On Some Aspects of Transgressing the Frame and the Boundary in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino: The Transmythologizing of Myth and the Transconstruction of Fa
On Some Aspects of Transgressing the Frame and the Boundary in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino: The Transmythologizing of Myth and the Transconstruction of Fa

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present article is to discuss some problems of narrative tensions created by Umberto Eco in his fourth novel Baudolino (2000), concerning the dialectic of mythologizing and fabula aspects. Therefore Juri Lotman’s ideas on frame and boundary (particularly in “The composition of a literary work” which forms part of The Structure of the Poetic Text) will be applied to Eco’s novel, especially as the consistency and/or shifting of the fabula go, comparing and confronting the mentioned concepts with some of Eco’s own ideas on artistic narrative, primarily with those ones which concern false and true paratexts (based on his analysis of E. A. Poe’s story Arthur Gordon Pym in Six walks in the Fictional Woods). Therefore the first part of this article deals with some theoretical aspects. The second part deals with the peculiarity of the narrative structure of Baudolino. The third part centres on the problematic of the boundary between the mythical and the historical in Eco’ s novel. The hypothesis of the study is that in Baudolino Eco demythologizes myth and deconstructs fabula in order to reconstruct both on a different level. Therefore I have preferred to use the terms “transmythologize” and “tranconstruct” instead.

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