Since I confused Jacques Barzun with Umberto Eco the other day, I thought I'd actually read Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, a collection of six lectures on literature he delivered at Harvard in 1993. I expected it to be difficult, but his writing is both full of humor and carefully organized so that, I imagine, even a lecture audience could follow his points. These six essays cover topics such as time in literature, how much truth is to be expected from fiction, and the complexities of narrative identity. As a former lit scholar, I like this kind of stuff, and I especially like it as an example of how accessible and coherent literary criticism can be. Last night at a restaurant I sat in the next booth from a former classmate in the English Department, a woman so jargony (and thus destined for greatness, I'm sure) that in a casual e-mail discussion she could toss off sentences like the following, which I have saved and re-read anytime I start to get nostalgic for Literature Studies:
I really don't have too much to say today because all my ideas are in the paper for the presentation. However, the largely neglected idea of exocannibalism deserves a mention. It can be explained as the Hegelian aeufhebung or overcoming which symbolically establishes a syncretism between the metropole and the colony, thereby dethroning nationalist discourses which result in annihilation and conquest.
If I had decided to weed Eco's collection of essays, rather than wanting to keep it both as a fun future re-read and as a possible introduction to literary studies for my home-schooled kids, and if I had had it in my pocket, I would have dropped it casually into my former colleague's lap as we passed, in the hope that something--not so much the content as the clarity of the writing--would sink into her.
I also realized as I re-read Six Walks that some of its ideas have stayed with me in the years since I first read it. The concepts of story time and discursive time, for instance, and their roles in setting the pace of literary works have been useful to me. Story time is how much time has passed in the story; discourse time is how long it takes to tell about it. The story time is very long, and the discourse time very short, in a sentence like, "The princess slept for a hundred years." Eco says that writers can impose a reading pace on their readers by matching or contrasting discourse time with story time: spending several pages describing events that take only a few seconds, for example, or dashing along rapidly.
Eco also says that the relationship between discourse time and story time, not prurient content, is the key to identifying pornography. This is an example of his humor, which I love:
When trying to asseess a film that contains sexually explicit scenes, you should check to see whether, when a character gets into an elevator or a car, the discourse time coincides with the story time. Flaubert may take one line to say that Frédéric traveled for a long time, and in normal films a character who gets on a plane at Logan Airport in Boston will, in the next scene, land in San Francisco. But in a pornographic film if someone gets in a car to go ten blocks, the car will journey those ten blocks in read time. If someone opens a fridge and pours out a Sprite that he's going to drink in the armchair after switching on the TV, the action takes precisely the same time it would take you if you were doing the same thing at home.The reason is pretty simple. A pornographic film is designed to satisfy the audience's desire for sexually explicit scenes, but it can't show an hour and half of uninterrupted sexual acts.... But no one has the least intention of spending time and money thinking up a worthwhile story, and the spectators aren't interested in the story either, because all they're doing is waiting for the sexy bits. The story is thereby reduced to a series of insignificant everyday actions, such as going someplace, drinking a whisky, putting on a coat... and it makes more economic sense to film someone driving a car that to mix him up in a shoot-out à la MIckey Spillane. (61)
One of my favorite parts of ths book, both times I've read it, has been the essay "The Strange Case of the Rue Servandoni," in which Eco discusses the level of faithfulness to the "real" world that a novelist is obligated to meet. One of his test cases is the novel The Three Musketeers, in which Alexandre Dumas, sadly, houses two of his characters on separate streets in Paris--which, it turns out, are the same street in the real world, its name having been changed to honor a famous architect some hundred years or more after the 1625 setting of the novel. After detailing this error for us, Eco goes on to argue that it's not an important mistake, because spotting it requires a familiarity with Paris history, and with the identity of formerly famous architects who have since fallen into oblivion, that most readers don't possess. In other words, this information isn't in what Eco calls the "Encyclopedia" of the "Model Reader." On the other hand, Eco says, if d'Artagnan had left his mistress's house and stepped onto the Rue Bonaparte, that would have been a serious error, because most readers know, without resorting to reference books, that Napoleon hadn't come to power before 1625, and so their ability to enter into the world of the novel would be compromised.
Eco is trying to establish an answer to the question of just how much novels and other works of fiction are allowed to distort reality. The answer is, of course, as much as they want--but each work establishes its own parameters and must then abide by them. Science fiction novels, for instance, can posit faster-than-light travel; surrealistic novels could even posit a Paris of 1625 in which one street that has historically gone by two names can become two streets existing simultaneously. But if a writer sets a novel in a realistic Paris, the expectation is that the Paris of the novel will correspond very closely to the Paris of the real world.
Eco tells a funny story about a character in one of his novels who takes a walk in (I think) Rome one evening. In the novel, Eco gives a specific date for this walk, and for verisimilitude he walked the route at the same time of the evening that the character does, so that his description would be accurate. After the novel was published, he got a letter from a reader who had checked the newspapers for that date and wondered how the character could have walked past a certain corner and not noticed the building on fire there. Eco's point is that you can never trust your readers to grasp the distinction between fact and fiction, though it crosses my mind that if a writer wants to make a characer take a walk on a specific night--June 24, 1993, say--instead of on "a late June evening," perhaps he had better check the paper for fires, too.
I've never read anything else by Eco, having always had a suspicion I'd find him a difficult read, based on having found most of what I've read by European writers strange and dense. But perhaps, when the Project is over, I'll give one of his novels a try, having, after all, nothing to lose.
Posted by Su Penn at June 20, 2003 03:01 PM | TrackBack