Eco, Nabokov, Wallace

Umberto Eco is known for being Borges' main apostle. Quite a few writers have a similar vibe, but nobody (from what I've read) has matched Eco's ability to infuse books with erudition. Borges' experience as a librarian obviously left a huge mark on all his work, and I'm yet to meet a single person that can accurately distinguish all the references in something like Tlön. It's made even more confusing by the fact that the references are either so random and obscure that you'd have to go to specialised centers to even begin tracking the original manuscript down, or they're just made up. Most of the time, the eloquent writing makes it impossible to tell the difference.

I'm currently reading Foucault's Pendulum, and I'm starting to notice a trend across a few different books I've read. In my opinion, Pale Fire, The Defense, Infinite Jest and Foucault's Pendulum are books which revolve around the same literary trick; the subject matter is different, but there is a general unifying technique across all of these works. Obviously, one aspect binding them together is their unusual structure: but that's not the whole story, and I thought it was cool that at least three different authors understood the same idea and reproduced it in different styles.

Pale Fire is Nabokov's most structurally ambitious work. It starts with a 999-line poem and continues into an extensive line-by-line commentary. At the time he wrote it, Nabokov had taken up an academic position as a professor of Russian literature in Cornell, and began spending more time on academic work instead of pure fiction. This led to two series of now-famous lectures (one on Russian literature and one on Western European literature), and an extensive monograph on Evgeniy Onegin, which is probably still the book to read if you want a deep understanding of Russia's greatest literary work. Nabokov's experiences as a professor, writer, poet, and editor - as well as his flawless command of Russian, English and French - were all inspirations for Pale Fire. The book itself is known for being full of random references, both obscure and not. As you read the book, you gradually get used to this academese style. The references (and you flipping over to check what they're about, or asking ChatGPT) become an integral part of the reading experience, until you begin doing it unconsciously: by the end of the book, you've gotten so used to triple checking every word that you begin overfitting and reading too much into every single line. But that's kind of the point. The more you read it, the more you realise you're becoming exactly like the protagonist. Your thought patterns, especially the paranoidal searching for hidden jokes and meanings, become exactly the kind of patterns you found yourself laughing at when you first picked up the book. So the book is recursive: even though, nominally, the book is about a commentator obsessively searching for hidden meanings in a poem, it's actually about you, the reader: you begin inevitably scanning for meaning in places where there is none, in the same paranoidal, obsessive style as Kinbote. The medium of the text becomes, itself, the message: after trying to follow Kinbote's train of thought, you are now writing in your own comments and explanations to Shade's poem, frantically looking for explanations of what Et in Arcadia Ego means, or comparing Kinbote's words:

"Line 501: L'if
The yew in French. It is curious that the Zemblan word for the weeping willow is also "if" (the yew is tas)."

to the actual meaning (the Russian word for yew is tis, not tas).

The Defense was the first Nabokov book I'd ever read. The novel follows the career of an autistic chess player, Luzhin, as he progresses from being a precocious child to grandmaster, and almost world champion. From the very first pages, we clearly understand that Luzhin literally sees physical reality as a chessboard: he pays particular attention to the way people and structures move around him, and Luzhin struggles to leave the Ivory Tower for the world of Men - not that he particularly wanted to, anyway, but this does cause him a lot of alienation and loneliness. Everything around him is a metaphor for a piece, a move, an idea: he constantly sees a deep beauty no one else is able to understand. This can be as subtle as a sound, or even the way light reflects through a window: instead of seeing a sunlit floor, he sees four white squares, separated by a cross. On the surface, both him and everyone around him are witnessing the exact same reality. But on a more fundamental level, only Luzhin understands how the universe conspires to be a metaphor for chess.

As we read more and more about Luzhin, we become used to his perspective, and also begin slowly embodying the same view: why did Nabokov write that this room's walls are black and white? The name of Luzhin's opponent is Turati - obviously a French reference? As Luzhin gets slowly crushed by his genius, we become so enveloped in his world that we, the readers, can't help but also look for the next move. And so the loop is complete: you are now thinking like Luzhin, seeing chess in every word of the book, even when, in reality, it was just someone asking for water. Nabokov deceives us into believing that we are simply observers, when actually we've become the objects of our own attention. Once again, the book has slowly looped around itself to become about you. A similar idea appears in The Eye.

I don't know how much Nabokov David Foster Wallace read, but I do know that he held him in very high regard and considered Nabokov to be one of the high priests of modernism. For good reason. You can see it through all of Infinite Jest: before the footnotes, there was Pale Fire. As pretty much everyone knows, Infinite Jest is an absurdly long encyclopedic novel set in Enfield, MA, a small town which is home to an elite tennis academy and a halfway house. The plot's MacGuffin is the eponymous Infinite Jest, a movie so entertaining that people lose the ability to move once they start watching it. The viewers obsessively play the movie on repeat, trying to squeeze out every bit of entertainment they can.

A natural question which arises before reading the book is why Wallace decided to make it so long. Why the footnotes referring to footnotes, why the endless digressions on irrelevant topics, why write a thousand pages? It's obviously a conscious decision, and not Wallace's shortcomings as a writer: he knew how to write very short pieces full of meaning.

As I was reading Infinite Jest, I saw Wallace mention that he wrote the book with a 'fractal' structure in mind. This didn't make sense to me, until pretty much the last pages of the book: a fractal is a recursive structure, built by referencing itself and infinitely (!) repeating its own shape. The whole point of Infinite Jest's enormous verbosity and intricate structure is that you, the reader, have now spent at least a few weeks obsessively reading, rereading, and then rerereading sections of the same book. You became so engrossed in the literature that you willingly indulged in over a thousand pages about an 'endlessly entertaining' structure. You thought this was a book about characters blurring the lines between manufactured truth and reality, but yet here you are double checking the timelines of each chapter, endlessly searching through the whole book for more answers, more meaning. Infinite Jest is about you - the Entertainment isn't a plot device; it's the book you're holding in your hands. Wallace deceived you into thinking that you were reading about the character's gradual descent into consumption and addiction, but, without even realising it, you have become just like them. Addicted to the Entertainment to the point that you didn't even realise how obsessed you became. Infinite Jest is, literally, infinite jest.

So the loop is the same as with Nabokov; we gradually lose our minds in the same way as the characters, without realising that fact in the process.

I haven't finished reading Foucault's Pendulum yet, but the idea is pretty much the same: the amount of references and jokes being made is so overbearing that before long, you begin seeing the same connections as Belbo: everything becomes imbued with meaning. Eco's quotes and deceivingly meaningless abstractions become objects of intense study: you become just as much part of Belbo's conspiracy, and, once again, the reader becomes the object of their own attention. Even though, on the surface level, you're reading about characters in a book, you're actually reading about your own descent into madness alongside Belbo.

Eco, Nabokov, and Wallace didn't just write books. They wrote mirrors, in the most Borgesian sense of the word.

I also really appreciated that Eco begins the book with a false quotation, albeit one which is very relevant to the whole novel:

"Superstition brings bad luck."
Raymond Smullyan, 5000 BC

Raymond Smullyan was a mathematician and philosopher that wrote quite a few books on self-reference and Gödel's theorems, which are the mathematical equivalents of the books above. He also died in 2017, about 30 years after Foucault's Pendulum was originally published.[1]

This self-referencing meta looping trick might seem like a gimmick, and it has become somewhat of a modernist staple. But I these books hide it very well. What's interesting isn't necessarily the fact that they're all built like fractals - that's been done by multiple different authors to much less impressive degrees. It's more the fact that you didn't even notice until the last page, even though you've been staring at yourself the whole time.