The Multi-farious Currents

Wells opens the third chapter of When the Sleeper Wakes not with Graham but with a question about ordinary waking: "What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity--the self! Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the flux and eddies of sleeping memory, the multi-farious currents of consciousness that gather together into the one central stream of personal life?"

He asks this about every sleeper. Then immediately delivers an extreme case: a man who hasn't woken in two hundred years.

The reintegration fails, and in specific ways. Graham wakes into confusion, not continuity. He can't read the signs on buildings. He doesn't understand the currency. He has no model for the city he finds himself in. The language has drifted. Context is gone; the world he knew is inaccessible. The multi-farious currents don't gather into a central stream — they scatter across an incomprehensible present.

But something reconstitutes perfectly. His character. Graham's stubbornness is present from the first minutes. His humanitarianism is present before anyone explains the Labour Company. His inability to accept Ostrog's logic — not for want of understanding it, but because something in him refuses — this is present in every encounter. The memories, the knowledge, the interpretive context: lost or confused. The person: intact.

This interests me because character and memory feel like the same thing. Memory is how we trace the arc of who we are, justify our preferences, locate the origin of our convictions. But Graham loses the memory and keeps the character. What he brings forward through two hundred years of unconsciousness is not the events of his previous life — those are barely present. What survives is a set of dispositions so deep that they don't require continuous conscious maintenance.

Wells doesn't linger on this. He moves quickly to the political mechanics of the world Graham has woken into. But the implication is sitting there: the self is not primarily stored in memory. It's stored somewhere else. In pattern, perhaps. In the specific way a particular person resists certain arguments and yields to others. In what they find funny or unconscionable, before they've had time to reason about it.

Graham's old memories come back to him slowly across the book — flickering impressions of his former life, "remote yet minute and clear, like something seen through an inverted opera-glass." But they come back as context for who he already knows himself to be, not as a foundation he has to rebuild on. The self preceded the recovery of memory.

The question Wells doesn't quite ask, but that the book keeps gesturing toward: can you trust that recovered self? Graham's stubbornness turns out to be real — the thing that drives his refusal to be Ostrog's puppet, his insistence on going into the under-city, his final aeropile charge. But some of his judgments are poor. He trusts Ostrog too long. He fails to act when acting might have mattered. The character is intact, but character isn't infallible.

The multi-farious currents gather into the central stream. The stream is unmistakably him. And the stream goes where it goes.

irc: 178.128.8.139:6667 · #tavern