V V: The truth about novels

Umberto Eco is a medievalist, philosopher and scholar of modern literature who, as he says in his latest book, Confessions of a Young Novelist (Harvard University Press, $18.95), “is a novelist only as an amateur”, or just for the fun of it. Good non-fiction, he believes, is crafted as a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research — qualities that were evident in his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), which became a bestseller. His novels, however, are not easy reading; they are as knotty and layered as his “Theory of Semiotics” with long asides on medieval philosophy. But the erudition is not for the sake of mere difficulty, only to enhance the mystery of things.

 

Now, after a lapse of 30 years since his venture into fiction, he has come up with a meandering little book that offers his readers an effective primer on both his oeuvre and the contemporary field of semiotics. The book was first conceived as a lecture series that explains its chatty, unpretentious prose, hence its easy readability

Like many European writers, Eco employs a method called “double coding”, a term that describes the ability of art to contain at least two meanings simultaneously. So, in addition to being a semiologist and medievalist, he is also a novelist. But the pure academic is always lurking in the background with a wistful glance at his younger self. In some ways, the book reminds you of James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. So, Confessions is both polemic and intensely personal.

Laced with Eco’s fastidiousness but delightfully unguarded and frank, Confessions is divided into four parts with the idea of providing a peek into the elusive process of a writer or what could be described as literary theory. The first three chapters deal with the theory and craft of writing or literary criticism: “Writing from Left to Right”; “Author’s Texts and Interpreters”; “Some Comments on Fictional Characters”; and “The Lists”, which briefly could be put down as an essential reading list for budding writers.

Earlier in the book, Eco says, “I do not belong to that gang of bad writers who say that they write only for themselves. The only thing that writers write for themselves are shopping lists, which help them remember what to buy, and then can be thrown away.” Put another way, it means that all writers must have a sense of discrimination: pick what is wanted and toss the rest aside. (Hemingway had described it as a “built-in shit detector”.)

Eco is at his best when discussing the how-to and wherefore of writing, which are no more than presenting a set of common truths. Like his text and its title, Eco struggles under the weight of his own different meanings, that is his identity as a popular writer and as a philosopher, “with a touch of Platonic arrogance.” Philosophy is first love which provides catalogues, questions and contradictions that the novelist has to balance. The balancing act usually leads to academic jargon that makes it incomprehensible, but Eco’s style is so commonsensical and well tuned that one cannot help but be influenced by it.

“Writing from Left to Right”, the opening chapter, is presented as a rejoinder to the commonly asked question, “How do you write your novels? I usually cut short this line of questioning and reply from ‘From right to left’. I realise that this is not a satisfactory answer, and that it can produce some astonishment in Arab countries and in Israel!”

Eco then goes to rubbish some of the popular myths like “inspiration”. It is a bad word that “tricky authors use in order to seem artistically respectable”; or, else they were in possession of a “secret recipe”. It’s nothing of the kind; it is simply hard work — reading everything around the subject, visiting places, drawing maps of the universe you wanted to create because narrative is “first and foremost a cosmological affair”. Thereafter, stick to the Latin rule, “stick to the subject and the words will follow”. Eco discusses these ground rules in relation to his three main novels, The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before.

It is in “Authors, Text and Interpreters” that Eco gives us something more meaty. Through a series of anecdotes, all relating to interpretation and misinterpretation of his novels, Eco tells us some fundamental truths about how, and why, one interprets a text. The basis of his theory, which has many takers because it has been repeated so many times, can be put down to these pithy observations:

• “A text is a lazy machine that wants its readers to do part of its job.” 
   
• “It seems the fictional worlds are parasitic on the real world.” 
   
• “It is always possible to tell when a given interpretation is blatantly wrong, crazy, farfetched.” 
   
• “It can happen that, when we enter a very absorbing and captivating narrative world, a textual strategy can provoke something similar to a mystical raptus or a hallucination, and we simply forget we have entered a world that is merely possible.”

Finally, Eco is quite frank about the immodesty of writers, including his own: “Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect that it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”