THE MNEMONE
It is a short crisp story which is entertaining and thought provocative, attempts to describe the importance of literature by describing a future without it.
A short story set in the future, where people are unaware of their history and literature, which have been lost and/ or destroyed during the war between the government and the power loving revolutionists. The portions of literature which managed to survive did so in the fragments of memory of the Mnemones, self proclaimed people who remembered snatches of history and ideas and sold them to the people thus saving the past from becoming completely obliterated. This made them an integral part in conserving the past. They were the last hope in the preservation effort. After the war the new government wanted people to remain ignorant, remain unaware of new ideas, and continue living in their eternally happy state not knowing the way things were, and the way things could be. It argued that one cannot progress when one remained shackled by the past; it hence classified history as dangerous and subversive and resolved to destroy it. Destruction of history implicitly meant the destruction of the Mnemones. This being the backdrop the story traces out the impact of one such Mnemone on the writer's village from the time of his arrival to his subsequent unavoidable death.The scene is set in a small self-sufficient village with happy peace-loving inhabitants. The story opens with the arrival of a Mnemone, a secretive man who does not disclose his identity to the people. The people infer his occupation based on his actions. On being confronted the Mnemone confesses and starts selling his wares. People buy quotes and stanzas of poems and this leads to the spiritual awakening of the village. The writer speaks very highly of the importance of literature in a person's life when he speaks of people getting addicted to Shakespeare and Voltaire, and experiencing withdrawal symptoms on being kept away from them. This is a phase of constant enlightenment for the village as people begin to think again, start reasoning and questioning the way things are, but like all good things even this comes to an end. One day three policemen come to the village and kill the Mnemone.
The death of the Mnemone extinguishes the last ray of hope, the end of an era. To impress upon us the seriousness of the situation and the harshness of the laws, the writer says that writing this story has brought upon him the wrath of the government and his almost certain death. The ending lines of the story are a call to the ignorant, blissfully unaware people to wake up, rise against the unjust laws of the land, and embrace the past as it is a part of us and because we need to understand the past to understand where we stand in the present.
