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.’
A Rat in the Book Pile 