At long last, Bodoni comes across Queen Loana herself, the wicked comic- strip beauty who lends her name to the novel and whose flame had so obsessed him as a boy. ‘The expression the mysterious flame had bewitched me, to say nothing of Loana’s mellifluous name,’ confesses Bodoni. But the re-encounter is not a happy one: the queen’s story, read without the generosity of a child’s eyes, proves to be ‘the most insipid tale ever conceived by the human brain’, and Bodoni realises that, ‘I had spent all the years of my childhood — perhaps even more — cultivating not an image but a sound.’
In the days of Bodoni’s childhood, Jorge Luis Borges invented a character, Funes the Memorious, who can forget nothing. His memory is filled with every single banal experience of every single moment. Funes compares his memory to a rubbish heap. He can remember exactly a day from beginning to end, but the futile exercise demands an entire day. He can’t however think: thinking (as Borges points out) means ‘to forget differences, to generalise, to abstract’. Unlike Funes, Bodoni can do nothing but think. One passage blends with other passages, one verse calls up another in a different context, and from the resulting flow of words, from what Bodoni calls ‘a semantic memory’, the ‘lector in fabula’ manages to rescue concepts and ideas that become now his lost memory of the world.
But, as his wife explains to him, Bodoni is wrong. His so-called semantic memory is in fact autobiographical. Through the remembered words, Bodoni does not only reassemble his mental library, he rewrites himself as if he were drawing his own portrait, a portrait that, in the end, may not entirely coincide with the person the world once knew as Signor Giambattista Bodoni. Every reader, Eco seems to say, invents, up to a certain point, not only the books he reads but also his own character, and different readers, using identical material, will construct other characters, other memories of the same reading, other associations, other Queen Loanas. At different times, a single reader’s attractions will also be different: the mysterious and ardent flame that the queen lit in young Bodoni is barely a pale flicker in the eyes of Bodoni the Elder. Our talents, our foibles, our experience no doubt lend us traits that make us who we are, but ultimately the face we send out into the world and which we recognise every morning in the mirror depends just as well on how we read those traits in our remembered books, and how those books retell our story.
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