Eco on the radio this morning and lying/signs in fiction

Marc Aramini · 26 Oct 2011, 15:01 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:01:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Eco on the radio this morning and lying/signs in fiction
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W14D5E89AD030BAE530B283CFED0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1319641303.17105.YahooMailClassic at web161801.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

This morning as I was coming in to work, Umberto Eco was on the radio!  In his thick accent, he was answering questions about his writing philosophy and making other comments. I was really suprised to hear it on the radio.  The interviewer asked him why he was obsessed with liars in his fiction, why his narrators like Baudolino were so untrustworthy, and it reminded me of recent debates over the trustworthiness of Wolfe narrators.

Eco claimed that as a man interested in semiotics, the creation of signs, that when human being create signs half the time they intend the contrary, and in fact want to conceal the truth, and that this occurs at almost every level of human interaction from the education of children to interpersonal relationships, and that ficiton is another level of this lying but the suspension of disbelief allows us to get together and lie about the existence of little red riding hood.  However, his attempt at verisimilitude and capturing humans and their communication style and the relationship between sign and signified would of course have to incorporate the tendency of humans to lie and have personal motivations in concealment in the creation of their signs.

Consequently, in Eco we will have unreliable narrators because people are unreliable according to his philosophy almost 50% of the time.  

Just thought this was interesting, I think some authors are more obsessed with this than others.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net