by Umberto Eco (2004)
Umberto Eco always puzzles me, yet I read his novels whenever I find them. This novel is no exception, puzzling and intriguing, exploring questions about memory, storytelling, imagination, and the construction of reality. First, the narrator Yambo has a stroke which leaves him with stories and images from the literature he has read, but with no knowledge of his own past. Later, after a second stroke, he recovers his memory but cannot communicate and imagines a story line that may or may not resolve his life’s desires.
Eco says that we need our memories to know who we are and
what to do. If we don’t know our past, what is the meaning of the present? How
are we to know what we want for the future? As Yambo thinks, I recognize this
image that I see in a flea market, but I don’t know if I like it or if I want
to escape from it. Should I buy it or leave it? I don’t know. His wife even has
to tell him what food he likes. Embarrassingly, he doesn’t know if he’s having
an affair with his assistant or not.
He returns to his childhood home, where books and papers
from his past have been stored. He hopes to recreate his past, but finds that
it just raises more questions. When he reads the fascist Italian propaganda
from his school days, it seems at first a happy memory, but reading more he
sees that the reality of fascism led to his disillusionment. He realizes that the
consciousness of his youth was shaped by the comic books he loved to read, which
may have been more influential than the slanted education he received in schools.
That consciousness he acquired from eclectic – and unreliable – sources seems
to be part of his mature life.
This raises a question that we all face if we choose to
think about it: how much of our current consciousness, values, beliefs comes
from comic books, television, games that we encountered and continue to
encounter as adults? How much comes from government, schools, religion, families
and the formal sources that society entrusts with forming our minds? And
setting the story in the period of Italian fascism and its aftermath, Eco
implicitly asks if societies entrust the formation of consciousness to
institutions that have their own flawed values. In the current social struggle
for the minds of people in Canada (and the USA and elsewhere), questions about
trust in social institutions are fundamental to both liberals and conservatives
(as they always have been to radicals.)
It's interesting when this story moves into Yambo’s
recovered memories. It becomes a time when he can relive the pleasures of his
life and imagine a happy future without having to worry about time or what’s
happening with his body in care. It becomes a positive way to exist in a coma,
unlike the endless frustration that I would have imagined otherwise.
Woven into all this internal reflection are a number of
intriguing stories that reflect on Yambo’s life. The story he finds about his
grandfather’s treatment by local fascists and the revenge he executes after the
war are hard to forget. His own role in the death of some German soldiers and
the saving of some partisans become part of the guilt he feels through his
life, although he’s forgotten the incident itself. Leading through the whole
narrative is a highly idealized love, which he can realize as a comic-book
blaze of glory in his detached state. But he says, “I want to know who I am. Life
may be indistinguishable from a dream, but in life we have to choose to believe
in what we see and know.” He does make a choice to reject illusion and live a
mature life. Inevitably, or ironically, he can make a choice, but he cannot
change the reality of his life.
