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The only thing more remarkable than the intellect and scholarly detail Umberto Eco marshals into his hulking novels is the fact that they sell so well. The Name of the Rose, his first and still his best-loved work, has moved somewhere in the area of 20 million copies — and that’s not counting the millions of black-market editions sold in copyright-flouting Asian countries. For many, the Italian author’s appeal lies in the fact that for all their sophistication, books like The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum are, at heart, old-fashioned mysteries. And who doesn’t love a page-turner? Eco’s books have always been a mix of high- and low-brow escapades, but none makes such a compelling case for the legitimacy of popular culture as his latest, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. A sixtysomething book dealer named Giambattista (“Yambo”) Boldoni awakens in a Milan hospital with acute amnesia. While his wit and encyclopedic array of literary quotations remain intact, he has no recollection of his past. His wife and friends try to help him connect the dots, but to little avail. Believing that his summer home — which has been in the family for generations — might hold some mnemonic key, Yambo takes up in the seaside town of Solara. There, he discovers boxes of personal effects, including the pulp literature of his youth. Immersing himself in the adventures of Flash Gordon, the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, Yambo recovers personal memories, as well as a broader picture of Italy in the clutches of Mussolini’s fascism. Part historical reverie, part celebration of mass entertainment, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana challenges the idea that pop culture is by nature ephemeral.
Q: What inspired the novel?
A: I have the virtue of not listening when people are talking to me, and to muse by myself. One day, a friend of mine — by the way, an antiquarian book dealer, which is probably why my character became a book dealer — was talking with me while we were sipping martinis. He used a word... I don’t know if it was memory, or maybe he said, “I forgot,” but something clicked in my brain, and I started musing. My friend said, “You are not listening to me,” and I said, “Sorry, I was writing my new novel,” and he bought me a second martini. It was born this way, more or less, because I was always nostalgic for my childhood. I lost 80 per cent of my [books and comics during the Second World War], and devoted my adult life to retrieving them: at flea markets, old book shops. I remade my small library of books of that period. One way or another I wanted to use these materials to which I was linked. At the beginning, the idea [for the book] was only a nostalgic one; then, I realized that it could be a story of a generation that grew up under a dictatorship but that was also exposed to other influences, including American comic strips.
Q: Typically, when a fictional character has amnesia, he not only has no memory, he also lacks personality. But even without his most vital memories, Yambo remains a very forceful, even opinionated character.
A: I was interested in somebody who had lost his personal memory and was condemned to live within culture alone. It was consciously analyzing a risk that I run — and any person like me can run — to know the world only through quotations. I wanted to make a Gedankenexperiment: what could happen to a person who only lives through, by, within books he has read, without personal, tactile memories. And to show in which way, if it were so, you would be a person with half a soul. Because memory is soul — that’s what I strongly believe.
Q: Is The Mysterious
Flame of Queen Loana a defence of pop culture?
Q: What is the chief benefit, then, of popular culture?
A: It creates a sort of common ground for people. And it creates differently organized mythologies. In my novel, I try to explain in which ways we were shocked by the Phantom, who was allied with black people, instead of hiding them, as the [Italian] regime was teaching us. In Italy, we grew up with a different mythology, by which the Phantom and Mandrake were important more than in the United States. If I meet a person of my age or 10 years younger, and I mention those things, we are speaking of the same myths — more so than if we were speaking of Joyce. All of them, if they lived in the ’30s and ’40s, they know who Mandrake was. I speak of myth, not necessarily of art.
Q: What sort of a role did these comics play in your childhood?
A: On my current tour in the United States, a lot of people are amazed by the fact that Flash Gordon or Mandrake could have had such an ideological impact on our generation. In America, they were taken as mere amusement. But I remember that I learned for the first time what freedom of press meant by reading Mickey Mouse Journalist [American title: Mickey Mouse Runs His Own Newspaper]. If you live under a dictatorial regime with censorship, you don’t have any idea of freedom of press. But it was through Mickey Mouse that I learned you could make a newspaper against corrupt politicians and mobsters. [Politicians] were not cultivated enough to understand that ideology can be smuggled through comics. They were only preoccupied, as I say in the novel, with Italianizing them. Change the names of the characters to show that they were Italian heroes, and not American heroes. But they did not realize that the figure of Mandrake was in plainclothes, without weapons, changing guns into bananas, a sort of non-violent hero – and exactly the contrary to the fascist hero presented to us every day. They were not smart enough to understand that he could have an ideological impact.
Q: At one point in the
novel, Yambo recalls his father’s warnings about
reading too much. How does getting lost in fiction
compare with our current inclination to lose
ourselves in the lives of celebrities and reality
TV shows?
A: People right now are encouraged to live a more public, fictional life than their own and you realize that when they are alone, they are compelled to talk on their cell phone to be in contact with somebody else, because they are unable to appreciate silence and solitude. I think it’s a dangerous risk of our time. Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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