Reading as Diagnosis: Umberto Eco, Hallucination, and the Composite Self

Twenty years ago, I underlined a quote in a book I had mostly forgotten. It was Umberto Eco’s On Literature, a collection from the Italian semiotician who once delighted my postmodern sympathies. At the time, I read Eco with a kind of abstract admiration, eager to deconstruct meaning and play in the ruins of interpretation. But I didn’t know then what I was underlining.

“The world of literature is a universe in which it is possible to establish whether a reader has a sense of reality or is the victim of his own hallucinations.”
—On Literature, p. 7

When I opened the book again recently—sorting a stack of titles into what I must read soon, what I want to read soon, and what I merely wish I had time for—this sentence stopped me. It struck me not as a clever turn of phrase, but as a diagnosis. A test. Perhaps even a judgment.

What I once admired for its irony I now read with the gravity of someone recovering from the very hallucination Eco described.

From Escher to Wick

In a recent reflection, I wrote about two metaphors for the soul: the Escher self, which draws itself from itself in an endless loop of recursion, and the wick, a living branch drawing sap from the vine. The first is the self as illusion of autonomy, caught in borrowed desires, unable to tell where it ends and the models it mimics begin. The second is the soul grafted into something real—capable of bearing fruit because it abides in something other than itself.

Eco’s remark functions as a test for which of these metaphysical orientations we bring to literature. He doesn’t say that hallucination lies in the book. He says it lies in the reader. The text becomes a mirror. Do you read in order to be confirmed in your illusions? Or do you read in order to be corrected—brought back into communion with the real?

In mimetic terms: do you read through a stable composite model, one anchored in tradition, truth, and non-rivalrous imitation? Or do you read with the chaos of shifting models, scandalized desires, and the hidden hope that the text will justify your inner confusion?

Literature as a Litmus Test of the Soul

What Eco suggests—perhaps more seriously than he knew—is that literature reveals the condition of your desiring structure. When we enter a novel, an essay, even a poem, we bring our composite model with us. If that model is grounded, we can read freely, absorbing truth without envy. If it is fragmented, we read for validation, or worse—for revenge. We look for ourselves in every character, or seek justification for why the world is as broken as we feel.

This is why the same book can seem wise to one reader and meaningless to another. It’s not just about interpretation—it’s about orientation. Literature, in this light, becomes an arena where the reality or hallucination of the self is disclosed.

Not unlike the liturgy.

From Postmodern Reader to Diagnosed Self

When I first read Eco, I thought hallucination was the point. That’s what I admired. The endless play of signs, the instability of meaning, the postmodern smirk. But what I’ve come to realize is that such reading wasn’t neutral—it was formed by a mimetic structure that had lost its center. I was not reading from reality; I was reading from the hallucination of a self spinning in borrowed desires.

What changed? I began to recover the wick. Not through a single model, but through a composite one—restored, re-formed, stabilized. Christ at the center. Tradition as a trellis. Literature became something else entirely.

Now, when I read Eco’s line, I hear not irony but warning. And an invitation. To read well, one must first become someone who is capable of seeing reality. And to become that person, one must be grafted—not into oneself, but into something living.