FROM ECO AND BOLL, TWO PROCESSES DESCRIBED
Author:
Date: Wednesday, November 7, 1984
Page: 82
Section: LIVING
Umberto Eco, everybody's favorite semiologist, and Heinrich Boll, the first
German after Thomas Mann to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, have
nothing in common on the face of it. Both, however, describe in these handsome
pocket-sized books a process. In Eco's case the process is creative, the
making of a book; in Boll's case the process is retrospective, the making of
an individual. Eco is diagnostic, Boll evocative. The events they recount
presumably belong to history but are as pertinent as today's headlines.
First, Eco's "Postscript." His novel of detection in a medieval monastery,
"The Name of the Rose," became that rarity, a critical and popular success, an
unexpected best-seller constructed from such improbable elements as
theological disputation and the rhythm of the canonical hours. What accounted
for it? "The author must not interpret," Eco says. "But he may tell how and
why he wrote his book." In other words, the author should not advise us how we
must read it, but he or she can let us know the poetics of the text, how it
was composed.
The seminal idea was simple: the notion of poisoning a monk. The title -
Eco settled on the rose, an image so rich in meanings that now it has hardly
any meaning left - actually came later. The structuring of the story was
partly inspired by the hourly tempo of "Ulysses"; less obvious is the
influence of "The Magic Mountain," a mountaintop setting in which diverse
conversations take place. Eco relates, and brilliantly, how he confronted
specific narrative problems, all the while stressing the dialog between the
author and his model reader, and the dialog between his work-in-progress and
all previous books - since books, he contends, are made only from other books.
''The Postscript" is a remarkable performance, opening onto considerations of
postmodernist fiction and the historical novel. Anyone interested in the
literature of the late 20th century will discover in Eco's pages a quiet
wisdom and, for a theoretical discussion, that rarest of qualities, gaiety.
Heinrich Boll's memoir of his high school years in Cologne from 1933
through 1938 are remarkable in a different sense: the resemblance of his
Germany to the United States today. Alarmingly familiar is the same jingoism;
the illusory promises of plenty held out to families in desperate financial
straits; the fatalism and despair of the apolitical and powerless; and the
mushrooming of militarism. Boll's mother dubbed Hitler Rovekoff, or "turnip
head," and in Boll's liberal Catholic family the Nazis were the "howling
void," not even meriting the term "rabble." Bad Germans and good, resisting
Germans don't exist here; the texture of Boll's memoir about drinking,
smoking, penny-ante, religious, pacifist, nose-thumbing, powerless Ordinary
Germans has a moving, plausible atmosphere.
School prepared them only for death. Institutional Catholicism upheld the
state after the Vatican signed the Reich Concordat with von Papen, but
Catholicism gave Boll, paradoxically, the moral equilibrium to resist the
state's pressures. His wants were modest: A job in a non-Nazi bookstore. The
bliss of a humdrum existence. A few marks from a pawnshop, which meant "three
movie tickets and two packs of cigarettes, or four movie tickets without
cigarettes, or four concert tickets - and we went to the movies a lot: it was
dark in there, and even the Nazis had to keep quiet and were not
distinguishable." In short order, though, their eyes got used to the dark.
RTAYLO;11/02,11:23 BEVERI;11/08,19:28 WEDBOOK
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