Encounters with Umberto Eco

This dialogue stages an encounter between Umberto Eco and Arnaud Quercy on the terrain of cryptic languages and the limits of interpretation. Eco's novelistic practice — from the scholastic Latin of *The Name of the Rose* to the invented medieval patois of *Baudolino* — constructed linguistic labyrinths held within the protective frame of fiction. Quercy arrives with *Boucles Abstraites*, a 2021 cycle of French verse transformed iteratively through Old French, regional dialect, argot, and morphologically valid coinage until the surface sounds like French yet resists decoding.

The exchange turns on a single asymmetry: Eco's cryptic languages are diegetic, absorbed by plot and character; Quercy's stand in the open, without frame. What Eco theorized as *intentio operis* — the constraint a text imposes on its own reading — is recast through the lens of ideamorphism as generative loss. The codex becomes the invariant; meaning passes through the receiver and becomes unrecoverable, even to the emitter. Quercy claims the position of first receiver, and the least privileged. Eco recognizes in this a more radical fidelity to what he himself wrote than he was prepared to practice. The encounter closes on a final reciprocal gesture — Eco in an invented medieval Italian, Quercy in his own cryptic French — neither speaking the other's language, both released into it.