On a superficial level, there is a lot of literary encryption going on in Remainder. For example, the building that he constructs in order to replay his displaced trauma memories, or his constructed memories of a time before the trauma, is called Madlyn Mansions, which is kind of a reference to Proust and the madeleine, which is the memory trigger for him. And there are other things. There is a whole sequence that is almost exactly paralleling the rhetorical pattern of the opening of Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, when he’s talking about how he went about building the house.
But, in a way, that doesn’t matter, I mean that’s kind of cute if you want to notice it. And in fact, if it were conscious, were it really explicit, if the hero had been an intellectual and said, “Oh, this is a bit like Proust,” then the novel would be over then and there, and you don’t need to write it. So it’s quite important that whatever influence is going on there does get buried. In that respect, encryption is actually an absolutely fundamental necessity in order to do something new, otherwise we are just annotating the old stuff.
But, in a way, that doesn’t matter, I mean that’s kind of cute if you want to notice it. And in fact, if it were conscious, were it really explicit, if the hero had been an intellectual and said, “Oh, this is a bit like Proust,” then the novel would be over then and there, and you don’t need to write it. So it’s quite important that whatever influence is going on there does get buried. In that respect, encryption is actually an absolutely fundamental necessity in order to do something new, otherwise we are just annotating the old stuff.