I’m currently re-reading Umberto Eco’s ‘Name of the Rose,’ famous for its Gothic overtones: the found manuscript, crumbling medieval Castle/monastery, endless punning and metaphor and a labyrinthine plot. The book was written in the early 80’s and is now something of a classic of ‘postmodern literature’. It was made into a successful Hollywood film - which doesn’t even come close to the intricacies of the book for obvious reasons.
Eco was using the classic ‘Gothic’ literary device in The Name of the Rose as an armature to hang all his little investigations into the nature of language, meaning, symbology, truth and error upon.
He’s a Semiotician – he studies the cultural history and nature of language and image as signs in two parts, e.g. ‘Margaret Thatcher’ – Denotative meaning: Long serving British female Prime Minister, Connotative meaning, depending on time and culture: Evil, selfish, destructive cow. (Okay, that was a bit of a generalization and a sly dig, but you hopefully get what I mean).
Connotation is the real engine of communication in each era or epoch - it even has its own subcultures in technical terminology and slang too of course. I know this is old news to a degree, but after reading Eco and others, I suddenly became aware of how slippery and strange our everyday communication is on every level – often outside of conscious awareness too.
For semioticians, words, images and everyday objects are never fixed and merely denotative, but are always traitorous, fickle and elusive, reassigned generalized symbolic roles by chance, accident and association.
The French writer Roland Barthes did a wonderful book of essays on the minutiae of signs called ‘Mythologies’ back in the late 50’s.
The title was making a statement about the construction of modern myths that occur within the arts, media and culture in general at particular moments of history, and how they then become embedded (at least for a while) as real and somehow unassailable transcendent truth. But all they really are of course, is time and culture dependent myths.
Barthes ‘deconstructed’ everything, from the way Roman’s had their haircut in movies, toys, the imperialism of plastic, detergent powder packaging, compared ’The New Citroen’ to a Gothic cathedral, and digressed on the real significance of Steak and Chips.
He used the example of professional wrestling to illustrate a general point as to how the suspension of disbelief (the wrestlers are REALLY trying to hurt each other)can be applied to a deeper level of fabrication and artifice on the everyday level of human discourse.
For Barthes, there is nothing 'essential' or natural about human nature, we are all just storytellers at the end of the day.
Eco prefers bigger themes, broader canvasses. He was trained as a medieval scholar and has that hermetic/alchemical Renaissance man approach to his narratives and varied subject matter. The macrocosm within the microcosm – everything is linked in a chain of associations, allusions, symbols and metaphor.
Language and history for Eco like the labyrinth of the great library in his novel, is full of trap doors, sliding panels and distorting mirrors, nothing is what it appears to be. The busy rows of copyists in the great hall of the monastery, transcribing the sacred texts – our fragile link to the past – are subject to the same psychological caprices, hidden agenda’s, cultural restraints, bad days and Friday afternoon feelings as we are today.
It is the job of William of Baskerville (a nod to Sherlock Holmes) to find a platform for reason to grip onto – at least for a while, until that little ‘truth regime’, and he himself become just another text to be deciphered by later scholars.
In a later work ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, Eco does a more sophisticate imagining of a Da Vinci code style tale (pre Dan Brown). An Italian publishing house is looking to cash in on the boom in medieval/Knights Templar/New age/Hermetic literature, so researchers are sent out to begin weaving together fact and fiction from a vast plethora of diverse sources.
Soon, various esoteric and encyclopaedic myths and facts are constructed into something like a terrifyingly real story – The Illuminati strike again!
If any story is reinforced by enough relatively self-consistent facts and is well written and enough people believe it – then it becomes truth. So people begin to die in the ‘real’ world of Eco’s tale. The gothic fairytale/conspiracy theory becomes real.
But isn’t all our knowledge a conspiracy theory? Culture, time, context dependent?
A form of narrative literary persuasion that appears to hold together for short periods of history? (Psychoanalysis is a good example).
We now have so much knowledge available to us via the internet we can weave the most outrageous stories that are ‘literally’ imaginable – just look at You-Tube and the Blogosphere.
There are so many competing stories, so many possible interpretations, so many facts, that we often haven’t the time or the inclination to find genuine truths (unless its something directly pertaining to our safety or livelihood).
It’s just whatever seems to work at the moment. All the authors have ‘died’ and we are just left swimming in myths and facts.
How will some blogs and homemade You-Tube clips be interpreted in decades to come? Maybe they will be embedded into some Illuminati conspiracy that will initiate Armageddon, or will be studied and copied by some future scribe/psychologist as an early example of 21’st century digital hallucinatory syndrome.
I know, I’m getting into Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Hype-Real’ territory here: ‘Did the Gulf War really happen?’ kinda thing.
The more literate we become, the more ‘stuff’ we know, the more we risk believing anything.
Maybe the Taoist’s and even Samuel Beckett have the best answer – less is more.
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