Umberto Eco’s death aged 84 on 19 February was an occasion for national mourning in Italy. Thousands turned up for the funeral at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. The newspapers were filled with adoring obituaries. Yet he wasn’t always loved. In the 1960s Italo Calvino objected to his easy enthusiasm for popular culture and genre fiction. “You can’t write off the Proustian novel simply because it’s ‘traditional’,” he told him. Pier Paolo Pasolini was more brutal. “Eco knows everything there is to know and spews it in your face in the most blase manner: as if you were listening to a robot.” “Eco sees culture as an amusement,” wrote the philologist Cesare Cases, “a day at the hunt that allows him to rove across boundless prairies.” “A buffoon,” pronounced Italy’s most prominent literary critic, Pietro Citati.
The criticisms remind us of Eco’s roots as a “militant” semiologist, moving back and forth through the 50s and 60s between the university and popular media, working as a lecturer, a TV journalist and publisher’s editor, constantly writing lively, provocative articles that aimed to give a deeper sense to such phenomena as gameshow hosts, TV serials, song contests and so on – all in a period when Italy was experiencing rapid social and cultural change. Essentially, the world was a huge and complex text in need of an expert interpreter: himself. As a result, Italians have always thought of the man first and foremost as a cultural critic, rather than a novelist.
In 1985, five years after the publication of The Name of the Rose, Eco began a column for the magazine L’Espresso called “La Bustina di Minerva”, which he continued right up until January of this year. His titles are chosen to remind us that everything needs decoding – this phrase means “Minerva’s Matchbook”. Minerva is a brand of matches, and, being a pipe smoker, Eco used to jot down notes on the inside flap of their packaging. His columns were to be equally extemporaneous, compulsive and incisive, each as illuminating and explosive as a struck match. All the same, the reference to the Roman goddess Minerva is important; it warns us that in the modern world we may struggle to distinguish between divinities and bric-a-brac.
Eco’s latest book, Pape Satàn Aleppe, rushed out ahead of schedule in Italian after his death, brings together more than 200 of these columns, tackling subjects ranging from mobile phones to monotheism, online porn to the chador, Harry Potter, 9/11, the order of the Templars, Twitter, pirates, literary festivals, calligraphy, Stephen Hawking, Halloween, taxi drivers, James Bond, Charlie Hebdo, Silvio Berlusconi, Jules Verne – and much more. It is honestly hard to think of anything Eco did not write about.
And the title Pape Satàn Aleppe? These mysterious words are spoken by Pluto at the opening of the seventh canto of Dante’s Inferno. None of the thousands of critics who have tackled the poem have ever worked out what they mean. The times are such, Eco remarks in his introduction, that much of what we come across is impenetrable. It is a rare admission of defeat, but he quickly makes up for it in the first piece in the book, which elaborates one of his main themes: that with the breakdown of the relationship between individual and community, and the consequent collapse of any shared narrative of social and political history, disorientation and confusion are the order of the day.
Uninterpretability is thus interpreted as the consequence of internet anarchy, the dominance of the contemporary over the historical, the mad promiscuity of Twitter and so on. If Eco was once an enthusiast for popular culture, he certainly changed position with the new millennium. Article after article laments the “universal craving for visibility” and the eagerness of the new media to cater for it. Not that the writer is against ambition. He is hugely ambitious himself. It is the desire to be visible regardless of talent that dismays him – to the point, he remarks, that people will recount the most humiliating private episodes, and even crimes, so long as it guarantees them a moment on TV.
Where all is clamour and chaos, and hence clever interpretation impossible, Eco steps in to impose a little order. He picks up one or other controversy – Berlusconi versus the magistrates; 9/11 conspiracy theories; internet porn and paedophilia; whether it is democratic to have a prime minister (Matteo Renzi) who is not an MP – and sets about defining the terms of the debate and giving a historical overview of their use. Relativism means exactly this, fascism that, conservatism the other. Armed resistance is distinguished from terrorism, idealism from fundamentalism.
As we start each new article it is as if we are in a noisy classroom at that moment when the teacher arrives and everything falls silent. Eco strides to the front and takes his place behind his big desk. If he has heard us swearing, he examines our bad language. If we have been slinging mud, he makes a compendium of the insults we have been using. Our differences are contextualised, our language etymologised. He is charismatic and funny and immeasurably superior, and we are made to feel vaguely stupid for having allowed ourselves to get involved. I say “we”, but actually the reader is never one of those flicking ink pellets or causing bedlam; rather, he or she is assumed to be that quiet pupil in the corner who is dismayed by the rumpus and longs for a voice of authority to put an end to it so the class can get back to some serious study. So a complicity is established between reader and writer: accepting the teacher’s account of events, we separate ourselves from the mob.
When Eco moves away from his hobbyhorse antipathy to Twitter and Facebook and deals with serious issues – the freedom of the press, Islamic fundamentalism, gun control, racism, the refugee crisis, the future of the EU – one has to be grateful. He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Some criticise the chador while adoring a veiled Madonna, not only in church but in a thousand Renaissance masterpieces. We preach the superiority of the computer over pen and paper, then turn the computer into a tablet screen that we write on with a pen. Quoting those opposed to gun control who suggest the solution to criminal gun use is to make every bullet identifiable, Eco wonders if it will be of any comfort to the victim to get a proper receipt at point of death. Analysing the politically correct obsession with apologising for the atrocities of centuries past, he wonders who should beg pardon for the crucifixion. Since Christ was killed under Roman jurisdiction it can only be the present head of state in Italy, he decides – at the time the affable ex-communist Giorgio Napolitano.
Eco’s irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling. Yet from time to time an underlying unpleasantness emerges. Speaking about those people so engrossed in their phones that they bump into you in the street, he describes deliberately turning his back on an approaching woman, allowing her to collide with him, then congratulating himself when her phone clatters on the pavement. “I only hope it broke and advise everyone in the same situation to do as I did,” he concludes. One wonders if he would have felt the same had she been bent over a book as she walked.
One bustina that didn’t make the cut for this collection is illuminating in this regard. Eco imagines himself as Socrates (a regular ploy) when a disciple asks how a man can prepare for death. “The only thing to do is convince yourself that everyone else is a coglione [idiot],” he replies, the logic being that to die thinking the world is full of intelligent people making important discoveries would be heartbreaking. Better to believe they are all fools.
It is playful, of course, but as we look through the last section of Pape Satàn Aleppe, entitled “From Stupidity to Folly”, one can’t help feeling that playfulness is sometimes a thin disguise. Immigrants are flocking to Italy because Berlusconi’s TV has stupidly depicted it as a paradise of pretty girls flashing their breasts at every opportunity. President George Bush is described as completely stupid. People are stupid to listen to fortune tellers. Book prefaces are stupid. Conspiracy theories are stupid. Sometimes it seems that the only person who is never stupid is Eco (together, perhaps, with the reader who sits at his feet), and the only thing he doesn’t write about is his own fallibility.
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