"Call me — for the sake of argument and though the memory is hazy and if I can believe what others say — Ishmael."
Doesn't quite have the same, succinct Melvillian ring we are accustomed to, but the evoked ambiguity and tentativeness gets to the heart of the matter that by turns murmurs and wildly palpitates in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Italian novelist, literary critic and semiotician Umberto Eco's tantalizing novel of ideas, identity and idolatry.
In his 1997 work centering around cognitive semantics, Kant and the Platypus, Eco points out that even though "In Moby Dick it is not expressly stated that all of the sailors aboard the Pequod have two legs," the reader, Eco avers, ought to take it as implicit — one-legged Ahab aside — given that the sailors are human. It's an assumption used by Eco to support a broader claim: "It has been said that narrative worlds are always little worlds because they do not constitute a maximal and complete state of things. ... In this sense narrative worlds are parasitical, because, if the alternative properties are not specified, we take for granted the properties that hold good in the real world."
But, to subvert the argument a little, consider a reality with properties predicated on narrative worlds, now more primary than parasitical. What if one's familiarity with the real world, with his personal past, is lost? Can narrative worlds be regarded as "maximal and complete," and used to secure a toehold on existence and to regain and rebuild a grasp, a past, a continued life?
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana looks at life from this other side of the ontological and literary telescope, with a little help along the way from an encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic array of 20th-century historical movements and figures, political and religious philosophy, high art and popular culture — everything from Mussolini to Josephine Baker to Ming the Merciless, Lord of Mongo, portrayals often illustrated and presented in a graphic-novel format.
Sixtysomething rare book dealer Giambattista "Yambo" Bodini awakens in a Milan hospital with a case of retrograde amnesia: He cannot remember his name, can't recognize his family or friends and is unable to recall anything about his life and career. In an intriguing twist, however, Yambo is capable of retrieving, from the merest sensations or suggestions, every scrap of every book, comic strip, magazine, movie and song he has ever experienced.
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