Overview of Eco

This section provides a summary of Eco’s comments on impossible fiction and the theoretical assumptions which drive them. As with Culler and Yacobi in the previous chapter, Eco draws on methodology and terminology from outside analytic aesthetics. My analysis therefore takes care to be sensitive to Eco while still indicating how his comments are relevant to an analytic account. I indicate which aspects of Eco’s argument I see as informative contributions to my analysis of impossible fiction, and which I see as misguided or irrelevant. Eco’s overall point is that the pleasure to be gained from impossible fiction is found either in recognising our own inability to conceive of the fiction, or from recognising the fiction’s inability to describe impossible things. I disagree with this. I do, however, agree that both of these are potential sources of aesthetic pleasure for readers of impossible fiction, and understanding Eco’s argument helps understand why this is the case.

In The Limits of Interpretation, Eco proposes an account of reader responses to impossible fictions. Eco establishes the existence of fictions which represent ‘impossible possible worlds’ (1994: 76). These worlds are ‘self-voiding’—they establish a certain proposition as part of the fiction, but then contradict themselves and so void the original proposition (Eco 1994: 76). His account of how readers might enjoy these fictions is not clearly stated, as Eco’s primary interest is not aesthetic pleasure but rather a study of fictional worlds more generally. However, I claim that it is possible to extract from Eco an argument which runs as follows:

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E: the reader can gain pleasure from reading impossible fictions because her inability to conceive of the content of the text encourages a higher-level, critical reading.

Eco’s account suggests how readers may respond to impossible fictions when many methods of normalisation are unavailable or undesirable. My goal is to reconstruct Eco’s argument, expressing it in analytic terms, and confirm my interpretation of it. This requires close reading and analysis of Eco. However, it first requires clarification of a concept Eco develops in earlier work on semiotics: the ‘Model Reader’.

To Eco, fiction-making is communicative. It is a process whereby information is encoded by an author, to be decoded by a reader. The Model Reader is the reader who can interpret the text in the way intended by the author (Eco 1984: 7).39 _{The Model Reader has}

the ability to decode the expressions of the text in such a way that she finds the information which the author originally encoded. Different texts have different Model Readers—Eco suggests that linguistic codes (language and dialect), literary styles and particular ‘specialization-indices’ (jargon and other domain-specific language) featured in a text are factors which determine that text’s Model Reader (Eco 1984: 7). This means that Model Readers only exist in relation to a particular text—there is no universal Model Reader. The Model Reader of Cervantes’s original Don Quixote is Spanish-speaking and familiar with the tropes of chivalric romance. The Model Reader of The Mote in God’s Eye is English- speaking, has read other works from the CoDominium series, and has some basic grounding in physics. There can also be multiple Model Readers for a single text, provided that the text has multiple equally appropriate interpretations (Eco 1994: 77).The concept has been entertained outside of semiotics—Eco’s Model Reader is similar to Jerrold Levinson’s notion of an ideally comprehending reader (Levinson 2006).40 _{The significance}

of the Model Reader to Eco is that she is the only reader who can decode the author’s expressions with total accuracy. This does not entail that she has complete knowledge of the text. The Model Reader of a devious mystery novel may not be able to solve the case of the murder (Eco 1994: 77). Rather, the mark of the Model Reader is that she will not interpret any expressions in a way which the author did not intend.

With the meaning of the term clarified, I can explain the significance of the Model Reader to Eco’s work on impossible fiction. The relevant aspect of Eco’s Model Reader is

39 _{It is not clear exactly what kind of interpretation Eco is referring to. Going by the evidence provided}

in the rest of this paragraph, the most likely kind of interpretation at stake is the understanding of communicative utterances, just as the previous chapter discussed in the context of Culler.

109 the response she has when reading impossible fictions, as opposed to her response to standard, possible fictions. Eco claims that, typically, the Model Reader of a fiction is led to conceive of a world as part of reading the text (1994: 75).41 _{This does not pose a challenge}

in the case of standard, possible fictions. However, he argues that even a Model Reader is incapable of conceiving of the kind of world which an impossible fiction represents (Eco 1994: 76). She is therefore ‘requested to display exaggeratedly generous flexibility’ in her interpretation of impossible fiction (Eco 1994: 76). In other words, she must take certain elements of the story for granted rather than conceiving of them as she normally would. The fact that the Model Reader must alter her mode of engagement in this way shows that Eco thinks the interpretation of impossible fiction is fundamentally different to the interpretation of standard, possible fiction. The intended, ideal reader of a possible fiction conceives of the world which that fiction represents. The intended, ideal reader of an impossible fiction, however, does not conceive of the world which that impossible fiction represents. The notion that readers cannot conceive of the content of impossible fiction is interesting in its own right—it is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. However, the asymmetry found between the reader’s engagement with possible fiction and with impossible fiction alone has a significant implication for the reader’s experience.

The implication is that this reader’s experience is impoverished. The reader of impossible fiction has a different experience than the ideal experience of standard fiction. The difference is that this reader has a reduced kind of engagement with the fiction. It does not involve conceiving of the fictional world, whereas engagement with standard fiction does. It is reasonable to suspect that the reduced engagement that the reader has with the fiction correspondingly reduces the pleasure which the reader gains from the experience. If it did not, then this reduced form of engagement would be appropriate for standard fiction as well. This implication can be illustrated by Maison. If even the Model Reader of Maison is unable to conceive of the bizarre world the novella represents, then a typical reader is unlikely to fare any better at conceiving of this world. Instead of engaging closely with the fiction by conceiving of its content, Eco thinks readers must take for granted that Mannaret is dead despite talking to other characters, or that the animate dog is in fact a statue.42 _If 41 _{Since I have avoided discussion of the metaphysics of fiction, the idea of a fictional world has not}

featured heavily in this thesis. The closest analogue which features in this thesis is the idea of a story (as opposed to a fiction), and I interpret ‘conceiving of a fictional world’ along the lines of ‘conceiving of a story’.

42 _{Compare this with learning new facts about the world. Learning that a cube is three metres wide}

is not a difficult fact to conceive of. However, learning that a cube is spherical is much more difficult to understand. Arguably, we have no meaningful conception of what it is like for a cube to be spherical. However, if given by a suitably reliable source, a person has no difficulty in taking

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this less imaginatively rich way of reading a work of fiction is not ideal for standard cases, then it is reasonable to suppose it is, overall, a less desirable kind of engagement.

Eco, however, thinks readers of impossible fictions like Maison can still have an experience which is net positive. The experience of reading impossible fiction, he argues, has two distinct layers. The first is the ‘illusion of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility (Eco 1994: 77)’. This first-level reading is the experience a naive reader has when an impossible fiction partially conceals its own impossibility. The second layer is a critical experience which analyses ‘the brilliant narrative strategy by which the first-level naive reader has been designed (Eco 1994: 77)’. This exercise grants the reader ‘the pleasure of [her] logical and perceptual defeat (Eco 1994: 77)’, and it grants this pleasure because she is unable to conceive of the world of the fiction. These quotations are not self-explanatory, and reading Eco leaves us with several questions. Why we should think that a first-level reader is under the illusion that an impossible fiction is consistent? In what sense is the reader logically and perceptually defeated? Why does the reader’s logical and perceptual defeat grant pleasure? These quotations therefore require unpacking, and that is the task of the following sections.