A Lover of Literary Puzzles

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, October 19, 2002
A Lover of Literary Puzzles
By CELESTINE BOHLEN

Umberto Eco is something of a practical joker. He is
also Italy's best-known living novelist and, almost as
famously, a philosopher who writes about matters
ranging from "Peanuts" to Kant, and a semiotician who
says he learned his excellent English by reading
Marvel Comics and "Finnegans Wake."

Mr. Eco makes no bones about his erudition, which is
on full display in all his novels, starting with the
phenomenally popular "The Name of the Rose" (1983), a
murder mystery set in a medieval monastery, and
continuing in his most recent, "Baudolino" (Harcourt),
a picaresque tour of the history and fantasies of
12th-century Europe.

But his jokes tend to be hidden, embedded amid
painstakingly accurate details of, say, the campaigns
of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa or the sack of
Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204. 

These are not jokes of the funny, ha-ha kind, but
inside jokes — historical or literary allusions that
can be about James Bond or Provençal poetry —
scattered by an author who clearly likes to keep his
audience guessing.

[...]

... "That was my idea," he said, "to invent enormous
lies that produce something true. Sometimes I put in a
normal story that no one is able to check."

[...]

This is in some ways pure Eco, a scholar for whom
finding the truth is a pleasurable game of
hide-and-seek, just as it is for Baudolino, a peasant
boy who is adopted and educated by the Emperor
Frederick. 

[...]

Restraint is also part of Mr. Eco's literary method,
used to rein in his imagination. "If you do not have
constraints, it is like a writer on mescaline," he
said. "You have to tame your fantasy."

(This is the same man who charmed an audience at the
Morgan Library on Wednesday night by confessing that
he had always wanted to have his own unicorn. "Maybe
it is not so practical," he said ruefully in an
interview afterward.)

... At the center of his novel is another medieval
artifact: the so-called Prester John letter, which
surfaced in the middle of the 12th century and
astounded its readers with fantastic descriptions of a
magical kingdom that lay beyond the Holy Land and was
ruled by a man known as Prester John. That letter was
later found to be a hoax; Mr. Eco called it "the most
important and beautiful false scoop in history."

[...]

In Italy, where the novel came out two years ago,
critics and journalists asked Mr. Eco what for many
Italians was the first and most obvious question,
namely what did the book have to say about Silvio
Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister whose rightist
government is openly loathed by the country's
left-leaning intellectual elite.

"In a situation like the Italian one, even if you
write a dictionary, they will ask you what is its
relationship to Berlusconi," Mr. Eco said, laughing.
"So there is a journalist who asks what is the
difference between Baudolino and Berlusconi, and I had
a sudden inspiration, and I said Baudolino believes in
the lies he tells." 

[...]

But he is still very much a public figure, often
quoted and sought out to comment on all sorts of
issues. In the mid-1990's, he jumped to the forefront
of a movement to tug Italy into the age of high-speed
information, with plans for a multimedia arcade in
Bologna, the city where he lives and at whose historic
university he teaches semiotics.

His multimedia project never did succeed, partly
because it was overtaken by the rapid spread of
computer technology among young Italians, who were
soon inventing their own ways of pooling resources.

Since then, Mr. Eco's enthusiasm for the marvels of
the Internet has been somewhat tamed. Now he finds
himself pressing for ways to teach young people how to
control the flood of information available on it
before it overwhelms them.

"The problem with the Internet is that it gives you
everything, reliable material and crazy material," he
said. `'So the problem becomes, how do you
discriminate? The function of memory is not only to
preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered
everything from your entire life, you would be sick." 

He likes to compare the computer (he has eight) to the
car (he has two): both are tools that people must
first be taught how to use. "We invented the car, and
it made it easier for us to crash and die," he said.
`'If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in
five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept
speed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/19/books/19ECO.html

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