Schema and the Architecture of Forgetting: A Review of Ed Adams' Residuals

Schema and the Architecture of Forgetting: A Review of Residuals

by Eliza Carrow

In Schema, the second movement of Ed Adams’ novella Residuals, the reader encounters a precise uncoupling of recognition from narrative. The scene is not simply a gallery visit; it is a moment of metaphysical summons. The protagonist, Josh, steps through smoked glass into a space that may once have been civic, domestic, or spectral—and the ambiguity is essential. This is not a place of art; it is a place of curation. And the object under display is not what hangs on the wall, but what walks the corridor.

Adams deploys a syntax of restraint and recursion, echoing DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, with layered nods to hauntological theory and surveillance aesthetics. The writing is spare, but never minimal. It operates on slow destabilisation: neutral light that isn’t neutral, silence that isn’t silent, drawings that are not seen but interpreted.

“The gallery wasn’t the exhibit. He was.”

This closing revelation is quiet, but total. It retrofits everything before it. The captions beneath the artworks—Schema per Recordar, Memoria Inestable—are not titles, but flags. Metadata. Diagnostic markers for a versioned memory stream in which Josh, and perhaps the reader, have already been indexed.

The section’s most powerful motif is architectural: galleries as bureaucracies of forgetting. The smoked glass, the neutral white, the upward-sloping corridor—all of it signals intent without explanation. The reader is not merely bearing witness to Josh’s entry into the Watcher-system; we are being conditioned to experience the same permissions and denials, to feel the pause before the door push, the scrutiny without source.

What makes Schema so affecting is not its speculative elements—which are implied, never explained—but its emotional fidelity. Josh is not a hero. He is a version. A redundancy. A man who once made systems work, and has now been placed in one.

The recursive framing is sharpest in the description of the artworks: Miró’s spindled lines, Picasso’s spiralled eye. These are not surrealist for ornament. They are memory constructs. Interfaces. Glyphs of cognitive design, etched with error and iteration. In the hands of a less subtle writer, this would lapse into metaphor. Adams keeps it firmly in the domain of encoded architecture.

If Arrival was the ghosted shell of a modernist resort town, Schema is the protocol room beneath it. It announces that Residuals is not about solving the past—it is about being formatted by it. Slowly. Willingly. As if by instinct.