I Heart Umberto

So here's my self-depricating preface:  I realize that claiming I just LOVE Umberto Eco is silly, at best.  However, I consider this progress of a sort.  I mean, I used to claim I was "in love" with Inspector Morse, and he's a fictional character.  Eco (or "Umberto" to his closer associates) is, at least, a real person.  And he's brilliant and wonderful and exactly the sort of academic I want to be.

So why, you may ask, do I love Umberto?  What makes him so great?  Hmm. . .where to begin. . .I love that he, of course, knows all about canonical literature, but he can connect it to pop culture in wonderful, insightful ways.  So one minute he's talking about Dante, and the next he's talking about Superman.  Superman seems to come up a lot, actually.  But I love that Eco realizes that elements of popular culture move us and inform us in the ways that serious literature can.

I love that Eco can talk about how language and literature work in this academic, informed way.  But he can so easily switch registers and explain why literature is powerful for the average reader.  Even more basically, I love that he acknowledges that language and literature are powerful, that they can move us on a level that transcends the literal and the logical.  I love that Eco recognizes the tension and balance between the openendedness of texts and the limited possibilities of interpretation.  But it seems to me that all the while, he allows that meaning does, in fact, exist and that it's not completely relative.  Eco realizes, of course, that ultimately words matter.  And he reminds us that texts and how we read them and even whether we read them--all these matter too.

But here's where I get silly.  I often wonder, "What would Eco think?"  This seems to be becoming my personal mantra for how I think about texts.  It's a reworking of the WWJD.  (Side note:  I REALLY want a tee shirt that says, "What Would Gandalf Do?" but that's another post).  And when I watch Lost or listen to Joni Mitchell's "River" until I cry or read Dickens, I have this fantasy about discussing it with Eco.  In my fantasy, we drink beer.  Does he drink beer, I wonder?  And he explains that Lost is powerful precisely because of the ways it taps into other texts we always already know.  And I tell my favorite episode from the Thursday Next series--the one where Hamlet, in the midst of identity crisis, is thrilled to discover that Mel Gibson plays Hamlet.  Hamlet, you see, LOVES Leathel Weapon.  And this is funny to me but powerful in a way that Eco could explain.  In "On Literature," Eco tells us that literature has an "intangible power," and so we understand why Hamlet, identity crisis and all, moves us.  Over beer, Eco also explains to me all kinds of grand stuff about the Middle Ages.  This part of the fantasy is probably a rehashing of his "Ten Little Middle Ages."  And at some point, I tell him that Foucault's Pendulum is kick ass.  And after enough beer, we talk about Salman Rushdie.  This is my perfect fantasy.  *sigh*  And so I guess that I'm "out."  I'm positively in love with Umberto Eco, dispite the fact that he doesn't know that I exist.  But hey, a girl can dream.