Umberto Eco, 1932-2016

Italian intellectual and novelist Umberto Eco died at his home in Milan Friday night at age 84 following a battle with cancer. A scholar of medieval studies and semiotics, he became famous in 1980 when his medieval mystery, The Name of the Rose, sold more than 10 million copies. He wrote four more best-selling novels, including Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004).

The Paris Review in 2008 ran a long but fascinating interview with Eco. Interviewer Lila Azam Zanganeh set the stage: “With Eco’s paunch leading the way, his feet shuffling along the floor, we walked into his living room.” Eco had smoked up to 60 cigarettes a day, “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.”

She asked how Eco began writing: “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. 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.”

Here are highlights from the Paris Review interview:

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: 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 still believe, like Cicero did, that historia magistra vitae: history is the teacher of life. …

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: 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. … 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: 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.

Eco’s praise for Starchy and Hutch is funny, coming directly after his castigation of “trash shows,” but he is acknowledging what World Journalism Institute students learn: Stay low on the ladder of abstraction. Eco also told interviewer Zanganeh, “I have written countless essays on semiotics, but I think I expressed my ideas better in Foucault’s Pendulum than in my essays. … [A]t 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.”

Also, the interview displays Eco’s ego, and maybe novelists need one. At Eco’s apartment, Zanganeh noted, “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.” Eco told his interviewer, “This one, you see, by Arman, is dedicated especially to me.” At a restaurant, Zanganeh observed that Eco was “sullen and aloof,” but his mood brightened when he ordered food and drink and a “beaming reader approached the table, ‘Are you Umberto Eco?’ The professore lifted an eyebrow, grinned, and shook hands.”

Zanganeh asked, “Do you think your status as a best-selling novelist has diminished your reputation as a serious thinker around the world?” Eco replied, “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.” When Zanganeh cited Catholic Church criticism of Eco—“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’”—he replied, “The strange thing is that I had just received honorary degrees from two Catholic universities, Leuven and Loyola.”

Eco taught at the University of Bologna and founded the Department of Communication at the University of the Republic of San Marino. The New York Times reported this morning that British novelist Salman Rushdie called Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum “humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts.” When Eco appeared on a panel with Rushdie in 2008, Eco read portions of Foucault’s Pendulum.

Eco often contemplated death: “Laughter, and why we laugh, always fascinated me. Man is the only laughing animal because, unlike other animals, we know we have to die. Laughter is a way to tame death, a way not to take our death too seriously, by not taking too seriously our life.” He told Paris Review interviewer Zanganeh, “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.”

Ten years ago, Eco wrote in The Telegraph of London, “Human beings are religious animals. … [I]t is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. … It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. … You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century. They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms—yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.”

Five years ago, David Mills wrote in First Things about Eco’s column, and quoted a friend of his saying, “I have hope for Mr. Eco. At least he knows the right questions. The ones I’m worried about don’t even know there are questions to be asked.” But Mills saw it differently: “Eco’s position is one of the worst from which to move back to religious faith, because it is so comfortable. You satisfy any religious leanings you still have by defending it and remembering it fondly while simply accepting that you can’t believe it anymore.”

Eco’s best-sellers made him affluent, but he wrote in The Telegraph, “Money can do a lot of things—but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million pounds on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can’t make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world. And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money’s great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can’t make sense of your death.”

Eco’s wife of 54 years, Renate Ramge Eco, and their son and daughter, survive him.