing already outsourced to the family documentarist.)

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