Fantastic collection of essays about literature and writing. A first place mind.

I don't know why, but I don't really want to read fiction these days. I'm all about essays. My latest read was Umberto Eco's On Literature, a collection of literary essays (often reworked from talks) published in 2002. Eco's engaging, personalized style makes for interesting reading even when you don't know anything about the book or books discussed or referenced, which happens rather a lot because of his Italian point of view. Works integral to Italian culture aren't always familiar to the English-speaking world. The litmus test for me is always the same: Does it make me want to read or re-read great works? The answer is yes (whether I immediately will rather depends on my coming off my essays kick). Better yet, it's made me want to WRITE. And I'm always happy when a famous critic pans a work of literature I have only disdain for, in this case, The Count of Monte Cristo. Hehehe.

required reading for anyone planning to write abt Il Paradiso

If Eco isn't your favorite Italian-medievalist-semiotician-novelist... well, I mean, who is?!! This collection of essays and addresses ranges far and wide hitting on many of Eco's passions and interests with respect to literature, meaning, and writing. (I did not read one of the essays: "Mists of the Valois" about Nerval’s [b:Sylvie|337463|Sylvie (La Petite Collection)|Gérard de Nerval|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173854772l/337463._SX50_.jpg|1444752] because Eco advises the reader to read Nerval's novella before reading the essay and I have delusions of eventually doing just that.)

The combination of Eco's esoteric knowledge, ease at connecting past/present (as well as concept/reality), and his shared passion for reading and writing are a delight (even when his intellect vastly outstretches my own). My favorite pieces from this assortment were:
- Wilde: Paradox & Aphorism
- Borges & My Anxiety of Influence
- On Symbolism
- Les Sémaphores sous la Pluie
- The Power of Falsehood

I want to try to give you a feel for his writing without going overboard with examples but I fear my enthusiasm may tread all over my attempts to draw connections and be anything close to concise. Recurring themes definitely include the limitations but still impressive power of language, the effects of a more secular world on meaning and narrative, and Eco's own concerns and understanding of writing.

From "A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor" we get:

" …the ambiguity of our languages, the natural imperfection of our idioms, represents not the post-Babelic disease from which humanity must recover but, rather, the only opportunity God gave to Adam, the talking animal. Understanding human languages that are imperfect but at the same time able to carry out that supreme form of imperfection we call poetry represents the only conclusion to every search for perfection. Babel was not an accident, we have been living in the Tower from the beginning. The first dialogue between God and Adam may well have taken place in finneganian, and it is only by going back to Babel and taking up the one opportunity we have that we can find our peace and face the destiny of the human race."

Joyce becomes an intellectual stepping stone to adding Borges to the discussion in "Between La Mancha and Babel:

"I believe that literary experimentalism works on a space we might call the world of languages. But a language, as linguists know, has two sides. On one side the signifier, on the other the signified. The signifier organizes sounds, while the signified arranges ideas. And it is not that this organization of ideas, which constitutes the form of a particular culture, is independent from language, because we know a culture only through the way in which language has organized the still-unformed data about our contract with the continuum of the world. Without language there would be o ideas, but a mere stream of experience that has not been processed or thought about.

Working experimentally on language and the culture it conveys means therefore working on two fronts: on the signifier front, playing with words (and through the destruction and reorganization of words ideas are reorganized); and playing with ideas, and therefore pushing words to touch on new and un-dreamed-of horizons.

Joyce played with words, Borges with ideas. And at this point we discern the different ideas the two writers held about what they played with and its infinite capacity for being segmented."

In "On Symbolism" Eco seems to want to rescue language and our enjoyment of it through outlining when and where to look for the symbolic and the risks of over-reading symbolism. We begin with scripture and religion and end with fiction and poetry:

"When something in scripture appears semantically understandable but seems to us out of place, excessive, inexplicably emphatic, that is where we have to seek a hidden second meaning. Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily not have been there, and one wonders why it is there. This something is not a metaphor, because otherwise it would have gone against common sense, it would have polluted the stark purity of the degree zero of writing. It is not allegory, because it does not refer to any heraldic code. It exists, it is there, it does not disturb us that is it there, at most it might slow down our reading, but it is the surplus that is represents, its blameless incongruity, its presence looming so large in the economy of the text, that makes us suppose that its placement means it may be saying something else as well."

"Today it is we who demand that poetry, and often fiction, supply us not just with the expression of emotions, or an account of actions, or morality, but also with symbolic flashes, pale ersatz elements of truth we no longer seek in religion.

Where everything has a second sense, everything is irredeemably flat and dull. The lust for a second sense ruins our ability to see second or even one thousand sense where they actually exist, or have been placed.

We no longer even know how to enjoy the revelation of the literal, the sense of amazement at that which is, when the maximum of polyvalence coincides with the minimum of tautology: 'a rose is a rose is a rose.'"

I'll end with my favorite essay of the collection, "The Power of Falsehood," which felt incredibly relevant to today's world thanks to the way Eco outlines the way falsehoods take hold and the many functions they serve socially (as polemic, as justification, as practical explanation). He draws a convincing line from the Rosicrucians to the Templars to the Illuminati and eventually the Protocals of Zion. It's not just that he is able to trace the origins of these stories and the texts from which they borrow and distort, but that he theorizes their psycho-social relevance culturally:

"We now know that Ptolemy’s hypothesis was scientifically false. And yet, if our intelligence is now Copernican, our perception is still Ptolemaic: we not only see the sun rising in the East and travelling across the sky throughout the hours of daylight, but we behave as though the sun went around us and we stayed still. And we say: “the sun rises, is high in the sky, is going down, set… “ Even a professor of astronomy speaks, thinks, and perceives this way: Ptolemaically."
...
"As Karl Popper has reminded us, 'The conspiracy theory of society…is akin to Homer’s theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened in the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies of Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society…comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?’ His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer.'"

The power of stories. Elusive. Persuasive. Enduring. Why else do we read?
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A SMALL BOOK'S WORTH OF NEW-TO-ME WORDS & REFERENCES
etyms | ethym | calembours | koine | oneiric | orphic | sprezzata disinvoltura (effortless nonchalance) | hypotyposis | asyndeta | sorites | hyperbata | polyptoton | zeugma | jasper | carnelian | interoceptive | Mozarabic | raptus | Cusanus | infratextual | feuilletons | cantica | anagicic | allopathic | Corybantism | Eleusinian | afflatus | immanentism | dialogism | psychagogic | lexis | opsis | dianoia | melos | glottogonic | euhemerism | Prester John’s letter | Fama Fraternitatis R.C. | Captain J. Cleves Symmes wooden universe model preserved in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia | phlogistron | skiapod | lipogram

The recent death of Umberto Eco prompted me to borrow one of his essays, "On Literature." The author is well-placed to talk about it. He has published novels of significant importance and thought more about writing than anyone else. Eco is a scholar, and his intelligence is subtle. The book in question is, in reality, a collection of lessons and lectures that the writer gave in various circumstances. Each has a particular subject: the critical study of one or more famous authors, recurring themes in literature, or even the work of Eco itself. All these brilliant reflections are only sometimes easy to understand, far from it. They may even discourage the reader. But, even if we only grabbed half of it, it would be alright.
I was very interested in the chapters devoted to authors for whom I have a particular preference. For example, the book evokes the work of J.-L. Borges (whose author is a great admirer) in two texts of great depth. But the most exciting part of the collection is the chapter "How I write." The writer explains precisely how he conceived his novels, matured and prepared them (at great length), and set their tone and rhythm: it's fascinating. It allows us better to understand the final result of his immense labor: his completed novels, as we readers discover them.

Ler Umberto Eco, na sua vertente não ficcional (mas também ficcional), prossupõe toda uma bagagem intelectual e literária absolutamente espantosa. Além disso, as suas paixões mais evidentes ficam muito claras nos seus discursos e, se a semiótica, Borges e Joyce não constam das nossas áreas de estudo ou recreação, o melhor é adiar a leitura destes ensaios para mais tarde (ou quiçá nunca).

Num conjunto de reflexões em que aborda estilo, formas de narrativa, influência, símbolo (etc etc) e toda uma miríade de assuntos pertinentes ao autor e a qualquer leitor curioso (quer se arrependa ou não após a sua leitura), Eco aborda também questões mais pessoais da sua atividade de escritor - neste plano nivelando-se mais com os leitores - como receios, ambições e práticas.

Faz uma leitura interessante, mas exigente. De todo um divertimento, mas antes um exercício de faculdades várias e de memória para regressar a muitos e muitos títulos e escritores, lidos e por ler, que desfilam por estas páginas.


"Eu tenho algumas experiências que creio serem comuns a quem quer que possua muitíssimos livros (eu agora tenho cerca de quarenta mil, entre Milão e as minhas outras casas) e considera uma biblioteca não só um lugar onde conservar os livros já lidos, mas sobretudo um armazém de livros a ler um dia ou outro, quando se sentir a sua necessidade. Ora acontece que sempre que o olho recai sobre um livro ainda não lido se é atacado pelo remorso.
Só que chega depois um dia em que, para se saber alguma coisa sobre um certo assunto, nos decidimos finalmente a abrir um dos muitos livros jamais lido, começamos a lê-lo e apercebemo-nos de que já o conhecíamos. O que aconteceu? Existe a explicação místico-biológica, que com o passar do tempo deslocando os livros, limpando-lhes o pó e arrumando-os de novo, através das pontas dos dedos a essência do livro terá penetrado pouco a pouco na nossa mente. Há a explicação do scanning casual e continuado: com o passar do tempo, ao manusearmos e arrumarmos os vários volumes, não é que nunca se espreite para um livro; mesmo só ao mexer-lhe, passava-se us olhos por algumas páginas, uma hoje, uma o mês que vem,e pouco a pouco acabou-se por lê-lo em grande parte, embora de modo não linear. Mas a explicação é que, entre o momento em que esse livro nos chegou às mãos e o momento em que o abrimos, se leram outros livros, nos quais havia algo que já dizia aquele primeiro livro, e portanto, no fim desta longa volta intertextual, descobre-se que este livro que não tínhamos lido também faz parte do nosso património mental e talvez nos tivesse profundamente influenciado."
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