In Search of the Meaning of Umberto Eco’s Narrative Metaphor “To Catch a Orange Dove”

Abstract

The narrative specifics of Umberto Eco’s novel “The Island of the Day Before is regarded through a basic idea of the narrative metaphor “The Orange Dove”. The methodological basis of the study is a summary concept of the relationship between narrative and metaphor. These are O. Freidenberg’s hypothesis of metaphor as a future narrative form of plots and genres; F. Ankersmit’s narrative logic of metaphor’s transformation into a plot through a “point of view”; P. Recoeur’s “common innovative nucleus” in narrative and metaphor designed for productive imagination; G. Genette’s “narrative modality” and regulation of narrative information through metalepsis; R. Barthes’ dichotomy of “functions and indices” as an analogy of metonymic and metaphorical relations. In the article under discussion, we consider metaphor as a narrative principle that ensures its own presentation, generates its rhythm, creates personosphere, and involves a reader in an intellectual game. Such a way of metaphor formation marks U. Eco’s literary style. In his novel “The Island of the day Before”, the following distinctive range of metaphors play a very constructive role: metaphor of sleep, metaphor of love as a source of creative activities, metaphor of duality, metaphor of hatred. Above all, it is worth pointing out author’s epistemological metaphor, which is closely related to the search of truth: in the latter sense, the “Orange Dove” is associated with a post-modernist analogue of the “Blue Rose”, borrowed from the epoch of Romanticism. Due to the technique of metalepsis (“the figure of speech denoting author’s intrusion”), offered by G. Genette, the narrator demonstrates his metaphoric intentions through the discourse of a character-narrator. In conclusion, narrative metaphor of the novel directs the narrative strategy to a variety of its numerous versions, which may be implemented owing to reader’s competence.