A Semiotic Archaeology of the Self

Umberto Eco

Sometime around 2005-2006, I forget exactly when, I read Umberto Eco’s (then most recent) novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005). I now can’t recall a single thing about the plot, or the characters, beyond the fact that it revolves around a man, late in life, going back to his childhood home to root around in its enormous attic in order to rediscover the books and comics which he’d loved as a child. My forgetting, it turns out, is entirely appropriate – because the novel’s main character, Giambattista Bodoni, is an amnesiac.

I do remember eagerly awaiting the publication of the English translation of this, Eco’s fifth novel. I was a huge fan of The Name of the Rose (1983), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), and The Island of the Day Before (1995). I also enjoyed Baudolino (2001), although not as much as I’d hoped I would. I’m still not 100% sure why I didn’t ... Again, I don’t recall much of the plot beyond the fact that it culminates in the search for the legendary king, Prester John. Along the way, as I recall, it contains some cinematically vivid descriptions of Crusader battles and sieges, as well as the poisoning of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I. The last parts of the book, the quest to get to the fabled land of Prester John, is where things get increasingly more fantastical and disorientating. As such, the story feels a lot like Marco Polo meets Terry Gilliam.

At the time it was intriguing to find that Eco was heading in a new direction with this novel and its strangely exotic title, but it seemed that not all the contemporary critics reviewing the book were entirely pleased with The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. There seemed to be a general consensus among them that in essence it was a good idea for a book, but in execution it would have been better if Eco had simply written it as a straightforward memoir, exploring his own past and his personal nostalgias in the first person. The book’s lavish illustrations were widely seen as props to reinforce the weaknesses of the text within. I do recall it did feel like quite a change in gear, perhaps even an imaginative slowing-down, and I’m fairly sure it was my reading of this novel which has since long-stymied me in getting around to reading his two subsequent novels, The Prague Cemetery (2011), and Numero Zero (2015). Although I’m sure I will get around to reading them, eventually.

What has recently put me in mind of this particular book, with its themes of a quest for lost literary and pop culture memories, is the process of packing up my possessions ahead of an imminent house move. Pots and pans, tables, chairs, and other items of furniture are one thing, all easily sorted and quantified. But books and other personal items are things of a different order of complexity. For me at least, they form an inventory of memory that needs to be handled with utmost care and a significant amount of forethought. This is because moving house is often the (sometimes much needed) prompt to off-load. Hence, in ideal circumstances, you would hope to be able to allow yourself sufficient time to sift through such items, allowing the time to review their relevance to you, to decide whether or not they are something you’ll need to keep and cherish into your future, or if they represent an aspect of your past which doesn’t need to be retained, something which can be jettisoned if not actually deleted. All too often though we end up packing our personal effects in a clock-racing frenzy, compelled to make fearlessly decisive choices, usually boiled down to the simple fact of whether a cardboard box of books is too heavy or not.

It’s only after this process, once countless bag-loads of things have been off-loaded at the local charity shop, and, worse still, if many of the boxes you have packed end up in a period of limbo in temporary storage as you transition from the old place to the new, inevitably the fretting begins to set in. You didn’t have time to make a detailed inventory. Hence you can’t help but mentally chase your tail, over and over, recreating a mental catalogue of your most precious possessions, for these are the things which define who we are. Whilst stuck in limbo you can’t help wondering what you got rid of, and what you kept ... Hoping you made the right choices. Wishing by some magic device you’ve actually not thrown anything away at all, or at the very least that all those specific things you feel fairly certain you have thrown away, which you now ardently wish you hadn’t, might somehow magically reappear at the other end of the move when you finally re-open your personal stack of Schrodinger’s boxes …

However, as we progress in life, moving house and the culling of our possessions is something we are all destined to do time and again, a ritual we’ll repeat at various key points in our lives. It’s an exercise which is actually very healthy. Shedding some things, retaining others. As I’ve said, the key thing is the process of evaluation, but an overlooked element is the age at which we do these periodic sifts and culls. Our perception of our possessions changes with time. At the tail end of childhood getting rid of our comic books and toys can feel like a liberation, lightening our passage into adulthood. But later on in life these books and objects might be the very things we rather unexpectedly find ourselves returning to once again – like Charles Foster Kane shallow breathing the single plaintive word “Rosebud” on his deathbed in Orson Welles’ most famous film – realising that what is most precious to us is perhaps something we lost a long time ago; something which, alas, we might never be able to retrieve, save for the memories we have of it.

Citizen Kane (1941)

This latest exercise in “life editing” – rather like Eco’s protagonist, the antiquarian bookdealer, Bodoni – set me pondering upon the thematic continuity running through my lifetime’s library. How each of the books currently sitting on my shelves (and those I recall which I once owned) are all connected by distinct threads of similarity. There’s an essential equivalence, a kind of continuity which refracts in different ways over the course of time. Staring at the spines now looking up at me from cardboard boxes during the process of packing up and emptying my home of the last sixteen or so years, I began to see a picture of myself passing from childhood to adulthood, yet essentially remaining a static point throughout that self-contained continuum. In many ways I am the same me that I’ve always been. My literary likes and interests have fundamentally remained unchanged since day one. But this realisation only served to get me thinking: what was the initial catalyst for my interests? … What one book (at some point) in my possession was, so to speak, the essential “lode-tome” which first set all of this continuity into perpetual motion? … And, perhaps more intriguingly, do I still own it?

Most of my interests have happily crystallised into the topic of my PhD, these being: history, culture, exploration, science, adventure, writing, maps, travel – all topics which aim at elucidating people’s experience of the wider world, the drive to cross boundaries and borders in order to seek out the unknown, and thereby to create some form of lasting knowledge which can be shared. My first degree is in anthropology. Originally my main academic interest was archaeology, and it was something which I’d gained quite a bit of practical experience of before I went to university. I had hoped to study archaeology and anthropology combined, but, inadvertently, I got diverted into the lesser-beknownst-to-me of my two allied interests.

Finishing university and beginning to work full-time in a big museum channelled that practical side of my interests (from archaeology) into material culture, but over time I slowly began to realise that I was never much interested in the technical aspects of manufacture or the evolution of typologies across the ages. I suspect this was because I never really got shot of my more anthropological leanings, instead I constantly found myself wondering about the person who made this object: why did they make it, and what did they think of it when they put it to use; how was it perceived by those around them; what did their world look like through their eyes, and how different or similar was it to ours?

These are just some of the ways in which archaeology and anthropology can coincide and collaborate, but as we get closer to our present time these two aspects can be augmented by a third element – the archive. If those past peoples we are interested in have left some form of written record, attesting to their thoughts, feelings, reactions, responses, justifications, pontifications – we can get a different angle on the material things they have left behind. All three elements combined, with a little imagination added in, can help us to visualise how the world might once have been.

As a young kid the books which helped me best achieve this sort of visualisation of the past were those published by Usborne. This publisher’s books managed to combine the perfect balance of information and images, telling stories through visual snapshots or windows into the lives of past peoples using intricate drawings which buzzed with lively interest, rather like comic books. They were filled with the kind of drawings in which your imagination could roam freely and all too easily get lost deep within. The Usborne Book of World History was a fantastic, large format, magazine-style book which spanned the globe in both time and culture. There were also lots of smaller format books which achieved the same aim but on more specifically focussed topics, such as Ancient Greece or Rome. A slim, large format book in their ‘Young Scientist’ series on Archaeology was a book which I read repeatedly, so much so that even now I can close my eyes and clearly see some of its pages.

Usborne books were never weighed down with words, but there was always sufficient text to elucidate the things the images were illustrating. And it wasn’t just history books they excelled at – one of my most treasured early possessions was Usborne’s Dictionary of Science. This was a hefty tome and delving into this book felt like serious-minded study indeed. Drawing was one of my fortes and so I used to love copying and recreating some of the magnificent scientific diagrams from the pages of this book, such as the cell structure of our skin and its pores (the epidermis through which we perspire) or the leaves of trees (the means by which plants similarly conduct evapotranspiration) as seen under a microscope. The format of Usborne books were their true genius – I think visual stimulation is key to teaching kids. It is a clear and concise way to convey certain facts and ideas, and it helps to harness and fix attention with arresting immediacy. The genius of Usborne books though was that they weren’t simply limited to straight educational topics, but that they similarly extended to books and guides on such off-the-wall topics as Ghosts, UFOs, and Monsters too!

Comic books, far from being mindless juvenile diversions, are a classic visual way to enter into reading more broadly. Like most British school kids I had a subscription to The Beano at our local papershop. Catching up with the antics of Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher, as well as Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, and Lord Snooty, was the highlight of every week. Later on, Superman and Green Lantern comics were added to my weekly subscription, Hal Jordan being my favourite of the Green Lantern Corps. The bite sized chunks of scene directions and character dialogue were far less daunting than a page of closely spaced text. This made it easier to see how certain words could be stressed or inflected with an accompanying illustration. Word and image once again working in tandem.

Having grown up watching the original Star Wars trilogy coming to a close at the cinema with the Return of the Jedi (1983), science fiction was a large part of my imaginative early world. Old TV show repeats such as the original Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The Invaders – even Mork and Mindy, were some of my favourites. There were also Sci-fi elements to some of the storylines in The Avengers, with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, such as the Cybernauts and a carnivorous triffid-like plant from outer space. Older Sci-fi movies too, such as Robinson Crusoe on Mars, This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War of the Worlds, were just as familiar to me as ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). V was a rather chilling TV phenomenon of the mid-1980s which spooked me and my friends no end. And, of course, whilst “hiding behind the sofa,” I watched Dr Who from Tom Baker’s tenure to that of Sylvester McCoy. Red Dwarf, which first aired in 1988, quickly got itself a similar cult following.

The Avengers

The Tripods

Around this time the BBC also made a fantastic adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ trilogy, which prompted me in my early teens to read the original books. I think these could well have been the first science fiction stories I read, but it was also around this time that I discovered Isaac Asimov’s ‘Space Ranger’ series. These were fantastic, fast paced tales of adventure which spanned the solar system – following the Space Ranger, David ‘Lucky’ Starr on his adventures for the Council of Science with his sidekick, John ‘Bigman’ Jones. It made little cognitive dissonance that some of the actual science was outdated, vide: The Oceans of Venus. If anything, that’s what made them all the more interesting; realising how much our knowledge of space and the solar system had changed since they were first written (astronomy being another one of my earliest and longest running interests). Plus, reading a name like Asimov felt very grown up at the time!

It wasn’t long before I’d graduated onto the first of Asimov’s Foundation books, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, whose Fountains of Paradise was suitably mind-blowing given the scope of time it covers, with Voyager returning to Earth millions of years in the future, barely recognisable for all the hybrid extra-bits of alien kit which it has accrued on its journey around the galaxy. Sci-fi again offered that potent combination of the visual to illuminate words and ideas. My school friends and I were all big fans of the comic book, 2000AD, which famously features the futuristic lawman, Judge Dredd. I loved the combination of the bizarre in storylines such as ‘Attack of the Fatties’, with the macabre in ‘The Body Sharks’ and the ‘Block Wars’, as well as the oddly transposed contemporary Cold War geopolitics of Mega City One’s on-going battle with Sov City. The peak of our enthrallment with all things Judge-Dredd-related came with the advent of graphic novels in the early 1990s and with the release of the seminal Judgement on Gotham in particular. SF, as Sci-fi is now known, is still a favourite form of light relief for me – with an expanded orbit which nowadays also takes in the likes of Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, and others – Gollancz’s SF Classics series is my favourite place of refuge when all the academic PhD stuff gets too heavy.

That eidetic marriage of text and images with other world-building imagination, essentially anthropology projected into space, which so absorbed my friends and I during my high school years also came together in fantasy role-playing game books, which reached their peak of popularity around this time in the mid-late 1980s. In the Dungeons and Dragons-type gaming tradition, these were essentially story books which you interacted with, directing the narrative yourself either by the choices you made at the end of each chapter, or by random number selection from a chart printed in the end-pages of the book, or a roll of the dice. They were the paperback equivalent of early computer games, or a sophisticated step-up from Top Trumps card games. The most well-known series of this genre were the Fighting Fantasy books, such as Death Trap Dungeon, but my friends and I were always more taken by the Lone Wolf series. 

Part of the attraction of these books was very definitely their elaborate cover art. I spent what felt like hours stuck in a mesmerised contemplation of the cover of The Jungle of Horrors, which seemed like a hyper combination of the swamp planet of Dagobah from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and the David Bowie / Gothic Muppets movie, Labyrinth (1986). However, the main frustration of these books, for me at least, was how I always seemed to die the very instant I came into contact with a monster, hence it was often more expedient to thumb back and forth through the sections and cheat your way to the end of the book in order to get any sort of narrative satisfaction from the underlying story. It was a losing trait which I somehow dexterously transferred over to actual video games, at which I am frankly totally inept. Little wonder then that I eventually gave up these role-playing books and similar games, instead immersing myself in more straightforward story books and movies.

The novels which had always hooked me the most before I graduated to fantasy game books were simple kids’ adventure stories. In the school holidays I used to pester my older sister into reading me Enid Blyton’s eponymous ‘Adventure’ books, such as The Castle of Adventure and The Island of Adventure. My mother says when I was very young, about four or five years old, I used to like hearing stories read aloud Jackanory-style, particularly listening to her reading C. S. Lewis’s books at bedtime. Around the age of eleven I discovered a series of books in our local bookshop which I went on to collect and read avidly – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators. Rather like the better-known Hardy Boys books, they were the stories of three boys – Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews, and Pete Crenshaw – who operated a private investigator firm from their ingeniously hidden and carefully booby-trapped headquarters in an old junk yard run by Jupiter’s aunt and uncle in Rocky Beach, California. They were forever going off on detective-style adventures, investigating haunted houses and thereby uncovering criminal smuggling operations and the like. As with James Bond movies, or TV programmes such as Airwolf and Knight Rider, there was always a moment of peril before the denouement in which the boys triumphed and saved the day.

However, there was one mystery which always intrigued me and my school friends at the time we were reading these stories, and that was who they were actually written by. The Three Investigators books were published in the UK in the 1980s by Armada and the covers always had the name of Alfred Hitchcock prominently at the top, which initially led us to believe they were penned by the inimitable film director himself. After all, the introduction was always signed by him, and he usually made a cameo appearance himself as a character at the start and end of each story; but a closer inspection of the front matter of these books credited the text as being created by a man called Robert Arthur. A mysteriously nondescript name if ever there was one. We were intrigued. Most of the books in the series were attributed to him, but later numbers were credited to a variety of other names, and often weren’t as good in our estimation; hence Robert Arthur was clearly the most authentic of them all. It wasn’t until many years later, when the internet was fully up and running, that I read more about who Robert Arthur was and how he had come to create these wonderfully captivating characters and stories, which Alfred Hitchcock seemingly endorsed. They really were the first books I read which I found utterly unputdownable!

Again the cover art of this type of kids’ adventure books amplifies the interest of what treasures are to be discovered in the text within – echoes of which can be found in the poster art for contemporary children’s adventure films, such as The Goonies (1985) or the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981-1989). I remember on one holiday in 1989 I read the novelisation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade over and over. At the time, lost in my own abstractions, I lived and breathed these stories and films ad nauseam, so much so that I can still pretty much quote my way word-for-word through all four of these particular movies even today! – Since then people have often assumed (as with many of my contemporary colleagues) that it was the character of Indiana Jones who inspired my choice of career, but this isn’t true – he merely augmented something I was already deeply interested in and already reading about. As I’ve described above, the fire already had ample fuel, not least in the form of Usborne history books. But these weren’t the only non-fiction books which I was reading.

In tandem with my love of The Goonies and The Three Investigators, the real history of pirates was a topic which deeply fascinated me, hence I read books such as Captain A. G. Course’s Pirates of the Western Seas just as avidly. Frequently returning to a specific book (whose title and author I can no longer recall) about genuine treasure islands, such as Cocos Island off the coast of Chile, or Nova Scotia’s Oak Island Money Pit, in my school library. Documentaries such as John Romer’s Testament and the Blair brothers’ voyages around Indonesia in the Ring of Fire also aided in furnishing the reality and thereby helped to consolidate the fantasy. David Attenborough’s natural history programmes brought the adventure novels of Rene Guillot’s Mokokambo – The Lost Land, and The Mountain with a Secret, all the more vividly to life. – But, on further contemplation, the real root may well still lie within that realm of awakened imagination, in the form of a different Hollywood adventure movie altogether, one which was released much earlier – and that movie was The Island at the Top of the World (1974).

It must have been around 1981-1982 or thereabouts. I was playing at a friend’s house when his mother unexpectedly announced that we were going out for an adventure. I remember the thrill of not knowing where we were going, or what we were going to do when we got there, as we put on our coats and set off down the road. After a short walk I recognised the place we were heading to – it was a huge old Art Deco cinema, which I usually visited with my older brother or sister. They still showed afternoon kid’s matinees in which the main feature was always preceded by one or two Children’s Film Foundation-type short movies (I very vividly remember one such film about a young, wheelchair-bound boy who kept homing pigeons). The main feature on this particular occasion was The Island at the Top of the World, in which an eccentric English aristocrat, played by Donald Sinden, goes in search of his lost explorer son with the aid of an American archaeologist in a magnificent airship. They eventually find the wayward explorer on a hidden island in the Arctic which is also home to a lost civilisation of Vikings. But the Vikings take them hostage and so they have to fight for their freedom, winning the respect of the Vikings and learning a number of lessons about humanity and struggles for power in the process, before they are able to depart and return to the modern world. It was the airship which captivated me the most, for weeks afterwards I used to make paper cut-outs of it with its trailing lines, its gantries, and its aquiline netted balloon. The idea of sailing off over the clouds to adventures in far off distant lands was very probably a seed which was planted in that very cinema watching this particular movie which later grew into a real, globe-trotting career of working in museums around the world.

That said though, I think the genuine origin of these deep-rooted preoccupations with exploration, discovery, and adventure lies even further back in my very early childhood, stemming from that notion of navigating ever onwards, in search of new worlds. All of childhood is after all a process of just such exploration and discovery, seeking to understand and classify the world around us. It is a lifelong quest. Throwing out the books, toys, and films of our earliest years doesn’t necessarily bring any of that process to a close; if anything, they merely represent a prologue, setting us up for ever-expanding expeditions heading even further afield from home. When I was a child a trip to the shops, or to the cinema, or better yet, to a grandparents’ house, or to the local park, was a world-enlarging adventure in itself. Sifting through my memories of the earliest books I loved best (such as Sheila Burnford's The Incredible Journey), whilst packing up my things in order to move house, I think I have finally managed to narrow my search down to just two books which were my favourites when I was aged around four or five years old.

The first book was Leila Berg’s Little Pete Stories. It helped that Little Pete, as depicted on the book’s cover and in the illustrations inside, looked a lot like me. He also took an uncanny fascination in the same kind of things that I did, for instance on similar trips to the shops or to the park. There was one story in which Pete is fascinated by a steamroller he finds chugging slowly but heavily up and down the street. Just like Little Pete, before I started going to school I was forever sauntering up to grown-ups – park keepers, road menders, or just old folk sitting on benches – and asking them what they were doing, or what they thought about unusual things, such as how was it that the Moon could be out in the sky at the same time as the Sun?

The second book is actually another series of children’s books – the Rupert Bear Annuals. Here again was another character with whom I could very easily equate myself. Rupert was a small bear whose curiosity led him to embark upon all sorts of unlikely adventures and discoveries. And once again, as with the Usborne books much later on, here too was the winning formula of text and image, for Rupert wasn’t simply a one-dimensional comic, it was a series of narrated portraits. Each image was contained in and of itself, your eyes could read whatever storylines or overlay whatever dialogue your imagination could suggest. But each image was also accompanied by two types of text: one a straightforward prose narrative, the other a shorter and more fluid text in verse which zipped along with a lot more pace. As I recall the verse sequences were always my favourites. In this manner the Rupert books were inexhaustibly multi-layered. The stories were also about transformations, Rupert was forever coming across mysteries which when looked into altered his perspective on the world, making him see the hidden magic at its core in operation, simultaneously astounding and entertaining him in equal measure. These transitions and transformations were similarly echoed in contemporary kid’s TV programmes, such as Jamie and the Magic Torch and Mr Benn, which were two of my favourites, as well as the movies which captured my imagination when I was a little bit older, such as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989).

Jamie and the Magic Torch

It’s no surprise then that the subtext of these cartoons readily translate into the more mind-expanding interests of anthropologists, many of whom have written about and studied cultural transcendence, social-boundary crossing, and transformative ritual practices, defining other worlds, other cultures and other ways of being from the supra- to the supernatural. All of these things get codified in the stories that we craft and hand down through the generations. It’s the magic formulae which belies all our children’s story books and much of the celluloid which has spooled itself endlessly out of Hollywood.

Thinking about it further, it was probably because of Rupert Bear that polar bears were my favourite animal when I was a child. I see now that the totemic significance of the polar bear to my early childhood-self probably ran far more deeply than I’ve ever realised. If we all have a spirit animal who guides us, shapes us, leads us, and helps us to explore and interpret our own personal view of the wider world and our place within it – it seems highly likely that my true spirit animal has always been a little bear in a red jumper and yellow-checked trousers with a matching yellow-checked scarf.

For many of us the interests we had as children are the things which have shaped who we are in later life. For some people cinema, theatre (pantos/musicals), sport, or music might have had more of an influence than books. An amusing question to spark lively conversation amongst friends in a pub is usually something like: what was the first album or single you ever bought? (for me, album: Lovely, by The Primitives (1988); single: Youth of Today, by Musical Youth (1982)). However, all of these things to varying degrees undoubtedly combine as the cultural influences which have shaped our characters.

For me it was definitely storybooks, movies, and comics more than most which have had the deepest influence. Looking into the mirror and delving deep into the roots of who I am, sifting back through all the accumulated layers of memory, conducting a kind of semiotic archaeology of the self, reflecting on all these lost elements of my past and the long forgotten personal possessions which have made me who I am, as I box all these things up, ahead of a move to a new life and a new chapter in a new home, it is a genuinely pleasant – and wholly unexpected surprise to find Rupert Bear looking back at me out of this mirror of my earliest memories ...

As I tape up the last of my boxes, ready to move 9000 miles across the globe, leaving my home country behind me – I can’t help wondering if perhaps, one day (hopefully still sometime far off in the future) when I eventually reach the end of my life’s personal road and look back upon the long distances I’ve covered, when I breathe my last, like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, the single word “Rupert” might very well be my “Rosebud” … unfathomable to anyone else but me.

Citizen Kane (1941)

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