Umberto Eco and The Useful Fiction of A “Structured Life”

This photograph was taken by Josef Albers in Anahuacali, Mexico. My (admittedly tiny amount of) research has not provided me with a date for it. I think that’s heaven up there, obscured by the wall to our left.

OH! BUT THIS IS SOMEWHAT NOT ENTIRELY PROBABLY UNRELATED:

As the result of a work environment which permits me to wear headphones most of the time, and the subsequent overexposure to (awesome) music which this situation has produced, I have ventured into the world of audiobooks.  It bears an even lesser resemblance to actual reading than I thought it might, initially, although it isn’t without its charms. As frustrated as I am by not being able to set my own pace, as a reader, I like the way in which it makes me notice my attention - certain topics, words, or turns of phrase will restore my focus to the audio when my mind drifts, as it inevitably does (I mean, I am at work). It’s fun to think that the pattern which emerges from the links between these terms is some sort of unique mental imprint, a sort of fingerprint for personal interests than run deeper than that over which we exact willful control. 

This evening, I finished Umberto Eco’s Six Walks In The Fictional Woods. I was actually looking for Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For The Next Millenium when I happened upon it. As such, audible.com did not have the text I sought, but Eco’s book looked promising enough. This was my third attempt at getting into his work, and this time, it worked. Granted, I wasn’t really “reading” it, and it’s not fiction: inspired by Calvino’s series of lectures on literary values (delivered just before his death and collected in Six Memos), Eco undertook a similar project, the results of which comprise Six Walks (which is dedicated to Calvino).

This was probably not the best thing to do, as a duty-driven employee, because I’ve spent a little too much time over the past few work-evenings furiously scribbling down notes inspired by Eco’s brilliance when I should have been doing my job. I guess that’s what happens when you mainline brilliant commentary on subjects such as: referential/contextual framing within a text, the difference between an invented literary figure and a real dead person, and Why Fog Is Always Awesome In Fiction (fog meaning both the appearance of real fog, as weather phenomenon, and a “fog” created as an affect of style in the writing).

What really got me worked up, though (…I promise I have a life, you guys, really, I promise) was his declaration that people tell stories, and have always told stories, to give form to their real lives. That’s some serious paraphrasing right there, but it’s the gist of it. He goes on to explain how we must imagine our lives as some sort of fictional work to provide a structure (such as a narrative arc or linear progression) necessary for us to make some sense from what would, without such a framework, much more closely resemble James Joyce’s Ulysses than, say, Ivanhoe: a life comprised of dispersed, heterogeneous moments which perpetually debase their own conditions for being true or meaningful. A life void of perspectival viewpoint, negating the very possibility of individuality or selfhood (or so some would argue, at any rate). I’ll take Ivanhoe, thanks…

My specific interest in Eco’s conception of the use of fiction-reading is its function with regards to metafiction. My wacky idea is that texts which call attention to their own status as fiction, and in doing so trouble or “make strange” the distinction between the work of art that they are and the reader’s real life, provide the reader with an ability to narrativize and structure their own lives that is both stronger and more instructive than that provided by non-metafictional works of fiction.

I’ve got loads more to say on these matters, but I’ll hold off until after I get some rest. If I get some rest. I hear there isn’t much around for the wicked these days.

((( emma )))