Eco and the Funnymen

[Dave Monroe]

Eco and the Funnymen
Novelist Umberto Eco talks about Homer, the Internet,
comic books—and ladies' shoes
by David Ng
July 5th, 2005 3:38 PM


For the record, Umberto Eco is an avid user of the
Internet but he's not a fanatic. "I've never
downloaded an MP3," confesses the Italian
author-semiotician. "And I don't surf late at night in
some hallucinatory way." On most days, Eco logs on
just to check his e-mail and the weather. In the
evenings, he'll connect to a radio station for a
little background music. Once in a while, he'll buy a
sentimental knickknack: a comic book from his youth or
a favorite video game from the '70s. Explains the
writer: "I use the Internet in the same way I use my
personal library—I'm in a constant state of coming and
going."

Eco-philes know the relevance that the online medium
has for the 73-year-old author, even if the public
will forever associate him with such medieval-themed
doorstops as The Name of the Rose and Baudolino. His
latest book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
(Harcourt), may just be his most hypertextual novel to
date—a sprawling network of mnemonic associations
ripped straight from a highly troubled brain. Yambo,
an antiquarian bookseller, awakens one day to find
he's lost his memory, unable to recognize his wife or
navigate the streets of his native Milan. In an ironic
twist, he has retained total recall of every book he's
read and drops literary quotations with savant-like
ease. An afternoon snack prompts him to utter, "The
distinctive scent of bitter almond . . . " (from
García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera), while a
meeting with a friend inspires "Call me . . .
Ishmael?"

In the Eco-ian universe, books aren't merely
stand-alone islands to be traversed in linear fashion;
they are nodes in an exponentially expanding extranet.
To read one book, you sometimes have to pass through
several others, accumulating countless references and
subtexts along the way. "We've been reading books in a
hypertextual way ever since Homer," Eco says. "We read
a page and then we jump, especially when we're
rereading it. Think of the Bible. When people read it,
they're always jumping here and there, constantly
connecting various quotations."

On a certain level, all of Eco's novels are texts of
texts—literary snippets (sometimes chunks)
synergistically arranged to form an alternate,
labyrinthine reality. In Foucault's Pendulum, a pair
of literary editors and an academic conspire to link
various conspiracy theories throughout history into a
giant über-conspiracy. Feeding various manuscripts
into a supercomputer, they create an intertextual
theory so complex that it quickly eludes rational
human intelligence. (Many readers experienced a
similar befuddlement with the novel itself.)

Arranged in three neat sections, Mysterious Flame
quickly reveals itself to be as knotty as anything
Eco's written. The novel begins with Yambo
unsuccessfully sifting through the debris of his total
system failure. Overwhelmed by faces and names, he
escapes to his boyhood home in the Italian Piedmont,
where he confronts a different inundation—the novellas
and comic books from his adolescence. The second
section has Yambo delving into this kitsch pool of
superheroes, damsels in distress, and cartoonish
fascists—relics of Italy's Mussolini generation. (One
such relic gives the novel its title.) In the final
section, Yambo suffers a relapse and is comatose, his
still-active mind resurrecting early-childhood
memories and hyperlinking them to the present.

"Obviously, when you write a novel about memory, you
have the ghost of Proust blackmailing you," says Eco.
"But this isn't the case here. Proust goes inside
himself to retrieve personal memories, while my
character has no personal memories, or madeleines, and
is dealing with collective, mineral memorabilia. He's
working with external material, not internal
material." Eco has reproduced much of this "mineral
memory" in the form of illustrations—period book
covers, movie posters, and propa-ganda material. "The
graphics don't illustrate what I've already verbally
described," he explains. "They have the function of an
'etcetera,' to give the impression of the abundance of
material that I found in my attic."

Eco says he structured Mysterious Flame to mimic the
free-associative behavior of electronic navigation.
(Indeed, his latest nonfiction book to be published
stateside, The History of Beauty, was originally
conceived as a CD-ROM.) But Eco stops short when asked
about the all too real physical convergence of books
and online matter. "I'm very skeptical about that," he
says. "The real function of a novel is to give the
reader the impression that destiny can't be altered.
With electronic material, you can change it whenever
you want. But a novel tells you that life can't be
changed. That's its power." Ever the pragmatist, he
adds: "The book form can be useful during a blackout,
or sitting on the branch of a tree, or maybe when
making love."

In its own way, Mysterious Flame embodies Eco's
ambivalence toward new media. Yambo's childhood
memories emerge wiki-like, each random fragment
lodging itself in his hollowed-out identity.

But memory doubly serves as a lethal cocoon,
imprisoning Yambo within himself and rendering human
contact impossible. For Eco, the Internet is similarly
double-edged. "If you and I rely on the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, we have a common ground for interaction,"
he explains. "But once we start learning exclusively
through the Internet, you risk creating your own
personal encyclopedia, which will be different from
others'."

A strange critique coming from someone who's perhaps
written his most inward-gazing novel. Early reviews
have dismissed Mysterious Flame as nostalgic and at
times so personal as to be impenetrable. Eco concedes
he wrote it with his own generation in mind. "It's a
book for Italian people of my age," he says. "When I
was in New York 30 years ago, I saw a shop with a sign
that said it was selling 'Shoes for Spanish-Speaking
Fat Ladies.' There was a special market for them! So I
thought of my book in this way."

Eco points out the novel has been a success throughout
Europe and adds, with winking immodesty, "We have
never been to Troy but by reading Homer, we feel like
we've always been there. So if Homer succeeded in
doing so, why not me?"

No doubt for Eco, books, in all their immutable glory,
will outlast any electronic medium. As he once wrote,
"Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once
invented, have not been further improved because they
are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife,
spoon or scissors." Be that as it may, Eco clearly
enjoys the occasional tech musing. Nearly 20 years
ago, he compared Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft DOS
to Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively. How
would he characterize today's Internet? "We could say
that the World Wide Web aspires to be God. In The
Divine Comedy, Dante looks directly at God and sees a
single volume containing all the sheets in the
universe. God is for him the totality of wisdom and
information. But the Internet, while being
well-informed, may be too much informed. It can't
distinguish good from evil. So I'd say that if the Web
is God, it would be a very stupid God!" 

http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0527,ngeco,65582,10.html

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