Six Walks in the Fictional Woods – Umberto Eco

I rarely read non-fiction and I’ve never read literary criticism in book form. Ever.

Umberto Eco’s series of six Norton Lectures therefore constituted, for me, an excursion into the great unknown.

Although his thoughts were presented originally as lectures, for clarity let’s call them essays. The essays are linked by a metaphorical walk through the woods, where reading may take the empirical route to the far side provided by the empirical author, or the model reader may attempt to follow a twistier path designed by the model author. And Eco asserts that there is nothing wrong in forcing our way along paths that don’t exist:

‘It is not at all forbidden to use a text for daydreaming, and we do this frequently, but daydreaming is not a public affair; it leads us to move within the narrative wood as if it were our own private garden.’

Eco, you will note, manipulates his extended metaphor with an elegance which I, earlier, was unable to emulate! Likewise, I am unable to recreate his arguments, and there would be little point in doing so.

For the record, there were those arguments which lost me along the way; and there were statements which, not withstanding a sound theoretical background, struck me as unhelpful for the common or garden reader; the odd conclusion that I couldn’t accept. I also learnt a great deal about the past imperfect tense which does not exist, per se, in English, and I have learnt the meaning of some words which I will never use!

But none of this is important. In a book where you hope, but do not necessarily expect, that something will stick it is the ‘how’ that is crucial. And this is why I, with due consideration, use the word essay. Eco does not lecture. He is not telling anyone how to read, but he is showing how much pleasure is to be gained from seeking and following the directions planted by the author.

Along the way, under the guise of literary criticism, Eco reveals his love for a variety of eclectic texts, some of which I really will have to read, and others of which now demand to be re-read.

It is Gerard de Nerval’s Sylvie to which Eco pays the closest attention. How have I never heard of this seminal text?! The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a more familiar proposition which now rises up the TBR.

Above all Eco writes in an entertaining style which is never dry. This is a great read, and I don’t mean to underplay his ability to get across narrative theory. Eco’s informality might lead one, as one reader to another, to amiably refute some of his assertions, but the effort required to follow his line of thought is always amply repaid.