(urth) Eco on the radio this morning and lying/signs in fiction

[Marc Aramini]

This morning as I was coming in to work, Umberto Eco was on the radio!  In his thick accent, he was answering questions about his writing philosophy and making other comments. I was really suprised to hear it on the radio.  The interviewer asked him why he was obsessed with liars in his fiction, why his narrators like Baudolino were so untrustworthy, and it reminded me of recent debates over the trustworthiness of Wolfe narrators.

Eco claimed that as a man interested in semiotics, the creation of signs, that when human being create signs half the time they intend the contrary, and in fact want to conceal the truth, and that this occurs at almost every level of human interaction from the education of children to interpersonal relationships, and that ficiton is another level of this lying but the suspension of disbelief allows us to get together and lie about the existence of little red riding hood.  However, his attempt at verisimilitude and capturing humans and their communication style and the relationship between sign and signified would of course have to incorporate the tendency of humans to lie and have personal motivations in concealment in the creation of their signs.

Consequently, in Eco we will have unreliable narrators because people are unreliable according to his philosophy almost 50% of the time.  

Just thought this was interesting, I think some authors are more obsessed with this than others.