there is no understanding if you refuse to understand

(this is a thesis-oriented rant)

umberto eco is killing me, one brain cell at a time.

i'm reading reflections on the name of the rose, a postcript that eco wrote in explanation of his reasons, methods, and other thought process in writing his first novel. at first, i believed i was on the same page. i understood why he chose the title, the narrator, and the setting. it wasn't until he started expounding on historical novels, irony, and postmodernism that i felt some kind of concussion in my head. then i started wondering, was it me who refused to understand or was it really that hard to understand or, better yet, was everything beyond my intellectual capacity that even if i spend my holidays working on this shit, it's a hopeless case.

in the chapter entitled "postmodernism, irony, the enjoyable", he began with a statement that goes like this:

"between 1965 and today, two ideas have been definitively clarified: that plot could be found also in the form of quotation of other plots, and that the quotation could be less escapist than the plot quoted."

i began to dissect what he could possibly mean by this. at first glance, the statement is already intimidating. my ultimate difficulty lies from texts that need not one or two or three rereadings, but countless rereadings in order to grasp a minute thought and connect it to the macro thought. like in this example, eco pertains to how plot is conceived through borrowings of previously written plots or stories. this is postmodernism. now the operative word "escapist" or perhaps in this statement, "less escapist", what does he mean by that?

i paused for a few minutes, drank my coffee and reread it for the nth time.

then it occurred to me that "less escapist" actually pertains to high art. this has been an ongoing preoccupation of eco, the balance of high art and pop culture. eco posted a follow-up question. "the real problem at stake then was, could there be a novel that was not escapist and, nevertheless, still enjoyable?"

i had to attack this follow-up by trial and error. my eyes zoomed-in to the word "enjoyable". surely enjoyable pertains to the pop culture quality of the work. thus, eco is again establishing the unending question, which he tries to answer/prove/show in both his theoretical and fictional works, that it is possible to strike a balance between high art and enjoyable, commercial art.

he further problematises that the postmodern preoccupation consists of revisiting the past, not innocently, but with irony. what does this mean exactly? this is what i am trying to problematise in my thesis. how did umberto eco revisit the past (with irony) in his three novels? let me recite and repeat that in my head until it explodes.

what is ironic revisitation in the first place? in your own words, define postmodernism? is it really a question of "how"?

i need another cup of coffee.