Umberto Eco, The Art
of Fiction
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5856/the-art-of-fiction-no-197-umberto-eco
The first time I
called Umberto Eco, he was sitting at his desk in his seventeenth-century manor
in the hills outside Urbino, near the Adriatic coast of Italy. He sang
the virtues of his bellissima swimming pool, but suspected I might have trouble
negotiating the region’s tortuous mountain passes. So we agreed instead to meet
at his apartment in Milan.
I arrived there last August on ferragosto, the high point of summer and the day the Catholic
Church celebrates the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Milan’s gray buildings
gleamed with heat, and a thin layer of dust had settled on the pavement. Hardly
an engine could be heard. As I stepped into Eco’s building, I took a
turn-of-the-century lift and heard the creaking of a door on the top floor.
Eco’s imposing figure appeared behind the lift’s wrought-iron grating. “Ahhh,”
he said with a slight scowl.
The apartment is a
labyrinth of corridors lined with bookcases that reach all the way up to
extraordinarily high ceilings—thirty thousand volumes, said Eco, with another
twenty thousand at his manor. I saw scientific treatises by Ptolemy and novels
by Calvino, critical studies of Saussure and Joyce, entire sections devoted to
medieval history and arcane manuscripts. The library feels alive, as many of
the books seem worn from heavy use; Eco reads at great speed and has a
prodigious memory. In his study, a maze of shelves contains Eco’s own complete
works in all their translations (Arabic, Finnish, Japanese . . . I lost count after more than
thirty languages). Eco pointed at his books with amorous precision, attracting
my attention to volume after volume, from his early landmark work of critical
theory, The Open Work, to his most recent opus, On Ugliness.
Eco began his career
as a scholar of medieval studies and semiotics. Then, in 1980, at the age of
forty-eight, he published a novel, The Name of the Rose. It became an
international publishing sensation, selling more than ten million copies. The
professor metamorphosed into a literary star. Chased by journalists, courted
for his cultural commentaries, revered for his expansive erudition, Eco came to
be considered the most important Italian writer alive. In the years since, he
has continued to write fanciful essays, scholarly works, and four more
best-selling novels, including Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and The Mysterious
Flame of Queen Loana (2004).
With Eco’s paunch
leading the way, his feet shuffling along the floor, we walked into his living
room. Through the windows, a medieval castle cut a gigantic silhouette against
the Milanese sky. I had expected tapestries and Italian antiques, but instead
found modern furnishings, several glass cases displaying seashells and rare
comics, a lute, a collection of recorders, a collage of paintbrushes. “This
one, you see, by Arman, is dedicated especially to me . . .”
I sat on a large
white couch; Eco sank into a low armchair, cigar in hand. He used to smoke up
to sixty cigarettes a day, he told me, but now he has only his unlit cigar. As
I asked my first questions, Eco’s eyes narrowed to dark slits, suddenly opening
up when his turn came to speak. “I developed a passion for the Middle Ages,” he
said, “the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.” In Italy, he is
well known for his battute, his comedic sallies, which he drops at nearly every
twist of his snaking sentences. His voice seemed to grow louder the longer he
spoke. Soon he was outlining a series of points, as if speaking to a rapt
classroom: “Number one: when I wrote The Name of the Rose I didn’t know, of
course, since no one knows, what was written in the lost volume of Aristotle’s
Poetics, the famous volume on comedy. But somehow, in the process of writing my
novel, I discovered it. Number two: the detective novel asks the central question
of philosophy—who dunnit?” When he deemed his interlocutor clever enough, he
was quick to extend professorial appreciations: “Yes, good. But I would also
add that . . .”
After our initial
two-hour interview session, Mario Andreose, the literary director of Bompiani,
Eco’s Italian publisher, arrived to take us to dinner. Renate Ramge, Eco’s wife
of forty-five years, sat up front with Andreose, and Eco and I took the
backseat. Eco, who just minutes before had brimmed with wit and vitality, now
appeared sullen and aloof. But his mood lightened soon after we entered the
restaurant and a plate of bread was placed before us. He glanced at the menu,
dithered, and as the waiter arrived, hastily ordered a calzone and a glass of
Scotch. “Yes, yes, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t . . .”
A beaming reader approached the table, “Are you Umberto Eco?” The professore
lifted an eyebrow, grinned, and shook hands. Then, at last, the conversation
resumed, as Eco launched into excited riffs about Pope Benedict XVI, the fall
of the Persian Empire, and the latest James
Bond movie. “Did you know,” he said while planting a fork in his calzone, “that
I once published a structural analysis of the archetypal Ian Fleming plot?”
INTERVIEWER
Where were you born?
UMBERTO ECO
In the town of Alessandria. It is known
for its Borsalino hats.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of family
did you come from?
ECO
My father was an
accountant and his father was a typographer. My father was the eldest of
thirteen children. I am the first son. My son is my first child. And his first
child is a son. So if by chance someone discovers that the Eco family is
descended from the emperor of Byzantium,
my grandson is the dauphin!
My grandfather had a
particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him
often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six.
He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books. The
marvelous thing was that when he retired, he started to bind books. So he had a
lot of unbound books lying here and there around his apartment—old, beautifully
illustrated editions of popular nineteenth-century novels by Gautier and Dumas.
Those were the first books I ever saw. When he died in 1938, many of the owners
of the unbound books did not ask for them to be returned, and the family put
them all in a big box. Quite by accident, this box landed in my parents’
cellar. I would be sent to the cellar from time to time, to pick up some coal
or a bottle of wine, and one day I opened this box and found a treasure trove
of books. From then on I visited the cellar rather frequently. It turned out my
grandfather also collected a fabulous magazine, Giornale illustrato dei viaggi
e delle avventure di terra e di mare—the illustrated journal of travels and
adventures by land and by sea—devoted to strange and cruel stories set in
exotic countries. It was my first great foray into the land of stories.
Unfortunately, I lost all of these books and magazines, but over the decades I
have gradually recovered copies of them from old bookstores and flea markets.
INTERVIEWER
If you didn’t see any
books until you visited your grandfather, does that mean your parents didn’t
own any?
ECO
It’s odd, my father
was a voracious reader when he was a young man. Since my grandparents had
thirteen children, the family struggled to make ends meet, and my father
couldn’t afford to buy books. So he went to the book kiosk and stood reading in
the street. When the owner was tired of seeing him hanging around, my father
made his way to the next kiosk and read the second part of a book, and so
forth. This is an image I treasure. The dogged pursuit of books. As an adult,
my father only had free time in the evenings and he’d mainly read newspapers
and magazines. In our house there were only a few novels, but they weren’t on
shelves, they were in the closet. Sometimes I saw my father reading novels
borrowed from friends.
INTERVIEWER
What did he think of
your becoming a scholar at such an early age?
ECO
Well, he died very
early, in 1962, but not before I had published a few books. It was academic
stuff, and probably confusing to my father, but I discovered that very late in
the evening he would try to read them. The Open Work was published exactly
three months before his death and was reviewed by the great poet Eugenio
Montale in the Corriere della Sera. It was a mixed review—curious, friendly, and
nasty—but it was a review by Montale nonetheless and I think that, for my
father, it would have been impossible to imagine anything more. In a sense, I
paid my debt, and in the end, I feel I met all his wishes, though I imagine he
would have read my novels with greater pleasure. My mother lived ten more
years, so she knew that I wrote many other books, and that I was invited to
lecture by foreign universities. She was very sick, but she was happy, though I
don’t think she quite realized what was happening. And you know, a mother is
proud of her own son, even if the son is completely stupid.
INTERVIEWER
You were a child when
Fascism thrived in Italy
and the war began. How did you perceive it then?
ECO
It was a strange
time. Mussolini was very charismatic, and like every Italian schoolchild at
that time, I was enrolled in the Fascist youth movement. We were all obliged to
wear military-style uniforms and attend rallies on Saturday, and we felt happy
to do so. Today it would be like dressing up an American boy as a marine—he’d
think it was amusing. The whole movement for us as children was something
natural, like snow in the winter and heat in the summer. We couldn’t imagine
that there was another way of living. I remember that period with the same
tenderness with which anyone remembers childhood. I even remember the bombings,
and the nights we spent in the shelter, with tenderness. When it all ended in
1943, with the first collapse of Fascism, I discovered in the democratic
newspapers the existence of different political parties and views. To escape
the bombings from September 1943 to April 1945—the most traumatic years in our
nation’s history—my mother, my sister, and I went to live in the countryside,
up in Monferrato, a Piedmontese village that was at the epicenter of the
resistance.
INTERVIEWER
Did you see any of
the fighting?
ECO
I remember watching
shoot-outs between Fascists and Partisans, and almost wishing I could join the
brawl. At one point I even remember dodging a bullet myself, and jumping to the
ground from a perch. And then, from the village we were in, I remember seeing
every week that they were bombing Alessandria,
where my father still worked. The sky burst like an orange. The telephone lines
didn’t work, so we had to wait until he came home for the weekend to know
whether he was still alive. During this period, living in the countryside, a
young man was forced to learn how to survive.
INTERVIEWER
Did the war have any
impact on your decision to write?
ECO
No, there is no
direct connection. I had started writing before the war, independently of the
war. As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and
fantasy novels set in Malaysia
and Central Africa. I was a perfectionist and
wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in
capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations. It was so
tiring that I never finished any of them. I was at that time a great writer of
unaccomplished masterpieces. Obviously, however, when I began writing novels my
memories of the war played a certain role. But every man is obsessed by the
memories of his own youth.
INTERVIEWER
Did you show those
early books to anyone?
ECO
It’s possible that my
parents saw what I was doing, but I don’t think I gave them to anybody else. It
was a solitary vice.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve talked before
about trying your hand at poetry in this period. In an essay on writing, you
said, “my poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal
configuration as teenage acne.”
ECO
I think that at a
certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in
life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I
gave up rather quickly.
INTERVIEWER
Who encouraged you in
your literary endeavors?
ECO
My maternal
grandmother—she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades
of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she
brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
In her eyes, there was not much difference—they were all fascinating. My
mother, on the other hand, had the education of a future dactylographer. She
started French and German, and though she read a lot in her youth she succumbed
to a sort of laziness when she got older, reading only romance novels and
women’s magazines. So I didn’t read what she read. But she spoke gracefully,
with a good Italian style, and wrote so beautifully that her friends asked her
to compose their letters for them. She had a great sensitivity for language,
even though she left school at an early age. I think I inherited from her a
genuine taste for writing, and my first elements of style.
INTERVIEWER
To what extent are
your novels autobiographical?
ECO
In some way I think
every novel is. When you imagine a character, you lend him or her some of your
personal memories. You give part of yourself to character number one and
another part to character number two. In this sense, I am not writing any sort
of autobiography, but the novels are my autobiography. There’s a difference.
INTERVIEWER
Are there many images
that you’ve transferred directly? I’m thinking about Belbo playing the trumpet
in the cemetery in Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO
That scene is
absolutely autobiographical. I am not Belbo, but it happened to me and it was
so important that now I will reveal something that I’ve never said before.
Three months ago I bought a high-quality trumpet for about two thousand
dollars. To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I
was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play
very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to
my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was. I
don’t feel anything for the violin, but when I look at the trumpet I feel a
world stirring in my veins.
INTERVIEWER
Did you find that you
could play the tunes of your childhood?
ECO
The more I play, the
more vividly I remember the tunes. Certainly there are passages that are too
high, too difficult. I repeat them several times, I try, but I know that my
lips simply don’t react the right way.
INTERVIEWER
Does the same thing
happen with your memory?
ECO
It’s odd, the older I
get, the more I remember. I’ll give you an example: my native dialect was
Alessandrino, a bastard Piedmontese with elements of Lombard,
Emilian, and Genovese. I didn’t speak this dialect because my family came from
the petite bourgeoisie, and my father thought that my sister and I should speak
only Italian. Yet among themselves my parents spoke dialect. So I understood it
perfectly but was unable to speak it. Half a century later, all of a sudden,
from the cavern of my belly or from my unconscious, the dialect grew, and when
I met my old friends from Alessandria
I could speak it! So as time went by in my own life I was not only able to
retrieve things I had forgotten, but things I believed I had never learned.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to
study medieval aesthetics?
ECO
I had a Catholic
education and during my university years I ran one of the national Catholic
student organizations. So I was fascinated by medieval scholastic thought and
by early Christian theology. I started a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas
Aquinas, but right before I finished it my faith suffered a trauma. It was a
complicated political affair. I belonged to the more progressive side of the
student organization, which meant that I was interested in social problems,
social justice. The right wing was protected by Pope Pius XII. One day my wing
of the organization was charged with heresy and communism. Even the official
newspaper of the Vatican
attacked us. That event triggered a philosophical revision of my faith. But I
continued to study the Middle Ages and medieval philosophy with great respect,
not to mention my beloved Aquinas.
INTERVIEWER
In the postscript to
The Name of the Rose you wrote, “I see the period everywhere, transparently
overlaying my daily concerns, which do not look medieval, though they are.” How
are your daily concerns medieval?
ECO
My whole life, I have
had innumerable experiences of full immersion in the Middle Ages. For instance,
in preparing my thesis, I went twice for monthlong trips to Paris, conducting research at the
Bibliothèque Nationale. And I decided in those two months to live only in the
Middle Ages. If you reduce the map of Paris,
selecting only certain streets, you can really live in the Middle Ages. Then
you start to think and feel like a man of the Middle Ages. I remember, for
instance, that my wife, who has a green thumb and knows the names of just about
all the herbs and flowers in the world, always reproached me prior to The Name
of the Rose for not looking properly at nature. Once, in the countryside, we
made a bonfire and she said, Look at the embers flying up among the trees. Of
course I didn’t pay attention. Later on, when she read the last chapter of The
Name of the Rose, in which I describe a similar fire, she said, So you did look
at the embers! And I said, No, but I know how a medieval monk would look at
embers.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you
might have actually enjoyed living in the Middle Ages?
ECO
Well if I did, at my
age, I’d already be dead. I suspect that if I lived in the Middle Ages my
feelings about the period would be dramatically different. I’d rather just
imagine it.
INTERVIEWER
For the layman the
medieval era is pervaded with an air of mystery and remoteness. What draws you
to it?
ECO
It’s hard to say. Why
do you fall in love? If I had to explain it, I would say that it’s because the
period is exactly the opposite of the way people imagine it. To me, they were
not the Dark Ages. They were a luminous time, the fertile soil out of which
would spring the Renaissance. A period of chaotic and effervescent
transition—the birth of the modern city, of the banking system, of the
university, of our modern idea of Europe, with
its languages, nations, and cultures.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that in
your books you never make conscious parallels between the Middle Ages and
modern times, but that seems to be part of the period’s attraction for you.
ECO
Yes, but one must be
extremely careful with analogies. Once I wrote an essay in which I made some
parallels between the Middle Ages and our time. But if you give me fifty
dollars, I will write you an essay about the parallels between our time and the
time of the Neanderthals. It’s always easy to find parallels. I think
nonetheless that being concerned with history means making erudite parallels
with the present time. I confess to being monstrously old-fashioned, and I
still believe, like Cicero
did, that historia magistra vitae: history is the teacher of life.
INTERVIEWER
Why as a young
medieval scholar did you suddenly take up the study of language?
ECO
For as long as I can
remember I have been interested in making sense of communication. In aesthetics
the question was, What is a work of art, and how does a work of art communicate
with us? I became especially fascinated with the how. Moreover, we are recognized
as human beings insofar as we are able to produce language. As it turned out,
immediately after my thesis I started working for Italian state television.
This was in 1954, only a few months after the first television broadcasts were
made. It was the beginning of the era of mass visual communication in Italy. So I
began to wonder if I had a bizarre sort of split personality. On the one hand,
I was interested in the most advanced functions of language in experimental
literature and art. On the other hand, I relished television, comic books, and
detective stories. Naturally I asked myself, Is it possible that my interests
are really so distinct?
I turned to semiotics
because I wanted to unify the different levels of culture. I came to understand
that anything produced by the mass media could also be an object of cultural
analysis.
INTERVIEWER
You once said that
semiotics is the theory of lying.
ECO
Instead of “lying,” I
should have said, “telling the contrary of the truth.” Human beings can tell
fairy tales, imagine new worlds, make mistakes—and we can lie. Language
accounts for all those possibilities.
Lying is a
specifically human ability. A dog, following a track, is following a scent.
Neither the dog nor the scent “lies,” so to speak. But I can lie to you and
tell you to go in that direction, which is not the direction you have asked
about, and yet you believe me and you go in the wrong direction. The reason
this is possible is that we depend on signs.
INTERVIEWER
Some of the enemies
of semiotics as a field of study assert that semioticians ultimately cause all
reality to vanish.
ECO
This is the position
of the so-called deconstructionists. Not only do they assume that everything is
a text—even this table right here—and that every text can be infinitely
interpreted, but they also follow an idea coming from Nietzsche, who said that
there are no facts, only interpretations. On the contrary, I follow Charles
Sanders Peirce, undoubtedly the greatest American philosopher and the father of
semiotics and the theory of interpretation. He said that through signs we
interpret facts. If there were no facts and only interpretations, what would
there be left to interpret? This is what I argue in The Limits of
Interpretation.
INTERVIEWER
In Foucault’s Pendulum
you write, “The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains
significance and power.”
ECO
A secret is powerful
when it is empty. People often mention the “Masonic secret.” What on earth is
the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be
filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say that
your work as a semiotician is completely separate from your work as a novelist?
ECO
It might seem
incredible, but I never think of semiotics when I am writing my novels. I let
others do the work afterward. And I am always surprised by the result when they
do.
INTERVIEWER
Are you still
obsessed with television?
ECO
I suspect that there
is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only
one who confesses. And then I try to use it as material for my work. But I am
not a glutton who swallows everything. I don’t enjoy watching any kind of
television. I like the dramatic series and I dislike the trash shows.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any shows
that you particularly love?
ECO
The police series.
Starsky and Hutch, for instance.
INTERVIEWER
That show doesn’t
exist anymore. It’s from the seventies.
ECO
I know, but I was
told that the complete series was just released on DVD, so I am thinking of
acquiring it. Other than that I like CSI, Miami
Vice, ER, and most of all, Columbo.
INTERVIEWER
Have you read The Da
Vinci Code?
ECO
Yes, I am guilty of
that too.
INTERVIEWER
That novel seems like
a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO
The author, Dan
Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my
characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and
Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle
that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
INTERVIEWER
This idea of taking a
fictional premise seriously seems to be present in many of your novels.
Fictions somehow acquire substance and truth.
ECO
Yes, invention can
produce reality. Baudolino, my fourth novel, is exactly about that. Baudolino
is a little trickster living at the court of Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy
Roman Emperor. And the boy invents a wild number of things—from the legend of
the Holy Grail to the legitimization of Barbarossa’s reign by Bolognese jurors.
In doing so he produces factual consequences. Fakes or errors can produce real
historical events. Just like the letter of Prester John: it was a forgery—and
in my novel it was invented by none other than Baudolino himself—but it really
incited medieval explorations of Asia because it described a fabulous Christian
kingdom thriving somewhere in the mysterious Orient. Or take Christopher
Columbus. His vision of the earth was completely wrong. He knew, like everybody
in antiquity, including his adversaries, that the earth was round. But he
believed it was much smaller. Led by this false idea, he discovered America.
Another famous example is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s a fake, but it corroborated Nazi
ideology and in a sense paved the way to the Holocaust, because Hitler used the
document to justify the destruction of Jews. He might have known it was a fake,
but in his mind it described the Jews exactly as he wanted them to be, and thus
he took it as authentic.
INTERVIEWER
Baudolino declares in
the end that, “The kingdom of the Priest is real because I and my companions
have devoted two-thirds of our life to seeking it.”
ECO
Baudolino forges
documents, devises utopias, constructs imaginary schemes about the future. His
lies become real when his friends gaily embark on an actual journey to the
legendary East. But this is only one side of the narrative business. The other
is that you can use real facts that, in the framework of a novel, seem
incredible and absolutely fictitious. In my novels, I have used countless real
stories and real situations, because I find them far more romantic, or
novelistic even, than anything I have ever read in so-called fiction. In The Island of the Day Before, for instance, there is a part
where Father Caspar makes up a strange instrument to look at the satellites of
Jupiter and the result is pure slapstick comedy. This instrument is described
in the letters of Galileo. I simply imagined what would have happened if
Galileo’s instrument had actually been created. But my readers take all this as
a comic invention.
INTERVIEWER
What drew you to
write novels based on historical events?
ECO
The historical novel
for me is not so much a fictionalized version of real events as a fiction that
will actually enable us to better understand the real history. I also like to
combine the historical novel with elements of the bildungsroman. In all my
novels, there is always a young character who grows up and learns and suffers
through a series of experiences.
INTERVIEWER
Why didn’t you begin
writing novels until you were forty-eight years old?
ECO
It wasn’t as much of
a leap as everyone seems to think, because even in my doctoral thesis, even in
my theorizing, I was already creating narratives. I have long thought that what
most philosophical books are really doing at the core is telling the story of
their research, just as scientists will explain how they came to make their
major discoveries. So I feel that I was telling stories all along, just in a
slightly different style.
INTERVIEWER
But what made you
feel that you had to write a novel?
ECO
One day in 1978, a
friend told me she wanted to oversee the publication of a string of little
detective novels written by amateur writers. I said there was no way I could
write a detective story, but if I ever did write one it would be a
five-hundred-page book with medieval monks as characters. That day, returning
home, I began making a list of names of fictional medieval monks. Later the
image of a poisoned monk suddenly emerged in my mind. It all started from
there, from that one image. It became an irresistible urge.
INTERVIEWER
Many of your novels
seem to rely upon clever concepts. Is that a natural way for you to bridge the
chasm between theoretical work and novel writing? You once said that “those
things about which we cannot theorize, we must narrate.”
ECO
It is a
tongue-in-cheek allusion to a sentence by Wittgenstein. The truth is, I have
written countless essays on semiotics, but I think I expressed my ideas better
in Foucault’s Pendulum than in my essays. An idea you have might not be
original—Aristotle will always have thought of it before you. But by creating a
novel out of that idea you can make it original. Men love women. It’s not an
original idea. But if you somehow write a terrific novel about it, then by a
literary sleight of hand it becomes absolutely original. I simply believe that
at the end of the day a story is always richer—it is an idea reshaped into an
event, informed by a character, and sparked by crafted language. So naturally,
when an idea is transformed into a living organism, it turns into something
completely different and, likely, far more expressive.
On the other hand,
contradiction can be the core of a novel. Killing old ladies is interesting.
With that idea you get an F on an ethics paper. In a novel it becomes Crime and
Punishment, a masterpiece of prose in which the character can’t tell whether
killing old ladies is good or bad, and in which his ambivalence—the very
contradiction in our statement—becomes a poetic and challenging matter.
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin researching
your novels?
ECO
For The Name of the
Rose, since I was already interested in the Middle Ages, I had hundreds of
files at hand, and it took me only two years to write it. Foucault’s Pendulum
took me eight years to research and write! And since I don’t tell anybody what
I’m doing, it occurs to me now that I lived in my own world for nearly a
decade. I went out on the street, I saw this car and that tree and I said to
myself, Ah, this could be connected to my story. So my story grew day by day, and
everything I did, every tiny scrap of life, every conversation, would give me
ideas. Then I visited the actual places I write about—all the areas of France
and Portugal where the Templars lived. And it became like a video game in which
I might take up the personality of a warrior and enter a sort of magical
kingdom. Except that with a video game you become completely stoned, while in
writing you always have a critical moment in which you jump off the locomotive,
only to jump on again the next morning.
INTERVIEWER
Do you proceed
methodically?
ECO
No, not at all. One
idea immediately summons another. One random book makes me want to read
another. And it happens at times that, reading a completely useless document, I
suddenly get the right idea for making a story proceed. Or for inserting
another little box in a larger collection of inset boxes.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that in
writing a novel you must first create a world and then “the words will
practically come on their own.” Are you saying that a novel’s style is always
determined by its subject?
ECO
Yes, for me the main
issue is to start constructing a world—a fourteenth-century abbey with poisoned
monks, a young man playing the trumpet in a cemetery, a trickster caught in the
midst of the sack of Constantinople. Researching then means setting all the
constraints for these worlds: How many steps in a spiral staircase? How many
items on a laundry list? How many comrades on a mission? The words will coil
round these constraints. In literary terms, I feel we often commit the mistake
of believing that style has only got to do with syntax and lexicon. There also
exists a narrative style, which dictates the way we pile certain blocks
together and build up a situation. Take flashback. Flashback is a structural
element of style, but it has nothing to do with language. So style is far more
complex than sheer writing. To me it functions more like montage in a movie.
INTERVIEWER
How hard do you work
to get the voice just right?
ECO
I rewrite the same
page dozens of times. Sometimes I like to read passages out loud. I am terribly
sensitive to the tone of my writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you, like
Flaubert, find it painful to produce even one good sentence?
ECO
No, it’s not painful
for me. I do rewrite the same sentence several times, but now, with the
computer, my process has changed. I wrote The Name of the Rose in longhand and
my secretary copied it out on a typewriter. When you rewrite the same sentence
ten times, it is very difficult to recopy. There was a real carbon base, but we
also worked with scissors and glue. With the computer it is very easy to go
over a page ten or twenty times on the same day, correcting and rewriting. I
think we are by nature never happy with what we have done. But now it is so
easy, perhaps too easy, to correct it. Therefore in a sense we have become more
demanding.
INTERVIEWER
Bildungsromans
usually involve some degree of sentimental, and sexual, education. In all your
novels you describe only two sexual acts—one in The Name of the Rose, and the
other in Baudolino. Is there a reason for this?
ECO
I think I just prefer
to have sex than write about it.
INTERVIEWER
Why does Adso quote
the Song of Songs when he has sex with the peasant girl in The Name of the
Rose?
ECO
That was a stylistic
amusement, because I was not so much interested in the sexual act itself as I
was to describe how a young monk would experience sex through his cultural
sensibility. So I made a collage of at least fifty different texts of mystics
describing their ecstasies, together with excerpts from the Song of Songs. In
the entire two pages that describe his sexual act, there is hardly a single
word of mine. Adso can only understand sex through the lens of the culture he
has absorbed. This is an instance of style, as I define it.
INTERVIEWER
When in the day do
you write?
ECO
There is no rule. For
me it would be impossible to have a schedule. It can happen that I start
writing at seven o’clock in the morning and I finish at three o’clock at night,
stopping only to eat a sandwich. Sometimes I don’t feel the need to write at all.
INTERVIEWER
When you do write,
how much do you write every day? Is there no rule for that as well?
ECO
None. Listen, writing
doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a
chapter while walking or eating.
INTERVIEWER
So every day is
different for you?
ECO
If I am in my
countryside home, at the top of the hills of Montefeltro, then I have a certain
routine. I turn on my computer, I look at my e-mails, I start reading
something, and then I write until the afternoon. Later I go to the village,
where I have a glass at the bar and read the newspaper. I come back home and I
watch TV or a DVD in the evening until eleven, and then I work a little more
until one or two o’clock in the morning. There I have a certain routine because
I am not interrupted. When I am in Milan or at the university, I am not master
of my own time—there is always somebody else deciding what I should do.
INTERVIEWER
What kinds of
anxieties do you have when you sit down to write?
ECO
I have no anxieties.
INTERVIEWER
You have no
anxieties. So you’re just very excited?
ECO
Before I sit down to
write, I am deeply happy.
INTERVIEWER
What is the secret of
such prolific production? You have written prodigious quantities of scholarly
work, and your five novels are not exactly short.
ECO
I always say that I
am able to use the interstices. There is a lot of space between atom and atom
and electron and electron, and if we reduced the matter of the universe by
eliminating all the space in between, the entire universe would be compressed
into a ball. Our lives are full of interstices. This morning you rang, but then
you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed
up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this
new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While
swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the
bathtub, but there too.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever not work?
ECO
No, it doesn’t
happen. Oh, well, yes, there was a period of two days when I had my surgery.
INTERVIEWER
What are your
greatest pleasures today?
ECO
Reading novels at
night. Sometimes I wonder whether as a renegade Catholic there might not still
be this fluty voice in my head whispering that novels are too pleasurable to be
read during the day. Hence the day is usually for essays and hard work.
INTERVIEWER
What about guilty
pleasures?
ECO
I am not in
confession! OK: Scotch. Smoking was a guilty pleasure until I quit three years
ago. I could smoke about sixty cigarettes a day. But I was a former pipe smoker
so my habit was to puff the smoke away while I was writing. I didn’t inhale too
much.
INTERVIEWER
You have been
criticized for the erudition you put on display in your work. A critic went so
far as to say that the main appeal of your work for a lay reader is the
humiliation he feels for his own ignorance, which translates into a naive
admiration of your pyrotechnics.
ECO
Am I sadist? I don’t
know. An exhibitionist? Maybe. I am joking. Of course not! I have not worked so
much in my life in order just to pile knowledge before my readers. My knowledge
quite literally informs the intricate construction of my novels. Then it is up
to my readers to detect what they might.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think your
extraordinary popular success as a novelist changed your perception of the role
of the reader?
ECO
After being an
academic for so long, writing novels was like being a theater critic and all of
a sudden stepping in front of the footlights and having your former
colleagues—the critics—stare at you. It was quite bewildering at first.
INTERVIEWER
But did writing
novels change your idea of how much you could influence the reader as an
author?
ECO
I always assume that
a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the
writer is not aware of.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think your
status as a best-selling novelist has diminished your reputation as a serious
thinker around the world?
ECO
Since the publication
of my novels I have received thirty-five honorary degrees from universities
around the world. From this fact I gather that the answer to your question must
be no. In the university milieu, professors were interested by the oscillation
between narrative and theory. They often found links between the two aspects of
my work, even more than I myself believed existed. If you want, I will show you
the entire wall of scholarly publications on me.
Besides, I continue
to produce theoretical essays. I continue to live like a professor who writes
novels during the weekends, instead of living like a writer who also teaches at
the university. I attend scientific colloquia more often than I attend PEN
conferences. In fact, one could say the opposite: perhaps my academic work has
disrupted my consideration as a writer in the popular press.
INTERVIEWER
The Catholic Church
has certainly given you a hard time. The newspaper of the Vatican called
Foucault’s Pendulum “full of profanations, blasphemies, buffooneries, and
filth, held together by the mortar of arrogance and cynicism.”
ECO
The strange thing is
that I had just received honorary degrees from two Catholic universities,
Leuven and Loyola.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe in
God?
ECO
Why does one love a
certain person one day and discover the next day that the love is gone?
Feelings, alas, disappear without justification, and often without a trace.
INTERVIEWER
If you don’t believe
in God, then why have you written at such great length about religion?
ECO
Because I do believe
in religion. Human beings are religious animals, and such a characteristic
feature of human behavior cannot be ignored or dismissed.
INTERVIEWER
In addition to the
scholar and the novelist, there is a third persona jockeying for position
within you—the translator. You are a widely translated translator who has
written at length on the conundrums of translation.
ECO
I have edited
countless translations, translated two works myself, and have had my own novels
translated into dozens of languages. And I’ve found that every translation is a
case of negotiation. If you sell something to me and I buy it, we
negotiate—you’ll lose something, I’ll lose something, but at the end we’re both
more or less satisfied. In translation, style is not so much lexicon, which can
be translated by the Web site Altavista, but rhythm. Researchers have run tests
on the frequency of words in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, the masterpiece of
nineteenth-century Italian literature. Manzoni had an absolutely poor
vocabulary, devised no innovative metaphors, and used the adjective good a
frightening amount of times. But his style is outstanding, pure and simple. To
translate it, as with all great translations, you need to bring out the anima
of his world, its breath, its precise tempo.
INTERVIEWER
How involved are you
with the translations of your work?
ECO
I read the
translations in all the languages I can follow. I am usually happy because the
translators and I work together, and I have been lucky to have the same
translators all my life. We now collaborate with a sort of mutual
understanding. I also occasionally work with translators in languages I don’t
know—like Japanese, Russian, and Hungarian—because they are so intelligent that
they are able to explain what the real problem is in their own language, so
that we may discuss how to solve it.
INTERVIEWER
Does a good
translator ever offer a suggestion that opens up possibilities you hadn’t seen
in the original text?
ECO
Yes, it can happen.
Again, the text is more intelligent than its author. Sometimes the text can
suggest ideas that the author does not have in mind. The translator, in putting
the text in another language, discovers those new ideas and reveals them to
you.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have time to
read the novels of your contemporaries?
ECO
Not so much. Since I
became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new
novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my
novels and I don’t like it.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of
the state of Italian literature today? Are there great authors in Italy that we
have yet to hear about in America?
ECO
I don’t know if there
are great authors, but we have improved the middle-level authors. The strength
of American literature, you see, is not only to have had Faulkner or Hemingway
or Bellow, but to have also a good army of middling writers who produce
respectable commercial literature. This literature requires good craftsmanship,
especially in the fertile field of the detective novel, which for me is a
barometer of literary production in any country. The army of average writers
also means that America can produce enough material to satisfy the needs of the
American reader. That’s why they translate so little. In Italy that kind of
literature was absent for a long time, but now at last there is a group of
young writers producing these books. I am not an intellectual snob, I don’t
think, and I do recognize that this brand of literature is part of the literary
culture of a country.
INTERVIEWER
But why don’t we hear
from Italian writers? You are probably the only Italian writer at the moment
who’s read internationally, at least on a large scale.
ECO
Translation is the
problem. In Italy, more than twenty percent of the market is work in
translation. In America, it’s two percent.
INTERVIEWER
Nabokov once said, “I
divide literature into two categories, the books I wish I had written and the
books I have written.”
ECO
Well, all right, in
the former category I would put books by Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Philip
Roth, and Paul Auster. Generally, though, I like the contemporary Americans far
more than the French, even though my culture is basically French for
geographical reasons. I was born near the border, and French is the first
language I studied. I may even know French literature better than Italian
literature.
INTERVIEWER
And if you had to
name influences?
ECO
Usually I say Joyce
and Borges to keep the interviewer quiet, though it’s not absolutely true. Just
about everyone has influenced me. Joyce and Borges, certainly, but also
Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke—you name it.
INTERVIEWER
Your library here in
Milan is a legend in and of itself. What kind of books do you like to collect?
ECO
I own a total of
about fifty thousand books. But as a rare books collector I am fascinated by
the human propensity for deviating thought. So I collect books about subjects
in which I don’t believe, like kabbalah, alchemy, magic, invented languages.
Books that lie, albeit unwittingly. I have Ptolemy, not Galileo, because
Galileo told the truth. I prefer lunatic science.
INTERVIEWER
With so many volumes,
when you go to the bookshelf, how do you decide which book to pick up and read?
ECO
I don’t go to the
bookshelves to choose a book to read. I go to the bookshelves to pick up a book
I know I need in that moment. It’s a different story. For instance, if you were
to ask me about contemporary authors, I would look through my collections of
Roth or DeLillo to remember exactly what I loved. I am a scholar. In a way I
should say I am never freely choosing. I am following the needs of the job I am
doing at any given time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever give
books away?
ECO
I receive an enormous
quantity of books every day—novels, new editions of books I already own—so
every single week I fill up some boxes and send them off to my university,
where there is a big table with a sign that says take a book and run.
INTERVIEWER
You are one of the
world’s most famous public intellectuals. How would you define the term
intellectual? Does it still have a particular meaning?
ECO
If by intellectual
you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the
bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a
computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do
with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an
intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who
understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at
that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of
philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t
amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or
inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual
function.
INTERVIEWER
Are intellectuals
today still committed to the notion of political duty, as they were in the days
of Sartre and Foucault?
ECO
I don’t believe that
in order to be politically committed an intellectual must act as a member of a
party or, worse, write exclusively about contemporary social problems.
Intellectuals should be as politically engaged as any other citizen. At most,
an intellectual can use his reputation to support a given cause. If there is a
manifesto on the environmental question, for instance, my signature might help,
so I would use my reputation for a single instance of common engagement. The
problem is that the intellectual is truly useful only as far as the future is
concerned, not the present. If you are in a theater and there is a fire, a poet
must not climb up on a seat and recite a poem. He has to call the fireman like
everyone else. The function of the intellectual is to say beforehand, Pay
attention to that theater because it’s old and dangerous! So his word can have
the prophetic function of an appeal. The intellectual’s function is to say, We
should do that, not, We must do this now!—that’s the politician’s job. If the
utopia of Thomas More were ever realized, I have little doubt it would be a Stalinist
society.
INTERVIEWER
What benefits have
knowledge and culture afforded you in your lifetime?
ECO
An illiterate person
who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the
lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d’Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to
read books, because it’s an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous
multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless
lives, which is a fabulous privilege.
INTERVIEWER
But an enormous memory
can also be an enormous burden. Like the memory of Funes, one of your favorite
Borges characters, in the story “Funes the Memorious.”
ECO
I like the notion of
stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit
yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have
to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing.
Culture in this sense is about knowing how to forget. Otherwise, one indeed
becomes like Funes, who remembers all the leaves of the tree he saw thirty
years ago. Discriminating what you want to learn and remember is critical from
a cognitive standpoint.
INTERVIEWER
But isn’t culture
itself, in the larger sense, already a filter?
ECO
Yes, our private
culture is a secondary operation, so to speak, because culture in the general
sense discriminates already. In a way, culture is the mechanism by which a
community suggests to us what has to be remembered and what has to be
forgotten. Culture has decided, for instance—look in every encyclopedia—that
what happened to Calpurnia after the death of her husband, Julius Caesar, is
irrelevant. Most likely nothing interesting happened to her. Whereas Clara
Schumann became more important after the death of Schumann. She was rumored to
be the lover of Brahms, and she became an acclaimed pianist in her own right.
And all this remains true until the moment a historian retrieves an unknown
document that will show that something we neglected was in fact relevant.
If culture did not
filter, it would be inane—as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on
its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would
be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual
labor. For you and for me it is enough to know that Einstein proposed the
theory of relativity. But an absolute understanding of the theory we leave to
the specialists. The real problem is that too many are granted the right to
become a specialist.
INTERVIEWER
What do you make of
those who proclaim the death of the novel, the death of books, the death of
reading?
ECO
To believe in the end
of something is a typical cultural posture. Since the Greeks and the Latins we
have persisted in believing that our ancestors were better than us. I am always
amused and interested by this kind of sport, which the mass media practice with
increasing ferocity. Every season there is an article on the end of the novel,
the end of literature, the end of literacy in America. People don’t read any
longer! Teenagers only play video games! The fact of the matter is that all
over the world there are thousands of stores full of books and full of young
people. Never in the history of mankind have there been so many books, so many
places selling books, so many young people visiting these places and buying
books.
INTERVIEWER
What would you say to
the fearmongers?
ECO
Culture is
continuously adapting to new situations. There will probably be a different
culture, but there will be a culture. After the fall of the Roman Empire there
were centuries of profound transformations—linguistic, political, religious,
cultural. These types of changes happen ten times as quickly now. But thrilling
new forms will continue to emerge and literature will survive.
INTERVIEWER
You have said in the
past that you would like to be remembered more as an academic than a novelist.
Do you really mean that?
ECO
I don’t remember
having said that because it’s the sort of feeling that changes according to the
context in which I’m asked this question. But at this point experience tells me
that the work of an academic survives with great difficulty because theories change.
Aristotle survives, but countless texts from academics of just one century ago
are not republished. Whereas many novels are continuously republished. So
technically speaking there are more chances to survive as a writer than as an
academic, and I take into account these pieces of evidence independently from
my own wishes.
INTERVIEWER
How important to you
is the notion of your work surviving? Do you often think about your legacy?
ECO
I don’t believe one
writes for oneself. I think that writing is an act of love—you write in order
to give something to someone else. To communicate something. To have other
people share your feelings. This problem of how long your work can survive is
fundamental for every writer, not just for a novelist or a poet. The truth is,
the philosopher writes his book in order to convince a lot of people of his
theories, and he hopes that in the next three thousand years people will still
read that book. It is just as you hope that your kids survive you, and that if
you have a grandchild he survives your children. One hopes for a sense of
continuity. When a writer says, I am not interested in the destiny of my book,
he is simply a liar. He says so to please the interviewer.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any
regrets at this point in your life?
ECO
I regret everything,
because I have committed many, many mistakes in all walks of life. But if I had
to start again, I honestly think I would commit the same mistakes. I’m being
serious. I’ve spent my life examining my behavior and my ideas, and criticizing
myself. I’m so severe that I would never tell you what my worst self-criticism
is, not even for a million dollars.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a book you
never wrote but ardently wish you had?
ECO
Yes, just one. Until
the age of fifty and throughout all my youth, I dreamed of writing a book on
the theory of comedy. Why? Because every book on the subject has been
unsuccessful, at least all the ones I’ve been able to read. Every theoretician
of comedy, from Freud to Bergson, explains some aspect of the phenomenon, but
not all. This phenomenon is so complex that no theory is, or has been thus far,
able to explain it completely. So I thought to myself that I would want to
write the real theory of comedy. But then the task proved desperately difficult.
If I knew exactly why it was so difficult, I would have the answer and I would
be able to write the book.
INTERVIEWER
But you have written
books on beauty and, more recently, on ugliness. Aren’t those notions just as
ungraspable?
ECO
Compared to beauty
and ugliness, comedy is terrifying. I’m not talking about laughter, mind you.
No, there is an uncanny sentimentality of the comic, which is so complex that—I
cannot quite explain it. And this, alas, is why I didn’t write the book.
INTERVIEWER
Is comedy a
specifically human invention, as you said lying is?
ECO
Yes, since it seems
that animals are bereft of humor. We know that they have a sense of play, they
feel sorry, they weep, they suffer. We have proof that they are happy, when they
are playing with us, but not that they have comic feelings. It is a typical
human experience, which consists of—no, I can’t exactly say.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
ECO
OK, fine. I have a
suspicion that it is linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know
we must die. The other animals don’t know it. They understand it only on the
spot, in the moment that they die. They are unable to articulate anything like
the statement: All men are mortal. We are able to do it, and that is probably
why there are religions, rituals, and what have you. I think that comedy is the
quintessential human reaction to the fear of death. If you ask me for something
more, I cannot tell you. But perhaps I’ll create an empty secret now, and let
everyone think that I have a theory of comedy in the works, so when I die they
will spend a lot of time trying to retrieve my secret book.
In truth, what really
happened with my desire to write a book on comedy was that I wrote The Name of
the Rose instead. It was one of those cases in which, when you are unable to
construct a theory, you narrate a story. And I believe that in The Name of the
Rose, I did, in narrative form, flesh out a certain theory of the comic. The
comic as a critical way of undercutting fanaticism. A diabolical shade of
suspicion behind every proclamation of truth.