ABSTRACT
Eco’s mischievous essay on the writing of The Name o f the Rose is perhaps not always to be trusted, but this apparently throwaway comment belies, I think, a genuine concern that runs throughout his fiction. Eco, as a critic and semiotician who turned to novel writing, has enjoyed (or perhaps suffered) the close critical attention of a large number of his sometime colleagues. However, lost in the firework display of historical references and intellectual allusions in Eco’s fiction, this particular claim - that dialogue in the novel has been measured against a scale plan of the physical environment - has been ignored by critics. Presumably they have felt that this is no more than an authorial quirk or bravado. Certainly, when measured against the postmodernist concerns and philosophical grids of interpretation brought forward by so many critics, this literalistic concern of Eco with the ‘real’ length of a walk seems, well, pedestrian. I wish to argue that, on the contrary, while the length of the dialogue per se is of little significance to the fiction, Eco’s concern with it certainly does matter.
