APPETITE FOR DECONSTRUCTION

Umberto Eco was an Italian professor of semiotics who in middle age became an international bestselling novelist with his medieval detective story The Name of the Rose.

Eco was immersed in the Middle Ages, which he regarded as a fruitful time, and in the ancient world.

He once said that you should remember that any idea you have might not be original: “Aristotle will always have thought of it before you.” In short he was the very model of the highpowered intellectual, collecting honorary degrees by the score from universities all over the world.

And yet The Name of the Rose sold 10 million copies worldwide and was turned into a film starring Sean Connery, while later novels Foucault’s Pendulum and Baudolino were almost as successful.

Intellectual though he was, with a personal library of some 50,000 books, Eco didn’t immure himself in the proverbial ivory tower. A whisky- drinker with, for most of his life, a 60- a- day cigarette- smoking habit, he was an accomplished journalist and early media don, who adored popular culture, starting with the comic books of his childhood.

“I suspect,” he said, “that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch t elevision.” Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice and, most of all, Columbo were among his favourite programs. (I don’t know if he watched Dad’s Army, but in certain photographs he bears a striking resemblance to Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwaring.)

While he took himself seriously, he was also able to laugh at himself. Writing a novel “became like a video game in which I might take on the personality of a warrior and enter a sort of magical kingdom”. “I always assume,” he said wisely, “that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer isn’t aware of.” And this is surely one reason for his success and popularity.

His medieval murder mystery, The Name of the Rose, tapped into the same sort of fantastical themes as the Indiana Jones films. There is the fascination of a lost manuscript — in this case the missing volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, which is regarded by the Catholic Church as heretical, the quest for it triggering a succession of murders in the monastery. It is all given an erudite intellectual gloss, which impresses and may delight the reader.

We live in an age fascinated by conspiracy theories and fakes. Think of the success of pseudo- scholarly books about the “Merovingian line” and the “Holy Blood”. Much of Eco’s scholarly and imaginative life may have been spent in the Middle Ages — when he was a student in Paris he confined himself for months to streets that had existed in medieval times — but he was also alert to this modern fascination. The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum point the way to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

“Dan Brown,” he quipped in a Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, “is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum. I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations — the world conspiracy of the Rosicrucians, Masons and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar; the hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect that Dan Brown might not even exist.”

This is a joke of course, but one reason for Eco’s enormous popular success, and the delight readers experience in reading his novels, is that he has the rare talent of combining skepticism with the ability to play intelligently with such ideas.

He knew there is no single “hermetic secret” nor a real verifiable history of the Knights Templar, but he understood why people respond to mysteries and the idea that there are hidden sources of esoteric knowledge which may shape the world.

Eco l oved the i dea of “fakes” and was aware of the influence or power they may have. The hero of his novel Baudolino is a trickster boy living at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. He invents fakes, forges documents, one of them proving the reality of the story of the Holy Grail.

Fakes, Eco said, can produce reality. The story of Prestor John was nonsense, a fake indeed, but it set people searching for a Christian kingdom in Africa. Or take The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The world knows this was a forgery, but “it corroborated Nazi ideology and so paved the way in a sense for the Holocaust”, he mused. Hitler “might have known it was a fake, but in his mind it described the Jews exactly as he wanted them to be, and so he took it as authentic”.

Eco’s popular success, coming in middle age, was as well deserved as it was remarkable. He took material that had been for the most part the property of middlebrow or lowbrow sensational novelists — Dennis Wheatley, a precursor of Dan Brown, being one such example — gave it an erudite twist and made it intellectually respectable.

He incarnated one of the paradoxes of our time: that a society whose values are social and materialist, a society that has for the most part rejected transcendental religion, a society in which fewer people believe in personal immortality than at any time since the dawn of the Christian era, was nevertheless eager for stories about arcane mysteries and magic. Harry Potter and Twilight’s vampires were among his heirs.

In the wake of his death, I expect there will be many quick to hail him as a great novelist. I don’t think he was in the sense that Proust and Mann can be called great. He doesn’t tell us enough about ourselves or the world we actually live in. In this respect he is less than other 20th- century Italian novelists — Lampedusa, Bassani, Sciascia, for example.

But Eco was undoubtedly a brilliant entertainer and a highly intelligent one. The Name of the Rose and Baudolino should continue to delight for a long time. I am less sure about Foucault’s Pendulum if only because I remember getting stuck, on account of boredom, half-way through.

Moreover, he will continue to interest critics and be the object of critical studies as an intellectual. Like the French philosopher Roland Barthes before him, Eco was fascinated by popular culture, and possessed the rare ability to turn material more commonly the property of trashy novelists into something that was intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.

Then I remember that he once wrote a semiotic study of a Bond novel. I haven’t read it because I’m not up to understanding semiotics, but I’m sure it’s fascinating for those who don’t have to consult the dictionary for the meaning of the word.