Confessions of a Young Novelist (Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature) Review

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Confessions of a Young Novelist (Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature) ReviewProfessor Eco is a well-known scholar in semiotics and novelist. He has written several best-selling novels, including "The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum", "The Island of the Day Before", and "Baudolino". In this book, Professor Eco demystifies skills in merging semantic knowledge with novel writing and interpretation.
This book consists of 4 key chapters in which Professor Eco offers the following insights to readers on his unique knowledge and experience in novel writing and interpretation:-
1.Novel writing requires more perspiration than inspiration (P.9). It took 2 years for Professor Eco to write "The Name of the Rose" because he had undertaken intensive research on medieval aesthetics and piled up huge medieval files for decades. However, it was relatively time consuming for him to write "Foucault's Pendulum" (8 years) and "Baudolino" (6 years) (P.11) because he had to collect information and visited different sites before starting the first chapter. Coming up with a title fully formed with puckish inspiration does not suffice to start writing.
2.Novelists should have seminal ideas and images and impose some constraints (P.25) to construct the narrative world which determines the novel's style (P.23). Novel is different with poetry because it is the narrative world the novelist has built that dictates rhythm, style, and word choice ("Remtene, verba sequentur") (P.14) whereas in poetry words can determine the subject. Taking the writing of "Foucault's Pendulum" as an example, the design of passageway between two publishing houses and the precise layout of the publishing house offices can affect how the story went.
3.Novel is creative writing and its key purpose is to elicit conjectures and interpretations so that novelists should never provide interpretations of their own work or eliminate the ambiguity to readers. According to Professor Eco, interpretations can include the intention of the novelist, the intention of the reader, and the intention of the text (P.35). Empirical readers may not understand unfathomable private life of empirical authors (P.68) and their every creative process that have grown out of unconscious mechanisms (P.64).
4.A lot of readers have emotional illusions and are used not to able to distinguish between fiction and reality (P.71) and take fictional characters as "physical existing objects" (PhEO). Every object can endow with certain properties but according to Professor Eco, existence is not an indispensable property (P.100) because from semiotic perspective, it concerns more the plane of expression (signified) instead of plane of content (signifier). In novel, assertions of fictional characters are due to "internal empirical legitimacy" (fictional truth) instead of "external empirical legitimacy" (encyclopedia truth).
5.It takes time for novelists to draw up a complete list of their lists for enumeration rhetoric purpose. What distinguishes a practical (i.e. guest list for a party and library catalogue) from a poetic list is that the former is necessarily (P.157) finite and the latter is open, "topo of ineffability" (P.141) or "etcetera" (P.122).
This book is highly recommended to readers who are interested in having full understanding of novel writing and interpretation. Moreover, students and scholars from modern literature are immensely benefited from this book which contains Eco's views on semiotics.
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