EMORY : in the world

Confessions of a Young Novelist
By Michelle Miles

On the night of October 7, Barack Obama and John McCain shared a stage in Nashville, Tennessee for the second of three scheduled presidential debates. That same evening, Umberto Eco concluded his three-part Richard Ellmann Lecture series at Emory University with a bilingual reading from Foucault’s Pendulum. Despite the unavoidable scheduling conflict between Eco’s reading and the presidential debate, the Italian novelist, semiotician, and professor drew a considerable and attentive crowd.

The atmosphere in the Schwartz Center was lively and expectant; after three days and an equal number of compelling lectures, Eco’s audience had gathered for the finale, and as the rich sibilants of his speech rose to fill the generous acoustic space of the performing arts center, first in English, then in rolling Italian, there was an unmistakable spell cast in the theater. Having been captivated by the man himself for the past three days, it was as if the audience was freed in this closing ceremony to wander the labyrinth of narrative, to lose oneself, as it were, in a wondrous story.

For three days, we had absorbed the flawlessly woven discourse of scholarly expertise and human curiosity, followed erudite discussions of textual creation, interpretation, and personal and historical influence. Now, in the final hour of his visit and as much of our nation tuned in to a discussion between two individuals poised to influence the next political phase of our world, those of us seated at Eco’s feet were invited to enter a high-stakes game of our own: we were called to dive into another world, one very much like the one in which we live, but imagined, created, even uncannily remembered by one creative, creating mind addressing our own.

In the second of his three Richard Ellmann lectures, entitled “Author, Text, and Interpreters,” Umberto Eco expounded upon the relationship of memory to imagination. Recounting his last twenty-five years as a “serious” book collector, Eco told of his discovery of a text by Aristotle that he had long forgotten was part of his library. Flipping through the pages, he came upon a sticky substance, which had glued the corner of several sheets together. Only at that moment did Eco realize with delighted astonishment that his discovery of such a text – synchronous with his protagonist Adso’s own – was not the stuff of purely invented authorial whim, but rather stemmed from this rediscovered truth, from a very real book housed and forgotten in his own very real library, a casualty of memory but not of fact. Thus, as Eco confessed to his audience, The Name of the Rose was a novel not entirely conjured, but was rather in part lived, in part forgotten, re-created unknowingly, and finally, re-encountered and remembered. Listening to the author read from his own text on the final evening of his visit, I could not help but observe that he, too, seemed to delight in the magic world it conjured, as if the source of the tale and the words that gave it form were as mysterious to the mind that penned them as they were to our own. As mysterious and as magical.

Inaugurated in 1988 by Nobel Prize winning poet, Seamus Heaney, the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature were established in the name of a literary scholar known not only for the brilliance of his work but for the extraordinary generosity of his character. Internationally reputed for his award winning and best-selling biographies of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, as well as an esteemed professor at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and Oxford (where he was Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature from 1970-1984), Richard Ellmann was a dedicated teacher and lifelong learner whose legacy as a literary giant was matched only by his reputation as a truly human scholar. Professor Ron Schuchard explains: “A soft-spoken teacher who was a taskmaster of substance and style, [Richard Ellmann] inspired excellence in scores of students who are now leading scholars and critics in universities throughout the world.”

Emory was privileged to welcome Ellmann to its faculty in 1976, and for the following ten years, to benefit from his presence on campus each spring. His legacy lives on at Emory University through the Ellmann Lectures and the personable, gifted, and creative intellects who gather, in his honor, to keep alive the spirit of inquiry and excellence Ellmann so aspired to and embodied throughout his lifetime.

Over the years, a winsome cast of poets, novelists, and literary critics have come to Emory as Ellmann lecturers. Naturally, each guest has been unique in style, in approach, and in creative temperament. But what all have shared is the unmistakable touch of imaginative and humbly human eloquence; to listen to an Ellmann lecturer is to be invited to believe once more in the capacity of literature, in all of its many guises, to provoke, to educate, to interrogate, and perhaps most importantly, to delight the mind’s eye with wonder, to build castles in alternate worlds, to facilitate our dreams, and, for the academic among us, to dismantle the acquired armor of jargon-laden discourse in favor of clear diction and honest approach.

Umberto Eco’s visit marked the twentieth anniversary of the Ellmann Lectures. As I sat in the auditorium that final evening, I recalled why I came to graduate school in the first place: for the love of a clever tale and a crafted line; in pursuit of creative joy. As I glanced around the theater, I saw faces both part of the university community and outside of it, young and old, infinitely varied, and I was reminded of the pull of a good storyteller on all of us. The comprehensive title of Eco’s lecture series, Confessions of a Young Novelist, made a great deal of sense by the end of his visit; the presence of play in both title and in speaker were palpable and contagious. I left each lecture with a buoyed spirit, rushing home to read.

In his seventies, Umberto Eco is a disarming combination of wise man and novice. There is a freshness to his work and a youthfulness in his step. His lectures were a tribute to the lifelong pilgrimage that is every writer’s path, as well as to the hardy-but-generous character required to connect with an audience both on and off the page. And in the words of Seamus Heaney, “[Richard Ellmann] would have loved every minute of them.”

Michelle Miles is a fifth year PhD candidate working towards a dissertation on Northern Irish poetry, the Classics, and translation.