The Holy War:

Mac vs. DOS

By Umberto Eco

The following excerpts are from an English translation of Umberto Eco's back-page
column, La bustina di Minerva, in the Italian news weekly Espresso, September 30,
1994.

A French translation may be seen here.

Friends, Italians, countrymen, I ask that a Committee for Public Health be set up,
whose task would be to censor (by violent means, if necessary) discussion of the
following topics in the Italian press. Each censored topic is followed by an
alternative in brackets which is just as futile, but rich with the potential for polemic.
Whether Joyce is boring (whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections).
Whether Heidegger is responsible for the crisis of the Left (whether Ariosto
provoked the revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Whether semiotics has blurred the
difference between Walt Disney and Dante (whether De Agostini does the right
thing in putting Vimercate and the Sahara in the same atlas). Whether Italy
boycotted quantum physics (whether France plots against the subjunctive). Whether
new technologies kill books and cinemas (whether zeppelins made bicycles
redundant). Whether computers kill inspiration (whether fountain pens are
Protestant).
One can continue with: whether Moses was anti-semitic; whether Leon Bloy liked
Calasso; whether Rousseau was responsible for the atomic bomb; whether Homer
approved of investments in Treasury stocks; whether the Sacred Heart is monarchist
or republican.
I asked above whether fountain pens were Protestant. Insufficient consideration has
been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern
world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they
immediately agree with me.
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and
users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the
Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is

cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by
step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their
document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via
simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture,
demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user,
and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the
system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque
community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner
torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to
resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true:
Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but
there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance
with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women
and gays if you want to.
Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do
with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as
time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner
changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have
written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed
in Pascal?
And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or
environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic
and cabalistic. The Jewish lobby, as always....

Return to Eco's Writings

Casablanca,

or,
The Clichs are Having a Ball

By Umberto Eco

From: Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, Sonia
Maasik and Jack Solomon, eds. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994) pp.260- 264.

(Copy-edited and spell-checked by Scott Atkins, September 1995. Tagged in html,

October 1995.)

When people in their fifties sit down before their television sets for a rerun of
Casablanca, it is an ordinary matter of nostalgia. However, when the film is shown
in American universities, the boys and girls greet each scene and canonical line of
dialogue ("Round up the usual suspects," "Was that cannon fire, or is it my heart
pounding?" -- or even every time that Bogey says "kid") with ovations usually
reserved for football games. And I have seen the youthful audience in an Italian art
cinema react in the same way. What then is the fascination of Casablanca?
The question is a legitimate one, for aesthetically speaking (or by any strict critical
standards) Casablanca is a very mediocre film. It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low
on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects. And we
know the reason for this: The film was made up as the shooting went along, and it
was not until the last moment that the director and script writer knew whether Ilse
would leave with Victor or with Rick. So all those moments of inspired direction that
wring bursts of applause for their unexpected boldness actually represent decisions
taken out of desperation. What then accounts for the success of this chain of
accidents, a film that even today, seen for a second, third, or fourth time, draws
forth the applause reserved for the operatic aria we love to hear repeated, or the
enthusiasm we accord to an exciting discovery? There is a cast of formidable hams.
But that is not enough.
Here are the romantic lovers -- he bitter, she tender -- but both have been seen to
better advantage. And Casablanca is not Stagecoach, another film periodically
revived. Stagecoach is a masterpiece in every respect. Every element is in its
proper place, the characters are consistent from one moment to the next, and the
plot (this too is important) comes from Maupassant--at least the first part of it. And
so? So one is tempted to read Casablanca the way T. S. Eliot reread Hamlet. He

attributed its fascination not to its being a successful work (actually he considered it
one of Shakespeare's less fortunate plays) but to something quite the opposite:
Hamlet was the result of an unsuccessful fusion of several earlier Hamlets, one in
which the theme was revenge (with madness as only a stratagem), and another
whose theme was the crisis brought on by the mother's sin, with the consequent
discrepancy between Hamlet's nervous excitation and the vagueness and
implausibility of Gertrude's crime. So critics and public alike find Hamlet beautiful
because it is interesting, and believe it to be interesting because it is beautiful.
On a smaller scale, the same thing happened to Casablanca. Forced to improvise a
plot, the authors mixed in a little of everything, and everything they chose came
from a repertoire of the tried and true. When the choice of the tried and true is
limited, the result is a trite or mass-produced film, or simply kitsch. But when the
tried and true repertoire is used wholesale, the result is an architecture like Gaudi's
Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. There is a sense of dizziness, a stroke of brilliance.
But now let us forget how the film was made and see what it has to show us. It
opens in a place already magical in itself -- Morocco, the Exotic -- and begins with a
hint of Arab music that fades into "La Marseillaise." Then as we enter Rick's Place
we hear Gershwin. Africa France, America. At once a tangle of Eternal Archetypes
comes into play. These are situations that have presided over stories throughout the
ages. But usually to make a good story a single archetypal situation is enough. More
than enough. Unhappy Love, for example, or Flight. But Casablanca is not satisfied
with that: It uses them all. The city is the setting for a Passage, the passage to the
Promised Land (or a Northwest Passage if you like). But to make the passage one
must submit to a test, the Wait ("they wait and wait and wait," says the off-screen
voice at the beginning). The passage from the waiting room to the Promised Land
requires a Magic Key, the visa. It is around the winning of this Key that passions are
unleashed. Money (which appears at various points, usually in the form of the Fatal
Game, roulette) would seem to be the means for obtaining the Key. But eventually
we discover that the Key can be obtained only through a Gift -- the gift of the visa,
but also the gift Rick makes of his Desire by sacrificing himself For this is also the
story of a round of Desires, only two of which are satisfied: that of Victor Laszlo, the
purest of heroes, and that of the Bulgarian couple. All those whose passions are
impure fail.
Thus, we have another archetype: the Triumph of Purity. The impure do not reach
the Promised Land; we lose sight of them before that. But they do achieve purity
through sacrifice -- and this means Redemption. Rick is redeemed and so is the
French police captain. We come to realize that underneath it all there are two
Promised Lands: One is America (though for many it is a false goal), and the other is
the Resistance -- the Holy War. That is where Victor has come from, and that is
where Rick and the captain are going, to join de Gaulle. And if the recurring symbol
of the airplane seems every so often to emphasize the flight to America, the Cross
of Lorraine, which appears only once, anticipates the other symbolic gesture of the

captain, when at the end he throws away the bottle of Vichy water as the plane is
leaving. On the other hand the myth of sacrifice runs through the whole film: Ilse's
sacrifice in Paris when she abandons the man she loves to return to the wounded
hero, the Bulgarian bride's sacrifice when she is ready to yield herself to help her
husband, Victor's sacrifice when he is prepared to let Ilse go with Rick so long as she
is saved.
Into this orgy of sacrificial archetypes (accompanied by the Faithful Servant theme
in the relationship of Bogey and the black man Dooley Wilson) is inserted the theme
of Unhappy Love: unhappy for Rick, who loves Ilse and cannot have her; unhappy
for Ilse, who loves Rick and cannot leave with him; unhappy for Victor, who
understands that he has not really kept Ilse. The interplay of unhappy loves
produces various twists and turns: In the beginning Rick is unhappy because he
does not understand why Ilse leaves him; then Victor is unhappy because he does
not understand why Ilse is attracted to Rick; finally Ilse is unhappy because she
does not understand why Rick makes her leave with her husband. These three
unhappy (or Impossible) loves take the form of a Triangle. But in the archetypal
love-triangle there is a Betrayed Husband and a Victorious Lover. Here instead both
men are betrayed and suffer a loss, but, in this defeat (and over and above it) an
additional element plays a part, so subtly that one is hardly aware of it. It is that,
quite subliminally, a hint of male or Socratic love is established. Rick admires Victor,
Victor is ambiguously attracted to Rick, and it almost seems at a certain point as if
each of the two were playing out the duel of sacrifice in order to please the other. In
any case, as in Rousseau's Confessions, the woman places herself as Intermediary
between the two men. She herself is not a bearer of positive values; only the men
are.
Against the background of these intertwined ambiguities, the characters are stock
figures, either all good or all bad. Victor plays a double role, as an agent of
ambiguity in the love story, and an agent of clarity in the political intrigue -- he is
Beauty against the Nazi Beast. This theme of Civilization against Barbarism
becomes entangled with the others, and to the melancholy of an Odyssean Return is
added the warlike daring of an Iliad on open ground.
Surrounding this dance of eternal myths, we see the historical myths, or rather the
myths of the movies, duly served up again. Bogart himself embodies at least three:
the Ambiguous Adventurer, compounded of cynicism and generosity; the Lovelorn
Ascetic; and at the same time the Redeemed Drunkard (he has to be made a
drunkard so that all of a sudden he can be redeemed, while he was already an
ascetic, disappointed in love). Ingrid Bergman is the Enigmatic Woman, or Femme
Fatale. Then such myths as: They're Playing Our Song; the Last Day in Paris;
America, Africa, Lisbon as a Free Port; and the Border Station or Last Outpost on the
Edge of the Desert. There is the Foreign Legion (each character has a different
nationality and a different story to tell), and finally there is the Grand Hotel (people
coming and going). Rick's Place is a magic circle where everything can (and does)

happen: love, death, pursuit, espionage, games of chance, seductions, music,

patriotism. (The theatrical origin of the plot, and its poverty of means, led to an
admirable condensation of events in a single setting.) This place is Hong Kong,
Macao, I'Enfer duJeu, an anticipation of Lisbon, and even Showboat.
But precisely because all the archetypes are here, precisely because Casablanca
cites countless other films, and each actor repeats a part played on other occasions,
the resonance of intertextuality plays upon the spectator. Casablanca brings with it,
like a trail of perfume, other situations that the viewer brings to bear on it quite
readily, taking them without realizing it from films that only appeared later, such as
To Have and Have Not, where Bogart actually plays a Hemingway hero, while here in
Casablanca he already attracts Hemingwayesque connotations by the simple fact
that Rick, so we are told, fought in Spain (and, like Malraux, helped the Chinese
Revolution). Peter Lorre drags in reminiscences of Fritz Lang; Conrad Veidt envelops
his German officer in a faint aroma of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari -- he is not a
ruthless, technological Nazi, but a nocturnal and diabolical Caesar.
Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made
haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors
and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in
spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making. For in it there unfolds with
almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art
intervening to discipline it. And so we can accept it when characters change mood,
morality, and psychology from one moment to the next, when conspirators cough to
interrupt the conversation if a spy is approaching, when whores weep at the sound
of "La Marseillaise." When all the archtypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric
depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly
that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as
the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion
border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse
of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a
phenomenon worthy of awe.

Return to Eco's Writings

For a Polyglot Federation

By Umberto Eco

New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1993

UMBERTO ECO Author Of THE NAME OF THE ROSE and FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM,
Umberto Eco is without doubt the world's most famous semiologist.
His comment here is adapted from an interview with his translator and friend, the
writer Jean-Noel Schifano. A longer version of this interview appeared in LE MONDE.

The Quest for a Perfect Language in the History of European Culture is a subject
containing a gargantuan utopia coupled with a search for the Grail. It is gargantuan
and Rabelaisian -- a farfetched, extraordinary idea for a project. In order for all of it
to be covered completely, 10 scholars should work for 20 years to produce 40
volumes. As it is, as I proceed into my third year of this project -- even I, who collect
ancient books -- discover texts that are either completely unknown or were
mentioned once by, let's say, Leibniz, another time by someone else.
What does this mean for Europe, which has constantly torn itself apart while
dreaming of coming into being? It means that the history of Europe, traversed by
breaks, wars, divisions and attempts to reestablish a Government, is continually
accompanied by this quest, which is punctuated with possible political upheaval.
Take Postel, for example, a man who dreamed of rediscovering the perfect original
Hebrew that would make universal religious and political harmony possible under
the King of France.
Or take the Rosicrucians, who sought a magical language -- one that would merge
with the language of birds, the natural language of Jacob Bohme. Behind their
quest, however, was also the search for universal peace, which was for them the
peace between Catholics and Protestants.
And under the Convention, there was the perfect republican language of Delormel
for the laical harmony of the Enlightenment.
This theme has always traversed European history. It is utopian -- a search for Grail
-- and, therefore, doomed to failure. But -- and this is the idea that interests methough it is a search that fails in each of its attempts, it produces what the English
call "collateral effects": the language of Lulle failed as a language of religious

harmony but gave rise to all of the combinatives, up to the word "computer." The
language of Wilkins failed as a universal language but produced all the new
classifications of the natural sciences. The language of Leibniz failed but produced
modern formal logic. So, in each failed effort to formulate the perfect language a
small inheritance remains.
Today, whether we are doing algebra or playing with the computer, we are, in effect,
benefitting from some inheritance of the quest for a perfect language. It is even
more fascinating for a linguist or semanticist, since, by studying the reasons why
perfect languages did not work we discover why natural languages are what they
are.

THE SEARCH AND ITS TREASURES

Every search for the perfect language started by describing the defects ofthe
natural language. For an example, we need only look to Italy, where the language of
Dante was born in response to the search for a perfect language. In the beginning,
Dante discussed only the Language of Adam and its characteristics. He then made a
truly marvelous decision: his own language would be the perfect language -- the
language he invented for his poetic use -- which then became Italian, and artificially
national.
While English was born imperfect but evolved as people reasoned for their own
account, the Italian language has suffered from having been born of the project of a
perfect language. Today Italy endures its language, which was and has remained a
laboratory language. Since Italy is not a unified nation, Italian has never become the
language spoken by everyone, though it remains the language of writers-and of
television.
Indeed, the Italian language had its standard unification relatively recently, with
television. Let us not forget that no more than 100 years ago Victor-Emmanuel, who
unified Italy after the battle of San Martino, said to his officers: "Today we have
given the Austrians a good thrashing." He said it in French, because he spoke French
with his wife and his officers, in dialect with his soldiers, and perhaps in Italian with
Garibaldi.

DEGENERATION OF LANGUAGE

I share the feelings of those who think that a language, as a living organism, always
manages to enrich itself and survive, to resist all "barbarization," to produce poems,
etc. It is obvious that in New York, where there are Puerto Ricans, Indians,
Pakistanis, etc., the mix of people imposes a simple language on the rest of the
community: 2,000 or 3,000 words, with easy constructions. But I am not like those
who become shocked when the new generations speak their standard jargon.
Language is strong; it always has the upper hand.
What is left, however, is what socio-linguists have called the social division of
languages. Obviously, a university professor has a richer language than a taxi
driver. Richelieu had a richer language than his peasants.
The social division of language has always existed, but that statement of fact does
not involve the notion of degeneration-enrichment. English is unquestionably the
language with the richest lexicon, and- by virtue of the social division of languages,
the taxi driver knows only a very small portion of this vocabulary. However, the
richness of the English language is not in question: it survives through literature.
Therefore, I do not think that a technological revolution can silence a language.
Look at Europe: Just 20 years ago, people were inclined to think that four or five
basic languages could suffice for the European people. What we have seen, after
the crumbling of the Soviet Empire, is a multiplication of regional languages: in exYugoslavia, in the ex-Soviet Union. And these trends give strength to other minority
languages such as Basque, Catalan, Breton.
Europe does not "melt" like the U.S., and so must therefore find a political unity
above the great linguistic divide. The challenge for Europe is that of going toward
multilingualism; we must place our hope in a polyglot Europe. The challenge for
Europe is finding political unity through polyglotism. Even if the decision is made to
speak Esperanto at the European Parliament and in airports, polyglotism will be the
true unity of Europe.
Europe must take Switzerland and not Italy -- with its diversity of dialects and
traditions, but a national language -- as its model. Europe must remain a
multilinguistic community.

POLYGLOT OR MISHMASH?

If one looks at what is happening in American universities, where studying

Shakespeare is being advised against in order to study African or Indian culture, one
sees a science fiction future in which Hemingway could be Menandre. But I am

insistent about there being a quality, a force in Europe, which keeps us from falling
into such naivete. In Paris, Western civilization can be studied, and an Institute of
the Arab World is being constructed at which Oriental civilizations may also be
studied.
One can picture a high school in which the history of France is studied at the same
time as the history of the African people. Europe is not ingenuous enough to say: let
us throw Shakespeare out so we can dive into the Hindu religions. Because of this,
the possibility that a Valery will become a Menandre in Europe is less than in
America. In order for Menandre to have become Menandre, his language had to die
at a precise moment. Therefore, before the living languages of Europe become dead
languages, with the capacity they have of rejuvenating themselves, there would
really have to be a tragedy on a planetary scale, which would cause the western
countries to fall into total ruin. And this is unlikely. The worldwide circulation of
information makes it much more difficult for there to be the danger that one day
Notre Dame will be regarded like the statues on Easter Island.

SEPARATE BUT UNITARY

In 1943, Alberto Savinio wrote, "The concept of nation was originally an expansive
concept and therefore active and fertile. As such, it inspired and formed the nations
of Europe, in the middle of which we were born and have lived until now. This
concept has since lost its expansive qualities and has now assumed restrictive
qualities."
I share this unitary and European vision with Savinio. It is very improbable that in
France today someone like Richelieu would intend that all of Europe speak French or
that a Kaiser, someone like Frederick II, would want all of Europe to speak German.
Unfortunately, the French in the North, who fear that European unity will erase
national identity, do not realize that Richelieu built the French nation but he did not
keep someone from Marseille from feeling deeply Marseillais -- with all his
meridional traditions, his culture and even his pronunciation and dialect.
In Italy, it is possible for the idea of nation to coexist with tradition. For instance, I
feel intimately Piedmontese and believe that someone else living in Sicily feels
deeply Napolitan. One must not think that Europe can be conceived without the
expansive concept of nation. The European Union exists precisely to keep us from
thinking of a German Europe or a French Europe. Nonetheless, the nation remains a
deep element of identity. The problem with this element of identity is that it must
merge into the multilinguistic perspective, into a Europe of polyglots.

Europe must become a land of translators -- people who have a deep respect for the
original text and a deep love of their language of origin, but who also seek to build
an equivalent. Such is the concept of Europe. Through translation, our language is
enriched in order to understand itself better.
A Europe in which the franc and the mark no longer exist but the Ecu does is alright
with me. But it must also be a Europe in which, when you are in Paris, you are in
Paris; and when you are in Berlin, you are in Berlin! In these cities we must be able
to feel two deeply different civilizations that make themselves understood and
loved.

A MODERN HOME FOR THE TOWER OF BABEL

Between the 18th and I9th century, the myth of the Tower of Babel became a
symbol of progress, of tomorrows that sing. There is no longer the fear of a tower
reaching as high as God, out of defiance or pride. In the beginning Babel was a sin;
it has become a virtue in the modern world. In fact, someone is planning to build a
"never-ending tower" -- a Tower of Babel -- in the La Defense section of Paris. But
the modern world has already made its decision to construct a Tower of Babel: the
space shuttle. The modern world has constructed the Tower of Babel by going to the
Moon and by seeking to understand what is happening at the furthermost bounds of
the universe. Under these circumstances, Paris' current wish for a tower may be
nothing but an archaic metaphor.

Return to Eco's Writings

Thanks to Erik Ketzan

A Rose by Any Other Name

By Umberto Eco
Translated by William Weaver

Guardian Weekly, January 16, 1994

There are writers who do not bother about their translations, sometimes because
they lack the linguistic competence; some sometimes because they have no faith in
the literary value of their work and are anxious only to sell their product in as many
countries as possible.
Often the indifference conceals two prejudices, equally despicable: Either the author
considers himself an inimitable genius and so suffers translation as a painful
political process to be borne until the whole world has learned his language, or else
the author harbours an "ethnic" bias and considers it a waste of time to care about
how readers from other cultures might feel about his work.
People think an author can check his translations only if he knows the language into
I which he is to be translated. Obviously, if he does know that language, the work
proceeds more easily. But it all depends on the translator's intelligence. For
example, I do not know Swedish, Russian, or Hungarian, and yet I have worked well
with my translators into those languages. They were able to explain to me the kind
of difficulties they faced, and make me understand why what I had written created
problems in their language. In many cases I was able to offer suggestions.
The problem frequently arises from the fact that translations are either "sourceoriented" or "target oriented," as today's books on Translation Theory put it. A
source-oriented translation must do everything possible to make the B-language
reader understand what the writer has thought or said in language A. Classical
Greek affords a typical example: in order to comprehend it at all, the modern reader
must understand what the poets of that age were like and how they might express
themselves. If Homer seems to repeat "rosy-fingered dawn" too frequently, the
translator must not try to vary the epithet just because today's manuals of style
insist we should be careful about repeating the same adjective. The reader has to
understand that in those days dawn had rosy fingers whenever it was mentioned.
In other cases translation can and should be target-oriented. I will cite an example
from the translation of my novel Foucault's Pendulum whose chief characters
constantly speak in literary quotations. The purpose is to show that it is impossible
for these characters to see the world except through literary references. Now, in
chapter 57, describing an automobile trip in the hills, the translation reads "the
horizon became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little
villages: we glimpsed endless vistas." But, after "endless vistas" the Italian text
went on: "al di la della siepe, come osservava Diotallevi." If these words had been
translated, literally "beyond the hedge, as Diotallevi remarked," the Englishlanguage reader would have lost something, for "al di la della siepe" is a reference

to the most beautiful poem of Giacomo Leopardi, "L'infinito," which every Italian
reader knows by heart. The quotation appears at that point not because I wanted to
tell the reader there was a hedge anywhere nearby, but because I wanted to show
how Diotallevi could experience the landscape only by linking it to his experience of
the poem. I told my translators that the hedge was not important, nor the reference
to Leopardi, but it was important to have a literary reference at any cost. In fact,
William Weaver's translation reads: "We glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien,"
Diotallevi remarked..." This brief allusion to the Keats sonnet is a good example of
target-oriented translation.
A source-oriented translator in a language I do not know may ask me why I have
used a certain expression, or (if he understood it from the start) he may explain to
me why, in his language, such a thing cannot be said. Even then I try to take part (if
only from outside) in a translation that is at once source and target-oriented.
These are not easy problems. Consider Tolstoy's War And Peace. As many know, this
novel -- written in Russian, of course -- begins with a long dialogue in French. I have
no idea how many Russian readers in Tolstoy's day understood French; the
aristocrats surely did because this French dialogue is meant, in fact, to depict the
customs of aristocratic Russian society. Perhaps Tolstoy took it for granted that, in
his day, those who did not know French were not even able to read Russian. Or else
he wanted the non-French-speaking reader to understand that the aristocrats of the
Napoleonic period were, in fact, so remote from Russian national life that they spoke
in an incomprehensible fashion. Today if you re-read those pages, you will realize
that it is not important to understand what those characters are saying, because
they speak of trivial things. What is important is to understand that they are saying
those things in French. A problem that has always fascinated me is this: How would
you translate the first chapter of War And Peace into French? The reader reads a
book in French and in it some of the characters are speaking French; nothing
strange about that. If the translator adds a note to the dialogue saying en francais
dans le text, it is of scant help: the effect is still lost. Perhaps, to achieve that effect,
the aristocrats (in the French translation) should speak English. I am glad I did not
write War And Peace and am not obliged to argue with my French translator.
As an author, I have learned a great deal from sharing the work of my translators. I
am talking about my "academic" works as well as my novels. In the case of
philosophical and linguistic works, when the translator cannot understand (and
clearly translate) a certain page, it means that my thinking was murky. Many times,
after having faced the job of translation, I have revised the second Italian edition of
my book; not only from the point of view of its style but also from the point of view
of ideas. Sometimes you write something in your own language A, and the
translator says: "If I translate that into my language B, it will not make sense." He
could be mistaken. But if, after long discussion, you realize that the passage would
not make sense in language B, it will follow that it never made sense in language A
to begin with.

This doesn't mean that, above a text written in language A there hovers a
mysterious entity that is its Sense, which would be the same in any language,
something like an ideal text written in what Walter Benjamin called Reine Sprache
(The Pure language). Too good to be true. In that case it would only be a matter of
isolating this Pure language and the work of translation (even of a page of
Shakespeare) could be done by computer.
The job of translation is a trial and error process, very similar to what happens in an
Oriental bazaar when you are buying a carpet. The merchant asks 100, you offer 10
and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50.
Naturally, in order to believe that the negotiation has been a success you must have
fairly precise ideas about this basically imprecise phenomenon called translation. In
theory, different languages are impossible to hold to one standard; it cannot be said
that the English "house" is truly and completely the synonym of the French
"maison." But in theory no form of perfect communication exists. And yet, for better
or worse, ever since the advent of Homo sapiens, we have managed to
communicate. Ninety percent (I believe) of War And Peace's readers have read the
book in translation and yet if you set a Chinese, an Englishman, and an Italian to
discussing War And Peace, not only will all agree that Prince Andrej dies, but,
despite many interesting and differing nuances of meaning, all will be prepared to
agree on the recognition of certain moral principles expressed by Tolstoy. I am sure
the various interpretations would not exactly coincide, but neither would the
interpretations that three English-speaking readers might provide of the same
Wordsworth poem.
In the course of working with translators, you reread your original text, you discover
its possible interpretations, and it sometimes happens -- as I have said -- that you
want to rewrite it. I have not rewritten my two novels, but there is one place which,
after its translation, I would have gladly rewritten. It is the dialogue in Foucault's
Pendulum in which Diotallevi says: "God created the world by speaking. He didn't
send a telegram." And Belbo replies:"Fiat lux. Stop."
But in the original Belbo said: "Fiat lux. Stop. Segue lettera" ("Fiat lux. Stop. Letter
follows.") "Letter follows" is a standard expression used in telegrams (or at least it
used to be standard, before the fax machine came into existence). At that point in
the Italian text, Casaubon said: "Ai Tessalonicesi, immagino." (To the Thessalonians,
I suppose.) It was a sequence of witty remarks, somewhat sophomoric, and the joke
lay in the fact that Casaubon was suggesting that, after having created the world by
telegram, God would send one of Saint Paul's epistles. But the play on words works
only in Italian, in which both the posted letter and the Saint's epistle are called
lettera. In English the text had to be changed. Belbo says only "Fiat lux. Stop." and
Casaubon comments "Epistle follows." Perhaps the joke becomes a bit more
ultraviolet and the reader has to work a little harder to understand what's going on
in the minds of the characters, but the short circuit between Old and New Testament

is more effective. Here, if I were rewriting the original novel, I would alter that
dialogue.
Sometimes the author can only trust in Divine Providence. I will never be able to I
collaborate fully on a Japanese translation of my work (though I have tried). It is
hard for me to understand the thought processes of my "target." For that matter I
always wonder what I am really reading, when I look at the translation of a Japanese
poem, and I presume Japanese readers have the same experience when reading
me. And yet I know that, when I read the translation of Japanese poem, I grasp
something of that thought process that is different from mine. If I read a haiku after
having read some Zen Buddhist koans, I can perhaps understand why the simple
mention of the moon high over the lake should give me emotions analogous to and
yet different from those that an English romantic poet conveys to me. Even in these
cases a minimum of collaboration between translator and author can work. I no
longer remember into which Slavic language someone was translating The Name of
the Rose, but we were wondering what the reader would get from the many
passages in Latin. Even an American reader who has not studied Latin still knows it
was the language of the medieval ecclesiastical world and so catches a whiff of the
Middle Ages. And further, if he reads De Pentagono Salomonis he can recognize
pentagon and Solomon. But for a Slavic reader these Latin phrases and names,
transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, suggest nothing.
If, at the beginning of War And Peace, the American reader finds "Eh bien, mon
prince... " he can guess that the person being addressed is a prince. But if the same
dialogue appears at the beginning of a Chinese translation (in an incomprehensible
Latin alphabet or worse expressed in Chinese ideograms) what will the reader in
Peking understand? The Slavic translator and I decided to use, instead of Latin, the
ancient ecclesiastical Slavonic of the medieval Orthodox church. In that way the
reader would feel the same sense of distance, the same religious atmosphere,
though understanding only vaguely what was being said.
Thank God I am not a poet, because the problem becomes more dramatic in
translating poetry, an art where thought is determined by words, and if you change
the language, you change the thought. And yet there are excellent examples of
translated poetry produced by a collaboration between author and translator. Often
the result is a new creation. One text very close to poetry because of its linguistic
complexity is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Now, the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter when it was still in the form of an early draft -- was translated into Italian with Joyce
himself collaborating. The translation is markedly different from the original English.
It is not a translation. It is as if Joyce had rewritten his text in Italian. And yet one
French critic has said that to understand that chapter properly (in English) it would
be advisable to first read that Italian draft.
Perhaps the Pure Language does not exist, but pitting one language against another
is a splendid adventure, and it is not necessarily true, as the Italian saying goes,

that the translator is always a traitor. Provided that the author takes part in this
admirable treason.

Return to Eco's Writings

Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

By Umberto Eco

Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15. Excerpted in Utne
Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57-59.

The following version follows the text and formatting of the Utne Reader article, and
in addition, makes the first sentence of each numbered point a statement in bold
type. Italics are in the original.

For the full article, consult the New York Review of Books, purchase the full article
online; or purchase Eco's new collection of essays: Five Moral Pieces.

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms
of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I
would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized
into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other
kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to
allow fascism to coagulate around it.

***

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of
counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in
the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the
Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently
accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the
dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had
remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in
Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions
of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary
says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination
must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of
wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are
nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has

been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure
message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you
can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But
combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually
reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism
was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the
surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection
of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The

Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In

this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection.

Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is
identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a
symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a
Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the
frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete
snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were
mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having
betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to

improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the

natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist
movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal
to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of
political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our
time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen

are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its
audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their
only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.

This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity
to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is
the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel
besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot
must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have
the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a
prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New
World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their
enemies.

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They
ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each
other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of UrFascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a
continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong
and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are
constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.

Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent
warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have
to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have
control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a
Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has
ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is

fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies
contempt for the weak.

Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best
people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens,
every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be
patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not
delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his
force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and
deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.

In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology

heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is
not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live
Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but
must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a
supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death,
advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to
die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the UrFascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and
intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to
homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends
to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one

might say.

In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety
have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the
decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no
rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the
Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the
Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation,
citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the
People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in
which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and
accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten"

parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of
a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell
Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language

of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common
to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an
impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the
instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify
other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a
popular talk show.

***

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier

for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen
Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not
that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our
duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances every day,
in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are
worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force,
seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism
will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Umberto Eco (c) 1995

Return to Eco's Writings

The Future of the Book

By Umberto Eco

From the July 1994 symposium "The Future of the Book," held at the University of
San Marino.

This essay is also found in The Future of the Book (Berkeley; University of California
Press, 1997). Edited by Geoffrey Nunberg, the volume collects twelve papers from
the symposium.

Since my arrival at the symposium on the future of the book I have been expecting
somebody to quote "Ceci tuera cela." Both Duguid and Nunberg have obliged me.
The quotation is not irrelevant to our topic.
As you no doubt remember, in Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo, comparing
a book with his old cathedral, says: "Ceci tuera cela" (The book will kill the
cathedral, the alphabet will kill images). McLuhan, comparing a Manhattan
discotheque to the Gutenberg Galaxy, said "Ceci tuera cela." One of the main
concerns of this symposium has certainly been that ceci (the computer) tuera cela
(the book).
We know enough about cela (the book), but it is uncertain what is meant by ceci
(computer). An instrument by which a lot of communication will be provided more
and more by icons? An instrument on which you can write and read without needing
a paperlike support? A medium through which it will be possible to have unheard-of
hypertextual experiences?

None of these definitions is aufficient to characterize the computer as such. First,

visual communication is more overwhelming in TV, cinema, and advertising than in
computers, which are also, and eminently, alphabetic tools. Second, as Nunberg has
suggested, the computer "creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed
documents." And third, as Simone has reminded us, some sort of hypertextual
experience (at least in the sense of text that doesn't have to be read in a linear way
and as a finished message) existed in other historical periods, and Joyce (the living
one) is here to prove that Joyce (the dead and everlasting one) gave us with
Finnegans Wake a good example of hypertextual experience.
The idea that something will kill something else is a very ancient one, and came
certainly before Hugo and before the late medieval fears of Frollo. According to Plato
(in the Phaedrus) Theut, or Hermes, the alleged inventor of writing, presents his
invention to the pharaoh Thamus, praising his new technique that will allow human
beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But the pharaoh is not so
satisfied. My skillful Theut, he says, memory is a great gift that ought to be kept
alive by training it continuously. With your invention people will not be obliged any
longer to train memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort,
but by mere virtue of an external device.
We can understand the pharaoh's worry. Writing, as any other new technological
device, would have made torpid the human power that it replaced and reinforced -just as cars made us less able to walk. Writing was dangerous because it decreased
the powers of mind by offering human beings a petrified soul, a caricature of mind,
a vegetal memory.
Plato's text is ironical, naturally. Plato was writing down his argument against
writing. But he was pretending that his discourse was related by Socrates, who did
not write (it seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not
publish). Therefore Plato was expressing a fear that still survived in his day. Thinking
is an internal affair; the real thinker would not allow books to think instead of him.
Nowadays, nobody shares these fears, for two very simple reasons. First of all, we
know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the
contrary they are machines that provoke further thoughts. Only after the invention
of writing was it possible to write such a masterpiece on spontaneous memory as
Proust's Recherche du temps perdu. Second, if once upon a time people needed to
train their memory in order to remember things, after the invention of writing they
had also to train their memory in order to remember books. Books challenge and
improve memory; they do not narcotize it.
One is entitled to speculate about that old debate every time one meets a new
communication tool which pretends or seems to substitute for books. In the course
of this symposium, under the rubric of "the future of the book," the following

different items have been discussed, and not all of them were concerned with
books.

1. Images versus alphabetic culture

Our contemporary culture is not specifically image oriented. Take for instance Greek
or medieval culture: at those times literacy was reserved to a restricted elite and
most people were educated, informed, persuaded (religiously, politically, ethically)
though images. Even USA Today, cited by Bolter, represents a balanced mixture of
icons and letters, if we compare it with a Biblia Pauperum. We can complain that a
lot of people spend their day watching TV and never read a book or a newspaper,
and this is certainly a social and educational problem, but frequently we forget that
the same people, a few centuries ago, were watching at most a few standard
images and were totally illiterate.
We are frequently misled by a "mass media criticism of mass media" which is
superficial and regularly belated. Mass media are still repeating that our historical
period is and will be more and more dominated by images. That was the first
McLuhan fallacy, and mass media people have read McLuhan too late. The present
and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer-oriented
generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays
more alphabetic letters than images. The new generation will be alphabetic and not
image oriented. We are coming back to the Gutenberg Galaxy again, and I am sure
that if McLuhan had survived until the Apple rush to the Silicon Valley, he would
have acknowledged this portentous event.
Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An oldfashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at
the same speed as a teenager. These same teenagers, if by chance they want to
program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical procedures and
algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at a great speed.
In the course of the eighties some worried and worrying reports have been
published in the United States on the decline of literacy. One of the reasons for the
last Wall Street crash (which sealed the end of the Reagan era) was, according to
many observers, not only the exaggerated confidence in computers but also the
fact that none of the yuppies who were controlling the stock market knew enough
about the 1929 crisis. They were unable to deal with a crisis because of their lack of
historical information. If they had read some books about Black Thursday they
would have been able to make better decisions and avoid many well-known pitfalls.

But I wonder if books would have been the only reliable vehicle for acquiring
information. Years ago the only way to learn a foreign language (outside of traveling
abroad) was to study a language from a book. Now our children frequently learn
other languages by listening to records, by watching movies in the original edition,
or by deciphering the instructions printed on a beverage can. The same happens
with geographical information. In my childhood I got the best of my information
about exotic countries not from textbooks but by reading adventure novels (Jules
Verne, for instance, or Emilio Salgari or Karl May). My kids very early knew more
than I on the same subject from watching TV and movies.
The illiteracy of Wall Street yuppies was not only due to an insufficient exposure to
books but also to a form of visual illiteracy. Books about the 1929 crisis exist and
are still regularly published (the yuppies must be blamed for not having been
bookstore goers), while television and the cinema are practically unconcerned with
any rigorous revisitation of historical events. One could learn very well the story of
the Roman Empire through movies, provided that movies were historically correct.
The fault of Hollywood is not to have opposed its movies to the books of Tacitus or
of Gibbon, but rather to have imposed a pulp and romance-like version of both
Tacitus and Gibbon. The problem with the yuppies is not only that they watch TV
instead of reading books; it is that Public Broadcasting is the only place where
somebody knows who Gibbon was.
Today the concept of literacy comprises many media. An enlightened policy of
literacy must take into account the possibilities of all of these media. Educational
concern must be extended to the whole of media. Responsibilities and tasks must
be carefully balanced. If for learning languages, tapes are better than books, take
care of cassettes. If a presentation of Chopin with commentary on compact disks
helps people to understand Chopin, don't worry if people do not buy five volumes of
the history of music. Even if it were true that today visual communication
overwhelms written communication the problem is not to oppose written to visual
communication. The problem is how to improve both. In the Middle Ages visual
communication was, for the masses, more important than writing. But Chartres
cathedral was not culturally inferior to the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun.
Cathedrals were the TV of those times, and the difference from our TV was that the
directors of the medieval TV read good books, had a lot of imagination, and worked
for the public benefit (or, at least, for what they believed to be the public benefit).

2. Books versus other supports

There is a confusion about two distinct questions: (a) will computers made books
obsolete? and (b) will computers make written and printed material obsolete?

Let us suppose that computers will make books disappear (I do not think this will
happen and I shall elaborate later on this point, but let us suppose so for the sake of
the argument). Still, this would not entail the disappearance of printed material. We
have seen that it was wishful thinking to hope that computers, and particularly word
processors, would have helped to save trees. Computers encourage the production
of printed material. We can imagine a culture in which there will be no books, and
yet where people go around with tons and tons of unbound sheets of paper. This will
be quite unwieldy, and will pose a new problem for libraries.
Debray has observed that the fact that Hebrew civilization was a civilization based
upon a book is not independent of the fact that it was a nomadic civilization. I think
that this remark is very important. Egyptians could carve their records on stone
obelisks, Moses could not. If you want to cross the Red Sea, a book is a more
practical instrument for recording wisdom. By the way, another nomadic civilization,
the Arabic one, was based upon a book, and privileged writing upon images.
But books also have an advantage with respect to computers. Even if printed on
acid paper, which lasts only seventy years or so, they are more durable than
magnetic supports. Moreover, they do not suffer power shortages and blackouts,
and are more resistant to shocks. As Bolter remarked, "it is unwise to try to predict
technological change more than few years in advance," but it is certain that, up to
now at least, books still represent the most economical, flexible, wash-and-wear
way to transport information at a very low cost.
Electronic communication travels ahead of you, books travel with you and at your
speed, but if you are shipwrecked on a desert island, a book can be useful, while a
computer cannot -- as Landow remarks, electronic texts need a reading station and
a decoding device. Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the
Day After.
I am pretty sure that new technologies will render obsolete many kinds of books,
like encyclopedias and manuals. Take for example the Encyclomedia project
developed by Horizons Unlimited. When finished it will probably contain more
information than the Encyclopedia Britannica (or Treccani or Larousse), with the
advantage that it permits cross-references and nonlinear retrieval of information.
The whole of the compact disks, plus the computer, will occupy one-fifth of the
space occupied by an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia cannot be transported as the
CD-ROM can, and cannot be easily updated; it does not have the practical
advantages of a normal book, therefore it can be replaced by a CD-ROM, just a
phone book can. The shelves today occupied, at my home as well as in public
libraries, by meters and meters of encyclopedia volumes could be eliminated in the
next age, and there will be no reason to lament their disappearance. For the same
reason today I no longer need a heavy portrait painted by an indifferent artist, for I
can send my sweetheart a glossy and faithful photograph. Such a change in the
social functions of painting has not made painting obsolete, not even the realistic

paintings of Annigoni, which do not furfill the function of portraying a person, but of
celebrating an important person, so that the commissioning, the purchasing, and
the exhibition of such portraits acquire aristocratic connotations.
Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any circumstance in
which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to
speculate and to reflect about it.
To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book. Think of the process of
learning how to use a piece of software. Usually the system is able to display on the
screen all the instructions you need. But the users who want to learn the program
generally either print the instructions and read them as if they were in book form, or
they buy a printed manual (let me skip over the fact that currently all the manuals
that come with a computer, on-line or off-line, are obviously written by irresponsible
and tautological idiots, while commercial handbooks are written by intelligent
people). It is possible to conceive of a visual program that explains very well how to
print and bind a book, but in order to get instructions on how to write such a
computer program, we need a printed manual.
After having spent no more than twelve hours at a computer console, my eyes are
like two tennis balls, and I feel the need to sit comfortably down in an armchair and
read a newspaper, or maybe a good poem. It seems to me that computers
are/diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual
needs they are stimulating. In my periods of optimism I dream of a computer
generation which, compelled to read a computer screen, gets acquainted with
reading from a screen, but at a certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a
different, more relaxed, and differently-committing form of reading.

3. Publishing versus communicating

People desire to communicate with one another. In ancient communities they did it
orally; in a more complex society they tried to do it by printing. Most of the books
which are displayed in a bookstore should be defined as products of vanity presses,
even if they are published by an university press. As Landow suggests we are
entering a new samizdat era. People can communicate directly without the
intermediation of publishing houses. A great many people do not want to publish;
they simply want to communicate with each other. The fact that in the future they
will do it by E-mail or over the Internet will be a great boon for books and for the
culture and the market of the book. Look at a bookstore. There are too many books.
I receive too many books every week. If the computer network succeeds in reducing
the quantity of published books, this would be a paramount cultural improvement.

One of the most common objections to the pseudoliteracy of computers is that

young people get more and more accustomed to speak through cryptic short
formulas: dir, help, diskcopy. error 67, and so on. Is that still literacy? I am a rarebook collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that
took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's
movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate
courtesy formulas praising the ideal addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and
lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the
virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly
books they would be horrified. Introductions are one-page long, briefly outline the
subject matter of the book, thank some national or international endowment for a
generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love
and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary
for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of
human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights
spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a
hurry....
But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines saying "W/c, Smith,
Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank my wife and my children; this book
was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller
Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction. It is a problem of
rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric. I think that in the coming years
passionate love messages will be sent in the form of a short instruction in BASIC
language, under the form "if... then," so to obtain, as an input, messages like "I love
you, therefore I cannot live with you." (Besides, the best of English mannerist
literature was listed, if memory serves, in some programming language as 2B
OR/NOT 2B.)
There is a curious idea according to which the more you say in verbal language, the
more profound and perceptive you are. Mallarme told us that it is sufficient to spell
out une fleur to evoke a universe of scents, shapes, and thoughts. It is frequently
the case in poetry that fewer words say more things. Three lines of Pascal say more
than three hundred pages of a long and tedious treatise on morals and
metaphysics. The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest
for a preinformatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere.

4. Three kinds of hypertext

It seems to me that at this time we are faced with three different conceptions of
hypertext. Technically speaking, a hypertext document is more or less what Landow
has explained to us. The problem is, what does a hypertext document stand for?

Here we must make a careful distinction, first, between systems and texts. A system
(for instance, a linguistic system) is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a
given natural language. In this framework it holds the principle of unlimited
semiosis, as defined by Peirce. Every linguistic item can be interpreted in terms of
itiuistic or other semiotic items -- a word by a definition, an event by an example, a
natural kind by an image, and so on and so forth. The system is perhaps finite but
unlimited. You go in a spiral-like movement ad infinitum. In this sense certainly all
the conceivable books are comprised by and within a good dictionary. If you are able
to use Webster's Third you can write both Paradise Lost and Ulysses. Certainly, if
conceived in such a way, hypertext can transform every reader into an author. Give
the same hypertext system to Shakespeare and to Dan Quayle, and they have the
same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
It may prove rather difficult to produce systemlike hypertexts. However, if you take
the Horizons Unlimited Encyclomedia, certainly the best of seventeenth-century
interpretations are virtually comprised within it. It depends on your ability to work
through its preexisting links. Given the hypertextual system it is really up to you to
become Gibbon or Walt Disney. As a matter of fact, even before the invention of
hypertext, with a good dictionary a writer could design every possible book or story
or poem or novel.
But a text is not a linguistic or an encyclopedic system. A given text reduces the
infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is sure that it will
never provide you with the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, or the complete
bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of
irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to believe that you
can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on
the Aquinas corpus is a marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a
satisfactory definition of electricity. With a system like hypertext based upon
Webster's Third and the Encyclopedia Britannica you can; with a hypertext bound to
the universe of Aquinas, you cannot. A textual hypertext is finite and limited, even
though open to innumerable and original inquiries.
Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We may
conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add
something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point
the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to
implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can only hail such a
possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of
producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in
which there will be a difference between producing infinitely many texts and
interpreting precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our present
culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's
Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans jam session.

We are marching toward a more liberated society, in which free creativity will
coexist with textual interpretation. I like this. The problem is in saying that we have
replaced an old thing with another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an
activity that has nothing to do with reading a movie. Italian TV watchers appreciate
Blob as a masterpiece in recorded zapping, which invites everybody to freely use
TV, but this has nothing to do with the possibility of everyone reading a Hitchcock or
a Fellini movie as an independent work of art in itself.

5. Change versus merging

Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph has set painters free
from the duty of imitation. I cannot but agree. Without the invention of Daguerre,
Impressionism could not have been possible. But the idea that a new technology
abolishes a previous role is much too simplistic. After the invention of Daguerre
painters no longer felt obliged to serve as mere craftsmen charged with reproducing
reality as we believe we see it. But this does not mean that Daguerre's invention
only encouraged abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting
that could not exist without the photographic model: I am not thinking only of
hyperrealism, but also (let me say) of Hopper. Reality is seen by the painter's eye
through the photographic eye.
Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed literature from certain
narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like
postmodern literature, it exists because it has been largely influenced by comic
strips or cinema. This means that in the history of culture it has never happened
that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly
changed something else.
It seems to me that the real opposition is not between computers and books, or
between electronic writing and printed or manual writing. I have mentioned the first
McLuhan fallacy, according to which the Visual Galaxy has replaced the Gutenberg
Galaxy. The second McLuhan fallacy is exemplified by the statement that we are
living in a new electronic global village. We are certainly living in a new electronic
community, which is global enough, but it is not a village, if by that one means a
human settlement where people are directly interacting with each other. The real
problem of an electronic community is solitude. The new citizen of this new
community is free to invent new texts, to annul the traditional notion of authorship,
to delete the traditional divisions between author and reader, to transubstantiate
into bones and flesh the pallid ideals of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. (At
least this is what I have heard said by enthusiasts of the technology. You will have to
ask Derrida if the design of hypertexts really abolishes the ghost of a
Transcendental Meaning -- I am not my brother's keeper -- and as far as Barthes is

concerned, that was in another country and besides, the fellow is dead.) But we
know that the reading of certain texts (let us say, Diderot's Encyclopdie) produced
a change in the European state of affairs. What will happen with the Internet and
the World Wide Web?
I am optimistic. During the Gulf War, George Lakoff understood that his ideas on
that war could not be published before the end of the conflict. Thus he relied on the
Internet to spell out his alarm in time. Politically and militarily his initiative was
completely useless, but that does not matter. He succeeded in reaching a
community of persons all over the world who felt the same way that he did.
Can computers implement not a network of one-to-one contacts between solitary
souls, but a real community of interacting subjects? Think of what happened in
1968. By using traditional communication systems such as press, radio, and
typewritten messages, an entire generation was involved, from America to France,
from Germany to Italy, in a common struggle. I am not trying to evaluate politically
or ethically what happened, I am simply remarking that it happened. Several years
later, a new student revolutionary wave emerged in Italy, one not based upon
Marxist tenets as the previous one had been. Its main feature was that it took place
eminently through fax, between university and university. A new technology was
implemented, but the results were rather poor. The uprising was tamed, by itself, in
the course of two months. A new communications technology could not give a soul
to a movement which was born only for reasons of fashion.
Recently in Italy the government tried to impose a new law that offended the
sentiments of the Italian people. The principal reaction was mediated by fax, and in
the face so many faxes the government felt obliged to change that law. This is a
good example of the revolutionary power of new communications technologies. But
between the faxes and the abolition of the law, something more happened. At that
time I was traveling abroad and I only saw a photograph in a foreign newspaper. It
portrayed a group of young people, all physically together, rallying in front of the
parliament and displaying provocative posters. I do not know if faxes alone would
have been sufficient. Certainly the circulation of faxes produced a new kind of
interpersonal contact, and through faxes people understood that it was time to
meet again together.
At the origin of that story there was a mere icon, the smile of Berlusconi that
visually persuaded so many Italians to vote for him. After that all the opponents felt
frustrated and isolated. The Media Man had won. Then, in the face of an unbearable
provocation, there was a new technology that gave people the sense of their
discontent as well as of their force. Then came the moment when many of them got
out of their faxing solitude and met together again. And won.
It is rather difficult to make a theory out of a single episode, but let me use this
example as an allegory: when an integrated multimedia sequence of events

succeeds in bringing people back to a nonvirtual reality, something new can

happen.
I do not have a rule for occurrences of the same frame. I realize that I am proposing
the Cassiodorus way, and that my allegory looks like a Rube Goldberg construction,
as James O'Donnell puts it. A Rube Goldberg model seems to me the only
metaphysical template for our electronic future.

Return to Eco's Writings

The Author and his Interpreters

By Umberto Eco

1996 lecture at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America.

I think that a narrator, as well as a poet, should never provide interpretations of his
own work. A text is a machine conceived for eliciting interpretations. When one has
a text to question, it is irrelevant to ask the author.
In 1962 I wrote my The Open Work (Cambridge, Harvard U.P., 1989). In that book I
was advocating the active role of the interpreter in the reading of texts endowed
with aesthetic value. When those pages were written, my readers mainly focused
the 'open' side of the whole business, underestimating the fact that the open-ended
reading I was supporting was an activity elicited by (and aiming at interpreting) a
work. In other words, I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and
the rights of their interpreters. I have the impression that, in the course of the last
decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed.
In various of my writings I elaborated upon the Peircean idea of unlimited semiosis.
But the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that
interpretation has no criteria. First of all unlimited interpretation concerns systems
not processes. A linguistic system is a device from which and by using which infinite
linguistic strings can be produced. If we look in a dictionary for the meaning of a
term we find definitions and synonyms, that is, other words, and we can go to see

what these words mean, so that from their definition we can switch to other words -and so on potentially ad infinitum. A dictionary is, as Joyce said of Finnegans Wake,
a book written for an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia.
But a text, in so far as it is the result of the manipulation of the possibilities of a
system, it is not open in the same way. In the process of producing a text one
reduces the range of possible linguistic items. If one writes "John is eating a..." there
are strong possibilities that the following word will be a noun, and that this noun
cannot be staircase (even though, in certain contexts, it could be sword). By
reducing the possibility of producing infinite strings, a text also reduces the
possibility of trying certain interpretations.
To say that the interpretations of a text are potentially unlimited does not mean that
interpretation has no object. To say that a text has potentially no end, does not
mean that every act of interpretation can have a happy end. I have proposed a sort
of Popper-like criterion of falsification by which, if it is difficult to decide if a given
interpretation is a good one, and which one is better between two different
interpretations of the same text, it is always possible to recognize when a given
interpretation is blatantly wrong, crazy, farfetched.
Some contemporary theories of criticism assert that the only reliable reading of a
text is a misreading, that the only existence of a text is given by the chains of the
responses it elicits and that a text is only a picnic where the authors brings the
words and the readers the sense. Even if that was true, the words brought by the
author are a rather embarrassing bunch of material evidences that the reader
cannot pass over in silence, or in noise.
In my book The Limits of Interpretation I distinguish between the intention of the
author, the intention of the reader and the intention of the text.
A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. This Reader is not
the one who makes the 'only/ right' conjecture. A text can foresee a Model Reader
entitled to try infinite conjectures.
How to prove a conjecture about the intention of a text? The only way is to check it
upon the text as a coherent whole. This idea, too, is an old one and comes from
Augustine (De doctrina christiana): any interpretation given of a certain portion of a
text can be accepted if it is confirmed and must be rejected if it is challenged by
another portion of the same text. In this sense the internal textual coherence
controls the otherwise uncontrollable drives of the reader.
When a text is put in the bottle -- and this happens not only with poetry or narrative
but also with the Critique of the Pure Reason -- that is, when a text is produced not
for a single addressee but for a community of readers, the author knows that he/she
will be interpreted not according to his/her intentions but according to a complex
strategy of interactions which also involves the readers, along with their

competence of language as a social treasury. I mean by social treasury not only a

given language as a set of grammatical rules, but also the whole encyclopedia that
the performances of that language have implemented, namely, the cultural
conventions that that language has produced and the very history of the previous
interpretations of many texts, comprehending the text that the reader is in the
course of reading.
Thus every act of reading is a difficult transaction between the competence of the
reader (the reader's world knowledge) and the kind of competence that a given
texts postulates in order to be read in an economic way.
The Model Reader of a story is not the Empirical Reader. The empirical reader is you,
me, anyone, when we read a text. Empirical readers can read in many ways, and
there is no law which tells them how to read, because they often use the text as a
container for their own passions, which may come from outside the text, or which
the text may arouse by chance.
Let me quote some funny situations in which one of my readers has acted as an
empirical and not as a Model reader.
In Chapter 115 of my Foucault's Pendulum the character called Casaubon, on the
night of the 23rd to the 24th of June 1984, having been at a occultist ceremony in
the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, walks, as if possessed, along the
entire length of rue Saint-Martin, crosses Rue aux Ours, arrives at Centre Beaubourg
and then at Saint-Merry Church. Afterwards carries on along various streets, all of
them named, until he gets to Place des Vosges. I have to tell you that in order to
write this chapter I had followed the same route for several nights, carrying a tape
recorder, taking notes on what I could see and the impressions I had.
Indeed, since I have a computer program which can show me what the sky looks like
at any time in any year, at whatever longitude or latitude, I had even gone so far as
to find out if there had been a moon that night, and in what position it could have
been seen at various times. I hadn't done this because I wanted to emulate Emile
Zola's realism, but I like to have the scene I'm writing about in front of me while I
narrate: it makes me more familiar with what's happening and helps me to get
inside the characters.
After publishing the novel I received a letter from a man who had evidently gone to
the Biblioteque Nationale to read all the newspapers of June 24, 1984. And he had
discovered that on the corner of Rue Raumur, that I hadn't actually named but
which does cross Rue Saint-Martin at a certain point, after midnight, more or less at
the time when Casaubon passed by there, there had been a fire, and a big fire at
that, if the papers had talked about it. The reader asked me how Casaubon had
managed not to see it.

I answered that Casaubon had probably seen the fire, but he hadn't mentioned it for
some mysterious reason, unknown to me, pretty likely in a story so thick with
mysteries both true and false. I think that my reader is still trying to find out why
Casaubon kept quiet about the fire, probably suspecting of another conspiracy by
the Knights Templars.
There are certain rules of the game, and the Model Reader is someone eager to play
such a game. That reader forgot the rule of the game and superimposed his own
expectations as empirical reader on the expectations that the author wanted from a
model reader.
Now let me tell you another story concerning the same night. Two students from the
Parisian Ecole des Beaux Arts recently came to show me a photograph album in
which they had reconstructed the entire route taken by my character, having gone
and photographed the places I had mentioned, one by one, at the same time of
night. Given that at the end of the chapter Casaubon comes up out of the city
drains and enters through the cellar an oriental bar full of sweating customers, beerjugs and greasy spits, they succeeded in finding that bar and took a photo of it. It
goes without saying that that bar was an invention of mine, even though I have
designed it thinking of the many bars of that kind in the area, but those two boys
had undoubtedly discovered the bar described in my book. It's not that those
students had superimposed on their duty as model readers the concerns of the
empirical reader who wants to check if my novel describes the real Paris. On the
contrary, they wanted to transform the "real" Paris into a place in my book, and in
fact, of all that they could have found in Paris, they chose only those aspects that
corresponded to my descriptions -- or, better, to the descriptions provided by my
text.
In this dialectics between the intention of the reader and the intention of the text,
the intention of the empirical author becomes rather irrelevant. We have to respect
the text, not the author as a person so and so. Frequently authors say something of
which they were not aware and discover to have said that only after the reactions of
their readers.
There is however a case in which it can be interesting to resort to the intention of
the empirical author. There are cases in which the author is still living, the critics
have given their interpretations of his text, and it can be nice to ask the author how
much and to what an extent he, as an empirical person, was aware of the manifold
interpretations his text supported. At this point the response of the author must not
be used in order to validate the interpretations of his text, but to show the
discrepancies between the author's intention and the intention of the text. The aim
of the experiment is not a critical one, but rather a theoretical one.
There can be, finally, a case in which the author is also a text theorist. In this case it
would be possible to get from him two different sorts of reaction. I certain cases he

can say "No, I did not mean this, but I must agree that the text says it, and I thank
the reader that made me aware of it." Or: "Independently of the fact that I did not
mean this, I think that a reasonable reader should not accept such an interpretation,
because it sounds uneconomic".
A typical case where the author must surrender in face of the reader is the one I
told about in my Reflections on The Name of the Rose. As I read the reviews of the
novel, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I found a critic who quoted a remark of
William's made at the end of the trial: (page 385 in the English-language edition).
"What terrifies you most in purity?" Adso asks. And William answers: "Haste." I
loved, and still love, these two lines very much. But then one of my readers pointed
out to me that on the same page, Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture,
says: "Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the
justice of God has centuries at its disposal." And the reader rightly asked me what
connection I had meant to establish between the haste feared by William and the
absence of haste extolled by Bernard. I was unable to answer. As a matter of fact
the exchange between Adso and William does not exist in the manuscript, I added
this brief dialogue in the galleys, for reasons of concinnity: I needed to insert
another scansion before giving Bernard the floor again. And I completely forgot that,
a little later, Bernard speaks of haste. Bernard's speech uses a stereotyped
expression, the sort of thing we would expect from a judge, a commonplace on the
order of "All are equal before the law." Alas, when juxtaposed with the haste
mentioned by William, the haste mentioned by Bernard literally creates an effect of
sense; and the reader is justified in wondering if the two men are saying the same
thing, or if the loathing of haste expressed by William is not imperceptibly different
from the loathing of haste expressed by Bernard. The text is there, and produces its
own effects. Whether I wanted it this way or not, we are now faced with a question,
an ambiguous provocation; and I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this
conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there (perhaps many meanings do).
Now, let me tell of an opposite case.
[Helena Costiucovich before translating into Russian (masterfully) The Name of the
Rose, wrote a long essay on it.]
At a given point she remarks that there exists a book by Emile Henriot (La rose de
Bratislava, 1946) where it can be found the hunting of a mysterious manuscript and
a final fire of a library. The story takes place in Prague, and at the beginning of my
novel I mention Prague. Moreover one of my librarians is named Berengar and one
of the librarians of Henriot was named Berngard Marre.
It is perfectly useless to say that, as an empirical author, I had never read Henriot's
novel and that I ignored that it existed. I have read interpretations in which my
critics found out sources of which I was fully aware, and I was very happy that they
so cunningly discovered what I so cunningly concealed in order to lead them to find

it (for instance the model of the couple Serenus Zeitblom Adrian in Mann's Doktor
Faustus for the narrative relationship Adso-William). I have read of sources totally
unknown to me, and I was delighted that somebody believed that I was eruditely
quoting them (recently a young medievalist told me that a blind librarian was
mentioned by Cassiodorus). I have read critical analyses in which the interpreter
discovered influences of which I was unaware when writing but I certainly had read
those books in my youth and I understood that I was unconsciously influenced by
them (my friend Giorgio Celli said that among my remote readings there should
have been the novels of Dmitri Mereskovskij, and I recognized that he was true).
As an uncommitted reader of The Name of the Rose I think that the argument of
Helena Costiucovich is not proving anything interesting. The research of a
mysterious manuscript and the fire of a library are very common literary topoi and I
could quote many other books which use them. Prague was mentioned at the
beginning of the story, but if instead of Prague I mentioned Budapest it would have
been the same. Prague does not play a crucial role in my story. By the way, when
the novel was translated in some eastern country (long before the perestrojka)
some translators called me and said that it was difficult to mention, just at the
opening of the book, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. I answered that that I
did not approve any change of my text and that if there was some censure the
responsibility was of the publisher. Then, as a joke, I added: "I put Prague at the
beginning because it is one among my magic cities. But I also like Dublin. Put Dublin
instead of Prague. It does not make any difference." They reacted: "But Dublin was
not invaded by Russians!" I answered: "It is not my fault."
Finally, Berengar and Berngard can be a coincidence. In any case the Model Reader
can agree that four coincidences (manuscript, fire, Prague and Berengar) are
interesting and as an empirical author I have no right to react. O.K.: to put a good
face upon this accident , I formally acknowledge that my text had the intention to
pay homage to Emily Henries.
However, Helena Costiucovich wrote something more to prove the analogy between
me and Henriot. She said that that in Henriot's novel the coveted manuscript was
the original copy of the Memorie of Casanova. It happens that in my novel there is a
minor character called Hugh of Newcastle (and in the Italian version, Ugo di
Novocastro). The conclusion of Costiucovich is that "only by passing from a name to
another it is possible to conceive of the name of the rose".
As an empirical author I could say that Hugh of Newcastle is not an invention of
mine but a historical figure, mentioned in the medieval sources I used; the episode
of the meeting between the Franciscan legation and the Papal representatives
literally quotes a medieval chronicle of the XIV century. But the reader has not the
duty to know that, and my reaction cannot be taken into account. However I think to
have the right to state my opinion as an uncommitted reader. First of all Newcastle
is not a translation of Casanova, which should be translated as New House, and a

castle is not a house (besides, in Italian, or in Latin, Novocastro means New City or
New Encampment). Thus Newcastle suggests Casanova in the same way it could
suggest Newton. But there are other elements that can textually prove that the
hypothesis of Costiucovich is uneconomic. First of all, Hugh of Newcastle shows up
in the novel, playing a very marginal role, and has nothing to do with the library. If
the text wanted to suggest a pertinent relationship between Hugh and the library
(as well as between him and the manuscript) it should have said something more.
But the text does not say a word about that. Secondly, Casanova was -- at least on
the light of a common shared encyclopedic knowledge -- a professional lover and a
rake, and there is nothing in the novel which casts in doubt the virtue of Hugh.
Third, there is no evident connection between a manuscript of Casanova and a
manuscript of Aristotle and there is nothing in the novel which alludes to sexual
incontinence as a value to be pursued. To look for the Casanova connection does
not lead anywhere.
(Obviously, I am ready to change my mind if some other interpreter demonstrates
that the Casanova connection can lead to some interesting interpretive path, but for
the moment being -- as a Model Reader of my own novel -- I feel entitle to say that
such a hypotheses is scarcely rewarding.)
Once during a debate a reader asked me what I meant by the sentence "the
supreme happiness lies in having what you have". I felt disconcerted and I sweared
that I had never written that sentence. I was sure of it, and for many reasons: first, I
do not think that happiness lies in having what one has, and not even Snoopy would
subscribe such a triviality. Secondly it is improbable that a medieval character
would suppose that happiness lied in having what he actually had, since happiness
for the medieval mind was a future state to be reached through present suffering.
Thus I repeated that I had never written that line, and my interlocutor looked at me
as at an author unable to recognize what he had written.
Later I came across that quotation. It appears during the description of the erotic
ecstasy of Adso in the kitchen. This episode, as the dullest of my readers can easily
guess, is entirely made up with quotations from the Song of Songs and from
medieval mystics. In any case, even though the reader does not find out the
sources, he/she can guess that these pages depict the feelings of a young man after
his first (and probably last) sexual experience. If one goes to re-read the line in its
context (I mean the context of my text, not necessarily the context of its medieval
sources), one finds that the line reads: "O lord, when the soul is transported, the
only virtue lies in having what you see, the supreme happiness is having what you
have." Thus happiness lies in having what you have, but not in general and in every
moment of your life, but only in the moment of the ecstatic vision. This is the case
in which is unnecessary to know the intention of the empirical author: the intention
of the text is blatant and, if English words have a conventional meaning, the text
does not say what that reader -- obeying to some idiosyncratic drives -- believed to
have read. Between the unattainable intention of the author and the arguable

intention of the reader there is the transparent intention of the text which disproves
an untenable interpretation.
An author who has entitled his book The Name of the Rose must be ready to face
manifold interpretations of his title. As an empirical author (Reflections, p.3 ) I wrote
that I chose that title just in order to set the reader free: "the rose is a figure so rich
in meanings that by now it has any meaning left: Dante's mystic rose, and go lovely
rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose
by any other name, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians..." Moreover
someone has discovered that some early manuscripts of De Contemptu Mundi of
Bernard de Morlay, from which I borrowed the exameter "stat rosa pristina nomine,
nomina nuda tenemus", read "stat Roma pristina nomine" -- which after all is more
coherent with the rest of the poem, which speaks of the lost Babylon. Thus the title
of my novel, had I come across another version of Morlay's poem, could have been
The Name of Rome (thus acquiring fascist overtones).
But the text reads The Name of the Rose and I understand now how difficult it was
to stop the infinite series of connotations that word elicits. Probably I wanted to
open the possible readings so much as to make each of them irrelevant, and a
result I have produced an inexorable series of interpretations. But the text is there,
and the empirical author has to remain silent.
There are however (once again) cases in which the empirical author has the right to
react as a Model Reader.
I have enjoyed the beautiful book by Robert F. Fleissner, A Rose by Any Other Name
- A survey of literary flora from Shakespeare to Eco (West Cornwall, Locust Hill Press,
1989) and I hope that Shakespeare would have been proud to find his name
associated with mine. Among the various connections that Fleissner finds between
my rose and all the other roses of world literature there an interesting passage:
Fleissner wants to show "how Eco's rose derived from Doyle's "The Adventure of the
Naval Treaty," which, in turn, owed much to Cuff's admiration of this flower in The
Moonstone" (p.139).
I am positively a Wilkie Collins' addict but I do not remember (and certainly I did not
when writing my novel) of Cuff's floral passion. I believed to have read the opera
omnia of Doyle but I must confess that I do not remember to have read "The
Adventure of the Naval Treaty." It does not matter: in my novel there are so many
explicit references to Holmes that my text can support also this connection. But in
spite of my open mindedness, I find an instance of overinterpretation when
Fleissner, trying to demonstrate how much my William 'echoes' Holmes' admiration
for roses, quotes this passage from my book:

"Frangula," William said suddenly, bending over to observe a plant that, on that
winter day, he recognized from the bare bush. "A good infusion is made from the
bark..."

It is curious that Fleissner stops his quotation exactly after bark. My text continues,
and after a comma reads: "for hemorrhoids." Honestly, I think that the Model Reader
is not invited to take frangula as an allusion to the rose -- otherwise every plant
could stand for a rose.
Let me come now to the Foucault's Pendulum. I called Casaubon one the main
character of my Foucault's Pendulum, and I was thinking of Isaac Casaubon, who
demonstrated that the Corpus Hermeticum was a forgery, and if one reads
Foucault's Pendulum one can find some analogy between what the great philologist
understood and what my character finally understands. I was aware that few
readers would have been able to catch the allusion but I was equally aware that, in
term of textual strategy, this was not indispensable (I mean that one can read my
novel and understand my Causaubon even though disregarding the historical
Casaubon -- many author like to put in their texts certain shibboleths for few smart
readers). Before finishing my novel I discovered by chance that Casaubon was also
a character of Middlemarch, a book that I read decades ago and which does not
rank among my livres de chevet. That was a case in which, as a Model Author, I
made an effort in order to eliminate a possible reference to George Eliot. At p. 63 of
the English translation can be read the following exchange between Belbo and
Casaubon:

"By the way, what's your name?"

"Casaubon."
"Casaubon. Wasn't he a character in Middlemarch?"
"I don't know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we are
not related."

I did my best to avoid what I thought to be a useless reference to Mary Ann Evans.
But then came a smart reader, David Robey, who remarked that, evidently not by
chance, Eliot's Casaubon was writing a Key to all mythologies. As a Model Reader I
feel obliged to accept that innuendo. Text plus encyclopedic knowledge entitle any
cultivated reader to find that connection. It makes sense. Too bad for the empirical
author who was not as smart as his readers. In the same vein my last novel is
entitled Foucault's Pendulum because the pendulum I am speaking of was invented

by Lon Foucault. If it were invented by Franklin the title would have been Franklin's
Pendulum. This time I was aware from the very beginning that somebody could
have smelled an allusion to Michel Foucault: my characters are obsessed by
analogies and Foucault wrote on the paradigm of similarity. As an empirical author I
was not so happy of such a possible connection. It sounds as a joke and not a clever
one, indeed. But the pendulum invented by Lon was the hero of my story and
could not change the title: thus I hoped that my Model Reader would not have tried
a superficial connection with Michel. I was wrong, many smart readers did it. The
text is there, maybe they are right, maybe I am responsible for a superficial joke,
maybe the joke is not that superficial. I do not know. The whole affair is by now out
of my control.
Giosue Musca wrote a critical analysis of my last novel that I consider among the
best I read. From the beginning he confesses however to have been corrupted by
the habit of my characters and goes fishing for analogies. He masterfully isolates
many ultraviolet quotations and stylistic analogies I wanted to be discovered, he
finds other connections I did not think of but that look very persuasive, and he plays
the role of a paranoiac reader by finding out connections that amaze me but that I
am unable to disprove -- even though I know that they can mislead the reader. For
instance it seems that the name of the computer, Abulafia, plus the name of the
three main characters, Belbo, Casaubon and Diotallevi, produces the series ABCD.
Useless to say that until the end of my work I gave the computer a different name:
my readers can object that I unconsciously changed it just in order to obtain an
alphabetic series. It seems that Jacopo Belbo is fond of whisky and his initials make
JB. Useless to say that until the end of my work his first name was Stefano and that I
changed it into Jacopo at the last moment.
The only objection I can make as a Model Reader of my book is that (i) the
alphabetical series ABCD is textually irrelevant if the names of the other characters
do not bring it until X,Y and Z, that (ii) Belbo also drinks Martini and furthermore his
mild alcoholic addiction is not the most relevant of his features. On the contrary I
cannot disprove my reader when he also remarks that Pavese was born in a village
called Santo Stefano Belbo and that my Belbo, a melancholic piedmontese, can
recall Pavese. It is true that I spent my youth on the banks of the river Belbo (where
I underwent some of the ordeals that I attributed to Jacopo Belbo, and a long time
before I was informed of the existence of Cesare Pavese). But I knew that by
choosing the name Belbo my text would have in some way evoked Pavese. And it is
true that by designing my piedmontese character I also thought of Pavese. Thus my
Model Reader is entitled to find such a connection.
I can only confess (as an empirical author, and as I said before) that in a first
version the name of my character was Stefano Belbo. Then I changed it into Jacopo,
because -- as a Model Author -- I did not want that my text made such a connection
so blatantly perceptible. Evidently this was not enough, but my readers are right.
Probably they would be right even though I called Belbo by any other name.

I could keep going with examples of this sort, and I have chose only those that were
more immediately comprehensible. I skipped other more complex cases because I
risked to engage too much myself upon matters of philosophical or aesthetical
interpretation. I hope my listeners will agree that I have introduced the empirical
author in this game only in order to stress his irrelevance and to re-assert the rights
of the text.
Let me now to mention some cases in which the reader can help the author to write
another book, or in any case to understand better the way he/she writes. The first
movie director who asked me to make a film out of The Name of the Rose was my
friend Marco Ferreri. Among other nice things he said: "Moreover, I don't even need
to rewrite the dialogues, because they look as if they were designed for a movie". I
felt astonished, and a little upset, because certainly I didn't write thinking for a
movie script. But suddenly I realized tyhat while writing I had under my eyes the
map of the abbey (as a matter of fact before writing I carefully design the world
where my story has to take place) and obviously, if two characters were crossing
the abbey's court I made them to speak more or less the time needed to walk from
one point to another. It was not as much a problem of realism as a question of
rhythm control.
After Foucault's Pendulum a French journalist asked me how did I succeed in
describing spaces so well. I felt flattered, and I repeated that perhaps that
happened because I usually write by looking to a sort of visual setting that I have
previously designed. But it was not enough: as a matter of fact, what does it mean
to look to a spatial setting and to render it through words?
It was after that interview that I stated being concerned with the theoretical
problem of hypotiposis. As you probably know hypotipoisis is the rhetorical effect by
which words succeed in rendering a visual scene; unfortunately all the rhetoricians
that wrote about hypothiposis, from the eniquity up to our times, provided only
circular definitions -- that is, in order to answer the question they restated the
question as if it was the answer. They said more or less that hypotiposis is the figure
by which one creates a visual effect through words. Requested to say how does it
happen, they simply repeated that this happens.
In the last years I have analyzed many literary texts in order to isolate different
techniques by which a writer, using sounds, brings so to speak images under the
reader's eyes, and I particularly focused my attention on the description of spaces.
But at the same time I felt the blind compulsion to write a novel in which the main
characters were space and light. The very reason why in my last novel, The Island of
the Day Before, I put a shipwreck on a boat, in face of an island that he was unable
to reach, is exactly that: I wanted to tell a story of spaces (and light) and in order to
keep my space untouched I wanted to write a story of an insuperable distance.

That is the reason why I decided that my main character was unable to swim. There
are many authors that, in order to give the reader the impression of a sort of
unending space, look at it, so to speak, from the point of view of an ant. I can walk
from here to there in few steps, but the same space, from the point of view of an
ant, is a long and tiring way (Eliot used such a technique in Prufrock, by describing
the streets from the point of view of the fog). Let me call this technique
fractalisation of space. Thus my character, trying to swim, and making few feets at
any attempt, always remained far from the island which, in some way, never
approached but rather shrank back at every effort of the swimmer. If in the course
of this process you keep describing the sea and the image of the coast, you provide
your readers with the experience of a continuously broadening space.
At the end of my speech I feel however the impression to have been scarcely
generous with the empirical author. There is at least a case in which the witness of
the empirical author acquires an important function. Not so much in order to better
understand his texts, but certainly in order to understand the creative process. To
understand the creative process also means to understand how certain textual
solutions come to being by serendipity, or as the result of unconscious mechanisms.
This helps to understand the difference between the textual strategy, as a linguistic
object that the Model Readers have under their eyes (so that they can go on
independently of the empirical author's intentions), and the story of the growth of
that textual strategy.
Some of the examples I have made can work in this direction. Let me add now two
other curious examples which have a privilege: they really concern only my
personal life and do not have any detectable textual counterpart. They have nothing
to do with the business of interpretation. They can only tell how a text, which is a
machine conceived in order to elicit interpretations, sometimes grows out of a
magmatic territory which has nothing -- or not yet -- to do with literature.
First story. In Foucault's Pendulum the young Casaubon is in love with a Brazilian girl
called Amparo. Giosue Musca found, tongue-in-cheek, a connection with Ampre
who studied the magnetic force between two currents. Too smart. I did not know
why I chose that name: I realized that it was not a Brazilian name, so that I was
pulled to write (p. 161) "I never did understand how it was that Amparo, a
descendant of Dutch settlers in Recife who intermarried with Indians and Sudanese
blacks -- with her Jamaican face and Parisian culture -- had wound up with a Spanish
name." This means that I took the name Amparo as if it came from outside my
novel.
Months after the publication of the novel a friend asked me: "Why Amparo? Is it not
the name of a mountain, or of a girl who looks at a mountain?" And then he
explained: "There is that song, Guajira Guantanamera, which mentions something
like Amparo."

Oh my God. I knew very well that song, even though I did not remember a single
word of it. It was sung, in the mid fifties, by a girl with which I was in love at that
time. She was Latin American, and very beautiful. She was not Brazilian, not
Marxist, not black, not hysterical, as Amparo is, but it is clear that, when inventing a
Latin American charming girl, I unconsciously thought of that other image of my
youth, when I had the same age of Casaubon. I thought of that song, and in some
way the name Amparo (that I had completely forgot) transmigrated from my
unconscious to the page. This story is fully irrelevant for the interpretation of my
text. As far as the text is concerned Amparo is Amparo is Amparo is Amparo.
Second story. In my last novel, my character Robereto has a double, Ferrante, and
during his childhood he suspects that his parents did not tell him about his
existence. I decided to put in my story a secret and unknown brother because the
double was a sort of must, of mandatory presence in the framework of the Baroque
novel. I adopted this sort of narrative standard before knowing what I could have
done with such an intruding and embarassing brother, and only at the middle of the
story his quasi-necessary presence encouraged me to make Roberto to invent a
story within the story.
Later my sister, reading the novel, told me that I had used Rosetta. Who was
Rosetta? I had forgotten her, but when my sister mentioned her I recalled the whole
story. It happened that when we were children, and playing together, we invented a
secret sister, Rosetta, whom our parents concealed to us for some mysterious
reasons -- and we had a lot of fun tormenting our mother by asking her to tell us
about Rosetta, and the poor woman was absolutely flabbergasted and did not
understand what we were talking about. True. I believed to have found Ferrante in
some old books while in fact I was disguising under male clothes the ghost of that
girl who obsessed my early years.
Third story. Those who have read my Name of the Rose know that there is a
mysterious manuscript, that it contains the lost second book of Aristotle Poetics,
that its pages are annointed with poison and that (at p. 570 of the paperback
edition) it is described like this:

"He read the first page aloud, then stopped, as if he were not interested in knowing
more, and rapidly leafed through the following pages. But after a few pages he
encountered resistance, because near the upper corner of the side edge, and along
the top, some pages had stuck together, as happens when the damp and
deteriorating papery substance forms a kind of sticky paste..."

I wrote these lines at the end of 1979. In the following years, perhaps also because
after The Name of the Rose I started to be more frequently in touch with librarians

and book collectors (and certainly because I had a little more money at my disposal)
I became a regular rare books collector. It had happened before, in the course of my
life, that I bought some old book, but by chance, and only when they were very
cheap. Only in the last decade I have become a serious book collector, and 'serious'
means that one has to consult specialized catalogues and must write, for every
book, a technical file, with the collation, historical information on the previous or
following editions, and a precise description of the physical state of the copy. This
last job requires a technical jargon, in order to precisely name foxed, browned,
waterstained, soiled, washed or crisp leaves, cropped margins, erasures, re-baked
bindings, rubbed joints and so on.
One day, rummaging through the upper shelves of my home library I discovered an
edition of the Poetics of Aristotle, commented by Antonio Riccoboni, Padova 1587. I
had forgot to have it, I found on the endpaper a 1000 written in pencil, and this
means that I bought it somewhere for 1000 liras, more or less 80 cents, probably
twenty or more years before. My catalogues said that it was the second edition, not
exceedingly rare, that there is a copy of it at the British Museum, but I was happy to
have it because it seems difficult to find and in any case the commentary of
Riccoboni is less known and less quoted than those, let say, of Robortello or
Castelvetro.
Then I started writing my description. I copied the title page and I discovered that
the edition had an Appendix "Ejusdem Ars Comica ex Aristotele". This means that
Riccoboni tried to re-construct the lost second book of the Poetics. It was not
however an unusual endeavor, and I went on to set up the physical description of
the copy. Then it happened to me what happened to a certain Zatesky described by
Lurja, who, having lost part of his brain during the war, and with part of the brain
the whole of his memory and of his speaking ability, was nevertheless still able to
write: thus automatically his hand wrote down all the information he was unable to
think of, and step by step he reconstructed his own identity by reading what he was
writing.
Likewise, I was looking coldly and technically at the book, writing my description,
and suddenly I realized that I was re-writing The Name of the Rose. The only
difference was that from page 120, when the Ars Comica begins, the lower and not
the upper margins were severely damaged; but all the rest was the same, the pages
progressively browned and dampstained at the end stuck together, and looked as if
they were ointed with a disgusting fat substance. I had in my hands, in printed form,
the manuscript I described in my novel. I had had it for years and years at my
reach, at home.
At a first moment I thought of an extraordinary coincidence; then I was tempted to
believe in a miracle; at the end I decided that who Es war, soll Ich werden. I bought
that book in my youth, I skimmed through it, I realized that it was exaggeratedly
soiled, I put it somewhere and I forgot it. But by a sort of internal camera I

photographed those pages, and for decades the image of those poisonous leaves
lied in the most remote part of my soul, as in a grave, until the moment it emerged
again (I do not know for which reasons) and I believed to have invented it.
These three stories have nothing to do with a possible interpretation of my novels. If
they have a moral it is that the private life of the empirical authors is under a
certain respect more unfathomable than their texts. At least as much unfathomable
as the soul of the readers. However, between the mysterious process of textual
production and the uncontrollable drift of its future readings, the text qua text still
represents a confortable presence, the point to which we can stick.

Umberto Eco (c) 1996

Return to Eco's Writings

It Was the Bean that Set the Pulses Racing

By Umberto Eco

This edited article was translated by William Weaver from the Italian -- New York
Times Syndicate

THE BEST INVENTION: Umberto Eco shows how after 1000 AD the cultivation of
beans, peas and lentils had a profound effect on European civilisation

A thousand years ago we were squarely in the middle ages. Of course, "Middle
Ages" is a scholastic convention. For example, in certain countries -- including Italy
-- the term "Middle Ages" is employed even when the writer is referring to the time
of Dante and Petrarch; in other countries, scholars already speak of these years as

the Renaissance. To make things a bit clearer, let us say that there are at least two
"Middle Ages": one lasting from the fall of the Roman Empire (fifth century A.D.) to
the year 999, and the other, beginning in the year 1000 and continuing at least until
the 15th century.
Now the Middle Ages before the year 1000 can deservedly be called the Dark Ages,
a term carelessly used to cover all the centuries between the 5th and the 14th. I say
"deservedly" not because those Ages were full of burnings at the stake, for there
were flames and pyres also in the highly civil 17th and 18th centuries, or because
superstitious beliefs were widespread, for when it comes to superstitions -- though
for different reasons -- our own New Age is second to none.
No, they can deservedly be called the Dark Ages because the barbarian invasions
that took place during this time beset Europe for centuries and gradually destroyed
Roman civilization. Cities were deserted, in ruins; the great highways, neglected,
disappeared under a tangle of weeds; and fundamental techniques were forgotten,
including the processes of mining and quarrying. The land was no longer cultivated
and, at least until the feudal reform of Charlemagne, entire agricultural areas
reverted to forest.
In this sense, the Middle Ages before 1000 AD were a period of indigence, hunger,
insecurity. In his splendid La civilisation de l'Occident mediaevale, rich in
observations of everyday life in the Middle Ages, Jacques Le Goff illustrated how
impoverished this time was by recounting popular tales. In one such story, a saint
appears magically to retrieve a sickle that a peasant had accidentally dropped down
a well. In an era when iron had become rare, the loss of a sickle would have been a
terrible thing, making it impossible for the peasant to continue harvesting: the
sickle's blade was irreplaceable.
As the population became smaller and less strong physically, people were mowed
down by endemic diseases (tuberculosis, leprosy, ulcers, eczema, tumours) and by
dread epidemics like the plague. It is always risky to venture demographic
calculations for past millennia, but according to some scholars, Europe in the
seventh century had shrunk to roughly 14 million inhabitants; others posit 17 million
for the eighth century. Underpopulation combined with undercultivated land left
nearly everyone undernourished.

As the second millennium approached, however, the figures changed -- the

population grew. Some experts calculate a total of 22 million Europeans in 950;
others speak of 42 million in 1000. In the 14th century, Europe's population hovered
between 60 million and 70 million. Though the figures differ, on one point there is
agreement: in the five centuries after the year 1000, Europe's population doubled,
maybe even tripled.

The reasons for Europe's boom are hard to pinpoint; between the 11th and 13th
centuries, radical transformations occurred in political life, in art, in the economy
and, as we shall see, in technology. This new surge of physical energy and of ideas
was evident to those living at the time. The monk Radulphus Glaber, born in the
very last years of the first millennium, began writing his famous Historiarum (known
in English as "Five Books of the Histories") about 30 years later. The monk did not
have a particularly merry view of life, and he tells of a famine in 1033, describing
atrocious instances of cannibalism among the poorest peasants. But somehow he
sensed that, with the year 1000, a new spirit was stirring in the world, and things -which until then had gone very badly -- were taking a positive turn.
Thus he burst forth in an almost lyrical passage, which still stands out in the annals
of the Middle Ages. In it, he told how, at the end of the millennium, the earth
suddenly blossomed, like a meadow in spring: "It was already the third year after
1000, when, in the whole world, but especially in Italy and the regions of Gaul, there
was a renewal of the basilical churches . . . each Christian nation strove to achieve
the most beautiful. It seemed that the very earth, stirring itself and shaking off old
age, was newly clad with a white mantle of churches." Now the flowering of
Romanesque art (for that is what Radulphus was talking about) did not suddenly
take place in 1003; Radulphus was writing more as a poet than as an historian. But
he was talking about a rivalry of power and prestige among various city-states; he
was talking about new architectural techniques and of an economic resurgence, for
you cannot build such churches without wealth behind you; he was talking about
churches conceived in dimensions larger than their predecessors -- churches
capable of accommodating a growing population.
Naturally it can be said that, with the reforms of Charlemagne, with the construction
of the Germanic empire, with the rejuvenation of cities and the birth of the
communes, the economic situation also improved. But would it not also be possible
to say the opposite, namely that the political situation evolved, the cities flourished
anew, because daily life and working conditions were improved by something? In
the centuries before 1000, a new triennial system of crop rotation was slowly
adopted, allowing the land to be more fruitful.
But cultivation requires tools and working animals, and on this front there were
breakthroughs too. Just before the year 1000, horses began to be fitted with iron
horseshoes (up until then, the hooves were bound with cloth) and with stirrups. The
latter, of course, were more for the benefit of knights than for peasants. For the
peasants, it was the invention of a new kind of collar for horses, oxen and other
beasts of burden that proved revolutionary. The old collars put all the strain on the
animal's neck muscles, compromising its windpipe.
The new collar involved the chest muscles, increasing the animal's efficiency by at
least two-thirds, and permitting, for certain tasks, horses to replace oxen (oxen were
better suited to the old type of collars, but they also worked at a slower pace than

horses). Moreover, whereas in the past horses had been yoked in a horizontal line,
now they could be yoked in single file, significantly increasing their capacity for
pulling.
Around this time, ploughing methods changed. Now the plough had two wheels and
two blades, one for cutting the earth and the other -- the ploughshare -- for turning
it over. Though this "machine" was already known to Nordic people as early as the
second century BC, it was not until the 12th century that it spread throughout
Europe.
But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and
lentils. All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who
goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice
dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the
poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise
a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of
the lords). And as I mentioned earlier, this poor diet begat a population that was ill
nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields.
So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a
profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a
result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and
repopulated a continent. We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that
have changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we are still
here -- I mean we Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and
the Spanish conquistadors -- because of beans. Without beans, the European
population would not have doubled within a few centuries, today we would not
number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this
article, would not exist. Some philosophers say that this would be better, but I am
not sure everyone agrees.
And what about the non-Europeans? I am unfamiliar with the history of beans on
other continents, but surely even without European beans, the history of those
continents would have been different, just as the commercial history of Europe
would have been different without Chinese silk and Indian spices.
Above all, it seems to me that this story of beans is of some significance for us
today. In the first place, it tells us that ecological problems must be taken seriously.
Secondly, we have all known for a long time that if the West ate unmilled brown
rice, husks and all (delicious, by the way), we would consume less food, and better
food. But who thinks of such things? Everyone will say that the greatest invention of
the millennium is television or the microchip. But it would be a good thing if we
learned to learn something from the Dark Ages too.

Return to Eco's Writings

The Roots of Conflict

By Umberto Eco

An English modification of an essay for La Repubblica, 15 October 2001. Excerpted

from Counterpunch).

Original Article: Le guerre sante passione e ragione

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from
passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and
bad, white and black. If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even
before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through
inquiry and the critical mind. Of course it did not always do this. Hitler, who burned
books, condemned "degenerate" art and killed those belonging to "inferior" races;
and the fascism which taught me at school to recite "May God Curse the English"
because they were "the people who eat five meals a day" and were therefore
greedy and inferior to thrifty Italians, are also part of the history of western culture.
It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own
roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
Should I prefer to live in Limoges rather than, say, Moscow? Moscow is certainly a
beautiful city. But in Limoges I would understand the language. Everyone identifies
with the culture in which he grew up and the cases of root transplants, while they do
occur, are in the minority: Lawrence of Arabia dressed as an Arab, but he ended up
back home in England.
The west, often for reasons of economic expansion, has been curious about other
civilisations. The Greeks referred to those who did not speak their language as
barbarians, that is stammerers, as if they did not speak at all. But a few more
mature Greeks, like the Stoics, noticed that although the barbarians used different
words, they referred to the same thoughts.

From the second half of the 19th century, cultural anthropology developed as an
attempt to assuage the guilt of the west towards others, and particularly those
others who had been defined as savages; societies without a history, primitive
peoples. The task of the cultural anthropologist was to demonstrate that beliefs
which differed from western ones existed, and should be taken seriously, not
disdained and repressed. In order to say -- as Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi
did, controversially, this month -- whether any one culture is superior to another,
parameters have to be established.
A culture can be described objectively -- these people behave like this; believe in
spirits or in a single divine being that pervades the whole of nature; meet in family
clans according to these rules; consider it beautiful to pierce their noses with rings
(this could be a description of western youth culture); consider pork to be impure;
circumcise themselves; raise dogs for the pot on public holidays or, as the English
and Americans still say of the French, eat frogs.
Obviously, the anthropologist knows that objectivity is always limited by many
factors. The criteria of judgment depend on our own roots, preferences, habits,
passions, our system of values. For example: do we consider that the prolonging of
the average life span from 40 to 80 years is worthwhile? I personally believe so, but
many mystics could tell me that, between a glutton who lives for 80 years and Saint
Luigi Gonzaga, who only survived for 23, it was the latter who had the fuller life.
Do we believe that technological development, the expansion of trade, and faster
transport is worthwhile? Many think so, and judge our technological civilisation as
superior. But, within the western world itself, there are those who primarily wish to
live in harmony with an uncorrupted environment, and are willing to relinquish air
travel, cars and refrigerators, to weave baskets and travel on foot from one village
to another, as long as the ozone hole isn't there.
So in order to define one culture as better than another, it is not enough to describe
it (as the anthropologist does), but it is advisable to have recourse to a system of
values which we do not feel we can relinquish. Only at this point can we say that our
culture is better, for us.
How absolute is the parameter of technological development? Pakistan has the
atom bomb, not Italy. So is Italy an inferior civilisation? Better to live in Islamabad
than Arcore? Shouldn't we respect the Islamic world by being reminded that it has
given us men like Avicenna (who was actually born in Buchara, not far from
Afghanistan) and Averroes, as well as Al-Kindi, Avenpace, Avicebron, Ibn Tufayl, or
that great historian of the 14th century Ibn Khaldoun, whom the west considers as
the father of the social sciences. The Arabs of Spain cultivated geography,
astronomy, mathematics or medicine when the Christian world was lagging far
behind in those subjects.

We might recall that those Arabs of Spain were fairly tolerant of Christians and Jews,
while we gave rise to the ghettoes, and that Saladin, when he reconquered
Jerusalem, was more merciful to the Christians than the Christians had been to the
Saracens when they took over Jerusalem. All very true, but in the Islamic world
there are fundamentalist and theocratic regimes today which the Christians do not
tolerate, and Bin Laden was not merciful to New York. The Taliban destroyed the
great stone Buddhas with their cannon: conversely, the French carried out the St
Bartholomew's day massacre, but this gives no one the right to say they are
barbarians today.
History is a two-edged sword. The Turks were impalers (and that's bad) but the
orthodox Byzantines put out the eyes of their dangerous relatives and the Catholics
burned Giordano Bruno; Saracen pirates did many wicked things, but the
buccaneers of his British majesty set fire to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean;
Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are ferocious enemies of western civilisation, but
within western civilisation there were men like Hitler and Stalin.
No, the problem of parameters is not set within history, but in our times. One of the
praiseworthy aspects of western culture (free and pluralistic, and these are values
which we consider basic and essential) is that it has been long held that the same
person can employ different parameters which may be mutually contradictory on
different matters. For example, the prolonging of life is considered good, and
atmospheric pollution bad, but we can very well see that maybe in big laboratories
where they study how to prolong life, there might be power systems which
themselves produce pollution.
Western culture has developed the capacity to freely lay bare its own contradictions.
Maybe they remain unresolved, but they are well known and admitted: how can we
manage some positive globalisation while avoiding the risks and injustices that
follow; how can we prolong life for the millions of Africans dying of AIDS (while at
the same time prolonging our own lives) without accepting a planetary economy
which causes people to die of hunger and AIDS, and makes us eat polluted food?
But it is just this criticism of parameters, pursued and encouraged by the west, that
makes us understand how delicate the matter is. Is it just and proper to protect
bank secrets? Many people think so. But if this secrecy allows terrorists to keep their
accounts in the City of London then is this defence of so-called privacy a positive
value or a doubtful one? We are always calling our parameters into question. The
western world does so to such an extent as to allow its own citizens to turn down
technological development and become Buddhists, or go and live in communities
where no tyres are used, not even for horse-drawn carts.
The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and
practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western
customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by

allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then
is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel
solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such
education.
An international organisation called Transcultura has been campaigning for an
"alternative anthropology" for some years. It has taken African researchers, who
have never been to the west before, to describe provincial France and society in
Bologna. Both sides started to take a genuine look at each other, and some
interesting discussions took place. At present, three Chinese -- a philosopher, an
anthropologist and an artist -- are completing a Marco Polo voyage in reverse,
culminating in a conference in Brussels in November. Imagine Muslim
fundamentalists being invited to research Christian fundamentalism (not the
Catholics this time, but American Protestants, more fanatical than ayatollahs, who
try to expunge all reference to Darwin from schools). In my opinion the
anthropological study of other people's fundamentalism leads to a better
understanding of one's own. Let them come and study our concept of holy war (I
could commend many interesting texts to them, including some quite recent ones).
They might then take a more critical view of the idea of holy war back home.
We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries,
and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into
prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban. The parameter of
tolerating diversity is certainly one of the strongest and least open to argument. We
consider our culture mature because it can tolerate diversity, and those who share
our culture, while rejecting diversity to be uncivilised, period. We hope that, if we
allow mosques in our countries, one day there will be Christian churches in their
countries, or at least Buddhas won't get blown up there. If we believe we have got
our parameters right, that is.
But there is a great deal of confusion. Funny things happen these days. It seems
that defending western values has become a rightwing prerogative, while the Left,
as ever, is pro-Islamic. Now, apart from the pro-third world, pro-Arab stance of some
rightwing and Catholic activist circles, and so on, this ignores a historical
phenomenon which is there for all to see.
The defence of scientific values, of technological development and modern western
culture in general, has always been characteristic of secular and progressive
political circles. Indeed, all communist regimes have relied on an ideology of
technological and scientific progress. The 1848 Communist Manifesto opens with a
dispassionate eulogy on the expansion of the bourgeoisie. Marx does not say it is
necessary to change direction and go over to Asian means of production. He merely
says that the proletariat must learn to master these values and successes.

Conversely it has always been reactionary thought (in the best sense of the word),
at least starting from the rejection of the French revolution, which has opposed the
secular ideology of progress and propounded a return to traditional values. Only a
few neo-Nazi groups have a mythical notion of the west and would be ready to slit
the throats of all Muslims at Stonehenge. The more serious traditionalist thinkers
have always looked to Islam as a source of alternative spirituality, in addition to the
rites and myths of primitive peoples and the teachings of Buddhism. They have
always made a point of reminding us that we are not superior, but impoverished by
our ideology of progress, and that we must seek the truth among the Sufi mystics or
the whirling dervishes. Thus a strange dichotomy is now opening on the right. But
perhaps it is only a sign that, at times of great bewilderment (such as the present),
no one knows quite where they stand any more.
But it is at times of bewilderment that the weapon of analysis and criticism comes
into its own, to be applied to our own superstitions and those of others.

Umberto Eco (c) 2001

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Literary game of drafts

Umberto Eco on... technology and ghosts in the machine

Umberto Eco
The Guardian, Saturday 30 March 2002
Article history

Philologists are often interested in seeing how an author goes from the first to the
last draft of a text, and they love to look at its various versions. This activity is often
called "notebook criticism". To be a good critic of notebook scribbles, or of versions
of texts, it's crucial that an author has left behind various handwritten phases of his
work.

For example, we have the various phases through which Alessandro Manzoni's La
Pentecoste passed, and it's very interesting to follow the changes of heart, the
substantial upheavals and the minimal variations that the author made to his text.

Similarly, it is moving to see at the National library of Naples, the phases through
which some of Giacomo Leopardi's most beautiful poems became those that we
know today. And we come to understand how a minor correction radically changed
the magic of a verse.

To make sense of the changes to a text, it is necessary, of course, for an author to

have left behind indications of what was changed from the original manuscript. If we
are dealing, for example, with an author such as Dante Alighieri - not even the
manuscript of The Divine Comedy remains - then the game is over before it begins.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the
psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature. So it makes
sense that the Institute of Texts and Modern Manuscripts at the National Centre of
Scientific Research in Paris dedicates many conventions and seminars to the
subject.

A recent seminar focused on a question that's often looked at the wrong way: isn't it
the case that the common practice today of writing texts directly on a computer - so
that there is only one definitive printed version - kills the study of changes? Now,
let's assume that an author drafts the first version of his text, and let's call this
version A. To simplify things, let's assume that the author wrote it directly on a
computer, or that if he had made any handwritten notes, they have disappeared.

This version A is printed, and at that point, the author begins correcting it by hand.
In this way, we get version B, which in turn is transferred to computer, where again
it is cleaned up and printed anew and becomes version C. In turn, this version is
altered by hand and again recopied as version D on the computer, from which a
new version will be created: version E. Since computers encourage corrections and
reconstructions, this is how the process can give rise to - if the author does not
throw the intermediate steps in the wastepaper basket - a series of versions, let's
say from A to Z.

So that's good news for the philologists, who in theory should have more to work
with, not less.

But the matter does not end here. Let's go back to version B, which was version A,
printed and corrected by hand, and let's imagine it was quite tortured. In
transferring it to the computer, does the author reproduce it word for word? Almost
never.

Just think about the common practice of composing a simple letter, when we are
liable to do a draft, erase or rewrite. In transcribing, new versions are introduced,
and perhaps we write down something that we had changed but then regret it,
erase it and take another crack at it.

And here - when we print out the version again - we do not have that version C,
which was supposed to faithfully reproduce version B. Instead, out comes a version
that we will call X, but between B and X there are "ghost" versions, each one
different from the other.

It could be the case, though rare, that the author - narcissistic and fanatical about
his own changes, and using some kind of special computer program - has kept
somewhere, inside the memory of the machine, all these intermediate changes. But
usually this does not happen. Those "ghost" copies have vanished; they are erased
as soon as the work is finished.

And so the work of the philologists of the future will be based on conjecture, on
what those "ghost" copies might have contained - and who knows how many great
texts and other erudite publications will be born from that conjecture? To outsiders,
they might seem like problems suited only for college exams. But the discussion
shows that the use of mechanical systems for writing doesn't necessarily simplify
and thereby mechanise the creative activity, but rather can make it that much more
shaded and complex.

For example, who says that the possibility of endlessly correcting a text ad infinitum
necessarily improves the work? Well, we all know that the best is the enemy of the
good. Or, it is true that with a writing program, one can determine (even with a text
of hundreds of pages) how many times the same word is repeated and decide to
substitute it with synonyms or paraphrasing?

But we know, that, for example, Manzoni's vocabulary was very poor, and the word
"good" in his novel I Promessi Sposi appears, to some at least, to have been used
excessively. Would Manzoni have benefited from having a computer, eliminating all
these repetitions, or would he have made his prose more baroque and less limpid?

Umberto Eco/New York Times

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An elementary guide to Afghanistan and Baker St

A well-known British medical officer was wounded in in a distant war. Umberto Eco
draws deductions from a surprising tale of valour
The Guardian, Saturday 19 January 2002 13.33 GMT
Article history

We all know that the British and American military authorities do not allow much
news to leak out about what is happening in Afghanistan, but it is enough to read
closely. For example, the case I will now tell you about occurred long before the war
moved to the vicinity of Kandahar.

The person whose story I'm going to relate enrolled as a medical officer in the
English deployment in Afghanistan. He registered in that very selective group known
as the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, but, as it happens, he was transferred to the
Royal Berkshires. As part of that outfit, he found himself facing Afghan fighters to
the north-west of Kandahar, more or less near Mundabad. That's where an error in
"intelligence" occurred.

The English were told that there were fewer Afghans than was the case and that
they were more poorly armed. The English went on the attack and they were
massacred - at least 40% died - at the mountain pass called Khusk-i-Nakhud. The
country's mountain passes are terrible and, as journalists have reported, the
Afghans are not accustomed to taking prisoners. Our friend was hit in the shoulder
by a bullet from one of those deadly - if antiquated - Jezail muskets. The bullet
cracked the bone and cut off the subclavian artery, and our hero was barely saved
by a brave orderly.

He returned to London to recuperate, and a little episode lets him know how much
the memory of that tragic battle was in everyone's mind. When he meets the
person with whom he is going to share an apartment, the roommate says to him,
"From what I can tell, you were in Afghanistan."

Asked later to explain how he knew that, the person says he thought to himself:
"This man has something medical and something military about him. He's been in a
tropical climate, because he has a very dark face, but that is not his natural
colouring, because his wrists are pale. He has suffered hardships and illnesses, as
his emaciated face demonstrates. In addition, he was wounded in his left arm. He
keeps the arm in a rigid and not very natural position.

"In which tropical country could a doctor in the British army have been forced to put
up with difficult exertion and hardships? In Afghanistan, of course."

This conversation took place in Baker Street. The medic was Dr Watson. His
interlocutor was Sherlock Holmes. Watson was wounded in what at the time was
known as the battle of Maiwand, on July 27, 1880. In London, the newspaper The
Graphic reported it on August 7 (news reports were delayed back then). We know
about it from the early chapters of A Study In Scarlet.

The experience marked Watson for ever. In the story The Boscombe Valley Mystery,
he says his experience in Afghanistan made him forever a prepared and
inexhaustible traveller. But when, in The Sign Of Four, Holmes offers him some
cocaine, Watson says that after his duty in Afghanistan, his body cannot handle new
experiences. Shortly afterwards, he says he likes to stay seated and take care of his
wounded arm, which suffers with each change in temperature. In The Musgrave
Ritual, Watson reflects on the ways in which the Afghan campaign left deep marks
on him.

In fact, Watson always loved to talk about his time in Afghanistan, but people
usually wouldn't listen. With much effort (in The Reigate Squires), he persuades
Holmes to visit a fellow soldier, Colonel Hayter. In The Naval Treaty, he tries in vain
to interest a certain Phelps - a peevish and nervous person - in his Afghan
adventures. In The Sign of Four, he busies himself trying to tell war stories to Miss
Morstan, and manages to pique her interest only once.

Veterans, especially if wounded, are boring. But the memory of Afghanistan is

always present. In The Adventure Of The Empty House, while talking about Holmes's
arch enemy, Moriarty, he comes upon the file of a Colonel Moran, "the second-most
dangerous man in London", who served in Kabul. Echoes of the Afghan war return in
The Crooked Man.

Finally, in both The Adventure Of The Cardboard Box and in The Resident Patient,
Holmes pulls off a masterstroke of what he erroneously calls "deduction". While they
are seated, relaxing in their apartment, Holmes suddenly comments on war without
prompting: "You are right Watson. It does seem to me to be the most ridiculous way
to resolve a dispute."

Watson agrees, but then he asks how Holmes knew what he was thinking. The
explanation: by following the simple movement of Watson's eyes to the various
parts of the room, Holmes was able to reconstruct precisely Watson's train of
thought. And then, realising that his friend was thinking about various and terrible
wartime episodes, and seeing that his friend touched the old wound, Holmes
inferred that he was dejectedly thinking about how war is the most absurd way to
settle international disputes. Elementary, my dear Watson.

Umberto Eco/L'Espresso 2002

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Culture
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The art of creating a legend

What distinguishes 'literature' from 'light fiction'? Umberto Eco looks to the past for
an answer
Umberto Eco
The Guardian, Saturday 20 July 2002
Article history

I've read that there have been animated discussions in France over the protests of
the town of Villers-Cotteret - the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas - at having the
ashes of their author moved to the Panthon in Paris. I fear that in Italy, many would
also protest if this great popular narrator (it's a bit of a stretch to ascribe to him this
kind of canonisation) were to be buried next to those who are already canonised by
way of scholastic decree. But in truth, we are not the only ones who have a difficult
time discriminating between literature and the so-called "light fiction".

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance

novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These
books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful
because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.

If this is the case, then did Dumas aim to write light fiction, or did he not even worry
about such things - as some of his critical and controversial writings would suggest?
He had "slaves" who helped write numerous books and he wrote lengthily to earn
more money. But with some works, he was able to create characters we can define
as "legendary," who populated the collective imagination, and who are copied and
retold as happens with such characters of legend and fairy tales.

Sometimes he succeeded in creating a legend by pure literary ability: The Three

Musketeers is quick; it reads like a sheet of jazz music and even when he produces
those dialogues, which I have defined as "piecemeal dialogues": two or three pages

of short and unnecessary quips (which he does merely for length), Dumas does it
with "boulevardier" grace.

And what about The Count of Monte Cristo? I have written previously about how
once I decided to translate it. I would find phrases such as: "He rose from the chair
upon which he was sitting." Well, which other chair should he have risen from, if not
from that upon which he was sitting? All I had to say in my translation was, "He rose
from the chair", or even "He rose", as it is already clear he was sitting at a table.

I calculated that I had saved the reader at least 25% reading time by shortening
Dumas's language. But then I realised that it was exactly those extra words and
repetition that had a fundamental strategic function - they created anticipation and
tension - they delayed the final event and were fundamental for the excellent
vendetta to work so effectively.

That this was Dumas's great narrative capacity is clear today in rereading his
contemporary, Eugene Sue, who at the time was more famous than Dumas. If we
reread The Mysteries of Paris - which produced collective hysteria through character
identification and also offered political and social solutions - we realise that the
added words and phrases make the book heavier than lead to read, and we can
read it only as a document, not as the novel it was intended to be.

Therefore, are there virtues in writing which are not necessarily identified with
linguistic creation, but are part of rhythm and shrewd dosage, and cross the
boundary, albeit infinitesimally, between literature and light fiction? The novel, like
a legend, begins in the language, in the sense that Oedipus or Medea are typical
characters and are exemplary simply because of their actions even before they
become the great Greek tragedies. Similarly even Red Riding Hood or the
characters in African or Native-American mythology function as models of life
beyond the poetry which overtakes them and creates another layer to them.

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern
novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was
deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure
and terribly disquieting state.

Particularly in Italy, we are led to identify the novel with prose as art and by a short
circuit with poetry, a kind of "proetry". And yet Stendhal used the prose of the civil
code; Italo Svevo, it is said, wrote badly, and if we want something "poetic", there is
more poetry in Liala than in Alberto Moravia.

The problem is that the novel must "tell a story" and enliven exemplary characters
even if it only describes their external behaviour. The psychology of D'Artagnan is
amusing, but the character becomes legendary. The psychology of Julien Sorel is
complex and therefore I agree that there is a distinction between the historical
novel, which makes us understand an entire era through its heroes, and a cloakand-dagger novel, which takes place in a certain time period but could have easily
taken place in another era and would have remained equally appealing.

But here we are not talking about works of art whose greatness and density of
layers no one disputes. We are talking about mythical writings, which are another
thing. Fundamentally, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allais also lengthened their works
to make more money. Their stories of Fantomas are not an example of exalted
writings, and yet the man became an urban legend who obsessed the Surrealists
and others. The Rocambole of Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail still entertains us, but
he has not become a legend.

Why? There are dazzling original models and narrative strategies that still need to
be studied and compared in depth.

2002 Umberto Eco

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A philosopher and writer, Umberto Eco was working in TV and was active in leftwing politics when his medieval thriller The Name of the Rose became an
international bestseller. His new novel, Baudolino, finds him dealing with ambiguity,
truth and lies once more.