Encounters with Umberto Eco

In which two labyrinth-builders meet, and the younger discovers he is standing on a staircase.

Encounters — a series by Arnaud Quercy

Umberto Eco spent his life building cryptic languages inside fictional worlds. Latin scholastic argument in The Name of the Rose, Kabbalistic permutation in Foucault's Pendulum, seventeenth-century rhetoric in The Island of the Day Before, the invented medieval patois of Baudolino. Each novel a linguistic labyrinth in which the reader is held without a map. As a theorist, he also defended the limits of interpretation, insisting that a text cannot mean anything the reader wishes. The tension between these two Ecos — the novelist who opens, the semiotician who closes — is where the encounter begins. It is not where it ends. Quercy arrives with his own cryptic-language project, Boucles Abstraites: a 2021 cycle of French verse transformed through Old French, dialect, argot, and invented morphology into something that sounds like French and cannot be decoded as French. Eco recognizes the procedure immediately. He also recognizes something else, which Quercy did not come prepared to hear.

Arnaud — I brought something for you to read.

Eco — A painting?

Arnaud — A poem. From 2021. I wrote a cycle of them.

Eco (taking the page) — "Le caresmel s'en va, les roses s'ensordent…" (pause) Caresmel. That's not modern French.

Arnaud — No.

Eco (reading) — "A costière des puis déjà court le prael…" Costière. Prael. These are old. Some I recognize. Some I don't. "Cependant du joiaument le froideillous verseret…" (he stops) I cannot place that word. Froideillous.

Arnaud — It's not in any dictionary you have.

Eco — You made it.

Arnaud — I followed a rule. The rule made it.

Eco (setting the page down carefully) — How many of the words are real?

Arnaud — I don't know anymore. That's the point. Some are attested in Old French. Some are regional. Some are invented by the procedure. I cannot reliably tell you which is which without going back to my notes.

Eco — So you have a codex. A transformation pipeline.

Arnaud — Modern French, passed iteratively through strata — Old French, medieval vernacular, dialectal slang, morphologically valid coinage. Each step obeys a rule. The cumulative drift produces what you just read.

Eco — And you do not publish the pipeline.

Arnaud — No. The poem stands alone. The reader receives the surface.

Eco (smiling) — Baudolino would love you.

Arnaud — I was going to bring him up.

Eco — Of course you were. A peasant from Alessandria who invents his own Piedmontese, who writes letters in languages that no one quite spoke, who lies so consistently that his lies become the historical record. I gave him a language and I thought I was being transgressive. You've done something I didn't quite do.

Arnaud — What?

Eco — I wrapped Baudolino in a novel. The reader is held inside a fiction. There is a plot. There are other characters. The cryptic language is diegetic — it belongs to a world. If the reader gets lost, the world catches them. You took the frame off.

Arnaud — Yes.

Eco — That is a more radical gesture than I allowed myself.

Arnaud — It's not a gesture. It's a position.

Eco — Explain.

Arnaud — A gesture is something one does to provoke a reaction. A position is where one stands regardless of the reaction. I didn't strip the frame to be radical. I stripped it because the frame was doing work I wanted the codex to do.

Eco — Ah. (pause) You wanted the codex to produce the reader's disorientation, not the fiction.

Arnaud — The codex produces everything. The fiction was redundant.

Eco — But then you lose the reader entirely.

Arnaud — No. I release them.

Eco (picking up the page again) — "Le Printemps imaginatif escreve l'horizon." I can hear what that means. I cannot read what it means. These are not the same operation.

Arnaud — They are not.

Eco — And you prefer the first.

Arnaud — I prefer what happens when the second is impossible. The work is not one thing. It is a seed of unbounded things. A single emission does not produce one reading — it produces as many creations as there are receivers, and each is a real creative event, not a degraded copy of mine.

Eco (very still) — Say that again.

Arnaud — Each reception is a distinct creation. The work is completed differently by each person who receives it, and no completion is the correct one.

Eco (a long silence) — Where do you think you found that?

Arnaud — I didn't find it. I arrived at it. Through the practice.

Eco — Yes. That is what everyone says. (pause) I wrote a book. 1962. Opera aperta ^[1]. The open work. The work of art is a form to be completed — the composer, the painter, the writer produces a field of possibilities, and the performer, the listener, the reader brings it to completion without ever exhausting it. Ambiguity is not a failure of the message. It is its condition. Each concretization is a different work, and none is the work.

Arnaud — (silence)

Eco — You did not read it.

Arnaud — I read The Limits of Interpretation ^[2]. I read the novels.

Eco — You read the man defending himself. You did not read the man making the claim. That is a common error and I have never known how to correct it. The book that made me was written when I was thirty. By the time you were born I was already arguing against people who had taken it too far.

Arnaud — I thought — (he stops)

Eco — You thought I closed what you were opening. In fact I opened it, and then spent thirty years trying to put a fence around the field, because the field had begun to swallow people. (a pause) You are not contradicting me, my friend. You are repeating me. With better paint.

Arnaud — (long pause) And you were the first.

Eco (sharply) — No.

Arnaud — No?

Eco — That is the part I want you to hear, and it is the only part that matters, so listen. There was a Pole. Roman Ingarden ^[3]. 1931. Thirty years before me. He wrote that the work of art is a schematic formation — a structure containing determinate elements and places of indeterminacy, points that are not filled in and that demand to be filled. The reader completes the schema. He called it concretization. Each concretization is a distinct aesthetic object. One work, many concretizations, and none of them the work itself.

Arnaud — I know the name. I cited him.

Eco — For what?

Arnaud — For the claim that the receiver is other than the emitter. That when you receive your own work you recognize it, you do not create from it.

Eco — And you stopped there.

Arnaud — I stopped there.

Eco — You cited the man on the one point that flattered your system and did not read the chapter that dissolved it. (no malice in it) I did the same to Husserl. Everyone does this. It is not a moral failing. It is what happens when you find the thing yourself first and then go looking for company.

Arnaud — (silence)

Eco — Ingarden wrote it in Polish, in a book almost no one read, in a language no one in Paris could be bothered with. I wrote it in Italian in 1962 and it was translated everywhere, and for sixty years people have said Eco's open work as though it began with me. It did not. I gave it a name. A name is not a discovery. A name is a piece of luck. (pause) And now you have given it another name.

Arnaud — Diffraction.

Eco — Diffraction. Which is also not yours — a woman took it from optics thirty years ago ^[4] and made it mean exactly what you want it to mean: not a mirror, not a copy, but the production of difference. (smiling, not unkindly) You are the third floor of a staircase you believe you built.

Arnaud — (a very long pause) Then what is left?

Eco — (picking up the poem again, holding it) This.

Arnaud — A poem.

Eco — A poem produced by a rule that you wrote, that you executed to the end, and whose result you cannot fully read. Ingarden described the schema. I named the openness. Neither of us built the machine. (he sets the page down) We wrote about what happens to readers. You built something that does it to you.

Arnaud — I don't understand.

Eco — You said, earlier, that by the tenth iteration you cannot reconstruct what you meant at the start.

Arnaud — Yes.

Eco — Then say it.

Arnaud — I receive the poem too.

Eco — You are the first receiver.

Arnaud — And the least privileged.

Eco (quietly) — There. That is not in Ingarden. That is not in me. Neither of us made a device that turns the author into a stranger to his own text and leaves the evidence on the page. We theorized the reader. You engineered the emitter. (pause) You did not need a theory. You needed the pipeline. The theory was already written and you would have found it if you had looked, and it would have cost you nothing but four years.

Arnaud — It cost me four years anyway.

Eco — Yes. That is the fee. (a pause) I built labyrinths and I always, somewhere, left a thread. An erudite reader with enough patience could always, in principle, reconstruct the path. You have cut the thread.

Arnaud — There was no thread to cut. The codex doesn't produce a path. It produces a surface.

Eco — And you will not publish the rule.

Arnaud — No.

Eco — Good. (setting the page down) Not because the reader must be kept out. Because the rule would not help him. A rule that generates a bounded field of possibilities is not exhausted by knowing it — you could hand me the pipeline tonight and I still could not tell you what froideillous is doing in that line. That is the one thing you have that is not borrowed, and you have not written it down anywhere.

Arnaud — I have.

Eco — Where?

Arnaud — In a draft. Not published.

Eco — (laughing) Of course. You publish the metaphysics and keep the discovery in a drawer.

(silence)

Eco — I have one last question.

Arnaud — Yes.

Eco — When you write these, do you know what you are saying?

Arnaud — At each step, yes. The rule tells me. But by the tenth iteration, when I read the finished poem aloud, I cannot always reconstruct what I meant at the start. The codex has taken the meaning where the codex took it.

Eco — And that is where I would have stopped. That admission. I would have turned it into a novel about a poet who could no longer read his own work. A character. A frame.

Arnaud — And I left it as the poem.

Eco — Yes. (a long pause) You left it as the poem. That is not nothing. It may be all you have. It is more than a name.

(silence)

Eco — I did not write the poems. But perhaps, for a breath, I can let the thread fall.

(a pause)

Eco — Forsan anc'hoggi lo filo se disligia da la mano, et lo verbo se'n va sanza nui, per li camini che non sapemmo.

Arnaud — Le mot s'est desbiné de nos pelmoires ; il crapaudille tout seuliot par les besgloises voies, et nul mézignant ne le desgoteillera.

(silence)

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