The Shiver of Destiny

Umberto Eco's third and final lecture in his Ellman series, "Confessions of a Young Novelist," was entitled: "On the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death."

The trivial answer to the question implied by the title of his lecture is the exploration of human psychology and the inculcation of moral value. But that is not the direction Eco wants to go. More interestingly, he must answer two separate questions:

• 1) How can a series of propositions that are avowedly untrue instruct us in the ways of life and death?
• 2) How can discourse on possible worlds influence our understanding of life and death?
  

Of fictional characters, Eco says, we can conceivably know more than we do of those human beings we encounter on a day-to-day basis (at school or the office or, tellingly, in our own homes). He claims he knows Leopold Bloom better than he knows his own father. Now that his father is dead, he can never uncover his inner secrets and the motivations behind his actions. Nor can he, other than trivially and by resort to hearsay, discover any more about his father's history. On the other hand, he can always discover more about Bloom each time he re-reads Ulysses.

For Eco qua philosopher, fiction clarifies the notion of truth. From the truth-conditional point of view, fiction should always present what is not. Fictional worlds are always incomplete and unhomogenous, never a complete state of affairs. A fictional world is a doxastic world—one in which the reader voluntarily suspends her disbelief. Fictional worlds are, further, parasitical on the real world. When it comes down to world-matching, we must be flexible. We know, for example, that no real British detective named Sherlock Holmes ever really resided at Baker Street, or that Nero Wolf never occupied a brownstone on West 35th Street in Manhattan. Similarly, in Act III of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, we know there is no Bohemian coast. But we accept these features as true de dicto, not de facto. In this sense, we read a fictional text like a musician reads a musical score.

Eco takes pains to distance his own reading from that of the deconstructionists. It is not the case that there are no facts, only interpretations. For Eco, fictional statements offer, if anything, a stronger form of truth than, say, cultural truths. Cultural truths, including scientific statements, are open to revision as new facts emerge. Fictional truths are at least as ontologically strong as cultural truths. Thus, as Eco would have it, that Hitler died in a Berlin bunker can, conceivably, be revised by the discovery of new facts—for example, a grave filled with his bones in Paraguay. That Nero Wolf lives at West 35th cannot. Truth must be as indisputable and immutable as the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. The theory of rigid designation must hold in fictional worlds. According to Eco, fictional characters also have ontological consistency (merely the valence differentiates them from real persons). Hitler was real; Clark Kent was not: this is consistent.

A narrative agreement is in effect between the author and readers to accept the fictional world as if it were our own. That Emma Bovary committed suicide is true in every possible world (except some rather poor speculative 'fan fiction', apparently). This is as true as that a right angle has 90 degrees—in the Euclidean world. Emma's world is the languaged world. The fate of Little Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, is in a bit of flux. She is not identified with a specific text—in an earlier version she is devoured by the wolf but in the Grimm retelling she is rescued by the woodsman. Sherlock Holmes and the like, because they are identified with a specific set of texts, take on greater significance than other fictional characters. Eco calls them 'cultural habits' or the creation of cultural imagination.

Now, Eco asks, can fictional characters lose their identities? It is possible in certain instances such as group text creation based on great narratives or illicit sequels or so-called fan fiction. But this, he says, is something like playing a Chopin Polonnaise on a ukulele; the timbre of the piano is crucial to the true appreciation of the work.

What we witness in reading fiction is what Eco calls the "shiver of destiny!" He brings up Hugo's depiction of the Battle of Waterloo. It reads like a helicopter shot in a movie. If Napoleon had only known of the sharp decline of the terrain, etc., etc., he might have detoured, delayed, etc. Today, we can create a very realistic Waterloo war game, yet in Hugo (as, coincidentally, in historical fact) Napoleon always loses. Similarly, in Hamlet, the good prince dies. There are many possible outcomes to his situation: he marries Ophelia, banishes the King, forgives his mother, etc. But, in the Shakespearean text, for all time, Hamlet's fate is what it is. Unchangeable.

What's more, neither Hamlet nor Napoleon can know their fates. They have no access to the world of the author (where possible worlds swirl in the imagination and disappear in the shredder of forgotten or discarded drafts). Oedipus cannot know the world of Sophocles, else he wouldn't have married his mother. And here's where fiction is most instructional: Fiction suggests our view of the real world is as limited as a fictional character's is of his own world.

Thus, the function of the unchangeable stories of fiction and the unchangeable nature of fictional characters is to teach us about fate and death, i.e., to show us the limits of our common human condition. This is the principle advantage of fiction for life and death.

Who Controls the Text?

Umberto Eco's second lecture in the Ellmann series was entitled "Author, Text, and Interpreters." It was more tailored to the academic crowd present to hear him lecture than yesterday's, though it drew in part on the groundwork he laid then.

According to Eco, one of the questions he most has to answer as an author when dealing with his books' translators has to do with perceived ambiguities in the text. He has three sorts of response: (1) "keep it in, I meant it to be that way;" (2) "keep it in, I didn't mean it but it's useful;" or (3) "iron it out, I didn't mean it." His position, for the main, is that creative writers should never interpret their own texts. The reader shouldn't appeal to the author's intention, but to the evidence of the text.

Eco borrows the term "unlimited semiosis" from the American logician C.S. Peirce to express his approach to what he calls the "open text." Peirce says: ""The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation ... the interpretant is nothing but another representation ... and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series." The text is susceptible to an infinite number of uses (apparently recursive uses). What, then, are the criteria that limit interpretation? Eco draws on the Augustinian notion that you can check the validity of an interpretation by reference to the text. Any interpretation that is incompatible with the text must be rejected.

Eco also distinguished the semiotic approach to the text from deconstruction. Briefly, semiotics holds that the text is a series of multiple, perhaps infinitely many, signs (as indicated above). Deconstruction, to the contrary, holds that the text is mere signifier. And, as we all know, the sign is comprised of the signifier/signified relation.

Eco cops to being an allusive writer. Indeed, in his first lecture he stated outright that he was explicit in his use of intertextuality, and more specifically, "double codes". He loves to drop clues for the "paranoid reader" to track down. However, there are limits to intertext. Thus, on a personal note, he found his early books The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum opened up a number of chains of associations in their readers. Some of those associations he felt were intended and embodied in the text and, thus, valid. Others, were unintended and unsupported by the text and, accordingly, invalid. There were others, however, which were unintended yet were supported in the text and, reluctantly, valid.

The delight of the lecture (for me) was Eco's anecdotal examples of dealing with his readers. Specifically, he recounted a couple instances of his unconscious inserting references into his text that were unavailable to his conscious creative mind. In particular, after Name came out, he found an old text by Riccoboni (sp?) on a dusty top shelf in his study. It had page corners darkened by Eco's eager fingerprints. In this book, the author had tried to reconstruct from the available evidence the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, i.e., the disappeared "Comedy". Eco had pored over this book as a young man, but had completely forgotten about it when writing Name. In another instance, he unconsciously used the name of a Brazilian singer of the pop song "Guantanamero" as a character in Pendulum. When he discovered this, he remembered having a crush on her at the time.

What was remarkable about this lecture was Eco's ability to maintain a critical detachment from his own creative works, to treat them as textual objects in order help locate the point were meaning must be fixed in the text without violating the text. Yet, he refrained from providing an interpretation of his own works. And he refrained from asserting that the text and its interpretation constituted a perfect system—there must necessarily be a leakage of significance.

In answer to the question we posed above, the text controls both its author and its interpreters. In our own terms, the text not only is battleground in the struggle between the writer and the critic, it is the ultimate proving ground. Intention as well as interpretation find their empirical constraints within its bounds.

How Eco Writes

Umberto Eco's first lecture in the Ellmann series was entitled: "How I Write."

Stately, plump Umberto Eco strode onto the stage in a slightly frumpy navy suit, chewing (like a former smoker) on a fountain pen top. Behind thick glasses and a small mustache, he read his lecture from a typescript, often holding a single sheet of paper up in the air as he stared at it through the bottom lens of his bifocals. Often, he would look up from his prepared remarks and detour for a delightful, wry, personal aside. For example, he had to shave his trademark beard for some research he had been doing in Fiji, he said. It turns out he had trouble keeping suction on his scuba mask. (Of course, if he'd asked me I would have recommended petroleum jelly to fix such annoying leaks.).

Eco warned the audience that his essays and lectures (as did his dissertation) often suffer from a "narrative fallacy." That is to say, they do not proceed from a thesis statement which is supported by a series of proofs and is then contrasted with opposing points of view. Rather, they accumulate meaning, exploring, building, rising to a climax, and concluding. He takes as his model Plato's Parmenides, which, he claimed, was comprised of nine successive hypotheses each of which contradicts the preceeding one and, at the end, you never find out "who did it."

Eco's novels always start with an image, he says. He wanted, he said, to pursue the image of the slow poisoning of a monk reading some sort of illuminated text or to kill off Cardinal Richelieu. His readers will recognize instantly the texts these particular images spawned. The goal of the writer, then, is summarized in the rhetorical term "ekphrasis" where the clarity of the image is replicated in the mind of the writer by the sharpness and accuracy of the descriptive language.

Eco's approach to writing fiction struck me as Nabokovian. To achieve this ekphrasis, he draws maps, lays out architectural plans, sketches faces, constructs models, paints flowers, etc. He calculates time down to the last second and space down to the last millimeter. For research, he visits sites while dictating his thoughts into a tape recorder. He also keeps notebooks of his impressions. For The Name of the Rose, for instance, he visited a number of Romanesque and Gothic monasteries. He timed his walks through these abbeys and then timed the length of his dialogues that took place as his characters walked these same routes. Verisimilitude.

The key point in this approach is that, in the novel, events (or reality) dictate the words in the narrative. It is quite the opposite in poetry, where the words determine the meaning and the reality. The novelist is like the demiurge; he creates and moves about in the world with utmost confidence. Once the writer has clearly detailed the world, the language of the point of view flows from it.

Eco stressed the importance of various sorts of constraints that operate on the writer in his quest to delineate the text's universe and its language. He also pointed to two "post-modern" techniques he relied on in his writing: intertextual irony (and its subspecies "double coding") and metanarrative in which the author directly addresses the reader.

Eco told the audience it only took him two years to write his first novel, The Name of the Rose. It took him between six and eight years for each of his subsequent novels. The reason? He is a medievalist by profession and before Name he had done practically all the research he needed. With the others, much more research was required.

The audience this evening was filled with a lot of scholarly-looking types. The Schwartz center auditorium was filed to the rafters. I wondered, as a writer of fiction myself, how this lecture went over with them.

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco is a multi-disciplinary Italian scholar and a novelist. He is often mentioned in the context of the Nobel Prize for literature. I had the great honor to meet him last night at Emory University. He was here to deliver the ninth in the biennial series of The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. His topic: Confessions of a Young Novelist. The lectures, which spanned three separate sessions, will be published in book form next year by Harvard Press. Last night he gave a reading of an autobiographical snippet from his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum.

The title of his lecture series is wryly ironic. Eco's first and most famous novel, The Name of the Rose (subsequently made into a competent film starring Sean Connery), was published in 1980 when Eco was 49 years old. In his own accounting, he is only a 28 year old novelist. (I guess that makes me a novelist in utero. Indeed, when does life begin?)

He entitled his three lectures as follows: (1) "How I Write;" (2) "Author, Text, and Interpreters;" and (3) "On the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death." The first lecture (near and dear to my heart) was a subjective account of himself and his processes as novelist. The second was a more objective look at his work from the standpoint of the critical interpreter. The third magically expanded out to an account of the ultimate subject of literature (which, I must say, coincided nicely with our own series of posts on what we called the Ur-Story). The form of the series of lectures was unconventionally narrative, less a thesis statement with proofs than an exploration working toward a grand solution.

Over the next series of posts, I shall try to set out some of Eco's major way-posts on the way toward his conclusion. Stay tuned.