Apologies if this subject offends anyone, but it's a thing I've been thinking about lately in connection with Jeremy's "Bourne Yesterday" article over at "The Debrief" . I noticed that at least one poster remarked that the idea of an otherwise highly virile bedroom athlete turning into a parfait gentle knight when he loses his memory goes back at two thousand years or so, and of course this may well be where DW got the idea from.
However, for me this phenomenon didn't really ring true. It's obvious that even in his amnesic state Gregory is highly attracted to Erika (who wouldn't be?!) so why wouldn't he respond accordingly? It isn't that he thinks sex with her would be "dirty" or "wrong", since Erika makes it quite plain that he is welcome to slake his thirst, and that she is his established lover. OK, I know sexual mores were different in the first half of the twentieth century, but the "real" Gregory wasn't troubled by such things.
When I first read it I wondered if it was going to lead to a revelation that Gregory had also suffered a physical injury, making him (perhaps temporarily) impotent. This obviously wasn't the case as is later revealed.
DW's "model" for Gregory's amnesic persona seems to be modeled on that of a child. He romps in the snow, follows the suggestions of "adults" without having any opinions of his own and seems to have become a rather childlike, simple version of himself. Fair enough - but somehow I doubt that even when he was a young child, Gregory was any Sir Galahad. I could imagine him looking up his teachers' skirts and having naughty fantasies about the girl down the street, NOT following any lady around with doglike devotion.
I think it would have been more believable if Gregory had become a totally uninhibited savage, but without any of the finesse and skill as a lovemaker that he would have had before the accident. More like Bourne, in fact!
Gregory Sallust's sex life
Alan, very interesting. I'll have to think about this a bit more. What I can say is that I read Fleming's You Only Live Twice first, and when I did the fact that Bond loses his memory with the side-effect that he forgets how to have sex made me smile. 'How very very Ian Fleming an idea!' I thought. It just seems precisely the sort of way his mind worked, to think 'Oooh, I wonder if you'd forget how to have sex as well'. So I was very surprised to read Faked Passports!
As for Bourne, he doesn't have any problems with sex, but the general principle of his memory loss is a little similar. He's a ruthless government agent who killed people for his country without flinching. But now he has lost his memory, he still has all the reflexes of his training, but he doesn't have any of the morality he had before, or the ideology I should say. He is simply a good man, an innocent, who happens to have all these skills. He comes to loathe his former self. I'm not sure how convincing it is psychologically, but it is, I suspect, common to many amnesia plots. The interesting thing in this case, I think, is just how precisely the plots echo each other. I found that comment on my blog a little annoying, frankly, because I pointed out in the article that it is about much more than just 'a hero loses his memory'. Or even forgets to have sex.
As for Bourne, he doesn't have any problems with sex, but the general principle of his memory loss is a little similar. He's a ruthless government agent who killed people for his country without flinching. But now he has lost his memory, he still has all the reflexes of his training, but he doesn't have any of the morality he had before, or the ideology I should say. He is simply a good man, an innocent, who happens to have all these skills. He comes to loathe his former self. I'm not sure how convincing it is psychologically, but it is, I suspect, common to many amnesia plots. The interesting thing in this case, I think, is just how precisely the plots echo each other. I found that comment on my blog a little annoying, frankly, because I pointed out in the article that it is about much more than just 'a hero loses his memory'. Or even forgets to have sex.
The other big difference between the Bourne story and the others one is that in the former, the entire story is built around the amnesia, thus allowing a much richer and more extensive development of the implications. In the other two , the memory loss is just a part of the story, put in purely for addeds suspense obviously the treatment is going to be somewhat different.
I'd go as far as to say that in "Passports" DW could have equally well had Gregory retain perfect memory but LOSE the "family day" paper, and later find it in an unexpected place, without much change to the plot. This would certainly not be feasible in the Bourne or Bond stories.
I'd go as far as to say that in "Passports" DW could have equally well had Gregory retain perfect memory but LOSE the "family day" paper, and later find it in an unexpected place, without much change to the plot. This would certainly not be feasible in the Bourne or Bond stories.