Lector in Fabula

or Eco in the Room

Five past five. Umberto Eco walks in with an unhurried, steady pace. There are enough students in the lecture room to begin, he says casually. The comment sounds ironic to the uninitiated, but it turns out to be as sober as his clothes. After all, as his own theory of communication would have it, the identification of irony in any comment depends on the listener. What may sound ironical to somebody may sound 'dead straight' to somebody else.

The auditorio in Via San Vitale where he delivers his lecture is a big room; it is perhaps half full. There are about fifty students ready to listen to his two-hour lecture in Italian, but language is hardly a barrier: quite a few students are obviously not Italian, and some are obviously not European. The number of students increases steadily during the first half hour as the latecomers trickle in calmly and chose their seats carefully. The wooden floorboards make their casual movements sound like affronts, but Eco goes on unperturbed. No one is surprised really: this happens every day, during every lecture. Some twenty minutes after the end of the influx starts the more contained efflux, or outflow, which gains momentum in the second part of the lecture, especially towards the end.

Eco is probably at his everyday best, delivering his lecture with a verve and lucidity which make many sixty-five-year-olds pant with incredulity. The students who are not on their way in or out are listening attentively: it's not the name they're after, but the ingredients that have made the name. Besides, it would be highly unsemiotic on their part to expect to get anywhere if they let themselves be dragged along by the lecturer. Semiotics is all about cooperation between the sender and the receiver, between the speaker and the listener: Eco himself has described this vital cooperation in literature by stating that it is the reader who makes 'the text talk'.

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of Eco's delivery is his passion for rhythm. His lecture is about ipotiposi, or hypotyposis, a rhetorical device derived from a Greek word meaning outline, sketch, pattern. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines hypotyposis as '(a) vivid description of a scene, event, or situation.' His main point is that definitions of this literary term are lean and sketchy because they do not describe how hypotyposis actually works. The examples specialized dictionaries give are much more convincing than their definitions.

This is where rhythm comes in. Eco reads three or four prose passages by some of his favourite novelists. One of his standard-bearers is the opening page of Manzoni's Promessi Sposi: he uses an overhead projector to project the text onto a screen and reads every word, simulating the movement of the roving eye of the narrator with his left hand. He points out that he only realized the brilliance of Manzoni's narrating voyeur when he flew over the Arno by plane and was struck by the fact that he had already seen the Arno from above when he had read the opening passage of Manzoni's masterpiece.

But Eco really lets go when he tackles Joyce's Ulysses: he reads with passion, collaborating with the text in such a deep way that he creates the rhythm and keeps time with both hands and both feet. The crisp but heavy sound of his hands on the table and his shoes on the wooden platform fill the large room with rhythmic movement and mix with something like an echo. He is totally absorbed: it's the one moment during the two-hour lecture when the intimate relationship between this man and literature is most evident. This relationship, one suspects, is what got him going in the first place. It is the one moment when he gives the impression of not being aware of what is going on around him.

The Reader in the Story

One of Eco's fundamental tenets is that the reader of a text is no passive spectator but its activator, the one who sets the text in motion and directs it. The text is always in some way 'reticent'; it is an 'idle machine' that 'demands' the bold (and daring) cooperation of the reader. The way Eco is absorbed by the passages he reads to the class and to himself, the way he is enveloped by and envelopes the text, is symptomatic of the reader's experience within the text: one of his most important books is Lector in Fabula (1979), which basically means 'the reader in the story'; the title of the English version, The Role of the Reader lacks the punch of its Italian counterpart. It is probably the interpretive cooperation between the reader and the text that often makes literature (and reading) such a complete experience.

Eco's voice is ideal for such situations: it is strong and clear, but it also has a slight hoarseness about it that makes it interesting. At the beginning he spends some five minutes 'negotiating' a gadget that turns out to be a portable microphone which he pins to his jacket. He only actually interrupts his lecture to unpin it and to continue without it. He doesn't need a microphone, even because he obviously uses his voice well, keeping constant eye contact with his undergraduate audience and making regular references to where the lecture started off and indicating where it is heading. He also makes almost casual references to what his audience should be reading: this seems to add depth and width to his words rather than discourage or even annoy his audience. In the meantime, his frequent humorous asides help to ease the tension of intellectual rigour.

In 1990, Eco was invited to give the Tanner Lectures at Clare Hall, Cambridge. In his important introduction to the publication of the text of these three lectures (Interpretation and Overinterpretation, CUP, 1992), Stefan Collini writes about Eco's 'formidable talents as a linguist' and his 'magnetic qualities' as a lecturer. But there doesn't seem to be any substantial difference between Eco giving any of the prestigious Tanner Lecturers and Eco delivering his hundredth lecture on Semiotics of the Text. And there shouldn't be.

During the five-minute break in the middle of his two-hour talk, Eco smokes a cigarette and chats with his students. At close range it's clear that he is slightly shorter and more plump than one would have guessed from his deft and elegant works. He looks relaxed but when his cigarette is finished he returns to the lecture room and latches onto what he was saying before the break with ease.

Ó Adrian Grima (March, 1998)

Published in The Sunday Times (Malta) (June 7, 1998)