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Workshop 2006
The text is focused on Umberto Eco's novel "Baudolino" (at that time translated in East-European countries, among them Bulgaria and Romania). To explain the specific literary way in which Eco's character conquers Constantinople in 1204 the text uses the broader context of Umberto Eco's semiotic and hermeneutical ideas expressed in his theoretical writings as well as in his earlier novels "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucalt's Pendullum". The first paragraphs are focused on the relations between a holistic model of the world (and especially on the influence of "The Aleph" of Borges on Eco's "Baudolino) and the postmodern conventions with respect to the specific devices of mapping the world. Further on, the text focuses on the hypostases of the figure of the liar in "Baudolino" – to reconstruct, to construct, and to create the world. The last part deals with the "copy/paste" procedures by which the different worlds look at each other; having Constantinople both as a border and a center: it is a center of the equal utopias of the East about the West, and of the West about the East; Constantinople is not understandable and could not be articulated in the terms of "barbarians" and "civilization"; third, Constantinople as the place of story-telling, yet Constantinople and the story are keeping somehow separate and indifferent to one another, there is no passion in their coarse of exchanging signs, and in the cultural exchange between the character and the place.
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