Umberto Eco
Academic and author of erudite bestsellers such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum
UMBERTO ECO, who has died aged 84, became Italy’s “best known literary export” when his medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose (1980) became a surprise international bestseller; he so boosted his country’s literary reputation that publishers described his influence on sales as “l’effetto Eco”.
Eco was 48 when he wrote the book, an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit spiced up with arcane medieval lore, after a publisher asked him to contribute to a series of short thrillers by prominent Italians who had never written fiction. He eventually agreed because “I felt like poisoning a monk”, but insisted the book would be set in the middle ages and be more than 500 pages long.
Eco thought the initial print-run of 30,000 overambitious, but the book – which was attacked by the Vatican as a “narrative calamity that deforms, desecrates and offends the meaning of faith” – sold two million copies in Italy and went on to sell 10 million copies in 30 languages. The English translation by William Weaver was published in 1983. In 1986 it was made into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Sean Connery as Eco’s monk-detective, William of Baskerville.
Eco’s day job was as a professor of an abstruse branch of literary theory known as semiotics, developed by the postmodernist French theorist Roland Barthes, which sees all culture as a web of signs – messages to be decoded for hidden meanings. Critics complain that it accords world-historical significance to trivia. Certainly there was nothing so ephemeral that Eco disdained to subject it to semiotic deconstruction. As a result he was able to position himself as a sort of portmanteau intellectual, giving his views on everything from how to eat peas with a plastic fork to changing concepts of beauty.
Among other things Eco decoded James Bond novels, Peanuts and pulpy strip cartoons such as The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian; he even subjected the pornography star La Cicciolina to semiotic scrutiny. In one memorable essay he analysed the cultural significance of his own denims: “Well, with my new jeans life was entirely exterior: I thought about the relationship between me and my pants, and the relationship between my pants and the society we lived in. I had achieved epidermic selfawareness.” Mickey Mouse, he proclaimed, “can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is”.
Before Eco became an international literary superstar, he had castigated Ian Fleming and other thriller writers for cynically devising entertainments for a reading public both “popular and serious”. Yet The Name of the Rose appealed to exactly the same readership, and some accused Eco of – equally cynically – using his knowledge of the formula for bestsellers to manufacture one himself. Will Self argued that Eco occupied a “perverse and tendentious position” as a writer of “superficially ‘intellectual’ books that … convince a great number of people they are reading something with a certain cachet. This is a loathsome confidence trick.”
Eco’s subsequent novels continued to sell well. In Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), three editors at a Milan publishing house try to link every conspiracy theory in history, from the Knights Templar to the Nazis, into a hidden Plan that would give control of the earth. The Island of the Day Before (1994) was a metaphysical conundrum about time and space centred around a 17th-century shipwrecked sailor who is unable to reach a nearby desert island both because he cannot swim and because it is across the international date line. In his fourth novel, Baudolino (2000), Eco returned to the middle ages with a protagonist, a “little liar who could concoct bigger lies”, whose narrative raises questions about historical truth.
As time went on, however, the suspicion arose, supported by newspaper “polls”, that, like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Eco’s novels were more bought than read. They were full of postmodern irony and symbolism, and their author was often accused of being “too clever by half ”. While Lorna Sage commended Eco’s investment in the “sanitising power of mockery, irony, laughter”, and his “personal tradition of carnival scepticism”, Salman Rushdie found himself irritated by
Foucault’s Pendulum, a “fiction about the creation of a piece of junk fiction that then turns knowingly into that piece of junk fiction”, pronouncing it humourless and devoid of characterisation or credible dialogue. “Reader: I hated it,” he concluded.
“I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult,” Eco reflected in later life. “Then I wrote a novel that is not erudite at all, that is written in plain language, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), and among my novels it is the one that has sold the least. So probably I am writing for masochists.”
That certainly seemed to apply to his sixth novel, The Prague Cemetery, published in English in 2011. The plot concerned the creators of the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a document which emerged in Russia in the early 1900s, purporting to describe a meeting at which Jewish leaders discussed their plans for world domination, but which later proved to be a pernicious fraud); but critics were troubled by the full-throated diatribes against Jews which Eco put into the mouths of some of his characters. A stinging review in the Vatican’s
L’Osservatore Romano newspaper complained: “Forced to read disgusting things about the Jews, the reader remains tainted”, adding that it was “possible that someone may think that maybe there’s some truth” in the story.
Although, as a good postmodernist, Eco was a fervent defender of the reader’s right to interpret a book how they choose, regardless of authorial “intentions”, it clearly did not apply in this case. He could not be held responsible, he said, for “weak readers” who misunderstood him.
Umberto Eco was born on January 5 1932 at Alessandria, a small industrial town in the Piedmont region of Italy where his father was chief accountant at the local iron works. His early life, he recalled later, had been shaped by Mussolini. He recalled being proud of his fascist uniform, and at 10 won first prize in a writing competition “for young Italian fascists”. It was only with the fall of fascism that “like a butterfly from a chrysalis, step by step I understood everything”. During the German occupation of northern Italy he experienced starvation and recalled dodging bullets traded by the SS, fascists and partisans.
As a teenager, he explored American literature and jazz, took up the trumpet and, aged 14, joined the Catholic youth organisation, of which by the age of 22 he had become a national leader, but from which he resigned the same year during protests against the strongly conservative Pope Pius XII. Subsequently he abandoned Catholicism in favour of a sort of unfocused religiosity and secular morality.
Eco’s passion for medieval thought began as a student at Turin University, where his doctoral thesis (published in 1956) was on St Thomas Aquinas. After leaving university he made cultural programmes for the television network RAI and, after military service in 1958, joined the Milan publishers Bompiani, where he worked as a senior non-fiction editor from 1959 to 1975.
From 1956 Eco lectured in aesthetics, architecture, visual communications and semiotics at universities in Turin, Florence, Milan and Bologna, where he became Professor of Semiotics in 1975. In 1959 he began a monthly column full of literary spoofs and pastiches in Il
Verri, an organ of the “neo-avantgarde”, some of which were later published in English in Misreadings (1993) and How to Travel With a
Salmon (1994). In the 1960s he became a founder-member of Gruppo 63, a radical and disputatious avant-garde group of young Italian writers opposed to what they called the “neocapitalistic” language of traditional literary and poetic texts, who developed a line in meaningless (“nonsignificanza”) verses and promoted the idea of “art as a plaything in itself ”.
As his contribution to the cause, Eco wrote Open Work, one of the first texts to advocate “the active role of the interpreter [the reader] in the reading of texts” – in other words the reader’s right to interpret a book as they wished, regardless of authorial “intentions” – a “postmodern” idea which, to the regret of many, has infected university English and History departments. It was at about this time, too, that he began defying the taboo against serious analysis of popular culture, finding a unifying theme in the theory of semiotics which he set out in books such as A Theory of
Semiotics (1976) and The Role of the Reader (1979). In addition he wrote several works on language and the use of words.
A unifying theme in both Eco’s fiction and his academic works was the power of human fantasy (“It’s a fundamental human activity to lie more than to tell the truth”) to shape human endeavour – Captain Cook looking for the Terra Incognita; Christopher Columbus searching for India – a mechanism he explored in such works as Faith in Fakes (1984), Kant and the Platypus (1999) and The
Book of Legendary Lands (2013), a work described by one critic as “a rumination on utopias – with a generous helping of piffle”.
Throughout his career as a novelist, Eco continued to teach semiotics at Bologna, where he became founder director of the Institute of Communications Disciplines. In addition to novels and academic books, from 1985 he had a regular column in L’Espresso magazine and later wrote for The Guardian. His final novel, Numero Zero, a satire on the popular press, was published last year.
Eco was an important Left-wing voice in debates on abortion, the mafia and corruption. He was a prominent critic of the former Italian president Sylvio Berlusconi, whom he once compared to Hitler and whose 90 per cent monopoly of Italian television he described as a “tragedy for a democratic country”. Nevertheless, his suggestions of how “Berlusconismo” might be counteracted (“a series of continuous, positive proposals could give the public a glimpse of another way of governing”) were vague.
A keen smoker of cigarettes (latterly cigars), short, plump, bearded and bespectacled, Eco was an amusing and energetic raconteur with that sort of studied nonchalance which Italians call sprezzatura. Though his novels made him rich and famous, he disdained his writing of them as a “hobby” and confessed that fame had its drawbacks: “I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.”
He married, in 1962, the Germanborn Renate Ramge, a graphic designer; she survives him with their son and daughter.
Umberto Eco, born January 5 1932, died February 19 2016