In a learned essay on semiotics (and here, I imagine, the chaste Spectator reader will blanch but, steeling himself for the worst, bravely carry on reading) published in 1979, Umberto Eco explored the role of the reader in the construction of a text. The essay, ‘Lector in fabula’ — punning on the Latin tag, ‘lupus in fabula’, ‘the wolf in the story’ or, as we would say, ‘talk of the devil’ — invited us to consider how a text is transformed, completed and appropriated by a ‘naive’ reader willing to play the game of fiction.
Twenty-six years later, Eco has decided to grant that naive reader a book of his own. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana recounts the adventures of a lector in fabula, a man who loses all memory of himself and of the present, and lives only in the literary memory of his past readings, in a world of quotations both textual and iconographic that replaces in his mind the real world outside. Forced to play the game, Eco’s hero reacts to his surroundings with words and images perused long ago. His name (he is told by his doctor) is Giambattista Bodoni, like that of the famous 18th-century typographer. His wife, his daughter, his assistant, all attempt to bring him back to the life he had as a family and professional man. But Signor Bodoni can only recall the imaginary life he acquired as a reader. His memory, he says, ‘is made of paper’.
From the very beginning, Eco’s novel tempts the reader with an avalanche of quotations. The vision of a fog in a dream, for example, on the novel’s first page, conjures up for Bodoni a patchwork of literary memories that blend into a Christmas quiz-like definition of ‘fog’ and I found myself trying hard to guess the sources: 1.
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