Mysterious Flames - The Fiction of Umberto Eco
We are surrounded by intangible powers...And among these powers I would include that of the literary tradition; that is to say the network of texts which humanity has produced and still produces...for humanity's own enjoyment.
- Umberto Eco, 'On some functions of literature'.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, the latest and (self-proclaimed) last novel of Umberto Eco, is a wonderful achievement in several regards. Firstly it is a visual delight - peppered with illustrations, sketches, novel covers and frames from comic books, it becomes something worth possessing even before one considers the text. Secondly it reveals a procession of wonderfully written prose. Thirdly and most importantly from the perspective of the Eco fan, it is the final fruition of a novelistic talent first displayed in The Name of the Rose. With that book Eco threatened a classic but fell short, and with Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before and Baudolino he seemed to lose something, something that he has rediscovered gloriously in The Mysterious Flame...
Eco's prose has always been exquisite; he possesses both a sumptuous gift for creating landscapes and a most wonderfully creative imagination. What he increasingly lacked, though, was a sense of control, of decorum. The Island of the Day Before, for example, comprises a fascinating premise and a faultless opening chapter with a weirdly choleric inability to allow the novel any shape or dynamism - it wanders, meanders. It is precisely this quality that is most disliked by his critics. Salman Rushdie memorably concluded of Foucault's Pendulum "Reader, I hated it" and Will Self said he fell asleep every night after a paragraph of Island.... Put simply, from Foucault's Pendulum onward Eco's books were novels that weren't. They were novels with aspirations and ambitions to function as philosophy, as bibliographies as post-modern anti-thrillers.
The truth is that this self-denial meant his books became about something other than character and paid the usual price. As the gap between author and character grows, so do two concomitant gaps: between author and reader and between author and subject. Each Eco novel is a search for meaning that fails to varying degrees as their characters seek an engagement with the same "network of texts" he discusses in his article 'On Some Functions of Literature'. There are two streams, the stream of life (which we inhabit) and the stream of knowledge (which is intermittently accessible to us). This relationship and its pitfalls are most simplistically expressed in Foucault's Pendulum, where a collection of academics and publishers build an alternate history of the world based upon a poorly translated shopping list before the alternate unreality becomes quotidian reality. Events such as these frequently befall Eco characters, events that exploit the uncomfortably apparent gap between "book" and "knowledge", between diligence and inspiration.
Repeatedly, in ways both explicit and implicit, Eco has been hammering away at bridging these streams for years. The Name of the Rose's William of Baskerville fights for the prevalence of unclouded reason in the face of obscene confusion and finds the closest thing to success that one can hope for in an Eco novel (his reward is coloured by the intimation of an imminent death by the plague). As the novels continued to flow, though, the nature of this success became curiously intangible, just another mysterious flame. Eco lost himself in the other varied intellectual pursuits of his life: medievalism, aesthetics and semiotics. All subjects on which Eco is an authority but subjects complete with their own codes of presentations, which are utterly incommensurate with those of the novel. Thus we see a reluctance for a character to do anything without a defined motivation; we see uncomfortable expository and exploratory passages fitted awkwardly into romantic scenes and, ultimately, an unsatisfactory end product.
Until now. His latest novel succeeds in ways that I didn't think it was possible for Eco to succeed. That he will build fiction around a centre of immense knowledge we expect, that he will blend this with a touching human story we do not expect. It is also a pleasant surprise that the centre of immense knowledge is not made from arcane science or religious history but from the stuff of childhoods - comics, adventure stories and school-work. The overriding feeling of the Eco fan; battered, bruised and enfeebled after two decades of penetrating the impenetrable is one of relief.
The success is the result of a very simple inversion of his style. Previous novels were built around unfolding an enormous and painstakingly catalogued series of symbols and facts around a central figure. In The Mysterious Flame... he rips apart any notion that meaning is found in such a catalogue. Here, the main character (Yambo, 60-odd) suffers a stroke and, forgetting who he is, embarks upon a personal re-discovery. In his childhood home he rapaciously consumes all of his childhood comic-books, adventure novels and school text-books. He is someone constructing and construing meaning from the inside out. "Stevenson" he remarks churlishly to his wife at one point "is not pulp"; finally, the personal outweighs the external.
The critical reception of the novel has been divided between those who consider the book to be 'another good Eco book' and those who find the long lists of books and comics turgid and the novel as a whole pointless. This latter group are part of the (perhaps highly sensible) pool of humanity just don't care for Eco very much. Perhaps I would be a happier consumer of literature on the whole if I hadn't persevered with through the years; I would have been spared the long, unending hours of trawling through The Island of the Day Before's frequent fallow spells, for one. Yet, as he finishes this part of his career I wouldn't have shared the orgiastic release of potential that this book allows.
Eco happily enlightens the gap between sign and symbol, between "word" and "thing" but now for the first time, he can truly be called a "novelist".
By J.L. Cranfield
Copyright October 2006
