(By Julieta Grosso) Although he will always be remembered as the author of the novel “The name of the rose”, which with its millions of copies sold, its audiovisual adaptations and even its video game version supposed an unexpected journey that came to overwhelm him, the semiologist and Italian writer Umberto Eco -who would be 90 years old today- left an overwhelming work condensed into more than 60 titles that orbit without tension between semiotics and popular culture, in turn predictor of phenomena such as technologies associated with communication, there where today his dialectic between apocalyptic and integrated seems dissolved.
In a scene where social networks magnetize public debate and exchanges are caught in a furious rift that often slides the debate towards disqualification or lightness, there seems to be little room for the antinomy between apocalyptic and integrated that Umberto Eco coined in 1964 to anticipate the arrival of an era articulated by technology and mass content, but its formulations anticipated the early phase of a process that today adds layers of complexity with an oversupply of content, a barrage of fake news and a dictatorship of metrics that seek to discipline reading consumptions.
This condition of lucid and biting antenna was one of the swords of the man who with a shrewd pulse built a heterogeneous essay and literary production that alternated between academic inquiries about art and mass culture, a successful journey as a novelist -which turned him into a best seller with “The name of the rose” – and the dissemination task that he displayed in the media, which he fascinated with his sometimes pyrotechnic interventions on journalism, politics or corruption.
“He wanted to poison a monk.” Thus, with his usual irony, Eco recounted in “Apostilles to The Name of the Rose” the genesis of his most famous novel, the one that deposited it in a place that few intellectuals usually travel: the top of the best-seller list. There were not many more explanations about the reasons that led to fiction, back in the 80s, a man who by then already had a consolidated path in academic life. “I wrote a novel because I wanted to. I think it is reason enough to start telling,” he managed to justify.
He was 48 years old and a budding essay production when he was surprised by the call of the mythical editor Giulio Enaudi to offer him a tempting contract and a print run of 30,000 copies without having read the book. “With the money from that advance I bought a very nice leather suitcase, which I still have,” the writer would later recall. Later, “The name of the rose” would perhaps become an inconvenience, the involuntary beacon to which he was obliged to refer in interviews, because at some point the talk led to the novel set in a fourteenth-century Catholic abbey that has been sold. 50 million copies.
“I hate ‘The name of the rose.’ , he said in 2011 before the surprised Turin Book Hall auditorium.
Click to enlarge
A fallback.
Eco never managed to process the derivations of the success of his novel, which had a film adaptation in 1986 with Sean Connery and Christian Slater in the main roles and a later in series format with 8 episodes that returned to focus on the Franciscan monk William de Baskerville ( played by John Turturro) and the novice Adso von Melk. Not only that: the story also became a successful video game developed in 1987 by the Spanish company Opera Soft with the title “The Abbey of Crime.”
Despite his later misgivings, the writer understood from “The name of the rose” that he could capitalize on the novel format as a novel resource to explore his central interests as a researcher: the construction of memory, the dynamics of time, the travel, uncertainty, irrationality and esotericism, issues that he explored in works such as “Foucault’s pendulum”, “The island from the day before”, “Baudolino”, “The mysterious flame of Queen Loana” or “The cemetery from Prague “.
“Books are not made for one to believe in them, but to be subjected to investigation. When we consider a book, we should not ask ourselves what it says, but what it means,” he maintains precisely in one of the sections of his best seller, a luck of covert cartography that reveals the way in which he perceived the scope of his trade: writing for inquiring readers who like to question themselves about the real purpose of speeches and stories.
In the temporal range that goes from his first work “The aesthetic problem in Tomás de Aquino” (1956) to “Number Zero” and “How to travel in a salmon” -a set of texts that were published posthumously- Eco displayed a reflective plot in which it was issued on information manipulation, theology, philosophy, the epic of the Templars, comics, aesthetics, conspiracies, the production of signs in contemporary culture, the collateral effects of the democratization of content facilitated by internet and social networks.
Crucial in his first years of intervention in the academic space are works such as “Medieval Art and Aesthetics” and especially “Open Work”, which made the question of indeterminacy and the role of chance in art visible as never before, almost as a prediction of the current proposals around the absence of identity of contemporary production.
His major milestone of those years is “Apocalyptic and Integrated” (1964), a work that a priori looks perhaps somewhat outdated: Eco captures the then incipient paradigm shift that is coming with the irruption of the mass media and raises two antagonistic positions as a reaction to this new sign of the times. Over time, the semiologist would appear closer to the side of the skeptics than the friendly ones with the new formats of global communication, although he could also represent a virtuous synthesis of his dialectic: the “apocalyptic-integrated” that abjures technologies but he uses them to spread his ideas.
“The Internet is still a wild and dangerous world. Everything arises there without hierarchy. The immense amount of things that circulate on the Internet is much worse than the lack of information. Excess information causes amnesia. Too much information is bad. When not we remember what we learn, we end up looking like animals. Knowing is cutting and selecting, “Eco said in a 2011 interview.
His diagnosis at that time included the characterization of a scenario that could function as an accurate description of the logic that defines the use of the networks: “We will see multitudes of ignorant people using the Internet for the most diverse stupid things: games, banal conversations and search for irrelevant news. . (…) In the long term, the pedagogical result will be dramatic “, warned the semiologist.
The writer’s bibliography covers more than 60 titles between novel and essay, in a chronology where the pulse of his obsessions can be traced, from his interest in analyzing the scope of concepts such as sign, code, metaphor or symbol -which express their concerns in texts such as “Open work”, “The absent structure” or “Treatise on general semiotics” – even the criticisms of contemporary journalism that crystallized in his latest novel “The book of the year zero”, where through parody he suggests that the media they function as a defamation and delegitimization machine with mechanisms that range from innuendo and suspicion to misinformation or manipulation, far from the nobility that he attributed to books.
“Books are those kinds of instruments that, once invented, could not be improved, simply because they are good. Like the hammer, the knife, the spoon or the scissors,” he summarized about his fervor for reading.
Eco died of pancreatic cancer on February 19, 2016. Five years later, his posthumous work, “How to travel with a salmon,” in which, in a fictional format of a newspaper column, appeared as a scholar surprised by a technological, bureaucratic world full of banalities that seemed to him at the same time alien, uncomfortable and funny.
In the months prior to his death, the writer used to express this disenchantment in his public speeches, such as when at a press conference in the Grand Palace of the Royal Riding School in Turin, where he was awarded the Honoris causa diploma in Communication and Culture. of the Media of the University of Turin – the same institution saw him enroll in philosophy in 1954 – expressed: “Social networks give the right to speak to legions of idiots who first spoke only in the bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. They were quickly silenced and now have the same right to speak as a Nobel laureate. It is the invasion of fools. ” (Télam)
–
