The death of Umberto Eco – novelist,
scholar, probably the best-known public intellectual in Europe – last week was a
loss to the world. I have been reading and rereading his books for twenty years,
both his novels and his academic works, and they have been an endless source of
delight; it is a great sadness that we shall have no more. Eco’s writings
reflect his remarkable mind, and the idea that everything is interesting, everything
is worth exploring. There is a curiosity about the world, combined with a
consistently applied seriousness: Eco might talk about Thomas Aquinas or about
Italian television, but his consideration of both is equally thoughtful.
For an academic, this can have
revolutionary implications – allowing your focus to expand beyond your current
project, spending time thinking about something not covered by departmental
research parameters. As an independent scholar, this is a pleasure I have been
allowing myself more and more. It is a practice which has enriched my research
as well as my quality of life.
Last summer I spent many commuter
hours reading Eco’s popular non-fiction, and many lunch hours with his online
interviews. My favourite is one from the Paris Review, which includes a
description of Eco’s work practices:
I
always say that I am able to use the interstices. (…)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.
It is a simple thought, and not new;
that imaginative and intellectual labour can be achieved anywhere, that we need
not be chained to our desks to work. Yet what comes across here is less the
spread of work to every moment of every day (which for many of us is already
ingrained) than the removal of ‘work’ from thinking. A freedom from the
pressure of ‘work’ at least, from the anxiety of being productive. What if we
were able to look at thinking as an opportunity, a pleasure, rather than a
duty?
This pleasure of thinking is what
makes Eco such a fascinating historical novelist. It’s not only that he offers
detailed and accurate information about the period in question, but that he
creates a plot around the crucial debates of the time. His historical context
is not something in the background, a question of fashion or architecture or a
few local wars, but rather it constitutes the point of the story. By showing us
what people were arguing about, Eco enables us to see the cultural framework that
underpins those arguments.
In the Name of the Rose we have debates about heresy, but we are made to
see them as being about reconciling different political practices as much as
about what constitutes religious dogma – and above all, about turning individual
preferences to ideology. The question of whether laughter is compatible with
Christianity might seem to us a ridiculous dilemma, but Eco’s novel demonstrates
how it could constitute a reasonable query, how it works and is supported by the
accepted imaginative reality to which logic can be applied. Much as we might
debate about whether Han shot first, or what would have happened if Neville
Longbottom had been the Chosen One, or whether Steve Rogers will ever find his
Bucky. These are arguments that you have in the pub rather than on a podium.
I started rereading Baudolino over the weekend; a novel
ostensibly about the creation of the Prester John legend. Like all of Eco’s
novels, it’s built around an inquiry, in this case how to force Italian cities
to stop fighting each other so that Frederick Barbarossa can take a break. But
it’s also about how rhetoric can be used as a social strategy, and the
temptations of narrative imperatives, and whether reality is constituted or
informed by language, and many other things I haven’t yet got to. These are the
debates Baudolino is having with his friends, with colleagues and enemies and
strangers in the bar. These are, I suspect, debates which I will be having inside
my head for a while.
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