The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There could hardly be a better snippet of dust-jacket praise than this to capture this reader's attention:

"Gabriel García Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show." - The New York Times Book Review

 And, to some extent, The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, reflects all of these influences. There is an element of the family saga and national history (Marquez), a literary thriller (Eco), and meta-textual play (Borges). There's no reason why these elements cannot cohere in a novel that is both tremendously popular and intellectually challenging, but The Shadow of the Wind does not quite live up the the challenge of this lineage. This is because, whereas Borges, Eco, and Marquez were all writers of the higher order, none of them were sentimental, or prone to melodrama, as Zafon is.

Which is not to say that The Shadow of the Wind is not entertaining, compelling even, but it lacks the clarity and generic playfulness of these other writers. Its strongest element is that of the meta-text, as the narrative of the protagonist and the author of the books he adores merge and coincide, through nested and interpolated stories. The initial Borgesian fantasy, the cemetery of forgotten books, is intriguing but never really examined. The mystery is not hard to anticipate, although many of the details are truly harrowing. But, in the spirit of a book about books and their value, both material and spiritual, The Shadow of the Wind seeks to affirm its own sort of literature, the literature of feeling, of imagination, of trauma described and therefore transcended.

This is why the plucky, sensitive protagonist ultimately marries the beautiful girl and has a son of his own, healing the wounds of the past and refusing to relive its injustices, though at some personal cost. Although one notable character pursues the idea that literature in itself is worthless, this view is reversed by the end of the novel. This is both a celebration of the text and the root of its sentimentalism. Eco and Borges, in particular, were profoundly conscious of the limits of literature, of what words and fictional worlds could and could not do, and played with these restrictions in their fictions. Zafon resolves these tensions, but although the journey is satisfying, all the narrative invention it entails leads to the happy ending, the popular narrative, we foresaw after all.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

The main character—it would be too much to say he is the protagonist—of Umberto Eco's novel The Prague Cemetery is flatly despicable. This is not to suggest that Simone Simonini is an anti-hero; he is simply a hateful man, a murderer, misanthrope, misogynist, opportunist, glutton and forger, whose cynical masterwork, the racist slander of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is one of the bricks in the foundation of the greatest mass murder of the 20th Century.

The Prague Cemetery has particular relevance today, as crimes of hatred and the politics of bigotry are on the rise, for the theme of the novel, amidst all the riot of detail and incident, is not only hatred but the generation and circulation of the fictions that support and validate it.

Having said that, it is not easy to analyse the roots of Simonini's hatred, except that he is brought up at the table of a bigoted, autocratic grandfather in isolation from other children. This is enough to explain why he is repulsed by women and yet obsessed with food, and lacks any sympathy for other human beings. Simonini inherits his grandfather's antisemitism, but racial hatred is only one aspect of his contempt for humanity, which manifests itself in his willingness to betray and murder, preferably—though not always—by remote means. Eco illustrates not so much the banality of evil as how bland and matter-of-fact such evil is; how the absence of empathy is also an absence of self-reflection. Perhaps in response to this, Eco introduces an element of psychological depth in Simonini's attempt to puzzle out his apparent split-personality. One of his disguises, as the clerical Abbe Dalla Piccola takes on a narrative life of his own, but this suggests not so much psychological complexity as the way a hollow man like Simonini assumes and discards false identities at will.

With characteristic verve, Eco drives Simonini, the only fictional character, through a gallery of late 19th Century historical figures: soldiers, terrorists, spies, agitators, propagandists, extremists, anarchists, fraudsters and opportunists. It's something of a treat for the reader to check any of the monstrous and extraordinary events Eco describes in Wikipedia to find that they are all historically accurate. The plot therefore is somewhat episodic, and the whirl of conspiracies, plots, counter-plots, frauds and intrigues can be exhausting to follow. In all of this Simonini goes relatively unscathed, whereas a significant few of his associates end up dead in a sewers beneath his apartments. It is in the conflict between radicals and reactionaries, in the clash of regimes, that Simonini plies his trade: false intelligence, fabricated conspiracies. Eco is at his most deft in illustrating how these falsehoods are truly nothing new, but plagiarized, copied, re-circulated. The old lies need no innovation, only selective editing, because they merely reflect to the reader and validate what their prejudices and politics demand.

Antisemitism is Simonini's masterpiece, but without asserting equivalence we could also draw parallels with the anti-muslim hysteria of Donald Trump or homophobia. Forgeries and fictions, in The Prague Cemetery, stand very close together. Where hateful forgeries are joined with state power or ideologies that validate themselves through violence, they turn monstrous. We need no more illustrations of that. What we need are more complex, self-aware fictions like Umberto Eco's, which can help us begin to unravel this pernicious combination. That's the real puzzle at the heart of this thriller. If The Prague Cemetery lacks anything, it lacks a figure like William of Baskerville, a skeptical humanist who can help us unpick the ramifications of the story and express our confusion. Instead, we're left alone as readers to do this, which is how the work might educate and entertain but bring us no closer to its loathsome principal character.

A thought about metaphors

All fictions, all fictional worlds, are to some degree extended metaphors. Recently, I've had reason to wonder how metaphors work, and that kind of work they do. We all sense that through the process of reading we not only gain an experience but discover, or recover, something. But what kind of meaning or knowledge is this, and how does the metaphor generate this response?

For a long time I was much taken with a remark by Umberto Eco: “What… is known is what a language has already said, and it is possible to recognize a metaphor that demands unprecedented operations, and the identification of semes not yet identified” (Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 122), which suggest to me that the telling metaphor can produce a realization or sense of ideas not already known. Eco’s discussion is dense with pseudo-mathematic notation, but the idea that a metaphor that is not closed can prompt the identification of a new meaning is a powerful one.

More recently, I came across this remark by David Gelernter in his essay “Machines that Will Think and Feel” that metaphors and the experiences they encapsulate are indexed, arrayed in memory, by emotion:

The poet Rilke compares the flight of a small bird across the evening sky to a crack in a smooth porcelain cup. How did he come up with that? Possibly by using the fact that these very different things made him feel the same way.
Emotion is a hugely powerful and personal encoding-and-summarizing function. It can comprehend a whole complex scene in one subtle feeling. Using that feeling as an index value, we can search out—among huge collections of candidates—the odd memory with a deep resemblance to the thing we have in mind. 

A striking or difficult metaphor generates an complex emotion that in turn points to another related thought curated by the same subtle emotion. In other words, it is how we feel about a metaphor that brings other metaphors, other possibilities of meaning to mind.

Are these two notions aligned? The best metaphor draws us both beyond ourself and within ourself to find a connection between things we could not previously describe. This connection is an authentic discovery, forged through memory and imagination; it extends beyond what has already been said, the given properties of the language, to see things differently, to say what we can't yet say, to connect and enrich our inner and outer worlds.

The Sign of the Rose - on Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco, the scholar, semiotician, and writer, was a touchstone for me as both a theorist and practitioner, for what he wrote and how he thought about writing.

Some books, a handful over a lifetime perhaps, have the authentic power to change how we think, and I still remember reading my father's copy of The Name of the Rose while on holiday, in a car by the lake in the rain, through the long evenings in the High Country bach without TV, captivated by the mix of whimsey, mystery, medievalism, and ideas that this singular novel combined. The Name of the Rose is more than a mystery about a book, it traces the mystery of books themselves: how, why, and for what we might read, and why that matters. Its qualities are too much to contain in a single blog post, but it was compelling enough that I have long used The Name of the Rose as a measure of the kind of books I wanted to write: intelligent, atmospheric, and entertaining.

Years later, as I worked on my Masters dissertation on detective fiction, The Name of the Rose was an obvious choice, and it was then that I also began to delve into the other labyrinth of Eco's thought: semiotics and literary theory. His thinking was dense, sometimes mathematical, but I found in it also a rigor, not to mention a humor and humanity, absent from the linguistic vagaries and anti-humanism (not to mention the anti-realism) of the deconstructionists. Eco, to my mind, saw that the text was a machine for generating interpretations, that metaphor sparked in the friction between signifier and signified, that intertextuality was a labyrinth and that fictional worlds were grounded in a sort of encyclopedia. But that did not mean that any interpretation was viable, or that the map was also the terrain without reference to anything else. Perhaps because he was also an author, Eco's work was sensitive to the role of the reader and the writer, to the endless fascination and pleasures of story-making.

As I learnt from Eco, semiotics anchor reading and writing as clues anchor detection. And in honour of his methods, I will indulge in a little literary detection. The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa) is a fine and memorable title, but there is very little reference to it in the actual text (which deals with monks, libraries, heresies, witchcraft, murder, and hermeneutics, among other things), so what does the title allude to? It is attractive to think of Juliet's remark (a rose by any other name) as a kind of appeal to realism, but this hardly connects with the mystery. On the other hand, we have a labyrinthine library guarded by a blind librarian whose name happens to be Borges. Now, Jorge Luis Borges wrote two stories about a rose, and though one, "The Rose of Paracelsus", serves our purpose only indirectly, the other, "A Yellow Rose", ends on the same note of skepticism as The Name of the Rose:

Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

The writer's rose, the semiotician's sign, the detective's clue: they refer to things but do not capture them, they are hints, allusions, pointers. Writing is not a mirror of the world, which persists beyond words, but our faltering attempt to trace it, the only knowledge we have to hold on to.

Farewell, maestro!