Electronic Memory and Forgetting

Electronic memory and forgetting names the novel’s contrast between human memory, which cannot reliably choose what to retain or lose, and the word processor, which can store, alter, delete, and retrieve text at a keystroke. In Belbo’s hands, Abulafia makes forgetting seem precise and reversible: a private archive can preserve even what its author wishes to erase. Yet the machine’s obedient memory does not disclose the truth of its contents. Casaubon’s attempt to read Belbo’s files as a key to Lorenza instead demonstrates how easily a technical archive becomes a vessel for desire and interpretation.

Belbo and the machine

Belbo’s early file “Abu” records a private answer to his critics and a playful, almost adolescent experiment in composition. He had described himself as an intelligent spectator rather than a protagonist, someone who saw no reason to write without serious motivation and preferred to rewrite other people’s books, as a good editor does. The word processor offered a different kind of activity: not, in his own estimation, creative writing, but a technical exercise without the judgment and exposure that writing seemed to demand. Its keyboard became a place to try variations freely, like improvising on the old piano at home.

The machine’s attraction lay partly in this permission to play. Belbo’s habitual pessimism and reluctant acceptance of his past loosened during his exchanges with a memory he imagined as inorganic, objective, obedient, and nonmoral—inhuman in a way that could nevertheless help him escape his chronic nervousness about life. The computer did not make him think for himself; it gave him something to think through. In that sense, its apparent neutrality was less important than the psychological distance it afforded: he could experiment without treating each line as a final declaration of authorship.

Editing, deletion, and recall

Abulafia makes the difference between an initial accident and a polished result visible on the same screen. Belbo describes entering a string of misspellings, asking the machine to copy it, then correcting the copy until it appears clean. He keeps both versions rather than deleting the first. The screen thus holds the flawed draft and its correction together: the accidental “is” and the deliberate “ought” coexist in a retrievable record. The machine can preserve an error without requiring it to remain the final text.

That dual record suggests a kind of memory unavailable to the mind. Human recollection takes effort to acquire and retain, but does not offer a dependable method for deliberately forgetting. Belbo and Diotallevi had once tried to devise an art of oblivion and found no rules for it: recovering lost time through fragile clues is not the same as intentionally misplacing time once recovered. Forgetting ordinarily arrives through uncontrolled processes such as stroke or amnesia, or through self-destructive interventions including drugs, alcohol, and suicide. Abulafia, by contrast, can perform what Belbo calls precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, and painless aphasias: particular passages can disappear without the destruction of the person who remembers them.

Belbo illustrates the operation with a half-line whose unfinished beginning hints at text he later regretted. He covers the lines with a pale screen effect and presses DELETE. The deletion is not quite final, however. Unlike a literal leap that cannot be reversed once the moment has passed, the word processor allows him to restore deleted text by pressing RETRIEVE. Its mercy consists in making erasure provisional: because recall remains available, the user can afford to forget. The machine separates the act of removing words from the irreversible loss of access to them.

This reversible deletion turns the screen into an archive not only of what is present but of what has been suppressed. Belbo imagines that he could remove an offending passage from view while leaving it in memory, withholding it from both psychoanalytic conjecture and scholars eager to establish variant texts. The fantasy is pointedly double-edged: the archive preserves repressed material, but its owner can regulate who sees it and when. Electronic memory does not abolish concealment; it makes concealment an operation that can be controlled, repeated, and undone.

A universe of mutable text

Belbo renders typing and deletion as the creation and dissolution of a small universe. The screen’s rows of letters resemble a galaxy of asteroids; words emerge from nothingness and can return to it, while the text remains in constant flux rather than settling into fixed boundaries of space and time. A finger can send the seemingly irreparable backward into a word, where it disappears. In this image, composition is less the inscription of a permanent record than a sequence of linkings and unlinkings, with the machine allowing thought to appear and recede at a speed and softness the body’s ordinary writing tools do not permit.

The cosmic imagery enlarges a practical feature of the computer into a model of memory. A handwritten page or typed line seems to accumulate marks in a single visible order; Abulafia’s editable screen makes the status of each mark unstable. A passage can be corrected, hidden, deleted, and recovered. The user can therefore experience forgetting not as the uncertain decay of recollection but as an action with a command and a possible reversal. Yet the machine’s power is local: it can manipulate recorded language, not resolve the emotional or historical meaning that language carries.

The archive becomes a projection

That limit becomes clear when Casaubon tries to understand Abulafia’s secret files through Belbo’s love for Lorenza. Reading an inscription on her photograph, Casaubon connects her name and the figure of Sophia with the machine’s password and its stored contents. He imagines Abulafia as the box containing everything Belbo knew, or believed he knew, and supposes that Belbo sought a word that would both grant access to the computer and serve as a talisman for possessing Lorenza’s secret. The analogy makes the archive intimate: entering the machine is figured as entering the beloved’s inaccessible interior.

But Casaubon immediately recognizes that this account is his own construction, like the Plan: it substitutes wishes for reality. His speculation is evidence not of what Belbo intended but of how a reader can turn stored information into an apparently coherent story. The computer may preserve words with mechanical obedience, but it cannot certify the interpretation attached to them. Casaubon even tries the name SOPHIA at the keyboard; the machine asks for a password and gives no response to the emotion behind his guess. Electronic memory can retain and retrieve a record, but it cannot distinguish knowledge from desire.

Personal memory and historical doubt

The novel places these experiments with recorded memory beside Belbo’s memories of wartime Italy and his later reflections on missed political choices. During a demonstration against fascist conspiracies in Milan, Casaubon describes the tacit arrangement that governed the streets: protesters operated beyond Largo Augusto, fascists were entrenched around Piazza San Babila, and the police watched so long as neither side crossed the unwritten boundaries. Casaubon attends but stands among the reporters, editors, and artists at the edge of Piazza Santo Stefano rather than marching. Later, he asks whether he stayed away because the conflict belonged to another generation, or whether this explanation merely disguises a failure of courage. The remembered event persists not as a neutral record but as a test repeatedly applied to the self.

Belbo’s childhood memories also return as embodied scenes rather than an impartial archive. After Canal gang boys chase him and throw a stone through the children’s magazine he is holding, he decides to join the Alley gang. Years later he remembers wartime partisan life as a period of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, a corpse was a corpse, and the opposition between red and black seemed distinct. Casaubon understands the sweetness of that recollection against the surrounding uncertainty of the Diabolicals and Colonel Ardenti’s ambiguous disappearance. Even so, Belbo had been a spectator in those supposedly clear years, watching other men’s memories and the birth of histories he would not write. Memory offers him a past with sharply marked sides, but it also carries the knowledge that he did not occupy the heroic role he later measures himself against.

The distinction between electronic storage and lived memory matters most when interpretation begins to claim more certainty than experience can bear. Casaubon’s growing conviction about a supposed Templar plan turns the castle at Tomar into a clue: he reads it as the first meeting place named in the Provins message and imagines that the Templars began a scheme intended to last six centuries. Yet he acknowledges the governing irony: the task is not to discover the Templars’ secret but to construct it. Abulafia’s preserved fragments, like the historical places Casaubon recruits into the Plan, can be made to support a pattern; preservation alone does not prove that the pattern was there all along.

Electronic memory and forgetting is therefore both a technical possibility and a figure for the novel’s larger problem of interpretation. Abulafia offers Belbo a humane-seeming alternative to irreversible loss: text can be held, hidden, and restored, letting him experiment without surrendering control of the record. But neither computer memory nor recollection is equivalent to truth. Belbo’s wartime past is colored by later doubt, Casaubon’s readings are vulnerable to wishful construction, and the machine’s impassive archive cannot tell a secret from a story invented around one. The promise of remembering whenever one chooses makes forgetting possible; it does not make the remembered material self-explanatory.