by Umberto Eco
There are two ways of avoiding this quandary. Establish that a commemorative volume is produced only for those who have reached eighty and beyond, or alternatively, do as I do and send the same essay for every Festschrift, altering the first ten lines and the conclusion. No one has ever noticed.
2010
The Catcher in the Rye fifty years on
After the recent death of J. D. Salinger, I read numerous reminiscences on The Catcher in the Rye and noticed that they fell into two categories: the first were fond accounts of how reading the novel had been a marvelous adolescent experience, and the second were critical reflections by those who, being too young or too old, had read it as you might read any other novel. Those latter readers were puzzled, and questioned whether The Catcher in the Rye would remain part of literary history or would represent a phenomenon attached to a single period and generation. Yet no one raised such issues on rereading Herzog when Saul Bellow died, or The Naked and the Dead on the death of Norman Mailer. Why then The Catcher in the Rye?
I think I’m an ideal guinea pig when it comes to answering this question. The novel came out in 1951, and was published in Italian the following year with the none-too-encouraging title Vita da uomo (A Man’s Life). It went unnoticed and achieved success only in 1961, when it was published under the title Il giovane Holden (The Young Holden). It’s therefore the Proustian madeleine for Italian adolescents of the 1960s. By that time I was thirty, reading James Joyce, and Salinger passed me by. I eventually read it some ten years ago, almost out of professional duty, and was left unmoved. Why?
First, because it didn’t bring back to me any adolescent passion. Second, the youthful language Salinger had used with such originality was now obsolete—youth-speak, as we know, changes from month to month—and therefore it had a false ring. Finally, the “Salinger style” had had such a success since the 1960s, and reappeared in so many other novels, that it was bound to seem mannered, and neither original nor provocative. The novel had lost its interest because of its success.
This leads me to wonder just how much the “success” of a work depends on the circumstances, the historical context in which it appears, and on its relevance to the reader’s own life. Here’s an example on another level: I don’t belong to the Tex generation, and I’m always surprised when I hear people say that they grew up with the Tex Willer legend. The explanation for this is simple: Tex first appeared in 1948, and at that time I was already in secondary school and had stopped reading comics. When I went back to reading them, around the age of thirty, it was the time of Charlie Brown, when classics such as Dick Tracy and Krazy Kat were being rediscovered, and the beginning of the great Italian comic book tradition, with artists like Guido Crepax and Hugo Pratt. Similarly, I remember the early comics of Benito Jacovitti, such as Pippo, Pertica e Palla of the 1940s, and not Cocco Bill, which came much later.
But we must be careful not to reduce everything to a personal level. Someone might loathe The Divine Comedy because at the time they were studying it they were desperately disappointed in love, but this could happen just as well with a Totò film. We mustn’t indulge, however, in the pseudo-deconstructionist vice of thinking that a text has no meaning and it all depends on the way the reader interprets it. We might feel sad recalling Totò, Peppino, and the Hussy because our girlfriend left us the same day we went to see it, but this doesn’t prevent us from reaching the objective conclusion that the scene in which Totò and Peppino write the letter to Marisa is a masterpiece of comic timing and effect.
If, then, the artistic value of a work can be assessed independently of the way in which we ourselves receive it, there remains the question of why it became successful or unsuccessful at a particular moment in time. To what extent can the success of a book be linked to the period and cultural context in which it appears? Why did The Catcher in the Rye fascinate young Americans in the early 1950s but have no effect at the time on young Italians, who came to discover it only ten years later? It’s not enough to suggest that its Italian publisher the second time around had greater prestige and editorial power than the first.
I could name many works that achieved vast popular success and critical acclaim that they wouldn’t have enjoyed had they been published ten years before or after. Certain works have to arrive at the right moment. And as we’ve known since the times of Greek philosophy, “the right moment,” or kairòs, is a serious issue. To state that a work appears or doesn’t appear at the right moment doesn’t mean we can explain why a particular moment is right. It’s one of those intractable problems, like predicting where a ping-pong ball thrown into the sea on Monday will fetch up on Wednesday.
2010
Aristotle and the pirates
The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, a curious book by Peter Leeson, has just been published in Italian. The author, an American historian of capitalism, explains the fundamental principles of economics and modern democracy by taking as his model the crews of seventeenth-century pirate ships, like “the Black Corsair” or François l’Olonnese, with skull-and-crossbones flags, from which came the name Jolie rouge, which the English then mangled into Jolly Roger.
The author shows how buccaneering, with its iron laws that every decent pirate respected, was an “enlightened,” democratic, egalitarian setup open to diversity. In short, it was a perfect model for capitalist society.
Giulio Giorello also develops these themes in his introduction to the Italian translation. What I propose to discuss, however, is not so much Leeson’s book but a few ideas that it brought to mind. Of course, the person who drew a parallel between pirates and merchants, free traders, the models for future capitalism, was Aristotle, though he could have known nothing about capitalism.
Aristotle is credited as the first to define metaphor—he did so in Poetics as well as in Rhetoric—and in those first definitions he claimed that metaphor is not pure ornament but a form of knowledge. This seems no small thing, considering that over the following centuries the metaphor was long seen as merely a way of embellishing discourse without changing its substance. And some people still think so today.
In Poetics he said that to understand good metaphors implies “an eye for resemblances.” The verb he used was theoreîn, which means to discern, investigate, compare, judge. Aristotle returned to this cognitive function of the metaphor more extensively in Rhetoric, where he maintains that what stirs admiration is pleasant because it allows us to discover an unexpected analogy. In other words, something is “brought before our eyes” that we had never noticed, so that we are prompted to say, “Look, that’s exactly how it is, and I just hadn’t realized.”
We can see that Aristotle attributed an almost scientific function to good metaphors, though it was a science that didn’t involve discovering something that was already there, but rather making it appear there for the first time by pointing to a new way of looking at things.
What was one of the most convincing examples of metaphor that brings something before our eyes for the first time? A metaphor—I’ve no idea where Aristotle came across it—in which pirates were called “purveyors” or “suppliers.” As for other metaphors, Aristotle suggested that at least one shared property be identified for two apparently different and irreconcilable things, then the two different things would be seen as species of that same kind.
Even though merchants were generally regarded as good people who went to sea to lawfully transport and sell their goods, whereas pirates were scoundrels who attacked and robbed the ships of those same merchants, the metaphor suggested that pirates and merchants had a shared interest in the passage of goods from source to consumer. There is no doubt that, having robbed their victims, the pirates went off to sell the captured goods, and were therefore transporters, purveyors, and suppliers of goods, even if their customers could have been accused of receiving stolen property. In any event, that instant similarity between merchants and predators created a whole series of suspicions, causing the reader to think,
“That’s how it was, and previously I was wrong.”
The metaphor required a reconsideration of the role of the pirate in the Mediterranean economy, but at the same time it led to suspicion about the role and methods of merchants. In short, that metaphor, in Aristotle’s view, anticipated what Brecht would say later, that the real crime is not robbing a bank but owning one, and of course the good man from Stagira couldn’t have known that Brecht’s apparent jest would seem deeply disturbing in the light of what has happened recently in international finance.
We shouldn’t imagine that Aristotle, councilor to a monarch, thought like Karl Marx, but you’ll understand why this story about pirates amused me.
2010
Lies and make-believe
I’ve discussed lying in some of my recent articles because I was preparing to take part in the Milanesiana literary festival, whose theme this year was “lies and truth,” and where I spoke about narrative make-believe. Is a novel a lie? On the face of it, when Alessandro Manzoni, in The Betrothed, tells us that Don Abbondio met two bravoes on the outskirts of Lecco, he was telling a lie because he knew perfectly well it was an invention. But Manzoni had no intention of lying: he was pretending that what he was recounting had actually happened and was asking us to participate in his pretense, in the way a child who grabs a stick pretends it’s a sword.
Narrative make-believe dictates, of course, that the make-believe is signaled from the word “novel” on the book cover, and from opening sentences such as “Once upon a time . . . ,” but it often starts with a false indication of truth. An example: “Mr. Lemuel Gulliver . . . three years ago . . . growing weary of the concourse of curious people coming to him at his house in Redriff, made a small purchase of land, with a convenient house, near Newark . . . Before he quitted Redriff, he left the custody of the following papers in my hands . . . I have carefully perused them three times . . . There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it.”
Look at the title page of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels. The name that appears there is not that of Jonathan Swift, author of a fictional story, but Gulliver’s as author of a true autobiography. Perhaps readers are not deceived. Ever since Lucian’s True History, exaggerated claims of truth tend to indicate fiction, but a story often mixes fantastical details with references to the real world in such a way that many readers lose their bearings.
They then take novels seriously, as if they were describing what really happened, and they assume the opinions of the characters are those of the author. I can assure you, as a novelist, that once sales have risen, let’s say, above ten thousand copies, one moves from a readership used to reading narrative fiction to one that is indiscriminate and treats the novel as a sequence of true statements.
2011
Credulity and identification
Last week I noted that a large number of people, when they read novels, find it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction, and tend to assume that the characters’ feelings and thoughts are those of their author. As confirmation, I’ve found a website that records the thoughts of a number of authors, and among “the phrases of Umberto Eco” I find the following: “The Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, finds himself more at ease with a dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only in changing sides with the wind.” It’s not that there’s no truth to it, but it’s one of those centuries-old commonplaces promoted by foreign writers, and appears in my novel The Prague Cemetery, written by a man who has expressed every kind of racist impulse using the most hackneyed clichés. I try to make sure my characters are never banal, otherwise I’d end up being attributed with such trite propositions as “You only have one mother.”
Now Eugenio Scalfari, commenting in L’Espresso on a recent article of mine, raises a new issue. Scalfari accepts that some people confuse narrative fiction with reality, but thinks, and correctly thinks that I think, that narrative fiction can be more real than the truth, that it can inspire a sense of identification with and perception of historical phenomena, that it can create new ways of feeling, and so on. It’s a point of view with which one can hardly disagree.
Narrative fiction, moreover, produces aesthetic effects. A reader can be perfectly aware that Madame Bovary never existed and still enjoy the way in which Flaubert constructs his character. But the aesthetic aspect takes us back to the “alethic” aspect—in other words, that notion of truth shared by logicians, by scientists, or by judges who have to decide whether or not a witness in court has given a correct version of events. They are two different aspects: woe betide a judge who is moved by a guilty man’s lying in an aesthetically appealing manner; I was referring to the alethic aspect, since my line of reasoning started off from a discussion about falsity and lies. Is it false to say that a television conjurer can make your hair grow back? It’s false. Is it false to say that Don Abbondio encounters two bravoes? From the alethic point of view, yes, but Manzoni isn’t trying to tell us what he’s narrating is true. He’s pretending it’s true and asks us to pretend too. He is asking us, as Coleridge suggested, to “suspend disbelief.”
Scalfari quotes Werther, and we know how many young romantics killed themselves having identified with Goethe’s protagonist. Did they perhaps believe the story was true? Not necessarily. We know that Emma Bovary never existed, and yet we are moved to tears by her fate. We recognize fiction as fiction, and yet we identify with the character.
Madame Bovary never existed, though we feel that many women like her have existed, and that we are also perhaps a little like her, and we learn something about life in general and about ourselves. The ancient Greeks believed that what happened to Oedipus was true, and used it as an opportunity to reflect upon fate. Freud knew well that Oedipus never existed, but he interpreted his story as a way of understanding how the unconscious works.
What happens to those readers who are totally incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality? Their response produces no aesthetic effects, because they are so busy taking the story seriously they don’t ask whether it’s told well or badly, they make no attempt to learn from it, and they fail to identify with the characters. They simply exhibit what I would call a fictional deficit; they are unable to suspend disbelief. Since there are more such readers than we might imagine, this bears thinking about, because we know that all other aesthetic and moral questions elude them.
2011
Who’s afraid of paper tigers?
In the early 1960s, Marshall McLuhan had forecast various drastic changes in our way of thinking and communicating. One of his intuitions was that we were entering the era of the global village, and many of his predictions have certainly come true in the world of the Internet. But, having examined the influence of printing on the evolution of culture and our own individual sensibility in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan went on, in Understanding Media and other works, to predict the decline of alphabetic linearity and the rise to dominance of the image—in the simplest terms, what the mass media translated as “You no longer read. You watch television or the strobe images in a nightclub.”
McLuhan died in 1980, when personal computers were being introduced into everyday life. The first models made little more than an experimental appearance in the late 1970s, but the mass market opened up in 1981 with IBM computers, and if he’d lived a few more years, he’d have had to admit that, in a world apparently dominated by the image, a new alphabetic culture was establishing itself. You can’t do much with a personal computer unless you can read and write. It’s true that young children can use an iPad these days even at preschool age, but all the information we receive via the Web, emails, and text messages is based on alphabetic knowledge. The computer fulfilled what had been predicted in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchbac
k of Notre-Dame by Archdeacon Frollo, who pointed first to a printed book, then to the cathedral decorated with images and other symbols that could be seen through the window, and said: “This will kill that.” The computer has shown itself to be a global instrument with its multimedia links, and is capable also of bringing to life “that” image of the Gothic cathedral, but it is based fundamentally on principles that postdate The Gutenberg Galaxy.
With a return to the written word, the invention of e-books has also meant that texts can be read on a screen rather than on a printed page, prompting new forecasts about the disappearance of books and newspapers, suggested in part by a decline in sales. Every hack journalist’s favorite sport for years has been to ask writers how they view the disappearance of printed paper. And it’s not enough to claim that the book is still vitally important for moving and storing information, that we have scientific evidence that books printed five hundred years ago have survived remarkably well, whereas we have no scientific evidence to show that magnetic media currently in use can survive more than ten years, nor can we find out, given that today’s computers can no longer read a 1980s floppy disk.
But the newspapers are now reporting disturbing developments whose significance and consequences we have yet to understand. Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, recently bought the Washington Post, and while the decline of the printed newspaper has been proclaimed, Warren Buffett recently acquired sixty-three local papers. As Federico Rampini observed in La Repubblica, Buffett is a giant of the old economy, and no innovator, but he has a rare acumen for investment opportunities. And other Silicon Valley wheeler-dealers appear to be moving into the newspaper trade.
Rampini wonders whether Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg might inflict the final blow by buying the New York Times. Even if this doesn’t happen, it’s clear that the digital world is rediscovering paper. Is all this commercial calculation, or political speculation, or a desire to preserve the press as a bastion of democracy? I don’t feel I can yet attempt any interpretation of what’s happening. But I think it’s interesting that we are witnessing another reversal of prophecies. Perhaps Mao was wrong: beware of paper tigers.
