Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics
at the University of Bologna, Italy, was known for his vast scholarly erudition,
which he displays both in his nonfiction, such as On Literature and Six Walks
in the Fictional Woods, and in his novels, like the Medieval mystery The Name of the Rose, and the conspiracy
theory-enamored Foucault's Pendulum.
In 2004, Eco published a new novel
(released in English translation in 2005) called The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Unlike his previous novels, this work was
light on erudition (at least by Eco's standards) and heavy on autobiographical
elements. The story concerns Yambo, a
rare book dealer of approximately Eco's age (and also like Eco, from Milan) who
wakes from a coma with an unusual form of amnesia: he can remember almost
nothing of his personal past, but seems to have an eidetic memory for all the
literature he has read in his long life; as a result, passages from various
books float into his consciousness as different experiences trigger
associations with them. This is one of
the forms Eco's famous erudition takes in the book—one much lighter than the
forms it has taken in some of his earlier works.
Yambo retreats to his family home,
where he attempts to restore his lost memory by reading through much of the
literature---especially popular literature---that has shaped him and his
generation. One of these works, a comic
with a plot very reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard's She, gives its name to Eco's novel.
Yambo's quest, which evolves into a
quest to recover the memory of his first love, constitutes the essence of the
novel. He sifts through and interacts
with various works, many images from which appear throughout the book (making
it to some degree an illustrated novel).
As he does so, he relives the story of his generation. It is here that we discover the
autobiographical elements in the novel, and we do so via comparison with
another book published by Eco in 2006 (English translation: 2007).
Turning
Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, is a collection of cultural
essays by Eco, published in Italian newspapers between 2000 and 2005. As with all of Eco's essays, they are
intelligent, entertaining, and thought-provoking (not to mention providing American
readers with a perspective on post-9-11 events from outside the
English-speaking world). What is
intriguing about them is how they provide a window into Eco's past, his
personal life, and his thought processes during the same time as he was writing
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Comparing the two books, we find several
common elements. Of course, we would
expect Italian Fascism to play a role, but what about Dick Tracy? He makes an appearance in both books. Also, in both the novel and one of the essays
from Turning Back the Clock, Eco
quotes the same line from a Humphrey Bogart film: "That's the power of the
press, baby!"
Finally,
we see the autobiographical core of the novel revealed when Eco recounts in his
essays two events from his life which occur in almost identical form in the
life of Yambo. First, he notes how, the
day after Fascism ended, numerous new political parties surfaced in the papers,
and how he realized, despite being very young at the time, that they had existed
in some form also during Fascism. In the
novel, Yambo discovers a paper from immediately after the end of fascism, with
numerous political parties featured. He
realizes that he must have had at that time the very same epiphany as his
real-life counterpart—that they had been there, underground, all along.
Perhaps the clearest indication of
the autobiographical roots of Eco's novel is the fact that Yambo discovers that
the first Allied soldier he met after the end of the war was a black American
soldier. In one of his essays, Eco says
the very same thing about himself.
In
the end, Yambo slips back into a coma—as he comes, eventually, to believe—and for
the final section of the book, the reader is in his mind as he experiences
various dreams and visions culled from his extensive reading. Here, Eco allows his erudition much fuller
play than earlier in the novel.
The educated reader may take
pleasure in realizing that the final section of these visions, although
ostensibly drawn from such popular works as Flash Gordon, are described in
language and contain events reminiscent of the visions in the final book of the
Bible, the Apocalypse. And so, Eco's
novel ends, as the Bible ends, with visions of the end of a world. However, while the Bible told of the end of a
city called Babylon the Great and the world she knew, we realize that the world
that ends at the close of Yambo's story...is Yambo himself.
