Eco's Favorite Sign

I had the pleasure of attending a reading and book signing for The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco's fifth novel. Eco, as a professor of semiotics, has dedicated the majority of his life to the study of signs, but not street signs or the famed Golden Arches (though they qualify), but the kinds of signs that are everywhere, from cancelled postage stamps to the arrangement of chairs at a restaurant. Everything, to one who studies semiotics, is a (potential) sign. Let me come back, though, to the title of this post in just a moment.

Eco read the first two pages of his novel and some passages from the seventh chapter in fairly fluent English. It's clear that, like his protagonist, Yambo, he came to English as an adult, but he manages magnificently. The highlight of the reading, though, was a passage he read from the eighteenth chapter, the book's last. In a barrage of characters, from the worlds of Yambo's life and Yambo's readings, come parading down a lighted staircase: all tap dancing, and most singing. As Eco read, I followed along as well as I could, but his pace was impressive, the songs ringing out in a fine voice, and the words only barely traceable to those of us who did not know Italian. It was the way in which Eco read that third passage that confirmed everything I ever suspected about his vitality and his sense of humor, even the way I had read it in the English translation not even two hours before.

This was followed all by a Q&A period, and while I could recount the general sense of the questions, it is the last that interests me here, more for how Eco answered than the depth of his response. A man some distance behind me asked Eco about the author's favorite sign. Puzzled, Eco asked him to clarify, so the man indicated that he meant Eco's favorite image or symbol—a semiotic sign. Eco replied, "My signature." But of course.