I don’t remember …

I've been reworking a paper I co-authored a couple of years ago into section for a book. Essentially the argument that we’re forwarding is that an era of pervasive computing, in which data about our lives is collected and stored across our life time, needs to be accompanied by an ethics of forgetting. I won’t rehearse the argument here as the paper is online as a working paper and as a published paper, but I thought it was worth listing out the six forms of forgetting that Schacter (2001) identifies as they all make an appearance in crime fiction and I can imagine trying to put together a story that weaves them in and out of each other.

Loss-based
1. Transience (the loss of memory over time)
2. absent-mindedness (the loss of memory due to distractedness at the time the memory relates to)
3. blocking (the temporary inability to remember – ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’).

Error-based
4. misattribution (assigning a memory to the wrong source)
5. suggestibility (memories that are implanted either by accident or surreptitiously)
6. bias (the unknowing or unconscious editing or rewriting of experiences).

Schacter notes one other problem with memory – persistence, the recalling of events that would rather be forgotten.

Of course, forgetting should not always been seen in a negative light. As Nietzsche suggests, forgetting will save humans from history, because ‘forgetting turns out to be more benefit than bereavement, a mercy rather than malady … for no individual or collectivity can afford to remember everything’ (Lowenthal, 1999, xi). Forgetting allows people to be fallible, to evolve their social identities, to live with their conscience, to deal with ‘their demons’, to move on from their past and build new lives, to reconcile their own paradoxes and contradictions, and to be part of society. Forgetting enables forgiveness.

If anyone has any good recommendations for some crime fiction that explore various kinds of forgetting – beyond using them as simple plot devices - I’d be grateful to receive them.

Lowenthal D, 1999, “Preface” in Forty A, Küchler S, (eds) The Art of Forgetting (Berg, Oxford) xi - xiii
Schacter D L, 2001 The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston)