Tripping down memory lane

He who lives by the text will die by the text; unless he kills it off first. This, more or less, is what Umberto Eco has done in the alternate convolutions and straight runs of his latest novel. Eco has written four other novels, most famously “The Name of the Rose.” All are knotted tight in the coils of semiology, Eco’s academic specialty, which treats the text as its own reality, superseding content, meaning, style and creator. (To vastly simplify: There is no Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” only a text called “Hamlet.”)

Now, with “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” Eco has written what might be called “The Death of the Semiotician.” Felled by a stroke, Yambo, a dealer in rare books, can remember nothing but quotes. The neurologist asks him his name, testing him. “Call me Ishmael,” he says (Melville). Should the neurologist send for Paola, Yambo’s wife? His reply: “What if she mistakes me for a hat?” (Oliver Sacks). And so on: The patient’s memory devoured by disjointed literary tags.

Paola arrives. Yambo likes her but has no recollection of who she is. Once home, he asks if they used to make love. “Moderately,” she replies, assuring him there’s no rush. “I certainly don’t want you making love with a woman you’ve just met.”

Without memory we hardly exist. Neither Yambo nor Paola can tolerate a state in which, with texts as his only memory, he can exist only as a text. So he goes off to his childhood country home to see if the setting, the house, the meals and reminiscences of Amalia, the devoted family servant, will restore him.

In this first section, Eco has written an insidiously witty and provocative story. A fanciful paradox, it is also the real tragicomic plight of a man semiotically imprisoned. Then, in the next part, reality gives way and text retakes the upper hand. Still unable to open his senses to the past, Yambo shuts himself up with a vast archive of books, magazines, boys’ weeklies, comics, schoolbooks, posters, newspaper clippings and records from the 1930s and 1940s. Instead of evoking a live world, they excavate a dead archeology. They stir no memory, apart from a fugitive exception or two.

The archives present a history of propaganda and pop culture in the Mussolini days: military and political vaunting, the mobilizing stories of patriotic youngsters and rousing martial anthems. These contrast with sentimental love songs, photo romances and a decidedly non-Fascist Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The portrait of an unstable era emerges (the saving grace of Italian Fascism perhaps lay in such instability). Eco plods on through a Sahara of pop-cult jumble.

In the first part, Eco set out a small fictional feast for us. Here, he has left the table to perform semiotic calisthenics. They go on so wearily as to arouse the suspicion that, far from declaring belief in them, he is demonstrating their exhaustion through reiterative overload. How can the text rule if nobody wants to read it?

The suggestion might seem hazardous except that in the third part Eco comes back to surpass the fictional vitality of his start. Yambo has a second stroke that renders him semiconscious. At the same time, his memory returns in shifting fogs and unpredictable clear patches -- and with it the book’s subversive life. Reality, that is, subverts text.

If the middle section evoked the wartime and postwar years by arcane deflections, we now get them direct, in a narrative of unsurpassed power and poignancy. There are memories of partisans in the area, pursuing and being pursued by the Fascist Black Brigades. Yambo’s grandfather emerges as an anti-Fascist newspaper editor. Forced by Fascist thugs to swallow a half-pint of castor oil, he preserves part of the revolting result in a bottle; and when Mussolini falls, he seeks out the thugs’ leader and has him drink the contents. (The story is told by the sole living voice of the middle part: Amalia’s.)

There is the radiantly corrosive portrait of Gragnola, a partisan who hid out in Yambo’s school and mentored him in his own anarchist philosophy. The venerable problem of how God could permit evil? No problem, Gragnola says: God was evil. Jesus, on the other hand, was good. Betrayed by God, who let him die, he represented the struggle to withstand an evil universe: Jesus is God’s worst enemy, in other words, and friend to the oppressed.

Gragnola carried a surgeon’s scalpel in a pouch, to kill himself if the Fascists caught and tortured him. “I’ll be screwing them all,” he declares, “the fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses.”

A prodigious partisan rescue effort in which young Yambo plays a heroic role as a guide is told in exhilarating detail; and we get more pithy and emotional reality from each page than from the 200 text-fed pages that precede it. Yambo gradually sinks after the second stroke, and at the novel’s end, the textual jumble returns, but this time as the hallucinatory clouding of a real mind, not as reality’s academic usurper. *