Val Dumond

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Articles on Writing, Grammar, and Publishing
by Val Dumond
©2009

Forgetting
A Book Report

The act of memory gets a lot of press these days, but what about the act of forgetting. Not much is discussed. Little is known about either part of the mind - either the remembering or the forgetting. Are they two sides of the same coin?

What makes us able to remember certain things: the way your best friend stuck by you when you made an ass of yourself, the words to a poem you learned in fourth grade, or the way your baby looked at you the day she was born, and not remember others: the recipe for triple chocolate dessert, his exact words when he left, or the name of that song?

What makes it possible to forget certain things: dates and anniversaries and names of people we've known for years, and not forget other things: the fool you made of yourself at that holiday party 28 years ago, the day you were fired, or a tune that got stuck in your head?

Forgetting is an art, a trick, a chore, a curse, a blessing, and it's magic. No one knows exactly how it works, or they'd have invented a way to control it. Forgetting is also the theme of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a book published a couple years ago by Umberto Eco. It's about an antiquarian book dealer who lost all memory of his existence, except for his reading. The 59-year-old Giambattista Bodoni has to discover all that he has forgotten; Eco helps him do that through the books he's read.

The things that I would want to know, if I were to lose my memory, include some of the same Bodoni sought to learn: is he married? Happily? Is he having an affair with his assistant?

The old man heads for his grandfather's country home, where he goes on a "wild, disorderly" reading spree, hoping that literary associations will recall his own story. Doesn't work like that, he quickly learns.

Could you reconstruct your life based on what you've read? Maybe. Probably not. Neither could Bodoni. He picks up slight recollections of any boy's life - marbles and tops and a fling with a girl whose face he has forgotten. But comic books and other children's books just don't work for the flustered Bodoni. (Even though the reader is aided by bold, beautiful, and unnecessary illustrations.)

nd in the end, the unfortunate man declares himself unable to use the mysterious messages of books, the revelations of human writing, the notions of other interpreters of life to reconstruct his own life. It's a nice trip, though, to accompany the pedantic, over-thinking Eco through his wild imagination. Eco writes, through his Bodoni character, "The diabolical power of paper got the better of me."

In fact, what happens when you seek something through books besides another writer's story, another writer's perceptions, another writer's views of life, doesn't reflect a darn thing about you. You have to do that yourself, by writing your own story.

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