Cult of Dan Brown: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I think if you were to ask Umberto Eco himself that question, he'd likely tell you that he writes his novels as "educational journeys"--he doesn't expect his readers to "get" all of his obscure references, but he does expect them to be willing to follow their own curiosity and look them up. That way the book becomes its own history lesson, even if many of the details are left as an exercise for the reader to chase down. Eco provides the clues, the hints for an intellectual scavenger hunt, and it's up to you to play along if you want to get the most out of the book.

As such, Eco's books don't make for particularly good reading on the subway, or for brief interludes in the waiting room at the dentist's office, where you're cut off from outside references. I remember reading Foucault's Pendulum long before the advent of the web or search engines, so for me it was a month-long read, largely because I was using an encylopedia to follow many of Eco's references. Today, Google would make this a lot more convenient

And really, this is not so different from the way we were all taught to approach reading when we were children, is it? Our parents and teachers surely taught us that when we encounter an unfamiliar word we should "look it up" to find out what it means, didn't they? The trouble seems to be that as we get older and our vocabulary reaches some baseline level, we start expecting everything we read to be written at or below that level, and without parents or teachers to urge us to improve ourselves we get lazy and stop reading material that requires us to learn something first. We develop a kind of righteous indignation, accuse the authors of being "elitists," and refuse the opportunity to improve ourselves.

In part, I think this is a consequence of mass literacy. While it's true that there are more "literate" people in the world today than at any time in history, the literacy standard has also been lowered considerably. That's a byproduct of economics--publishers know full-well that as they lower the literacy requirements of their books their products become accessible to a wider audience, so they make more sales by targeting a reader with 8th-grade literacy skill than by targeting college-educated readers. Before the advent of mass literacy writers didn't have this problem, since they knew they were writing only for the educated few--there was no "mass market" to sell to, so publishers had no financial incentive to encourage their authors to "dumb down" the language of their works.

A lot of modern readers, though, have grown up reading "mass market" novels, and they're not used to having to work a little to reap the benefits of older-style works. That's why students so often groan when they're force-fed classic literature in school--it's not the "easy" reading they've become used to. Even Shakespeare's works, as popular as they are, are lost on many modern readers unless they chase down copious footnotes (or literature professors) to explain the period references.

That said, I think you have to approach Eco's works with a certain humility, no matter who you are. His novels will help you teach yourself a great deal, but you'll only get out of them what effort you put into them. You could read Foucault's Pendulum and just gloss over all of the obscure references he drops, but that would be like wolfing down a slice of a rich, expensive cheesecake in one gulp--it's not very satisfying if you can't "taste" what you're eating.

In the end, then, I think Eco's novels aren't so much for "smart" or "knowledgeable" people, but rather for people who are willing to put in the effort to appreciate them--people who want to be knowledgeable. It's a very different style of reading, just as that rich cheesecake is different from a store-bought cookie, or fine dining at an upscale restaurant is different from a meal at a fast-food chain, or an art film differs from a summer blockbuster--the key difference being that one can be enjoyed passively like comfort food, while the other requires you to actively invest in the "tasting" experience to get the most out of it.

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