Life is nothing but memories. Memories, distorted and remembered in a nonlinear order! They recreate my past, again and again, inside my head, like a movie. All my pain and pleasure depend on what I remember and how I remember. When I lose my memories, I lose my life and its meaning. Death is not just physical, but it signifies the loss of ones memories forever.
The loss of memory was one of the major themes for Umberto Eco's two novels: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery. In both novels, the main characters, Giambattista Bodoni and Simone Simonini, respectively, wake up in the morning to realise that they don't remember who they are and what they used to be in their lives. Later, Bodoni even laments that he does not remember if he made love to any women, including [the woman who claims to him to be] his wife [which is true]. Love forgotten is love never existed. A life forgotten is a life never lived, not even in the dreams; it's quite like never born at all. In the novels, the memory losses cause both the protagonists to start an ardent endeavour to regain their memories and recreate their past. The result is that we have exciting, passionate, emotionally and intellectually stimulating stories!
One of the protagonists, Casaubon, in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum also gets caught in a similar situation. He does not lose his memory, but he becomes fully disoriented and is unable to properly interpret the sequence of bizarre events he and his friends had to go through, as a consequence of their pranks. He tries to organize his memories in order to interpret them and thereby recreate his past in a more meaningful way.
In fact, all of the Eco's novels are like this. The protagonists get caught in very strange situations and become completely confused. They do not shy away, but want to solve the mystery by engaging in intellectual inquiries and reflections. This is why Eco becomes my favourite. Each character starts a feverish search for meaning and stability in his own way. This leads to an intellectually stimulating conversation with the reader in multiple ways.
In Mysterious Flames of Queen Loana, the Prague Cemetery and Foucault's Pendulum, the protagonists start writing down everything. They start the "talking cure" as suggested by Sigmond Freud.
Baudolino in Umberto Eco's another novel Baudolino also starts telling his story, but not to himself; he does not document it himself, but tells his story to another character, Niketas Choniates, who starts documenting it to interpret it. Here, like many of Eco's characters, Niketas Choniates is also a fictional depiction of a historically real individual.
In The Name of the Rose, which is Eco's first novel, William of Baskerville and his disciple Adso of Melk, set forth to solving a murder mystery in a monastery. The search for truth again starts an intense and stimulating conversation, which gets entangled with the questions truth, interpretation and such philosophical questions. Here, the story is told in the voice of Adso and the author [Eco] claims he just translates a historical document he came across. Finally, the point is a document written in search for finding a meaning of events by proper interpretation.
Eco's another novel, Island of the Day Before, which I have not started reading yet, tells the story of Roberto della Griva, who gets shipwrecked and washed up on the shore of a lone island. I do not know anything about the story beyond this point, but surely constitutes an attempt by Griva to reinterpret his past. I am sure that the novel will contain a self-documentation by Griva of his thoughts, interpretations and inquiries.
Reviewing Eco's novels is beyond my talent. Already you can find a few reviews and discussions in the Internet. This post [and a sequence of coming posts] is not about Eco's novels, but how they inspire an interpretation of my own memories. I do not know yet how and to what extent I am going to do this, but we will see that in the coming days. In other words, this is a review of my self-documentation of my own interpretation of the past and search for a meaning. Note that I have said "a review of my self-documentation", which means that the real self-documentation, in its candid and true form, will not appear here:)
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