Reflections on Umberto Eco and Narrative

Read several of Umberto Eco’s essays over the weekend, including a couple that deal with postmodern literary techniques and the role(s) of literature.  He summarizes a couple of interesting ideas, including metanarrative and intertextual irony.  Metanarratives are literary devices and elements that comment on the construction of the story in which they are used.  Intertextual Irony is a reliance on allusional structures that are not always apparent to the reader.  Related to this is the notion of double coding, that the allusions can be read on different levels by different readers:  some will miss the allusions entirely; some will recognize the allusions, but do nothing to pursue their full texture; others will comprehend the references and take pains to comprehend their function(s) within the text and the contextual interpretative practices that the reader employ to make sense of them (historical, reader-response, objective correlative, etc.). 

What is important to me is “On Some Functions of Literature”:

Literary texts explicitly provide us with what we will never cast doubt on, but also, unlike the real world, they flag with supreme authority what we are to take as important in them, and what we must not take as a point of departure for freewheeling interpretations.  (5)

In Eco’s point, we must study the text to figure what is important at the story level, and thus the discourse level of the story being told.  What does the text itself highlight as fundamental to its explication?  What are the mundane details that matter?  That don’t matter?  Eco is suspicious of presumptuous theories like reader-response criticism, which essentially places the primacy of the text within the reader’s cultural node.  Yet, for Eco, clearly there are examples that transcend the individual reader’s little node of culture.  Hamlet, Odysseus, Dante, and others are cut from a fabric that covers vast intellectual territories, visible to everyone within that culture.

But how much so?  Even if a reader has heard of Hamlet, it still takes a sophisticated understanding of Hamlet to really identify the character and what (at least in theory) makes him transcendent.  If these characters are cut from a different cloth that covers a rather vast expanse of cultural territory, there must be places in the intellectual/landscape where Hamlet doesn’t resonate, points from which we can found thought processes that do not rely on anything from Hamlet, literally or figuratively.  Many people have heard the name of the character, but have no idea what he did.  He’s simply a nominal figure without context:  no identity, no history, no ethics—none of the things that help us attach to and define a personality-as-symbol as it exists within the text. 

I also have to wonder what this means for the structure of narrative.  The story/discourse dichotomy is one that clearly exists.  Can they be conflated?  Or at least blended?  The Harry Potter novels construct a story telling device in which the reader reads Harry’s attempts to “read” the narrative(s) that are emerging and/or rending in front of him.  He seeks to codify some simple notion of his own past, something completely alien to him.  And he easily latches onto a recaptured/reconstructed narrative of his father as a heroic and popular figure.  His experience in Snape’s memory fractures that self constructed narrative (one largely built from shaky, biased sources filtered into a biased narrative architect/ure[Harry]).  It’s a transgressive moment that figures the discursive element of narrative architecture as unstable, at least to a degree.  It cannot collapse, or else the text is unintelligible entirely.  But Harry must interpret the memory and do something with it.  He does empathize with Snape, but only for a brief moment.  He destroyed the limits of the narrative he had constructed, but only saw it as a minor crack in his father’s character instead of a seminal comment on the nature of Snape’s character evolution. 

Is this a simple metanarrative?  Or might it be a kind of elided narrative, or bifurcated narrative?  One could argue that the real story is the one that Harry is trying to read, that we never fully see.  Most of the plot in each book is bound to the attempts by Harry and the others to understand the behind-the-scenes activities that involve primarily Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Snape.  And Rowling encourages this speculation by building a plot in HBP centered on Harry’s education in deciphering the text(s) to which he has access.  The Pensieve lessons are devoted to an understanding of Voldemort’s motivations and plans through interpretation of his personal histories, both as Tom Riddle, and as the fictional Voldemort, a simulacra of the original in some fashion.