The Name of The Rose author’s deep dive into the craft of storytelling

ESSAYS
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
Umberto Eco
Harvard University Press, $41.95

February marks a decade since Umberto Eco died in Milan, aged 84.

The Italian writer and polymath was the author of dozens of non-fiction books, including A Theory of Semiotics (1978) and The Role of the Reader (1979). But it was Eco’s novels that made him a literary superstar. Among his most famous are Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and The Name of the Rose (1980) – a fictional debut he published aged 48 that sold 50 million copies. “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told,” Eco wrote in the novel’s postscript.

The murder mystery is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery, where a Franciscan friar investigates a series of suspicious deaths. Literary critics liked to joke that Eco was the author of the world’s bestselling unread book. Their hatchet-job reviews often circled back to the same question: are the abstract historical, linguistic and cultural references Eco’s novels contain all that necessary? “No man should know so much,” the British novelist Anthony Burgess once remarked about Eco, whose personal library was said to have housed 50,000 books.

“Every author has a double dream,” Eco told The Washington Post in 1989. “To sell a million copies and to be read by the happy few.” These Eco defined as “model readers”.

“One must observe the rules of the game, and the model reader is someone eager to play [it],” Eco writes in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

The collection of essays was part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which Eco delivered at Harvard University in 1992-1993. This revised edition is introduced by Louis Menand. The American critic notes that Eco was part of a pan-European cultural movement that rose to prominence in the 1960s. It featured figures such as Tzvetan Todorov, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, who penned the extended essay The Death of the Author in 1967.

These urbane intellectuals-theorists used structuralism, semiotics, narratology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and reader-response theory to think and talk about writing and reading from a new perspective. Breaking down barriers that hitherto existed between high and low culture, they made critical theory seem sexy and modern. But intellectual snobbery sometimes entered the cultural equation. Some readers may detect a slight whiff of that elitism in Eco’s prose. I didn’t.

Eco borrows the title of the book from Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinian novelist once compared meandering through a narrative text as akin to taking a leisurely stroll through the woods. “There are woods like Dublin, where instead of Little Red Riding Hood one can meet Molly Bloom,” Eco writes. The Joycean woods had many cultural and historical branches. Homer was one. Laurence Sterne was another. The Anglo-Irish cleric and author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) is often credited as the founding father of metafiction. “After Sterne, avant-garde narrative has [created] readers who expect complete freedom of choice from the book they are reading,” Eco explains.

Model readers, of course, cannot exist without model authors: “To identify the model author the text has to be read many times,” Eco writes. But for how long? Eco spent four decades rereading Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie (1853). He even provides a complex diagram documenting the flashback sequences from the complex 19th century novella.

Using graphs to explain literature with mathematical precision? It feels like an absurd joke. But this technical tone doesn’t last long. What emerges from these pages is Eco’s love of literature. It’s sincere, heartfelt, intriguing, fun, erudite, and almost childlike in its endless quest for meaning.

“We will [never] stop reading fictional stories,” he writes with enthusiasm. A nice sentiment. Although recent evidence suggests worrying trends. In August last year, a combined study from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure in the United States has declined by more than 40 per cent over the last 20 years. If you take the cynical view, it’s easy to see where this story ends. Social media and AI are dumbing down everyone and everything, as the image replaces the written word.

It’s not a sentiment I think Eco (a progressive thinker who wrote frequently about AI and technology) would share. Model readers and model authors, after all, are just too curious. “We read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place,” Eco concludes.

In our present age of post-truth chaos, it’s food for thought.

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