One of my main characters is a young adult who developed magical mutant abilities in response to the total erasure of all of his memories. He doesn't remember anything from before he developed his powers, but one of his powers is a superhumanly perfect memory, so he has a significant advantage when it comes to piecing his understanding of the world back together. I plan on having several scenes from his perspective while he's still nonverbal and extremely confused about the world, and I'm having trouble deciding how to tackle a certain issue with regards to his thoughts: I want to make it clear that his understanding of a lot of things at first is highly limited and basic, and that he doesn't understand a word of any language even though he can repeat back things he's heard flawlessly. So part of me wants to have him not use the actual words for things he's coming to grips with. The problem is that could very, very easily get wildly confusing in a non-visual medium if I'm constantly referring to things with terms he's made up for them, and part of me feels I should find some way to use the real words for things anyway, despite the fact that he doesn't know what they are. But of course doing that also feels like it wouldn't make much sense at all, so I feel stuck. Does anyone have any advice on how to strike a good balance around this?
This doesn't seem like something that would work unless the OP already knows a way how. The MC has both amnesia and a perfect memory. Usually, amnesia is a plot device, and the problem perhaps arises from wanting to show it convincingly. What is the amnesia doing: is there some dialogue the MC mustn't understand? Or is it providing an countervailing excuse for the superpower developing? In which case an easier-to-write one might replace it.
He never gets his old memories back. The idea is that this is a character re-learning the world from the ground up, both magical and mundane. It's a major part of his character, and it also serves as a handicap for the first story that massively complicates the other main character's efforts to keep him out of trouble and get his help when she needs it.
It'll only serve any of that if it can be written. How much of the story is already drafted and how many drafts have there been?
I can't give any answers, but I can pont toward a few similar things that might help. Animal Children – Superminds 13 Feral children lack a conscious mind—they have no sense of time or of personal identity, no knowledge of language written or spoken. Of course yours is different, as he was rasied by humans and has developed his conscious mind. But a child's mind 'solidifies' at a certain point, and if by that time it hasn't been trained to become consciously aware, it never will be able to. He becomes an animal for life. I did a blog post on this some time ago: What if you were never taught how to people? And a followup post: How a child's mind is programmed to be human in a primitive society It also reminds me of the movie Memento, and a story by Gene Wolfe called Soldier of Sidon, about a man who forgets everything each time he sleeps. I haven't read that one, just know a little about it. Much like in Memento, he has to try to write things down to help himself get by. Memento may well be largely based on it, I don't know. But it also has some simialrities with Gene Wolfe's New Sun series. The protag, Severian, claims to have perfect memory (his eidetic memory is stated as a fact by Wolfe in Shadows of the New Sun). In spite of this, some critics and analysis claim him to be an unreliable narrator. Memory is one of the topics Wolfe is especially interested in.
I have indeed seen Memento, though not Soldier of Sidon or New Sun. Thanks for the tips, tangential though they may be!
Introduce some basic real-world terms that your character has picked up through repetition. These terms can serve as anchors for the reader while still conveying the character's confusion.
You will of course have to use some sort of words, but since this character is beginning with a limited set of concepts, it might work to have him interpret every new phenomenon in terms of those limited concepts. If his first memory is of a circus, every new person is classed as some kind of clown, trapeze artist, strongman, every vehicle some form of unicycle, every location some new sideshow, etc. Here the power of analogical thinking is all-important. Surrealism has a lot to offer. For a bit of practice, try this game. Another possibly useful surrealist reference would be the book The Immaculate Conception by Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, where the authors used a kind of guided automatism to verbally simulate various forms of mental illness. This is related to the paranoiac-critical method being developed by Dali around the same time. It's a good opportunity to think about how all phenomena are not merely connected but mutually reflecting and interpenetrating, an insight shared by movements as varied as Huayan Buddhism, kabbalah, and medieval alchemy. One of my favorite expositions of this is Fazang's Treatise on the Golden Lion.
That is a fascinating angle I hadn't considered. Especially since his initial memories are from being in a top secret underground research station.
