Posts tagged Umberto Eco
The Acacian
Art Is The View From Somewhere Else, Nothing More, Nothing Less
10/21/2011: Theory: I Was an Under-Age Semiotician - NYTimes
Embracing semiotics came with certain costs. In my own case, I spent most of my mid-20s detangling my prose style. (It got younger as I got older.) I now spend more time learning from the insights of science than deconstructing its truth claims. I slowly killed off the desire to impress with willful obscurity. During my grad school years, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit, modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined reading his written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, rather than just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question that began by putting “under erasure” the very nature of an answer. I remember breaking into a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, “I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.” It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself was asking for more clarity. - Steven Johnson
5/23/2010: Excerpt du Jour: On Literature by Umberto Eco
The following passage comes from the essay, “On Some Functions Of Literature,” which is the first essay in the book. Paraphrased, it is one of my favorite quotations of all time, and it feels great to be able to share it in this larger context. Also, excellently, this is the first time I’ve reread it since I read the passage In Les Miserables he mentions.
Page 14:
With a hypertextual structure we could rewrite the battle of Waterloo, making Grouchy’s French arrive instead of Blucher’s Germans. There are war games that allow you to do such things, and I’m sure they are great fun. But the tragic grandeur of those pages by Hugo resides in the notion that things go the way they do, and often in spite of what we want. The beauty of War And Peace lies in the fact that Prince Andrej’s agony ends with his death, however sorry it makes us. The painful wonder that every reading of the great tragedies evokes in us comes from the fact that their heroes, who could have escaped an atrocious fate, through weakness or blindness fail to realize where they are heading, and plunge into an abyss they have often dug with their own hands. In any case, that is the sense conveyed by Hugo when, after showing us other opportunities Napoleon could have seized at Waterloo, he writes, “Was it possible for Napoleon to win that battle? We reply no. Why? Beacuse of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.”
This is what all the great narratives tell us, even if they replace God with notions of fate or the inexorable laws of life. The function of “unchangeable” stories is precisely this: against all our desires to change destiny, they make tangible the impossibility of changing it. And in doing so, no matter what story they are telling, they are also telling our own story, and that is why we read them and love them. We need their severe, “repressive” lesson. Hypertextual narrative has much to teach us about freedom and creativity. That is all well and good, but it is not everything. Stories that are “already made” also teach us how to die.
-Umberto Eco, 2000 (Translated by Martin McLaughlin)
5/4/2010: Books: Review: Vanishing Points - NYTimes
New York Times book blog, PaperCuts, has an intriguing review of article on Ander Monson’s new book, Vanishing Points. The article, entitled “The Future of Books” (found here), focuses on the “meta” aspects of the book, which, granted, seems to be the point of the book. What isn’t clear, is what the book is about. Good article anyways.
Here’s a blurb:
As you read, then, you find daggers (those sword-shaped footnote indicators - The Acacian) appended to words and phrases like “the memory of vanilla” (as in ice cream), “mother” (as in Monson’s), or “diversity of the city” (as in Grand Rapids, Mich.). I happened to be reading his book while riding subway, and I have to say, it was an odd feeling. Each time I saw a dagger, I had the impulse to go explore; I found myself wishing I were reading with my laptop at the ready, so I could stop and see where these daggers wanted me to go. I imagined a picture of Monson’s mother, a chart showing the racial breakdown of Grand Rapids. And “the memory of vanilla”? I wasn’t sure. Would it be a poem? A photograph? A video of Monson enjoying an ice cream cone? (In the future, would the technology exist in which an e-reader might shoot a whiff of vanilla at my face, like some shopping-mall perfume spritzer?)
Interestingly, I’ve seen something similar, granted without the online concepts, in the meta/semiotic masterpiece, House of Leaves. Also, anything ‘meta’ related always brings me to Umberto Eco’s essay, “On Some Functions of Literature,” which would answer some of this article’s questions. (I wish I had already posted an Excerpt du Jour on that essay, so I could link to it.)
